Meriwether Lewis set off for the Pacific Coast on July 5th, 1803. He would return to the President’s House on December 28th, 1806. Against all odds he had reached the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Ocean, reinforcing the U.S. claim to the Pacific Northwest under the Doctrine of Discovery. It would establish the United States as a continental nation from “sea to shining sea.”
History is a twice told tale and every generation tells its own tale. In honor of the 200th anniversary of the expedition in 2003–2006, its peaceful nature and contact with Indian nations was emphasized. The story of Lewis’s supposed suicide in 1809 was presented as a fact, which distorted all interpretations of his character. That his death was immediately labeled a suicide has unintentially colored the assessment of who he was and what he accomplished for over two centuries.
He celebrated his 29th birthday at Pittsburgh on August 18, 1803, while he was living in the officer quarters at Fort Fayette, (Fort Lafayette) waiting for his boat to be built by a drunken contractor. Lewis himself had arrived at Pittsburgh on July 15th, only ten days after leaving the capitol. If William Clark was unable to go, Lieutenant Moses Hooke, commander of Fort Fayette, was going to be his replacement. Hooke would serve as second in command, not as co-commander. But by the 29th of July, Lewis had received a reply from Clark:
I will cheerfully join you in an “official Charrector” as mentioned in your letter, and partake of the dangers, difficulties, and fatigues, and I anticipate the honors & rewards of the re sult of such an enterprise, should we be successful in accomplishing it. This is an undertaking fraited with many difeculties, but My friend I do assure you that no man lives whith whome I would perfur to undertake Such a Trip &c. as yourself, and I shall arrange my matters as well as I can against your arrival here.367
On July 22nd, Lewis wrote to Jefferson that the goods had safely arrived from Harpers Ferry and the army volunteers who would take the boat down the Ohio had arrived from Carlisle. The boat would be ready by August 5th. The water on the Ohio River was exceedingly low and getting lower. No matter how low the river got he was—
determined to go forward though I should not be able to make a greater distance than a mile pr. day.368
By the time he wrote to William Clark on August 3rd, he was going to do it, even if he could make no more than a “boat’s length pr. day.” He wrote the boat would be ready by mid August and he would be at the Falls by the end of the month.
He cautioned Clark he was pleased to hear he had engaged some men for the expedition, but they should be told it was conditional on Lewis’s approval. He was “well pleased” that Clark had rejected the young gentlemen who were applying, as “they will not answer our purposes.” They needed hunters, who were willing to share in the general duties of the party.369
Lewis had successfully managed things so far. The purveyor’s summary of his purchases for the journey listed the following categories and took many pages to describe in detail—mathematical instruments; arms, ammunition and accoutrements; medicine &c; clothing; provisions &c; Indian presents; and camp equipage. Altogether his purchases totaled $2,160.14, and were based on the estimate of 12–15 soldiers making up the party.370
The expedition was expanding. His original plan had been to use volunteers from Southwest Point, an army post in Tennessee, and to purchase a boat at Nashville. However, Lewis learned there were not enough good men stationed at Southwest Point for his purposes and no boat was available at Nashville. Building a boat at Pittsburgh was a substitute plan. The use of recruits from Carlisle to take the boat down the Ohio was also improvised. The soldiers would be traveling to their first assignment at Fort Adams in Mississippi Territory, and would leave the boat once it reached Fort Massac near the Mississippi River.371
A portrait of the original breed of Newfoundland dogs, circa 1790.
On July 2nd, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn authorized the commander at Kaskaskia in Illinois Territory to supply eight men and a sergeant who understood how to row a boat and to provide the best boat at the post to accompany Lewis up the Missouri. The soldiers were expected to return to Illinois before the river iced over.372
Dearborn also instructed Captain Lewis that he should have no more than 12 non-commissioned officers and privates under his command. Another officer (Clark) and a hired interpreter, would bring the total to 15.373 Lewis interpreted these orders to mean that he could hire as many civilians as he needed when he wrote to Clark.
