Part Two Chapter 6 Which Way?

As the great barge had started down the river, the two pirogues which had come so far, joined by the cottonwood dugouts laboriously fabricated during the winter months, had started up the river, manned by thirty-one men.

With the pick of the original party, there had come but one woman, the girl Sacajawea, with her little baby, born that winter at the Mandan fortress. Sacajawea now had her place in the camp; she and her infant were the pets of all. She sat in the sunlight, her baby in her lap, by her side an Indian dog, a waif which Lewis had found abandoned in an Indian encampment, and which had attached itself to him.

Sacajawea smiled as the tall form of the captain came toward her. She had already learned some of the words of his tongue, he some of hers.

"Which way, Sacajawea?" asked Meriwether Lewis. "What river is this which goes on to the left?"

"Him Ro'shone," replied the girl. "My man call him that. No good! Him--big river"; and she pointed toward the right-hand stream.

"As I thought, Will," said Lewis, nodding; and again, to the Indian girl: "Do you remember this place?"

She nodded her head vigorously and smiled.

"See!"

With a pointed stick she began to sketch a map on the sand of the river bar, showing how the Yellowstone flowed from the south--how, far on ahead, its upper course bent toward the Missouri, with a march of not more than a day between the two. The maps of this new world that first came back to civilization were copies of Indians' drawings made with a pointed stick upon the earth, or with a coal on a whitened hide.