Free The Captain's Dog by Roland Smith Page A

be on our way. Captain Clark and I have written a detailed letter to President Jefferson outlining our journey thus far. We will also be sending back the animal and plant collection and some of our notes.
    From this point on we will be traveling into uncharted territory, but I am confident we will discover the Northwest Passage if what the Hidatsas have told us is true. We will be traveling in our two pirogues and in six dugout canoes the men have made, all of which have been rigged with sails. With these smaller boats we should make 25 miles a day, arriving at the Pacific this summer and perhaps even returning to Fort Mandan before winter.
    Captain Clark and I are confident in the 26 men we have chosen to continue on with us in the permanent party. We have organized the privates into three squads, with a sergeant over each squad. In addition we travel with five
civilians—York, Drouillard, Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and Pomp.
    I am so eager to leave, I can barely sleep at night....
    OUR FINAL DAYS at Fort Mandan were hectic, but at last the men were ready and the boats were loaded. The keelboat headed back down the Missouri toward Saint Louis with the French voyagers and the men not assigned to the permanent party. On board were all of the captains' notes, the dead animal collection, four live magpies, a live prairie dog, a live prairie hen, and Privates Reed and Newman.
    After the long winter Captain Lewis wanted to stretch his legs and decided to walk alongshore. I led the way. We proceeded on.

    The men tired easily at first. The long winter at Fort Mandan had softened them and the lack of meat had not helped matters. The Indians seemed to have killed nearly every animal for a hundred miles, and the few our hunters managed to shoot were in poor flesh after the harsh winter.
    On most days I stayed on shore foraging, unless the Captain made me ride in the boat, which he seldom did. Sometimes I rambled by myself, sometimes with the Captain, sometimes with the hunters, and sometimes with Bird Woman.
    She walked with little Pomp strapped to her back on a cradleboard, bundled in blankets and skins, with only his little black eyes and nose exposed. On warm days his arms were freed to play with his mother's black hair as she walked with her head down, looking for plants and roots and mice nests, which she found faster than I could smell them. When she discovered a nest, she opened it with a stick to retrieve the hog peanuts the mice had stored.
    I was more interested in the mice than the peanuts, but the rodents were so quick I was lucky to catch one out of every other nest. And Bird Woman didn't allow me to eat the pink baby mice. The first time I tried to snap one of the blind squirmers up, she whacked me a good one across the nose with her stick. "Bad dog! It is wrong to eat babies that cannot run away."
    She always left a couple of peanuts in the nest for the mice to eat, and covered the babies before she proceeded on.
    At night the captains slept in a buffaloskin lodge along with Drouillard, Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and Pomp. I slept nearest to the door, so I could get out quickly if I heard something outside.
    Charbonneau snored louder than any man I have ever heard, which added to Captain Lewis's irritation with him.
    Before we left Fort Mandan Charbonneau had assured the captains he was a skilled boatman, but it
became clear that this was not true. 1 was in his boat one day with Captain Lewis, Sacagawea, Pomp, Drouillard, and three men who could not swim. A sudden squall came up, turning the boat sideways. Charbonneau sat at the tiller frozen in fear, despite Captain Lewis's shouting at him to swing the bow into the current. The boat nearly sank with all of our trade goods, to say nothing of the men who could not swim. Drouillard, ever steady in the face of disaster, calmly lowered the sail and the boat righted itself. If it were not for Sacagawea, I am sure the captains would have sent Charbonneau back to the Mandan