2005-02-14 - 10:17 a.m.
On Tuesday morning, August 11, 1803, Lewis set out once again to engage the Shoshones.
"At nine miles, Lewis saw two Indian women, a man, and some dogs. When he had arrived within half a mile of them, he… unslung his pack and rifle and put them on the ground, unfurled a flag, and advanced alone at a steady pace… The women retreated, but the man stayed in place until Lewis was within a hundred yards.
Lewis called out 'tab-ba-bone,' loudly and frequently. The man 'absconded.'
Lewis had his men join him and proceeded… After less than a mile, topping a rise, they came upon three Indian women, one a twelve-year-old, one a teen, and the third elderly, only thirty yards away. At the first sight, Lewis laid down his rifle and advanced on the group. The teen ran off, but the old woman and the child remained. Seeing no chance to escape, they sat on the ground and held their heads down; to Lewis it looked as though they had reconciled themselves to die.
He approached and took the elderly woman by the hand, raised her up, said 'tab-ba-bone,' and rolled up his shirtsleeve to show her his white skin (his hands and face were so deeply tanned he might have been an Indian, and his clothes were entirely leather). [Lewis’s men rejoined him.] From their packs he gave the woman some beads, a few moccasin awls, a few mirrors, and some paint. His skin and the gifts, and his friendly attitude, were enough to calm her down."
Lewis (through Drouillard’s sign language) asked the old woman to call the teen back, fearful that she might head off and alarm the main body of Indians. He was unaware that his previous attempts at contact had already alerted the Shoshone and that, in fact, a war party was at that moment headed towards him.
"The Indians were overwhelmingly superior. It would have been the work of only a moment for them to overwhelm Lewis’s party, and they would have more than doubled their firepower in rifles and gathered as loot more knives, awls, looking glasses, and other trinkets than any Rocky Mountain Indian band had ever seen.
But rather than assuming a defensive position, Lewis laid down his rifle, picked up his flag, told his party to stay in place, and following the old woman who was guiding, advanced slowly toward he knew not what."
Of course, it all ends favorably for the explorers, the old woman anxiously explaining what Lewis’s repeated incantation of 'tab-ba-bone' could not: that they were white men, and meant nobody harm. But one can easily surmise a far different outcome for this first meeting between the Shoshone and the Americans had Lewis not encountered and befriended the old woman first.
The favorable intercession of fate and good fortune continued when Sacagawea, who had stayed back with Clark, rejoined Lewis at the Indians' camp.
"In the midst of the excitement, one of the Shoshone women recognized Sacagawea. Her name, Jumping Fish, she had acquired on the day Sacagawea was taken prisoner, because of the way she had jumped through a stream in escaping the Hidatsas. The reunited teens hugged and cried and talked, all at once."
There has hardly been a movie with a more moving or, for that matter, less probable plot twist. And yet, the script gets better.
"Dispensing with Drouillard and the sign language, [Lewis] decided to use a translation chain that ran from Sacagawea, speaking Shoshone to the Indians and translating it into Hidatsa, to [her husband] Charbonneau, who translated her Hidatsa into French, to Private Francis Labiche, who translated from French to English.
Scarcely had they begun the cumbersome process when Sacagawea began to stare at [the Indian Chief] Cameahwait. Suddenly recognizing him as her brother, 'she jumped up, ran & embraced him, & threw her blanket over him and cried profusely.'"
(Excerpted portions taken from “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West” by Stephen E. Ambrose.)
