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July, 1806

On horseback, Lewis led nine soldiers and five Indians northwest along the Bitterroot River. After going five miles, they headed up the Blackfoot River through heavily timbered country, where high, precipitous mountains brought feelings of awe. The Corps of Discovery was now divided into four groups, each with a mission of its own as they made their way back home. In three weeks they would all reassemble at the mouth of the Yellowstone River—if everything went as planned.

On the second day out, Drouillard returned from hunting to report, “I found tracks of a very large Indian party, Captain.”

Lewis was not surprised. “I imagine it’s a Hidatsa hunting party. Let’s be ready to meet them soon.”

They encountered no Indians, however, and continued to travel up the Blackfoot River through beautiful country. After eleven miles, the river dwindled to little more than a creek.

“I sure hope we find some b-b-buffalo soon,” Reuben Fields commented. “I’ve b-b-been dreaming of delicious b-b-buffalo hump all winter, and I w-want to eat some.”

But they saw no buffalo even though tantalizing signs of their passage through this valley were all around them. They covered a total of thirty-one miles before camping the third day. That night, Lewis fought off nagging doubts about whether he and Clark had made the right decision to split up. Too many things could go wrong. Still, his duty was to extract the maximum advantage from this mission, and he was determined to fulfill that pledge to President Jefferson.

Brave Eagle approached Drouillard the next day. “You don’t need us any longer because the trail is so easy that even a white man couldn’t get lost,” he signed, stating an obvious fact and meaning no disrespect. “We will return to our village tomorrow.”

“Our hunters will provide you with meat for your journey,” Lewis had Drouillard sign.

Lewis ordered the hunters to turn out early the next morning to find meat for the returning guides. He was unwilling to let them leave without a good supply of provisions after they had so expertly guided the expedition over such dangerous mountain snows.

This was a sad day for the men because it was their last contact with the Nez Perce, their friends and companions for the past two months. The Nez Perce had seen the soldiers of the Corps starving and fed them, confused and given them good advice, lost and guided them. They had ridden together, eaten together, played together, danced together, lived together, and crossed the Lolo Trail together. Although the two groups could communicate only through sign language, they had shared experiences that firmly bonded them. They had managed to master their communication and cultural barriers to become true friends.

Now traveling without guides, Lewis and his men crossed one river and camped at another after covering thirty-one miles.

“Hey, Reuben!” Joseph Fields called to his brother as he came in from hunting. “We’ve got your buffalo hump!”

The hunters had finally found and killed a fat buffalo. When the next day turned out to be blustery and rainy, they stayed at their campsite all day and feasted on buffalo.

“Man, this is good eating!” Shields said gleefully.

“T-t-too b-b-bad we don’t have Charbonneau with us to make his b-b-boudin b-b-blanc,” Reuben Fields added.

They rejoiced at being on the plains of the Missouri River again, which abounded with game. They saw herds of buffalo farther down the river. It was mating season, and the continuous roar of bellowing bulls kept the party awake at night. The sound echoed and amplified across the plains, frightening the tethered horses so much that the men had to roust themselves from their bedrolls to calm them down.

The party continued traveling through high plains that were heavily populated with buffalo, providing meat as well as hides to make boats. Lewis and his men used the boats to cross the wide Missouri to get to their cache on the eastern bank. Lewis ordered eleven buffalo killed so that the men of his party who would be left at the Great Falls of the Missouri would not run out of food.

Next morning brought a serious problem. “Captain, seven of our horses are missing,” Hugh McNeal reported, pulling nervously at his nose.

Lewis grimaced. “Indians have stolen them,” he guessed. “Drouillard, track them and see what you can find out.”

Drouillard rode off, and the remaining men swam the few horses they had across the river and then paddled the bull-boats over. They were now just above the Great Falls of the Missouri, and they camped at the upper White Bear campsite where they had unsuccessfully tried last fall to build the iron-frame boat. Eagerly, the men dug up the cache they had left at the site, but they were bitterly disappointed when they discovered that high water during the spring runoff had soaked everything. The bearskins, most of the medicine, and Lewis’s plant specimens had been ruined.

“Damn!” Lewis agonized. He was devastated at the loss of the dozens and dozens of flora that he had so painstakingly labeled, dried, and preserved. However, the papers, illustrations, and maps were still legible.

“Well, let’s hope the wagon wheels we buried fared better,” he said hopefully. “Let’s dig them up.”

