Longarm and the Shoshoni silver

Tupombi snorted. "A bird woman riding in a canoe being pulled? Some so-called Indian scholars have tortured Sacajawea into such Shoshoni baby talk, and Shoshoni Sam keeps saying nobody will ever pay a dime to meet anyone called Grass Baby, and I fear he may be right. I only agreed to help him and Miss Marvella to find Boinaiv. I owe them for getting me out of a fix a lot like the one the crying Boinaiv found herself in when Lewis and Clark came along. I was stranded in Kansas City when the owner of an other Wild

West Show decided he didn't like my stuck-up-ways. Then the manager of my hotel insisted on being paid or taking it out in trade, in bed with me."

Longarm grimaced and said, "That's how come mothers warn their daughters about show folk, ma'am. But even assuming way nicer show folk took you under their wing and asked you to help 'em track down a more famous Indian lady, what in thunder makes you think a gal who marched over the mountains with Lewis and Clark back in the days of the first Napoleon, as a woman grown, would still be—"

"Somewhere in her nineties," Tupombi cut in. "She was in her early teens, pregnant or not, when she led the way west back in 1804. But there's more to it than the mere fact it would be possible for most any healthy person to live to be a hundred or more. If you know my mother's tongue at all you know the people you call Snakes and Comanche are really one. So both nations tell the same tale of a proud Ho woman leaving the breed brute who beat her and his other Indian wives. They say that to avoid Charbonneau and other Taibo mountain men who might have helped him she rode far south, far, to fall in with the Quohada or Antelope People you also know as a Comanche band. They say an important powamu made her his paramount wife because she was not only beautiful but knew so many secrets of both his red and white enemies. I cannot tell you his name because nobody knows it now. You know how my mother's people are about the names of those who have gone back to Taiowa."

Longarm nodded soberly and observed, "Makes the true history of you all a chore to figure too. But we can still talk about Bird Woman because she's still supposed to be alive?"

Tupombi nodded the back of her head to him but said, "She was given that name by enemies. I know you find this hard to understand. Shoshoni Sam finds it impossible because he understands no Ho at all. He keeps trying to

say things to me in baby-talk Algonquin. He thinks squaw, papoose, and moccasin are Shoshoni words."

Longarm said, "Well, he does call himself Shoshoni Sam. What makes you think Sacajawea or, all right, Boinaiv would be way up at Fort Hall, dead or alive, if she was last seen married to a Comanche chief down around the Staked Plains?"

Tupombi said, "I just told you her man was turned into a ghost nobody remembers much about. They think it might have been in a bad fight with Taibo, whether Mexican or Anglo, back when everyone was fighting for control of West Texas. By this time Boinaiv wasn't afraid of her French Canadian man anymore, and before she'd run away from him they'd had a son, a healthy one with a lot of puha, who'd been sent to a fine school by the red-headed chief, William Clark."

Longarm brightened and said, "Oh, sure, I know about John Baptiste Clark Chapineau, better known as Pomp and bom along the way to the wide Pacific. Wasn't there some scandalized gossip at the time about old Clark giving the lad his name as a middle name after being so friendly with his Shoshoni mamma?"

Tupombi shrugged and sounded unconcerned as she replied, "He could have fucked her had he wanted to. That was one of the reasons she and a dozen or so other Indian girls had been brought along. But Pomp Chapineau was almost surely the son of her half-breed lord and master because she was carrying when the two of them joined the expedition. Do you want to hear my story or do you want to talk dirty about a girl who had no say at all in the matter?"

He said, "Well, Clark never would have named that Judith Basin after a gal waiting for him back home if he hadn't been sort of fond of her as well. Keep talking about Sacajawea-Boinaiv and her long-lost mixed-breed son. Didn't he die of Rocky Mountain spots during the Montana gold rush, around '66?"

She sighed and replied, "Some say it was water on the lungs. I told you my mother's people don't like to talk about ghosts. I don't know whether Boinaiv ever met her grown son again when the two of them were seen around the Montana gold fields about the same time. I hope she did, and that he was kind to her. In any case she was last seen back north, in Shoshoni country where she belonged."