Sacajawea Saves Lewis and Clark

Surprising a squaw so encumbered with pappooses that she could not escape, they won her heart by the gift of a looking-glass and painting her cheeks.

Continuing The Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Today is our final installment from James Davie Butler and then we begin the second part of the series with Robert Southey. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in The Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Time: 1804-1806

They dragged their canoes, however, up the rivulet for five days longer. It was four hundred sixty days since they had left the mouth of the river, and their mileage on its waters had been three thousand ninety-six. A mile farther they stood on the Great Divide, and drank of springs which sent their water to the Pacific. But meantime they had been ready to starve in the mountains. Their hunters were of the best, but they found no game; buffaloes had gone down into the lowlands, the birds of heaven had fled, and edible roots were mostly unknown to them. For more than four months they had looked, and lo! there was no man. It was not till August 13th that, surprising a squaw so encumbered with pappooses that she could not escape, and winning her heart by the gift of a looking-glass and painting her cheeks, they formed friendship with her nation, one of whose chiefs proved to be a brother of their Bird-Woman. Horses were about all they could obtain of these natives, streams were too full of rapids to be navigable, or no timber fit for canoes was within reach. So the party, subsisting on horse-flesh, and afterward on dog-meat, toiled on along one of the worst possible routes. Nor was it till October 7th that they were able to embark, in logs they had burned hollow, upon a branch of the Columbia, which, after manifold portages and perils, bore them to its mouth and the goal of their pilgrimage, late in November. Its distance from the starting-point, according to their estimate, was forty-one hundred thirty-four miles.

A winter of disappointment followed, for no whaler or fur trader appeared to supply the wayfarers with food or clothing or trinkets for the purchase of necessaries on the homeward journey. Game was so scarce that it is possible they would have starved had not a whale been stranded near them -— sent, they said, not as to Jonah, to swallow him, but for them to swallow.

In the spring of 1806, when they turned their despairing faces away from the Pacific, all the beads and gewgaws for presents to savages and procuring supplies during their home-stretch to the Mississippi might have been tied up in two handkerchiefs, if they had had any such articles. Their last tobacco had been consecrated to the celebration of Christmas, and the last whiskey had been drunk on the previous Fourth of July. All roads homeward are down-hill. A forced march of six months brought the discoverers from the ocean to St. Louis, September 23, 1806, though they were obliged to halt a month for mountain snows to melt. From first to last not a man had perished through accident, wild men, or wild beasts, and only one through sickness.

Many an episode in this eventful transcontinental march and countermarch will hereafter glorify with romantic associations islands, rivers, rocks, cations, and mountains all along its track. Among these none can be more touching than the story of Bird Woman, her divination of routes, her courage when men quailed, her reunion with a long-lost brother, her spreading as good a table with bones as others could with meat, her morsel of bread for an invalid benefactor, her presence with her infant at testing to savages that the expedition could not be hostile. But when bounties in land and money were granted to others, she was unthought of. Statues of her, however, must yet be reared by grateful dwellers in lands she laid open for their happy homes.

Robert Southey

Now we begin the second the second part of our series with our selection from an essay published in Great Events by Famous People, Vol. 15 by Robert Southey published in 1905. The selection is presented in 6.4000000000000004 easy 5 minute installments.

Robert Southey (1774-1843) was one of the famous Lake Poets of the Romantic Period. He also wrote essays such as this one.

On April 7, 1805, the adventurers renewed their journey, sending off, at the same time, their barge with dispatches to the Government, and the subjects in natural history which they had collected as a present for the President. The party now consisted of thirty-two persons. A French interpreter, by name Chaboneau, had been engaged and it was hoped that his wife would be equally useful, for she was a Snake Indian who had been taken in war by the Minnetarees and sold to her present husband. They went in two large pirogues and six small canoes. The squaw was found serviceable in a way which had not been foreseen. When they stopped for dinner she found out the holes of the mice, opened them with a large stick, and supplied the party with wild artichokes of the Jerusalem (girasole) kind, which these creatures hoard in great quantities.

Summer comes close upon the skirts of winter in these climates; five days after they set out several of the men threw off all their clothes, retaining only something round the waist -— a fashion which was found more convenient, because the river was so shallow that, in some places, they were obliged to wade. The fashion must have been convenient to the mosquitoes also, who now began to annoy them. On the 14th they reached a part of the river beyond which no white man had ever been. The bluffs along the river bore traces of fire, and, in some places, were actually burning, throwing out much smoke with a strong sulphureous smell; they are composed of a mixture of yellow clay and sand with many horizontal strata of carbonated wood resembling pit-coal, from one to five feet in depth, and scattered through the bluff at different elevations, some as high as eighty feet above the water; great quantities of pumice-stone and lava, or rather earth which seemed to have been boiled and then hardened by exposure, being seen in many parts of the hills where they were broken and washed down into gullies by the rain and melting snow.

To be Continued.

James Davie Butler began here.

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