Captain Clark had heard, for at breaking camp in the morning, John was placed under arrest and confined in the forecastle aboard the barge.
That night, at camp, twenty-five miles above the Arikara villages, a court-martial was held on the case of John Newman. He was found guilty of mutinous speech and sentenced to received seventy-five lashes, and be suspended from the company. The next noon the boats stopped in the rain, at a sand-bar in the middle of the river, everybody was ordered out, and John was roundly whipped on the naked back with ramrods and switches.
Chief Ah-ke-tah-na-sha of the Arikaras, who was going with the expedition up to the Mandans, to make peace between the Mandans and the Arikaras, squatted on the sand-bar, to watch. Evidently he did not understand, for he began to weep.
“Why does Ah-ke-tah-na-sha cry?” asked Captain Clark.
Ah-ke-tah-na-sha, who could speak some Sioux, explained to Drouillard, and Drouillard explained to the captains.
“He say de ’Rikara dey punish by death, but dey never whip even de children. He weep for Newman.”
“Tell him what the matter is, and that this is the white man’s way of punishing disobedience,” directed Captain Clark, to Drouillard.
“He say mebbe so, but ’mong Injuns to whip men make women of dem. If dees is white man way, all right. Men ought to obey deir chiefs.”
“Now aren’t ye ’shamed o’ yourself, when even an Injun cries over ye?” reproved Patrick Gass, of John Newman, who was painfully donning his shirt and coat.
“Well, I am,” admitted John. “I guess I deserved what I got. I don’t harbor any grudge, and I’ll do my duty.”
The weather had grown much colder, with squalls of snow and sleet and high winds; the wild geese were flying high, headed into the south; and the river, falling rapidly, was split with bars and narrow channels, when, two weeks after the punishment of John Newman, the barge and the two pirogues anchored off the first of the Mandan villages, in the centre of present North Dakota.
“Five long months we’ve been travelin’, an’ for sixteen hundred crooked miles,” quoth Patrick Gass. “Sure we desarve a bit o’ rist. Now what will the Mandans say, I wonder?”
“Did you see that young fellow who’d lost the halves of two fingers?” queried George Shannon. “Well, he’d cut ’em off, on purpose, because some of his relatives had died! That’s the Mandan way of going into mourning.”