Our long winter stay at Fort Mandan has been enlivened by the arrival—isn’t it always so?—of a mysterious woman. But you must not be jealous, my dear one, for she is a very young native, married, who arrived in the very process of giving birth. She sought the medical services, and even a little bit of healing magic, from Captain Lewis. Something to do with a snake’s rattle. I confess I slept through most of it, and awakened to the cries of a newborn baby.
Since the girl named Bird Woman, Sacagawea in her language, is very young—we think about sixteen—and her baby is a large and lusty boy, she was in dire straits delivering the infant, but our redoubtable Meriwether Lewis used local custom and magic to ease the birth by feeding her bits of a snake’s rattle. This did the trick, and ushered her son into the world.
Our confinement continues to be cold and dreary, but more interesting than before. Sacagawea has given a reminder of home to the many men trapped here until the river thaws, and she has even brought some order to the unruly half dozen local women who follow this expedition with their halfbreed trapper and fur trader husbands. They still bicker among themselves, but the women take direction from Sacagawea, perhaps because they are surprised at the spectacle of a strong and determined woman who speaks three languages, as well as numerous native dialects, and who is not afraid of speaking to the white men.
In fact, I doubt Sacagawea is much scared of anything, after her long cold journey after escaping from some sort of evil force to find us in the middle of the worst blizzard we’ve endured in this forsaken region.
She has already proved her worth. With her son in a snug wrapping tied to her back, she goes out and finds us berries and roots and other edibles to enliven the dreary meals of endless preserved meat we’d been eating. She has shown or directed the other camp women how to create dishes that are palatable to us white men. Perhaps she has fed them to her husband, a man named Charbonneau, before.
Her husband remains captive of whatever force it is that has been directing the sinister magical attacks against us.
Before the thaw is fully set—which Sacagawea claims will restore that unknown enemy to power—we must decide whether we will continue our determined push westward to try to make it to the Pacific Ocean and possible connection to the rest of the world after the Sundering. Or whether we should stay to fight this evil force and neutralize it. Lewis seems to think he has some sort of power that can stand against it.
This will necessitate long conversations with Sacagawea, since she knows more about the magical perils inherent in this region, but she must be fully recovered and clear-headed before she can make a case for what we should do, and before we can weigh it against the danger to our expedition and our duty to the wizard Franklin.
I shall let you know in the next letter what we decided, since I write to comfort myself more than you, an indulgence for which I hope you’ll forgive me.
Yours, sincerely,
William Clark
—Letter from William Clark to Julia Hancock,
Fort Mandan, February 20, 1805
Thin Ice
Spring approached like a creeping thief, and the men were certainly impatient to go.
“The ice is getting thin around our embarkations.” Meriwether strode into the common room of Fort Mandan. The sun was bright and relatively warm as he made his perimeter inspection. He’d passed the outdoor sentinels stationed at the defensive stockade wall, which today were Gass and Ordway, and entered to find a friendly scene. Sacagawea, with her son strapped to her back, stirred a meal over the fire, some savory potage of meat and herbs. They’d grown used to her potages, which varied their diet and also warmed them through the coldest winter.
In the common room, six men played a game of cards, while Captain Clark inspected his maps and writings in a corner, diligently making clean copies of his surveyor’s maps, which would be delivered back east with the next set of trappers whose path they crossed. Sitting on one of the low benches near the fire, Pryor used a cobbler’s needle to sew his boots. From the other large room at the back of the main building, Meriwether could hear voices, other men of the expedition mixed with the sharp reply of a woman’s voice, one of the wives of the interpreters.
After making his announcement, Meriwether shook snow off his outer garments and hung them to dry on a peg affixed to the wall. Clark looked up from his maps. “Good. It’s about time we resumed our way. There’s no telling how far we are from the Pacific.”
Sacagawea’s face bore a worried expression as she looked up from the food. Later, after the meal, she came to speak to the two captains in private. They met her in Clark’s little cubicle of a room, which had barely space for a writing desk, strewn with his papers. He preferred to work in the main room and make use of the candlelight while others pursued their own projects.
It said something about how highly Meriwether had come to regard this proud and pensive native woman that he considered it quite proper for the two men to meet with her in a separate room. But Sacagawea’s tribe had no concept of female honor, and the fort, which lacked interior doors and had only curtains dividing the rooms, would never be private enough to endanger anyone’s honor without the whole expedition knowing.
She entered the room looking grave. Due to her upbringing, she did not smile in the ingratiating way that European women did when they thought to convince men. Instead, Sacagawea looked somber and self-contained, which made Meriwether respect her. Most of the men in the party treated her as a fellow explorer, rather than one of the wenches who fell in with the expedition.
She wore her own clothes again, native pants and tunic in suede, mended now so as to look new. Her slick black hair shone, freshly washed, and she looked ready to face an important social occasion. Even with the baby strapped on her back, she might have been an emissary between tribes.
Which is probably what she considers herself, Meriwether thought.
“You wished to speak to us, Sacagawea?” Clark asked. Disrupting the gravity of the occasion, he extracted little Jean Baptiste from the carrying board on the woman’s back, cuddling him, and calling him “Little Pompy” from Pompy, a term that meant leader or chief in the local languages.
Meriwether noted Sacagawea’s slight tension as the babe was taken from her back, but she relaxed almost immediately, showing that she trusted them now. At first, the young mother had been very protective of her child, refusing to let the others near her. And why should she not fear? Meriwether thought. How strange we must look to her, with our bearded faces, our light eyes and pale skin, our strange clothes.
For all the time he’d dealt with the natives, starting back in Virginia, he had never considered them normal, but rather strange, exotic. But now he realized, so far from the populated east, it was himself, Clark, and their party who were strangers, not to be trusted until they proved themselves.
Sacagawea looked at Clark with a smile, pleased to see the fondness he lavished on her son, then she returned her grave dark gaze to Meriwether once more. “The keelboat and pirogues will soon be free from ice. I—” she stopped, not quite sure how to proceed. “I wondered what your plans were.”
In the silence, Meriwether and Clark traded a look. They both were devoted to fulfilling the commission the wizard had given them, and they were determined to find their way to the Pacific, if such a way existed. There, they would hope that no great wall of nothing blocked the path to the rest of the world, as it did from the Atlantic side.
Meriwether hesitated before delivering a quick answer, though. He held another purpose, just as explicit, that of making sure that this great continent remained safe for the Europeans stranded here after the Sundering.