Lewis made a decision that was important for the safety of the party, and certainly for its morale. He purchased a Newfoundland dog for $20 at Pittsburgh which he named Seaman. The big dogs originally came from Newfoundland and were famous for their swimming ability. Newfoundlands were working dogs used by fishermen to retrieve lines and nets of fish. They had short, thick coats and were very strong.374
Keelboat at Lewis and Clark State Park, Onawa, Iowa. (Photo by Kira Gale)
Finally the boat was completed. Lewis sent two wagons loaded with goods down to Wheeling on the Virginia side of the Ohio River. The Ohio was the lowest it had ever been in the memory of the “oldest settler in this country.” The boat had to be unloaded and lifted by hand over bars of stones and driftwood in the river, or dragged by horses and oxen over the bars. The water level at many bars was six inches or less. Lewis left Pittsburgh on August 31, 1803. When he reached Wheeling on September 8th, he wrote Jefferson that he had been “most shamefully detained by the unpardonable negligence of my boat-builder,” and that he had averaged about 12 miles a day to Wheeling, but some days it was 5 miles or less.375
At Wheeling he purchased the red pirogue—a large row boat manned by seven oars and equipped with two sails—to haul some of the goods brought by the wagons. The water level was deeper from Wheeling on down the Ohio to its mouth on the Mississippi River.
One of Lewis’s prize possessions was his newly purchased airgun. When the boat left Pittsburgh he stopped at Brunot’s Island, five miles down river, to say goodbye to his fellow Masons who had gathered to bid him farewell. He demonstrated the airgun, firing it seven times on one charge before giving it to a friend to try out. The friend accidentally shot a woman bystander, standing about 40 yards away. The .46 caliber (nearly half an inch) lead ball passed through her hat and cut her temple. She fell to the ground, bleeding. Lewis wrote in the first day’s entry in his journal:
… we were all in the greatest consternation supposed she was dead [but] by a minute she revived to our enespressable satisfaction, and by examination we found the wound by no means mortal or even dangerous; called the hands aboard and proceeded. & 376
The next account of the airgun comes from the journal of another traveler, Thomas Rodney, who was going down the Ohio to become a judge and land commissioner in Mississippi Territory. Rodney had traveled by horseback to Wheeling and was going by flatboat the rest of the way. On September 8th he wrote:
Visited Captain Lewess barge. He shewed us his air gun which fired 22 times at one charge…. It is a curious peice of workmanship not easily discribed and therefore I omit attempting it.377
Rodney did not actually witness the gun fire 22 times on one charge. Lewis was having trouble with the firing mechanism, but he could manage to fire it seven times on a charge. If you were 50 yards away, the airgun would appear to fire silently. Closer to the firing, a “whack” sound was heard. The gun was a Girandoni airgun, a military weapon made in Austria and was one of only one or two repeating airguns in the U. S.378
The Grave Creek Mound, from an 1847 engraving.379
After leaving Wheeling, Lewis visited the Grave Creek burial mound at Moundsville, West Virginia. He estimated the “remarkable mound of earth” to be 65 feet high, ending in a blunt point of 30 feet in diameter. He wrote:
near the summet of this mound grows a white oak tree whose girth is 13 ½ feet, from the aged appeance of this tree I think it’s age might resonably be calculated at 300 years.380
The Ohio Valley was covered with Indian burial mounds and ceremonial and astronomical observation earthworks, built by prehistoric Indians who moved countless tons of earth in constructing them. Lewis wrote that some brass beads found near two skeletons excavated from the site had been sent to Mr. Peale’s museum in Philadelphia. The Grave Creek Mound dates back to 250–150 B. C. and is now a National Historic Landmark.
Two days later he arrived at Marietta, Ohio, established by veterans of the American Revolution as the first settlement in Northwest Territory. Located at the junction of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers, Marietta is the site of an ancient complex of platform mounds. There he visited with the postmaster, an “excalent republican,” and wrote another letter to Jefferson.
