Chapter 16
Cameahwait
Camp Fortunate, near present-day Dillon, Montana
Sacagawea’s brother was Cameahwait, chief of the Lemhi Shoshone band the Corps met in the Rocky Mountains. When they met on 17 August 1805, five years after she had been taken from her people, the reunion helped the captains get the horses they needed to cross the mountains.
17 August 1805
On 17 August Clark is walking along the river ahead of the canoes when he sees a group of Shoshone on horseback. Charbonneau and Sacagawea, a little way in front of him, “danced for the joyful sight,” Clark writes, “and she made signs to me that they were her nation.” The account published in 1814 adds that she sucked her fingers, the sign-language gesture for her own people.
When they reach the camp, one of the Shoshone women runs to her, and the two hold each other. Lewis writes that “the meeting of those people was really affecting, particularly between Sah cah-gar-we-ah and an Indian woman, who had been taken prisoner at the same time with her and who, had afterwards escaped from the Minnetares and rejoined her nation.”
The council
That afternoon the captains sit down to talk with Cameahwait. They need an interpreter, so they send for Sacagawea. The chain of translation is long: she turns Shoshone into Hidatsa for Charbonneau, who turns it into French for François Labiche, who turns it into English for the captains.
Sacagawea sits down, looks at the chief, and recognises him. Lewis writes that she “proved to be a sister of the Chief Cameahwait.” According to the account published in 1814, she jumped up, ran to him, threw her blanket around him and wept. Then she sat down again and tried to go on interpreting, but kept bursting into tears.
She learns that most of her family has died since she was taken, all except two brothers and the son of her eldest sister. Five years after being captured, she is home, and she is about to leave again.
The captains name the place Camp Fortunate.
18 August 1805
The next day is Lewis’s thirty-first birthday. That night he writes one of the most personal passages in all the journals. He reflects “that I had as yet done but little, very little, indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation.”
He resolves to do better, to live “for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.” He is standing at the top of the continent, and he is not sure his life has amounted to anything.
20–29 August 1805
Now the captains need horses and a route. Clark takes a small party down the river on the west side of the pass, hoping it will carry canoes to the Pacific. It turns into a roaring canyon between cliffs, impossible for boats. Today it is called the Salmon River, and in the 1800s it was nicknamed the River of No Return.
Meanwhile Lewis bargains for horses. It nearly goes wrong. On the morning of 25 August Sacagawea learns that Cameahwait has sent word for his people to meet him the next day and go east with him to hunt buffalo, which would leave the Corps stranded in the mountains without horses. She tells Charbonneau. He does not tell Lewis until the afternoon, when he mentions it, Lewis writes, “with apparent unconcern.” Lewis “was out of patience with the folly of Charbono who had not sufficient sagacity to see the consequencies.”
Lewis talks Cameahwait round. By the end of August the Corps has enough horses, and an old Shoshone guide they call Toby. On 30 August they head north, into the mountains.