Читать книгу The Men Who United the States: The Amazing Stories of the Explorers, Inventors and Mavericks Who Made America - Simon Winchester, Simon Winchester - Страница 19

Yet not all of their encounters with American Indians were so fraught. It was some few weeks later, in November, when the winter chill had begun to freeze the rivers and farther upstream travel was proving difficult, then impossible, that they first met up with a middle-aged French fur trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau and his two wives—one of whom, most memorably, was a heavily pregnant fifteen-year old Shoshone girl named Sacagawea. A captive youngster from an Indian tribe based in the distant western mountains, she would become in time an unforgettable, romantic American heroine and perhaps one of the better-remembered human legacies that the Great Plains would bestow upon President Jefferson’s great unifying expedition.

By now the men had moved beyond the main Sioux lands and had reached the territory of three of the lesser Indian tribes, the Arikara, the Mandan, and the Hidatsa (the latter also for some reason known by the French who met them as the Gros Ventre, or Big Belly), which were all affiliated with and linguistically part of the Sioux. But unlike the nomadic Sioux proper, these tribes were in the main sedentary farmers, who raised crops (developing a strain of maize still planted today) and kept dogs and livestock, and (long after their encounter with Lewis and Clark) who died in massive numbers of a smallpox epidemic.

But in 1804 they were healthy, numbered in the thousands, and lived in large circular earthen lodges arranged in villages, in groups of twenty or thirty. They were a people who had not entirely abandoned travel: on occasion their hunters set off on horseback to bag buffalo. But the Mandan in particular were generally more homebodies and quite amiably disposed to all. The Hidatsa people by contrast were still wanderers and frequently took off westward for the distant mountains, to hunt not only for food but to seize new horses, once in a while to collect Indian slaves, and from time to time to give a few old enemies a bit of a hiding.

On Sunday, November 4, while the expedition team was building its heart-shaped stockade (a fort “so strong to be almost cannonball proof,” it was noted), the French Canadian trader named Toussaint Charbonneau arrived from his home in a nearby Hidatsa village, asked for work as an interpreter, and was hired more or less on the spot.

Charbonneau had worked for the North West Company for some years and had lived with the Hidatsa most of that time. We know from the expedition diaries just a little of his appearance—that he was small and dark—and a little more of his character; he was said to have been cowardly and aggressive by turn, valued initially only as a translator, though later found to be indispensable for expedition morale as a talented maître de cuisine. But though his early worth may have been trifling, that of the younger of his two wives, Sacagawea, has since become inestimable—even if her value may have been magnified and driven by the popular demand for compelling narrative, and maybe also by a need to introduce a decisively female personality into the largely male-dominated world of the Western story.

No one has the slightest idea of what Sacagawea looked like, though there has been much speculation and invention. Fanciful images of her—in oils, watercolors, mosaics, pastels, cartoons—are plentiful. The Iowa-born white all-American beauty Donna Reed played her in one older movie (with Charlton Heston playing Clark and Fred MacMurray as Lewis), and more recently a Japanese Cherokee actress named Mizuo Peck did so in two others. Sacagawea stamps, mountain peaks, and rivers abound. The eighteen best-known American statues⁸ of Sacagawea usually display a tall, robed woman of classically noble bearing, invariably carrying, papoose-style, the boy child she bore in camp in February 1805. His name was Jean-Baptiste, but the expedition members more familiarly called him Pomp. (Clark could never get his tongue around Sacagawea’s proper name and called her Janey instead.)

But while the artistic world might allow some license, the United States Mint is more severe in its demands. To present as accurately imagined a profile as possible for the gold-tinted Sacagawea dollar coin required some rather more intelligent speculation. The coin artist chosen by the Treasury eventually chose as her model a twenty-two-year-old college student named Randy’L He-dow Teton, a Shoshone from Idaho who won some lasting fame as the girl on the coin and has since become a motivational speaker for the American Indian cause.

By general consensus Sacagawea is thought to have been a Shoshone from the mountains of Montana or Idaho captured by a Hidatsa raiding party. Many others claim evidence that suggests quite the opposite: that she was a Plains Indian, a member of the Hidatsa tribe all along, who had actually been captured by Shoshone raiders and spirited back to their lair in the Rockies, from which she escaped and managed to get all the way back to the Plains with the help of (the story at this point somewhat straining belief) a party of sympathetic wolves.

To judge from the expedition diaries, in which Sacagawea is seldom named as anything but “the Squaw,” there is little evidence she did a vast amount for the explorers. There is no suggestion, in particular, that she enjoyed an affair with Clark, as Donna Reed so luridly did with Charlton Heston, though the fact she gave him two dozen white weasel tails as a Christmas present was apparently enough to set Hollywood’s imagination going. Her quick thinking may once have saved some of the expedition papers from getting waterlogged when one of the pirogues tipped over. She was helpful in recognizing parts of the Western landscape from her childhood memories, and she was able to nudge the scouts to cross a particular mountain pass she knew. She was helpful as a translator and interpreter of the Shoshone language and of those other tongues that were its linguistic kin, and she knew a little French, as did Captain Lewis.

Probably her most valuable contribution was her simple presence. She was a Native American, a woman, and a mother. She traveled with her child. Any expedition that included so innocent a member could not—at least to the many Native Americans who might be encountered—pose a threat of any kind. Sacagawea thus became, unwittingly if not unwillingly, the key that opened the gates of the West and allowed the white men through.