I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company by Brian Hall and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling

Oh! This one jumped up and threw the pronghorn around we-both and hung on rides ahead and wailed and thanked and sang grief for her long thoughts of his death, as spirit said a sister should, and felt his short hair against her fingers and cried more, wondering whether it was brother or father who died, and she cried for the starvation in his face. Rides ahead was a good brother (he was the son of two bears' younger brother, white elk skin, five or six winters older, a man already when this one was a child, and often speaking to her, but protecting her from black cheek and sometimes taking her up on his horse), and as a brother and a man should, he accepted her tears and let himself be fondled and hung on, and thanked for, keeping back his own tears, and his words. He said only, calmly, in the man's way (the ant-sting of hunger on his breath),--Walks slow, small mother, scar cheeks. We thought you were lost.

There are few stories as foundational to the myth of America as that of Lewis and Clark, speaking as it does to the country's vastness and wildness, and the intrepid nature of those who chipped away at its frontier. The coast at which they arrived was already mapped and more or less well-known by sailors and trappers, but the interior, which had recently been added to the United States by way of the Louisiana Purchase, was a blank map. In a way, every cross-country road trip is a kind of reenactment of the Corps of Discovery, who embarked from St. Louis on a journey through the continent just to see what was there--not to arrive somewhere, but to travel through.

In reality, of course, the interior of the country was well known to the Indigenous people who lived there, a fact acknowledged by the popular memory of Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who helped guide the Corps through the Missouri River and across the Rockies. Sacagawea is only mentioned a few a times in Lewis and Clark's journals, and they seemed mostly to have considered her a kind of emblem of peace--a woman's presence signaled a disinterest in war. There's actually something in the Sacagawea legend that's ahead of its time, in that it has always sought to "recover" the contributions of an Indigenous woman to American history. Such stories seem more common now, but Sacagawea may have been one of the first figures to be dredged up in this way. 200 years later, it's worth wondering what purpose the elevation of Sacagawea in the Lewis and Clark myth has served, and whether that elevation has in turn served Sacagawea. These two books--I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company by Brian Hall and The Last Journals of Sacajewea by Debra Magpie Earling--both try to enliven the story of Sacagawea and make us see it in new ways.

Hall's novel takes its title from a line in Meriwether Lewis' letter to his old friend, William Clark, inviting him to join the Corps of Discovery. Though I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company is a novel of many voices--Clark, Sacagawea, Sacagawea's French-Canadian trapper husband Toussaint Charbonneau, and Clark's enslaved servant York all get a chance to speak--Lewis is at the story's center. In Hall's telling, Lewis is a mercurial and depressive figure who feels inadequate to the task of leading the Corps of Discovery, which President Jefferson has assigned to him more out of personal affection than a sober assessment of his abilities. Lewis is prone to long bouts of depression and frustration; he can't even work up the resolve to write regularly in his journal. His anxieties and fear of failure are self-fulfilling: his experimental boat (called, naturally, the "Experiment") sinks, the Corps faces starvation, then months of rain on the Oregon coast. On the way back Lewis is shot in the buttock by one of his own men, mistaking him for a deer, and he lies face down on the company's pirogue as it travels down the Missouri, embarrassed and ashamed. This Lewis would be surprised to hear that his name has hardened into myth. Few remember from their high school history classes that Lewis was shot to death under mysterious circumstances only a few years later, probably by suicide, after a disastrous governorship of the Louisiana Territory that left him broke. In Hall's novel, the suicide hangs over Lewis' character, as if worked out backward from his tragic end.

One thing that works about I Should Be Extremely Happy is the way it presents the Corps as a collection of colorful personalities: besides Lewis, the neurotic sadsack, there's the enslaved York, who present mixed feelings about the attention lavished on his skin and body by Indigenous people whom the Corps wants to impress. (Hall relies on an old and possibly true legend that York, after being cruelly denied freedom by Clark, ran away to live the rest of his life with one of the Indigenous tribes encountered by the Corps.) There's also Charbonneau, a shrewd scumbag, whose slimy and cynical sections are probably the book's best parts. Charbonneau, who was living with Sacagawea and another Indigenous wife near the Mandan villages in North Dakota, is hired as a translator, and is often in the forefront of the Corps' interactions with Indians. This, perhaps, is the biggest way that Hall subverts the myth of Lewis and Clark: by presenting it not as a story of traveling through wilderness, but as it was, a journey from tribe to tribe, begging for food, supplies, horses. What the Corps found in the end was not just rivers, plants, and animals, but people.

So, Sacagawea. Except for a short prologue, she's the first voice that appears in Hall's novel, narrating her capture as a child by the Hidatsa Mandan Indians that abducted her and sold her, in the end, as a wife to Charbonneau: "This one," Hall writes in a defamiliarizing imitation of Shoshone grammar, "was still a child." Her voice is a kind of pidgin, cobbled together from Shoshone and English, and though sometimes it's a little too hard to follow, it works, because it helps us understand Sacagawea's experiences as a kind of rough encounter with language; she slowly learns to understand the husband she does not want, and then the white "sun-men" who arrive at the Mandan village heading west. The story becomes one of restoration and return: after identifying the area at the headwaters of the Missouri as the place she had been abducted from many years ago, Sacagawea helped guide the Corps to the Shoshone camp where she was reunited for the first time with her brother Cameahwait, who had since become chief. It's a hell of a story, almost melodramatic, and Hall captures the sweetness of it well.