The wagon wheels were in good shape, so the men began to reassemble the wagons. The missing horses, however, could not be found. The men responsible for hobbling them had not done their job adequately, and the horses had freed themselves and wandered off. The men searched all day, but the horses were not to be found.

“Well, let’s load two canoes onto the wagons anyway and hope we find the horses tomorrow,” Lewis said.

Next morning, the men spread out to search in different directions. Near noon, they found the horses at the falls and brought them back to last night’s campsite. They harnessed them to the wagons and set out to haul the large canoes over the portage to their old camp below the falls. One of the wagon axles broke after going only five miles, so they made another axle and resumed travel. The wheels on the wagon carrying the larger canoe had a series of breakdowns. With much difficulty, they finally moved the canoes and some of their supplies close to a creek where they camped. As night approached, rain and wind pounded them, and the men lacked shelter because their tents were in a cache farther east.

“Turn the canoes upside down and try to sleep under them,“ Lewis suggested. Some of the men lay under the canoes, and others sat by the fire, enduring the rain under whatever covering they could find.

They continued the next day, halting frequently to rest the horses, which struggled to continue when wagon wheels sank into the mud nearly to the hubs. After much fatiguing labor for both horses and men, they managed to arrive at Portage Creek, the old lower campsite. Next morning, they opened the cache they had left there nine months earlier. A few beaver skins and robes had rotted, but everything else was in good shape. The men hauled the white pirogue out of the bushes to repair it. When they went to do the same with the red pirogue, however, they found that it had rotted and was now useless.

“Well, we can’t expect everything to go right,” Lewis said with resignation.

McNeal, out hunting alone, suddenly found himself face-to-face with a grizzly that roared up not more than ten feet from him. His heart leaped, and his startled horse reared, throwing McNeal to the ground as it galloped away. McNeal leaped to his feet and with all his strength clubbed the grizzly’s head with the stock of his gun. McNeal was shaking with fear, the adrenalin pumping. Frantically, not waiting to see the effect of the clubbing, he dashed for the nearest tree and scrambled for high branches. The dazed grizzly momentarily fell to its knees and began pawing at the pain in its head. Then it recovered and angrily charged the tree where McNeal had taken refuge. Knowing that grizzlies do not climb trees, McNeal felt that he was temporarily safe. Growling ferociously, the grizzly waited at the base of the tree until dusk, reminding McNeal of a hound dog with a treed raccoon Finally, the bear gave up its futile vigil and abandoned his prey. McNeal slipped cautiously down the tree, tracked his horse by hard-to-see hoof prints, and returned to camp in the dark. He had a story to tell around the campfire that evening.

Drouillard hadn’t returned after several days, and Lewis began to fear that a grizzly had attacked him also. “He’s been gone too long. He’s never gone this long, and I’m afraid something may have happened to him.”

But later that day Drouillard rode into camp. “I followed the trail for two days and found where the thieves had crossed the river with our horses,” he reported. “I kept following their tracks, but they had too big a head start, so I finally gave up.”

“How many were there?” someone asked.

“It was a large group—maybe fifteen lodges. I wouldn’t have been able to get our horses back even if I had found them.

As hunters brought in a good supply of fresh meat, the men cut it into strips and put it out to dry in the bright sunlight. This food would sustain the group that planned a trip up Maria’s River. Lewis reduced the size of his party from nine to four, leaving more men at the falls than originally planned. Before departing for Maria’s River, he sketched the Great Falls of the Missouri for his records.

He and his small party set out across treeless plains toward the upper reaches of Maria’s River. They proceeded along the river for several miles until they reached a place where they decided to cross the hundred-and-fifty yard span. They collected wood and built three small rafts to take their supplies across the swiftly moving river. With supplies safely across, they drove their horses into the river and swam them across. But in this entire area, mosquitoes filled the air in great swarms, so thick and troublesome that they flew into men’s mouths as they talked. The men built two huge fires—one for the horses and one for themselves—so that the flames and smoke would deter the mosquitoes. Both men and horses were so tortured by the devilish insects that they willingly placed themselves in the densest smoke.

“Any other time, the fire would make the horses frantic,” Lewis said to Drouillard at they fanned the smoke toward their faces.

“I guess it’s a matter of the lesser evil,” Drouillard remarked. When the air cooled an hour after dark, the mosquitoes disappeared.

The countryside now was broken and filled with steep ravines, and the river was confined between narrow cliffs. The land was so rocky that the horses developed sore hooves. After many miles, the land became more level and less rocky, but no timber or underbrush was to be seen. High cliffs had given way to normal river banks three or four feet high. Lewis’s small group had to make their fires using buffalo dung, which served the purpose quite well.

