If you look at the river, Firstborn Son, you might think that everything in it always goes downstream. You see how the river’s s
trength pushes down the limbs of trees and the small islands of grass that are torn from the banks. You see how its waters move so swiftly. But just as some things go downriver with the current, so do other things push up against it. You see how people take their boats upstream—how they paddle and push them or how they spread sails like the big white wings of birds, and then the wind helps them travel upstream. It is not easy for people to go upstream. They must work hard.
That fourth summer since I had been taken captive, as the captains made their way up the Great Muddy River, the stories about them traveled ahead of them. Those stories even reached the place where we lived among the Mandans and the Minnetarees. What were those stories? Curious stories. Stories of a huge war boat that had guns on it so big that when they were fired it was like the crack of thunder. Stories of soldiers who came and told the nations along the river that they were no longer the children of the Spanish king. Now the Great White Father of the new nation to the east was their father. Now there must be a new way among their people, the white warrior chiefs said. Now it was wrong for the Indian nations to fight one another. Think of that, warriors telling other warriors not to fight. They actually ordered the people to stop fighting and said if they did not stop, they would punish them.
People laughed when they heard that. It was amusing. If the young men of one tribe could not go and raid another tribe, then how would they be able to earn names of honor? How could any young man of one tribe become a leader if he could not prove himself in battle? It was curious that a few handfuls of white men thought they could punish whole villages of Indians. These white men coming up the river were brave, but they were also foolish.
Other strange stories were told about them, too. It was said that their boats were filled with trade goods, with guns and powder and useful things. Everyone wanted to trade for these things, especially for the weapons. People understood trading. Even those tribes that fought with each other one season would meet together in peace to trade the next. For many winters other white men, British and Spanish and French, had gone up and down the rivers trading. But these strangers said they did not want to trade. They would not sell their guns or powder to anyone. They said they had brought all the other things to give away as gifts. But even though they gave gifts, the gifts they gave were very small. It was as if they were crazy.
When those stories came to us, we were not sure that those crazy white soldiers would reach the Mandans and Minnetarees. First they would have to pass by the Brule, the people the whites call the Tetons. If the white men would not trade with them, if they just gave the Brule a handful of little presents, the Brule would be insulted. Then those stories of the white men would stop coming up the river. They would float back down with the same current that would carry the burned remains of their war boat and the dead bodies of those brave but foolish white men, and their story would be at an end.
But the ways of stories are mysterious, Firstborn Son. And I will end this part of our story for now.
From Sacajawea by Joseph Bruchac. Scholastic Inc. New York. © 2000 by Joseph Bruchac.
The white men think that they can punish whole groups of Indians for fighting. With this fact in mind, you might conclude that the white men —
a.
fear and respect the courage of the Indians
b.
do not understand the ways of the Indians and underestimate them
c.
think the Indians want their help in making peace with each other
d.
think the Indians fear the Spanish king and so will not put up a fight