Seaman was having a great time, catching black squirrels who were swimming across the Ohio, from the west to the east shore. Lewis wrote the squirrels were fat and he found them “when fryed a pleasant food.”
Lewis passed Blennerhassett Island without comment in his journal. The island was the home of one of the largest mansions in the United States, built by a wealthy and eccentric Irish couple, Harmon and Margaret Blennerhassett, who emigrated to America in the 1790’s. Blennerhassett Island would become an important part of the Aaron Burr treason trial in 1807.
After Lewis reached Letart Falls on September 18th, he quit writing in his journal for almost two months. The Falls were near the bend of the Ohio, where the river heads west to join the Mississippi. During this time he visited Cincinnati and Big Bone Lick to collect bones for Jefferson, and then spent almost two weeks at the Falls of the Ohio.
When he reached Cincinnati on September 28th he wrote to Clark that he had conditionally engaged two young men. They were George Shannon and John Colter. Shannon would become the youngest member of expedition at age 16. Shannon is often said to have been 18 years old in 1803, but it seems more likely he was two years younger. Perhaps Lewis was remembering how disappointed he had been when he wasn’t allowed to join Michaux’s expedition at the age of 18.381
In his letter to Jefferson on October 3rd, Lewis described mastodon bones (which he called “mammoth” bones) that he examined in the collection of Dr. William Goforth of Cincinnati. He then went to Big Bone Lick, 17 miles southwest of Cincinnati, to collect bones for the president—which unfortunately were lost in a boat accident on their way to Monticello. Mastodons roamed North America until 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. The salt licks and a sulphur springs at Big Bone Lick had supplied salt and minerals to animals living in the Pleistocene era and for many years afterwards. The mastodons were the animals, the “American Incognitum,” which they hoped to find were still living in the unexplored regions of the West.
Lewis included some alarming news in his letter. He had decided to explore the country south of the Missouri on horseback over the winter, perhaps going by the route of the Kansas River to Sante Fe. He added that if Clark could be spared from other duties, he could explore the area in another direction. Jefferson wrote back to Lewis on November 16th—
We are strongly of the opinion here that you had better not enter the Missouri till the spring …. One thing however we are decided in: you must not take the winter excursion which you propose … Such an expedition will be more dangerous than the main expedition up the Missouri & would by an accident to you, hazard our main object, which since the acquisition of Louisiana interests every body in the highest degree….The object of your mission is single, the direct water communication from sea to sea formed by the bed of the Missouri & perhaps the Oregon [Columbia]. By having Mr. Clarke with you we consider the expedition double manned & therefore the less liable to failure, for which reason neither of you should be exposed to risques by going off of your line.382
Jefferson also advised him to spend the winter in Illinois Territory at Kaskaskia or Cahokia in order to avoid all danger of Spanish opposition. He gave Lewis the news that he expected congress would authorize $10–12,000 in additional funding for three more expeditions to explore the principal waters of the Mississippi and Missouri. Lewis received this letter after he arrived at Cahokia in December.
William Clark was waiting for Lewis when he reached the Falls of the Ohio on October 14th. The boat was piloted through the Falls on the 15th and moored at Mill Creek near George Rogers Clark’s home on Clark’s Point overlooking the falls. William had moved across the river from Louisville in March to live with his brother in Clarksville, Indiana. His brother’s home was a two room log cabin with an upstairs sleeping loft. Due to his brother’s financial entanglements, William owned the land adjacent to Mill Creek, and had entered into an agreement with the town trustees in March to build a boat canal and waterworks on the land.383
Lewis and the two Clark brothers must have immediately agreed that the seven men William Clark had recruited, and the two recruits with Lewis, needed to be enlisted in the army rather than hired as civilians. These became the expedition members known as “The Nine Young Men from Kentucky.” In addition, Clark informed Lewis he was bringing his slave York along on the journey, making it a total of ten men who joined at the Falls.