The main reason Lewis had taken this small detachment so far north was to see if the source of Maria’s River lay within the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase. A secondary purpose was to meet the Blackfoot Indians and add them to the tribes of those interested in establishing a system of trade across the vast territory. But now, Lewis’s desire to meet with the Blackfoot was starting to give way to a nagging fear. When he had planned this excursion, he had hoped to have some leading Nez Perce with him to help make peace, but that safeguard was now gone. He had also planned for a party of nine men, and now he had only four. Finally, what the Nez Perce chiefs said about the Blackfoot—that they were a vicious and lawless set of wretches—was beginning to affect Lewis’s thinking. He decided to avoid the Blackfoot if at all possible. He felt sure now that the Blackfoot, finding a small and vulnerable party of white men, would attack and rob them. These dangers were close to his mind as he stepped up to take his turn on sentinel duty.

For the next three days, the small party followed Maria’s River upstream. When the river forked into two branches, they took the northern fork. The horses’ feet were still sore, and clouds of mosquitoes still harassed every man and beast, slowing the pace and bringing great discomfort to all.

“It’s beginning to look like Maria’s River doesn’t go as far north as I had hoped,” Lewis told his companions, “but we need to know for sure.”

They went twenty-four miles before stopping to eat and let the horses graze and rest. Then they continued twelve more miles and camped in a grove of cottonwood tress that was only ten miles from the base of the northern Rocky Mountains. After making and recording celestial observations, Captain Lewis decided that there was no point in going any farther up Maria’s River.

“We’ll call this place Camp Disappointment,” he told the men glumly.

He decided to stay there two days to rest both the men and the horses from the trying journey. Drouillard returned from a scouting mission to report many signs of Indians in the area. The men went out to hunt, but without success—a sure sign that a great number of Indians had been hunting in the area.

“We’re probably lucky we haven’t met the Blackfoot,” Lewis told Drouillard.

“I think you’re right. From what we’ve heard about them, and the fact we are such a small group, that is a good thing,” Drouillard agreed.

They left Camp Disappointment and rode south. There was no game in the area, but the hunters killed some pigeons and cooked them with roots for a tasty meal. After grazing the horses, they continued, with Drouillard out in front hunting. Lewis and the Fields brothers ascended to a high plain while Drouillard remained in the valley.

When Lewis reached the high plain and looked around at the beauty of the place, he was alarmed to see a herd of about thirty horses a mile away. He got out his telescope and discovered several Indians astride their horses, staring intently into the valley. Lewis could tell they were watching Drouillard. If there were as many men as there were horses, Lewis’s little party would be vastly outnumbered. He resolved to make the best of the situation.

“Show the flag,” he ordered Joseph Fields.

Fields unfurled the flag. Lewis and both Fields brothers advanced slowly toward the Indians, who were now milling about as if much alarmed. Suddenly one of the Indians broke out of the milling group and whipped his horse full-speed toward Lewis’s party. Lewis dismounted and stood waiting for the onrushing horse and rider. His behavior seemed to confuse the Indian, who probably expected the three men to flee from him. When the Indian halted a hundred yards away, Lewis held out his hand in calm greeting, but the Indian wheeled his horse and galloped back to his companions. Lewis could count them now: there were eight young men. Lewis suspected that others were hidden behind the bluffs because there were many other saddled horses. Lewis and the Fields brothers advanced cautiously.

“If they are hostile, we have to fight to the death,” Lewis said soberly as they walked. The Fields brothers both nodded in grim-faced assent. The Indian party could possibly outnumbered Lewis’s group by as many as eight to one.

“If they are friendly, or at least not violent, we might be able to establish contact with the Blackfoot chiefs and have a chance to talk to them about a trading system,” Lewis said hopefully.

“Well, let’s hope they’re friendly,” Joseph Fields said, cracking his knuckles nervously. Down on the plain, Drouillard was unaware of the drama taking place behind him.

When they advanced to within a hundred yards of the Indians, they stopped. Lewis continued alone to meet the Indian who had ridden out in front of his group. He was a young brave of nineteen or twenty years, very thin and dressed in buckskin, his hair pulled back into a single braid. He eyed Lewis cautiously. These two men from vastly different cultures met and shook hands, nodding at each other tentatively. Then both moved on to shake hands with the others of their respective parties. The Indians signaled they would like to smoke. Using his limited sign-language skills, Lewis told them that his pipe was with his hunter in the valley. He proposed that Reuben Fields and one of the Indians ride down to find Drouillard and bring him back, which was done.

