Chapter 11
The Journals Overboard
The upper Missouri, present-day central Montana
Sacagawea was not the expedition’s guide, but she was much more than a passenger. On 14 May 1805, when a boat nearly capsized, she calmly rescued the papers, books and medicines floating out of it, and Lewis praised her courage. She also interpreted with the Shoshone and gathered food.
14 May 1805, evening
The white pirogue is the safest boat they have, so it carries the most precious things. Lewis lists them: “our papers, Instruments, books, medicine, a great proportion of our merchandize, and in short almost every article indispensibly necessary.” Sacagawea is on board with her baby. So is her husband, and that evening he is steering.
Lewis is not happy about it. “Charbono cannot swim,” he writes, “and is perhaps the most timid waterman in the world.” Both captains are walking on the far shore when a sudden squall hits the boat’s sail and tips it on its side. It fills with water to within an inch of the top.
Charbonneau panics. He is “still crying to his god for mercy” and has let go of the rudder, and nothing will bring him to his senses until the bowsman, Pierre Cruzatte, “threatend to shoot him instantly if he did not take hold of the rudder and do his duty.”
The rescue
Watching from the bank three hundred yards away, Lewis almost does something foolish. He writes that he “droped my gun, threw aside my shot pouch and was in the act of unbuttoning my coat, before I recollected the folly of the attempt.” He would never have reached the boat alive through those waves.
On board, Cruzatte gets the men bailing with kettles and rowing for the shore. As the boat wallows, the precious papers and packages begin to float away. Sacagawea, sitting at the back with her baby, calmly reaches out and catches them one by one.
They reach the bank with the boat barely floating. They lose some garden seeds, a little gunpowder and a few cooking things. The journals are saved.
16 May 1805
It takes two days to dry everything out. Lewis sits down and writes a line about Sacagawea that he never wrote about anyone else on the journey: “the Indian woman to whom I ascribe equal fortitude and resolution, with any person onboard at the time of the accedent, caught and preserved most of the light articles which were washed overboard.”
Since leaving Fort Mandan she has been doing more than anyone expected. She digs up wild roots to eat, finds edible plants the men do not know, and cares for her baby while travelling all day in an open boat.
20 May 1805
On 20 May the captains name a river after her. Lewis writes: “this stream we called Sah-ca-ger we-ah or bird woman’s River, after our interpreter the Snake woman.”
26 May 1805
On 26 May Lewis climbs a ridge and sees, far to the west, a line of white peaks: the Rocky Mountains. He writes that he “felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the heretofore conceived boundless Missouri.”
Then the pleasure fades. He thinks of the difficulties “which this snowey barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific,” and of what he and his men will suffer getting across. The mountains on the maps back home are a single low ridge. The mountains in front of him are something else entirely.