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And she hid her face in her blanket. "By gracious, go you shall, Sacagawea, and see the salt water and the big fish," declared Captain Clark. "Chaboneau can stay home and tend baby!" However, the Bird-woman took little Toussaint, of course; and they two viewed in wonderment the rolling, surging, thundering ocean; and the immense whale, one hundred and five feet long, that had been cast ashore.
Her hands were mutinous of the restraint he put upon them, and unconsciously she was beginning to pull and tug to be away from him. Also, there was fear in her eyes. He knew her fastidiousness, and he guessed, with the other man's lips recent on hers, that she feared a more ardent expression on his part. "And please, please be not frightened, timid, sweet, beautiful, proud, little bird-woman. See.
The captains offered to take Chaboneau and Sacagawea and Toussaint on down to St. Louis. The Bird-woman would gladly have gone. She wanted to learn more of the white people's ways. She wanted to be white, herself. But Chaboneau respectfully declined. He said that it would be a strange country, and that he could not make a living there; later, he might send his boy, to be educated by the captains.
But there is record that he was United States interpreter, in 1837, on the upper Missouri; and that he died of small-pox among the Mandans, soon afterward. The Bird-woman out-lived him. She and her boy removed with the Snakes to the Wind River reservation, Wyoming; and there, near Fort Washakie, the agency, she died on April 9, 1884, aged ninety-six years, and maybe more.
She saved stuff of much value, and the captains praised her. "She's a better man than her husband," asserted the admiring soldiers. After hard travel, fighting the swift current, the strong winds, storms of rain and sleet, and monster grizzly bears, the expedition arrived at the Great Falls, as the Bird-woman had promised. She had ridden and waded and trudged, like the rest.
From there, with twenty-seven horses and one mule, with the happy Bird-woman and the beady-eyed Toussaint, the two captains and their men took the trail for the Great Salt Water, one thousand miles toward the setting sun.
In the spring they broke camp, and taking Chaboneau as interpreter in case that the hostile Minnetarees were met, and little Sacagawea to spy out the land of the Snakes, and littlest Toussaint, the baby, as a peace sign to all tribes, with a picked party of thirty-one the two captains started on, up the swollen Missouri. They made no mistake, in the Bird-woman.
And the Bird-woman, riding in the exhausted file, never complained, but kept her eyes fixed to the low country and the big river and the Great Salt Water. Once, in the midst of starvation, from her dress she fished out a small piece of bread that she had carried clear from the Mandan towns. She gave it to Captain Clark, that he might eat it. A brave and faithful heart had Sacagawea.
He was a generous, whole-souled man, was this russet-haired William Clark, and known to all the Indians of the plains as their stanch friend. So it is probable that he did not forget Sacagawea, his loyal Bird-woman. In 1810 she, the boy Toussaint, and Chaboneau, visited in St. Louis. In 1811 they were on their way up-river, for the Indian country.
"He is speaking, perhaps, of the mysteries of the universe our immediate universe." "Yus-s-s-s," observed Hippy solemnly. "Tell me, I prithee, little bird-woman, what is the wise old owl saying? Has he a message for me?" "Yes. And I can tell you what it is.
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