Lewis had Drouillard sign, “What nation are you from?”

“Blackfoot nation,” was the reply.

“Who is your chief?”

Three of them stepped forward. Lewis knew they were too young and too many to be chiefs, but he decided to humor them. He handed out a medal, a flag, and a handkerchief to the three who had stepped forward. By now, Lewis was confident that there were only eight of them in the immediate vicinity. He was relieved because he was convinced that he and his men could handle eight of them if they became hostile. The sun was sinking, and when Lewis proposed that they camp together, they agreed.

They came to a favorable spot in a bend of the river, a bowl-like bottom with three large cottonwood trees in the center and excellent grazing for the horses. With Drouillard flashing signs, Lewis asked question after question. The Indians said they were part of a large band that was one day’s march away, near the foot of the mountains. They said a white man was living among them. They also said another large band of their nation was hunting buffalo while on the way to the mouth of Maria’s River. Lewis had no way of knowing how much of this was true and how much of it was meant to intimidate. If it was all true, it meant that he and his men were in the middle of the Blackfoot nation and that a Canadian trader was living with them—which meant they had firearms, although this group of eight had only two muskets. Lewis asked about trading patterns of the Blackfoot.

“We ride six days to a British post on the North Saskatchewan River to buy guns, ammunition, whiskey, and blankets in exchange for wolf and beaver skins,” was the reply.

Lewis explained that they would get a much better deal from the Americans once the Americans arrived on the high plains. He gave his peace speech. He said he had come from the rising sun and had gone to where the sun set and had made peace among warring nations on both sides of the mountains. He said he had come to their country to invite the Blackfoot nation to join the American trading empire. To his delight, they readily gave their assent.

The young Indians were willing to talk the sign language as long as the smoking continued. They were extremely fond of tobacco, and Lewis plied them with it until late that night. He told them that he had other men in the area, a party of soldiers he would be meeting at the mouth of Maria’s River. He asked them to send messengers to nearby bands of their nation to meet in three days at the mouth of Maria’s River for a council about peace and trade. He concluded by asking them to accompany him to the mouth of Maria’s River and promised them ten horses and some tobacco if they would do so. They made no reply to his invitation.

Lewis took the first watch that night. At 11:30 he roused Reuben Fields to take his place as sentinel.

“Watch the Indians carefully, lest they try to steal our horses,” he whispered.

During the night, as the Blackfoot braves slept in an area apart from Lewis and his men, they began talking in low voices among themselves. Lewis and Drouillard, awakened by the murmur, could hear occasional phrases and words as they spoke their native language, but neither could understand the words. However, from the tones of their voices and the intensity of various phrases, the white men perceived that they were brewing a plot against them.

Lewis fell back to sleep, but awoke before daybreak when Drouillard shouted, “Damn you! Let go of my gun!” Lewis saw Drouillard scuffling with an Indian for his rifle. Lewis leaped to his feet and frantically reached for his rifle, but it was gone. He drew his pistol, and when he saw a second Indian running away with his rifle, he ran after him, shouting in English and aiming his pistol.

“Lay down my rifle or I will shoot you!”

Understanding Lewis’s tone of voice, the brave lowered the rifle as Drouillard rushed in.

“Let me kill the bastard, Captain!”

Lewis extended his arm to halt Drouillard’s action while keeping his eyes on the would-be thief. “No! We have our rifles, and the Indians are falling back.”

Simultaneously, the Fields brothers woke to see two Indians running off with their rifles which had been lying beside them as they slept. Dashing at full speed after the thieves, they tackled them at fifty yards and wrestled their rifles from their grasp. During the scuffle, Reuben pulled his knife and plunged it into one young man’s chest, killing him instantly. The Fields brothers leaped to their feet and took off after the horses.

Lewis was running after two Blackfoot who were trying to drive off the white men’s horses. He sprinted some three hundred yards, at which point the Indians had reached a vertical bluff. Lewis, out of breath, could pursue no farther. He shouted that he would shoot if they didn’t return the horses. When one Indian aimed a British musket at him, Lewis shot him in the stomach. The wounded Indian raised himself to one knee and fired at Lewis, who felt the wind of the bullet as it passed his head. Unable to reload because his shot pouch was back at camp, Lewis turned and made his way back.

“Call the Fields boys back! We have enough horses!” Lewis shouted to Drouillard. But the Fields brothers were too far away.