Here's the same scene from Debra Magpie Earling's new novel The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, where the presence of Cameahwait is deemphasized in favor of a communal embrace among women, all of whom, as far as I know, are invented characters:

Many People are coming toward me. They surround me and embrace me. Onion Wife makes her way to me and holds my hands so tightly I see Bia. The People, my People, turn to someone coming toward me. I see the top of her head before I see her.

She struggles to get to me.

.. I look .. I cannot believe .. I cannot believe .. I bite my fingers ..

Li-li-li, I shout. Women join me. Li-li-li-li-li-li, we call.

I cannot hold what overflows me. I am river.

It's easy to see the linguistic similarities between Hall and Earling's renditions. Both have sensed that a too-familiar language would elide the differences between us and Sacagawea; only a language that is, or feels, closer to the historical figure's will allow us to see past the myth into something true. Interestingly, in some respects they come up with opposite approaches: Hall places everything, including names, in lower-case, as if to emphasize the connection between names and things: "camas flower" is both a flower and a person. By contrast, Earling capitalizes more things and ideas, as if to elevate certain words to the level of the sacred. Some words that are too sacred are even italicized and printed in fainter type, to signify that speaking them endangers their sacredness and threatens to make them disappear. (As with the double-period "pauses," though, I wonder if a linguistic trick that needs explaining in advance isn't a little too clever.)

Lewis and Clark don't show up until late in The Lost Journals of Sacajewea, which chooses to emphasize not the story of Sacagawea's return but the story of her abduction. Although Earling is as scrupulous as Hall when it comes to the historical record of the Corps of Discovery, most of The Lost Journals is, by necessity, pure invention. Young Sacagawea is, in Earling's telling, promised to a handsome young warrior named Blue Elk, which causes the tribe's jealous beauty to curse her, perhaps bringing on the violent abduction of the Mandan. Before she is violated by Charbonneau, Sacagawea is raped by one of her Mandan captors, reminding us that the myth obscures the fact that Sacagawea's presence with the Corps is ultimately rooted in sexual violence. Earling's Sacagawea is endowed with mystic powers, too, able to see the water monsters and ogres that are invisible to most people.

Earling's Sacagawea is defined by victimhood and violence, but she has a raft of helpers and allies as well, starting with a "White Man" who teaches her rudimentary English. These lessons are meant to explain, I think the nature of the novel as a literally written "journal," but it's an idea that doesn't quite do enough. Among the Mandan, Sacagawea finds a supporter in the form of a Two-Spirit person whose name--and yes, pronouns--shift along with the gender by the page. Those are fine, but I really hated the depiction of York, who sneaks away from the Corps to inform Sacagawea of how much he hates Lewis and Clark: "Makes me sick. I get sick every time I think about it. Because what they want is every goddamn thing! They ain't lookin' to discover nothin'. The reason these people are white is they already dead." Though Hall perhaps doesn't give us enough of York, saving his section until the very end, this version of York--who already innately shares a perspective with Sacagawea on the sacredness of the land and the futility of the Corps--is too didactic to be interesting.

As for Lewis and Clark themselves? They are arrogant, cruel, and rapacious. They believe that, by seeing and naming every place, animal, and plant they come across, they have possession of it, and by doing so they violate the sacredness of these things: "If we name things," Sacagawea writes, "we kille the gifts they offer." I would have liked the book to do more with the tension between this and Sacagawea's own "naming"; the faded words suggest that her journal puts her in a kind of complicity with Lewis and Clark, but the novel isn't quite bold enough to commit to such an idea. Lewis remains a pathetic figure, but not because of his doubts, but rather because of his confidence; when Sacagawea convinces her brother to provide the Corps with horses, it's because she knows they are too stupid to survive without them. (Something about this doesn't work right, because they are a little too evil: see Clark--who took in Sacagwea's son Jean Baptiste after the Corps returned--bouncing the baby on his knee and scheming to steal it from her.)

Still, the book ends with Sacagawea--jilted by Blue Elk, whom she had trusted to save her--deciding to continue on with the Corps to the coast, inspired by a vision of a whale. (This is one of my favorite stories about Lewis and Clark, which neither book is interested in putting on the page: they traveled down to the Oregon seaside to see a big beached whale, with Sacagawea insisting she had a right to see it just like anybody else.) Hall's book is either not very interested in why Sacagawea wouldn't stay with her family after returning, or it gets lost in the profusion of historical detail. But for Earling, it's key: Sacagawea insists on her own tour of discovery; she'll do it smarter, kinder, better.

Neither of these books quite worked for me. I thought Hall's attempts at capturing the various voices worked better than Earling's, which I sometimes found inconsistent and gimmicky. But I also found Hall too scrupulous about the historical record, and unable to separate the details that matter from the ones that don't: every little thing makes it onto the page, which means that every little thing gets lost in the deluge. And the decision to cut out the expedition's nadir, the miserable months-long idle at stormy Ft. Clatsop and the "Dismal Nitch," which are instead recollected by butt-shot Lewis face down in the boat, to be nearly unforgiveable. Earling's book is more imaginative, which perhaps is right, because figures in the margins of history will never be completely rediscovered by history alone. It gives Sacagawea a hell of a story, but what gets sacrificed, I think, is a more complex, and thus more interesting, version of the others: Lewis, Clark, Charbonneau, York. Reading them back-to-back made me feel that there's still a great novel about the Corps of Discovery to be written, and next time, please don't forget the whale.