When Winter Come by Frank X Walker

known descendents of York, a feat ironically impossible in Kentucky and Virginia, where such descendents are not publicly recognized. The legacy of devaluing the families and marriages of enslaved individuals like York continues today; his slave wife’s name, for example, is still absent from our history books, along with all references to any children they might have borne together.
    It was also at Fishtrap where I met the late Marc Jaffe, who was working with Alvin M. Josephy Jr. on an important anthology of Native voices called
Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes
(New York: Knopf, 2006), which included essays by Allen V. Pinkham Sr., N. Scott Momaday, Roberta Conner, and other recognized Native American writers, scholars, and leaders. This collection would prove extremely useful in helping to shift the focus in the public discourse around the importance of the great trek to include a Native perspective, just as the bicentennial commemoration was coming to a close.
    The information contained in the transcribed oral histories from the Nez Perce I had encountered, in addition to
Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes,
forced me to take another look at the voices from this story that were, after all this time, still silent. These resources encouraged me to begin looking at the Lewis and Clark expedition again, but this time through the lens of the women in York’s life—specifically his Nez Perce wife and his slave wife, whose voices provide the emotional undercurrent in this latest retelling of the journey.
    I tried to look for light wherever the poetic prism led. Many works helped me to re-enter the space these poems come from. There were general sources on the expedition, such as The National Council of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial’s brochure called
A Guide to Visiting The Lands of Many Nations & to the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial
; NebraskaLand Magazine’s
America Looks West: Lewis and Clark on the Missouri,
80, no. 7 (2002);and the more specialized
Or Perish in the Attempt: Wilderness Medicine in the Lewis & Clark Expedition
, written by David J. Peck (Helena, Mont.: Farcountry Press, 2002).
    The scholarly work of Dr. Jim Holmberg’s
Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark
proved invaluable, and Ken Burns’s film on the expedition entitled
Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery
(PBS, 1997) continued to help me to visualize the landscape all the way from Kentucky to the Pacific when I needed to re-see what I was writing about.
    To reacquaint myself with the voices of the participants, I looked again at
The Journals of Lewis and Clark
, edited and abridged by Anthony Brandt (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Adventures Classics, 2002); as well as the journals of expedition member Patrick Gass,
The Journals of Patrick Gass, Member of the Lewis & Clark Expedition
, ed. Carol Lynn Mac-Gregor (Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1997), which provided an additional point of view. Robert B. Betts’s
In Search of York
(Boulder: The University Press of Colorado, 2000) was important in exploring the main character of my story.
    Books on slavery, such as Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider’s
An Eyewitness History of Slavery in America From Colonial Times to the Civil War
(New York: Facts on File, 2000); Velma Mae Thomas’s
Lest We Forget: The Passage from Africa to Slavery and Emancipation
(New York: Crown Publishers, 1997); and the primary sources contained in John W. Blasengame’s
Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977) were crucial to the voices I wanted to develop. Additionally, Joseph M. Murphy’s
Santeria: African Spirits in America
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1993) helped me to address this necessary component of the narrative.
    There were many sources that helped to contextualize the Native American voices and lives I wished to know better,