The True Account Read Free Page A

Missouri River was labeled
terra incognita;
and when my uncle’s saffron-colored eyes grew weary during our school lessons or his interminable revisions of his play, he liked to pause and gaze at those intriguing words and muse about the great foray that he and I would someday make into that unknown land.
    In the spring of 1803, when I turned fifteen, my uncle received, from his Boston bookseller, Alexander Mackenzie’s
Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Lawrence, Through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Ocean.
The intrepid Mackenzie, it seemed, claimed to have done that which, above everything else in the world, my uncle himself had long wished to do—to have forged his way through the wilds of America to the Pacific. “‘With a mixture of bear grease and red vermilion,’” my uncle read aloud to me in his harsh, nasal, schoolmasterly voice, “‘I wrote on a rock above the western sea, Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three.’
    â€œOh,” he cried out, smiting his metal dome in a way that would have done credit to my father, “I am bested. It’s already been done, Ti. And wouldn’t you know, by a fellow Scotsman.”
    My uncle could scarcely have been more distressed had Mackenzie’s words “from Canada by land,” etc. been branded on his forehead with a sizzling hot iron. But then his eyes gleamed with a new light—for his spirits never flagged longer than a minute or two—and he said that to go overland in
Canada
was one thing; but to cross through the Territory of Louisiana, to Oregon and the River Columbia, was something else again.
“That
will be our route, Ti. Eureka! We leave tomorrow.
    â€œWhat’s more,” he continued, “to make sure we get to the Columbia and not some puny, less illustrious
Canadian
river, we will
start
there. We will make the trip backward. From the Pacific.”
    â€œBut, uncle,” I protested, “how will we get
to
the Pacific? How can we
start
from there until we
get
there?”
    Whereupon he smiled and said, “We will go round the Horn by ship, Ti. You might ask Helen of Troy to put us up a lunch.”
    Early the following morning we prepared to embark. We allotted an entire day for the journey, including our return trip overland. Besides his chain mail, the belled stocking cap over his copper crown, and his galoshes, my uncle carried a flagstaff and flag, his umbrella, his collapsible spyglass, his arquebus, and his homemade sextant and astrolabe for determining our latitude and longitude. Instead of sea biscuit and salt beef, we had laid in a stock of my mother’s most delicious baked-bean sandwiches, a brown crock of her famous ginger cookies—which we called cartwheels because of their prodigious size—and a stone jug of switchel, the popular Vermont haymakers’ drink distilled from pure mountain spring water slaked with a touch of molasses and a touch of vinegar; for we did not know where we would find our next supply of fresh drinking water.
    We set sail at sunrise on my fishing raft, which my uncle had christened the
Samuel de Champlain,
he wiping his sleeve across his eyes at the thought of leaving his beloved Green Mountains for a whole day, my mother calling “Bon voyage, my brave expeditionaries”—and my father mouthing to me, “Not your fault, Ti.
Not your fault.
”
    The first leg of our trip went capitally. We stopped to visit the Amazonian delta, where one Sucker Brook debouched into the Kingdom River. There my uncle, briefly disembarking from the
Samuel de Champlain
to perform a necessary office in the alders, was harried back onto the ship by a thirty-foot anaconda—which bore more than a passing resemblance to a spotted yellow newt sunning itself on a tamarack stump. Our vessel was three times beaten back around the tumultuous