William Clark and the two Field brothers, Reuben and Joseph, have the date of August 1, 1803 for their army enlistments. Clark must have recruited them and secured their commitment very soon after receiving Lewis’s letter. At the end of the expedition, Lewis would recommend bonus pay for the Field brothers, describing them as—
… two of the most active and enterprising young men who accompanied us. It was their peculiar fate to have been engaged in all the most dangerous and difficult scenes of the voyage, in which they uniformly acquitted themselves with much honor.
The other men enlisted between October 15–20th. Charles Floyd and Nathaniel Pryor, who were cousins, were appointed sergeants by the captains after the expedition set out. Another of Clark’s recruits, John Shields, was praised by Lewis who wrote at the end of the expedition—
Nothing was more peculiarly useful to us, in various situations, than the skill and ingenuity of this man as an artist, in repairing our guns, accoutrements, &c.
Lewis had written to Clark that “much must depend upon the judicious scelection of our men” and of the seven men chosen by Clark five received special recognition. His ability to recruit the right men was essential to the expedition’s success. The other two men who joined the party were William Bratton and George Gibson who also became members of the permanent party. Bratton was a blacksmith and Gibson was a fiddle player among their other accomplishments. The expedition left the Falls on October 26th.
Lewis resumed writing in his journal on November 11, when they reached Fort Massac, where he hired the services of a civilian, George Drouillard (pronounced “Drewyer”), a sign language interpreter and hunter of mixed Shawnee and French Canadian descent. Lewis urged additional pay for “Drulyard” at the end of the expedition, writing—
A man of much merit; he has been peculiarly usefull from his knowledge of the common language of gesticulation, and his uncommon skill as a hunter and woodsman….It was his fate also to have encountered on various occasions, with either Captain Clark or myself, all of the most dangerous and trying scenes of the voyage, in which he uniformly acquited himself with honor.384
The soldiers who had manned the boat from Pittsburgh were dropped off at Fort Massac. They passed Wilkinsonville on November 14th with just a brief mention in Lewis’s journal. Lewis had been stricken with malarial fevers the day before, and Clark was ill with violent stomach and bowel pains from November 16th until reaching Kaskaskia on November 27th.
Seven of the soldiers who volunteered at Kaskaskia became members of the permanent party—John Collins, Patrick Gass, John Ordway, Peter Weiser, Joseph Whitehouse, Alexander Willard and Richard Windsor. The others were part of the military escort who brought the barge back to St. Louis. The white pirogue, the larger of the two rowboats with sails, was acquired at Kaskaskia.
Lewis left Kaskaskia on November 5th, traveling on horseback to Cahokia. There he met with postmaster John Hay and French fur trader and land speculator Nicholas Jarrot, who agreed to serve as translators at his meeting with the Spanish Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana, the Marqués Carlos Delassus in St. Louis. At the meeting, Lewis informed Delassus that twenty five men would be accompanying him on the expedition to the Pacific, and that Louisiana would soon be formally acquired by the United States. On December 9th, Delassus wrote to the military governor of Louisiana, the Marqués de Casa Calvo, and to Governor Juan Manuel de Salcedo, that—
Mr. Merryweather Lewis, Captain of the United States army and former secretary of the President of them has presented himself at this post….I should inform Your Excellencies that according to advices, I believe that his mission has no other object than to discover the Pacific Ocean, following the Missouri, and to make intelligent observations, because he has the reputation of being a very well educated man and of many talents.386
On November 30th in New Orleans, Casa de Calvo and Manuel Salcedo had presided over the transfer of Spanish Louisiana to France. Twenty days later, Pierre de Laussat—the bureaucrat sent by Napoleon to govern Louisiana after the planned invasion by the French army—unhappily presided over the peaceful surrender of Louisiana to the United States.
