Across the Endless River Read Online Free PDF Page A

use an interpreter to converse with Clark. Among themselves, the tribes whose languages were dissimilar relied on sign language.
    French in its many variations was frequently heard. The voyageurs from the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay region spoke with flat, nasal intonations, while the Creole merchants and traders from New Orleans had a lilting, singsong openness to their words that sounded like music to Baptiste. Travelers newly arrived from France spoke in an entirely different way, and they often had trouble understanding the voyageurs. “Monsieur, parlez français!” Baptiste overheard a Frenchman say to an old trapper whose pronunciation he could not comprehend. The voyageur spoke French with the same inflection as Baptiste’s father, and to a recent arrival from Paris the sounds were impenetrable.
    English, too, resonated in tones that could have been different languages until you knew the speaker’s origins. Captain Clark’s speech was soft-toned and even, with a gentle cadence that commanded attention, while his wife had a Virginia drawl. Factors and tradesmen often spoke English with the strong accents of their native tongue—French, German, Spanish—but they always made themselves understood. The household slaves, Baptiste noticed, spoke English clearly and well when they addressed their masters, but among themselves the sound of their talk changed altogether, a barrier of inflections, rhythms, and meanings that kept others from understanding.
    The clothes of the visitors were as varied as their ways of speaking. The fur traders usually wore fringed buckskin leggings and shirts, fur hats, and colorful sashes at the waist. Indian chiefs displayed their full tribal regalia: massive bear-claw necklaces, beads and shell loops dangling from their ears, stiff roaches of vermilion-tinged hair standing up from shaved scalps, elaborately painted robes of buffalo or elk hide about their shoulders, and often a silver peace medal from the Great Father gleaming on their painted chests. As the government’s representative, Clark was careful to create a sense of occasion with his clothes also. He wore a deep blue uniform with gold piping and epaulets, a black silk neck scarf over a starched white shirt, and highly polished black boots. Government officials and judges sometimes appeared wearing clean white shirts, fancy cravats, broadcloth coats, and carefully creased trousers, dress that was as exotic in its way as the tribal costumes from throughout the territory. No one wore formal clothes above St. Louis.
    His parents returned in the summer of that first year and took Baptiste to the faraway Mandan villages, where he remained with them for the warm months. He knew the other children in the tribe, and Limping Bear, the head of their clan, made sure he was included in the Kit Fox Society, the “young foxes” who together prepared for their initiation as men. Their activities, supervised by elders, developed the skills young boys would need in adulthood: the use of a knife to remove the skin of an animal with fluid and precise movements; how to wait noiselessly in the places where animals passed along their trails and at favored points for crossing streams and rivers; where to find the best wood for a bow and how to fashion its grain into an arc that had strength and suppleness. These and a hundred other things they learned in organized groups that often erupted in play against the ceaseless flow of the river. There was an openness to life with the tribe that felt very different from the rhythms he had known in St. Louis.
    One evening during that first summer, he had finished playing with his companions on the sandbank along the river’s edge. Tired, hungry, and dripping water from his soaked leggings, he ran to the tepee his mother had put up at the edge of the camp. He burst through the flap to the hot and close interior. Directly in front of him he saw his father astride his mother,