Lewis and Drouillard began to saddle the horses as the Fields brothers returned leading four of the Blackfoot horses. Lewis appraised his herd and selected the four Indian horses because they were fresh and rested, as well as four of his original herd. As the men arranged saddles and the placement of supplies on the packhorses, Lewis began burning the articles the Indians had left behind, including two bows and two quivers of arrows. Only the musket the Indians had left behind and the flag Lewis had given the Indians the previous evening escaped the fire. Angry at Indian treachery, Lewis found the medal he had awarded at last night’s campfire ceremony and left it hanging around the neck of the dead Indian to let his friends know who his killers were.

But Drouillard, familiar with Indian ways, asked, “Do you think it’s wise to taunt them that way?”

“Let them know who they are dealing with!” Lewis answered grimly.

Minutes later, Lewis told the others, “The surviving young Blackfoot braves will ride at top speed to the nearest village and report what happened. Then a big party of warriors will set out to kill any white men they can find. I just hope we don’t find a band of Blackfoot Indians between us and Maria’s River.”

With one Blackfoot brave dead and another fatally wounded, Lewis and his group knew they were in deadly danger. They were four white men in the middle of a land of hundreds of Blackfoot warriors who would surely seek revenge the instant they heard the news. They must leave the area immediately.

They struck out toward the mouth of Maria’s River, the horses proceeding at a trot that covered eight miles per hour. They rode through the morning and midday, not stopping until three o’clock, when they finally halted to eat and let the horses graze. They had covered sixty-three miles. After an hour-and-a-half break, they covered another seventeen miles before dark. Seeing a buffalo, they killed and ate it for supper, setting off again at a walk across flat plains by moonlight. At two o’clock in the morning, Lewis finally ordered a halt. They had started the day with an Indian fight and followed that with a hundred-mile ride. Now they turned their horses out to graze and finally lay down to sleep. Everyone was extremely tired and since there were only four of them, Lewis didn’t post a sentinel, deciding they would risk danger so all could get some uninterrupted sleep Lewis woke at first light, so stiff he could hardly move.

“Wake up, men,” he called. “We’ve got to keep moving. Let’s get saddled up.”

Joseph Fields was dragging his aching body from his bedroll. “Can’t we rest just a little longer, Captain?” he pleaded.

“Our lives depend on the distance we can put between us and the Blackfoot warriors,” Lewis said, shaking his head.

With that, the men became alert, and their retreat was resumed. After twelve miles, they reached the Missouri River and continued alongside it for eight more miles. Suddenly they heard rifle shots. Staring anxiously upriver—fearing that a Blackfoot war party would ride into view—they suddenly saw Corps of Discovery canoes coming down the river. It was Sergeant Ordway’s party!

“You will never know how happy we are to see you!” Lewis shouted to them as they put in to shore. “We killed two Blackfoot braves who tried to rob us. A war party is probably searching for us. Help us quickly transfer our supplies from our horses to your canoes, and then we’ll turn the horses loose.”

Down the Missouri River the enlarged party went, sharing their separate experiences and still on the lookout for angry Blackfoot warriors. Finally, they arrived at the mouth of Maria’s River, the very place Lewis had told the Blackfoot braves his group would be.

Lewis gave orders. “Quickly! Dig up the caches we buried here last summer. We have to keep moving!”

Skins and furs had been damaged in the cache, but the gunpowder, corn, flour, pork, and salt were all in fairly good condition. They returned to the canoes in record time and continued downstream. After fifteen miles, Lewis decided they had left the Blackfoot warriors safely behind, so they made camp across the river facing the direction from which the Blackfoot could appear.

Lewis’s exploration of Maria’s River was finished.

“Separating into small groups was a mistake,” he admitted privately to Sergeant Ordway. “All I accomplished was to make enemies of the Blackfoot nation.”

The only objective now was to reunite with Clark and his party and arrive at the safety of the Mandan villages. Next morning, they shoved off and sailed along with the current at seven miles per hour. Progress continued uneventfully over the next five days. Game was so plentiful that at one stop the men killed twenty-nine deer. They stayed over to cut the meat into strips and dry it in the sun. The canoes passed large timbered bottoms, eventually arriving at last year’s camp at the three forks of the Missouri River.

Through heavy rain, thunder, and hail, they continued the next day before camping that night. The next morning, they entered the high country with the white clay cliffs that resembled ancient towns and buildings. When they spotted bighorn sheep on the cliffs, the Fields brothers went out and killed two large rams. Lewis saved the skeletons, horns, and skin to take to Washington.

Every day they felt closer to home.