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Unless the company could get guides and horses from the Snakes, and travel rapidly, they would be stuck, for the winter likely enough starve; at any rate be forced to quit. By August 16 Captain Lewis had not returned. Captain Clark set out afoot, with Sacagawea and Chaboneau, to walk across country. The Snakes simply must be found. The toiling boats rounded a great bend, and a shout arose.
Hitherto Captain Lewis had been able to secure the services of French trappers as interpreters with the Indians; but the next year he was going where there were no trappers; and now he luckily engaged an old Nor'wester, Chaboneau, whose Indian wife, Sacajawea, was a captive from the Snake tribe of the Rockies.
This circumstance induced our interpreter, Chaboneau, to remain here with his wife and child, as he could no longer be of use to us, and, although we offered to take him with us to the United States, he declined, saying that there he had no acquaintance, and no chance of making a livelihood, and preferred remaining among the Indians.
Of the original forty-five men two had been lost; but three recruits had been gained, Chaboneau, his squaw Sacajawea, and their infant son, born in February. From Fort Mandan fourteen of the men returned to St. Louis in the barge, carrying documents, collections, and trophies, while thirty-two went onward, to be separated from their kind for almost eighteen months.
Chaboneau was engaged as interpreter, this winter, and moved over to the white camp. Sacagawea proved to be such a cheerful, willing little woman that the captains and the men made much of her. And when, in February, a tiny boy arrived to her and Toussaint, there was much delight.
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.
It was not without difficulty, nor till after nearly half the day was spent, that we were able to convey all this information to the Chopunnish, much of which might have been lost or distorted in its circuitous route through a variety of languages; for in the first place, we spoke in English to one of our men, who translated it into French to Chaboneau; he interpreted it to his wife in the Minnetaree language; she then put it into Shoshonee, and the young Shoshonee prisoner explained it to the Chopunnish in their own dialect.
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.
That winter was spent a few miles back from the Pacific, near the mouth of the Columbia River in present Washington. Only once did the Bird-woman complain. The ocean was out of sight from the camp. Chaboneau, her husband, seemed to think that she was made for only work, work, work, cooking and mending and tending baby. "You stay by ze lodge fire. Dat is place for womans," he rebuked.
It was therefore agreed that Captain Clark should set off in the morning with eleven men, furnished, besides their arms, with tools for making canoes: that he should take Chaboneau and his wife to the camp of the Shoshonees, where he was to leave them, in order to hasten the collection of horses; that he should then lead his men down to the Columbia, and if he found it navigable, and the timber in sufficient quantity, begin to build canoes.
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