General Wilkinson was prepared to enforce the transfer of power from France to the U. S. with about 350 regular troops and volunteer militia who accompanied him to New Orleans. The general and the new Governor of Louisiana Territory, William Claiborne, were given the keys to the city at the ceremonies on December 20th and the American flag rose over the Cabildo and Place d’Armes on the city’s waterfront. The eight to ten thousand citizens of New Orleans—who almost all spoke French as their native language—were not happy. Most of their quarrels started over French or American style of dancing at public balls, and the songs and music played at them. Wilkinson, with the small number of troops under his command, managed to maintain order during this time of government and cultural transition.
In February, 1804, the general met in secret with Vincent Folch, Governor of Spanish Florida, and the Marqués de Casa Calvo, the newly appointed Spanish boundary commissioner. Casa de Calvo was in charge of determining the extent of the land Spain had ceded to France. Wilkinson wanted to resume his career as Agent Number 13 at a pay scale of $4,000 per year; to receive $20,000 in back pay; and to sell 16,000 barrels of flour in Havana. In return he would write a report, “Reflections on Louisiana.” After negotiations he was paid $12,000, which the general invested in sugar to be shipped to the east coast.
Over the next month Wilkinson wrote a long report, which Governor Folch translated into Spanish and sent under his own name to his superior in Cuba. The report urged that the Lewis and Clark expedition be arrested or forced to retire from the Upper Missouri country. On March 5th, Casa de Calvo and Manuel Salcedo wrote a letter to Salcedo’s brother, Nemesio Salcedo, Governor of Spanish Texas, advising him that it was “absolutely necessary for reasons of state” to carry out the arrest of Captain Merry Weather and his party.387
After writing his “Reflections,” Wilkinson rewrote it for an American audience and brought it to President Jefferson. This version described the country between the Mississippi and the Rio Grande and was accompanied by 28 maps made by the late Philip Nolan. Wilkinson did not provide any maps to the Spanish government. Essentially, his report on the western frontier served at least two purposes for the general, and he was paid handsomely for it by the Spanish government.388
Wilkinson’s Spanish report explains why Lewis and Clark’s original mission—to find a direct water route from the Missouri to the Pacific Ocean—was expanded to include discovering the source of the Missouri. Finding the source of the Missouri River would establish America’s claim for the northern boundary of the Louisiana Purchase. The Spanish insisted the northern boundary was based on the boundary between French Louisiana and New Spain in the 1700’s, when the Arroyo Hondo (the Calcesieu River in today’s state of Louisiana) served as the boundary line between the two colonial empires. The United States’s position was that the Louisiana Purchase included the mouth of the Missouri River at St. Louis, and all of the land whose waters drained into the Missouri from its source in the western mountains.
Wilkinson’s report, signed by Folch, stated:
If anyone should doubt the dispositions of the American government with respect to the western boundaries of Louisiana it will be necessary to refer those incredulous ones to the doctrines uttered in full Congress and published in the ministerial gazettes of the city of Washington, and those of this capitol [Pensacola,West Florida]. To these proofs may be added the following interesting facts: that the president of the United States has commissioned his astronomer, who is at this very moment in the province of Louisiana, with the duty of determining by all practical investigations the relative positions of the mouth of the Rio Bravo or Rio Grande, and the source of the Missouri River; that, as an aid to this end, orders have been given to the presidents’s private secretary and the Infantry Captain Lewis to ascend the Missouri River with a military command, and supplied with the articles necessary to make the proper observations at different points, and if circumstances favor the extension of the enterprise, they are to proceed as far as the Pacific Ocean; while wagers of consideration have been laid that the United States will have a seaport on said ocean before five years roll by.389
Wilkinson accompanied his sugar cargo back to the east coast, amidst much speculation in New Orleans about the source of his new found wealth. Upon his arrival in New York City in May of 1804, the general met in secret with Aaron Burr, which will be the subject of the next chapter.390
The Spanish authorites did send four expeditions out to capture “Captain Merry” as they called him, and in their last attempt they almost succeeded. It happened in September, 1806 as the Lewis and Clark expedition was returning to St. Louis on the Missouri River. About 300 Spanish soldiers were 140 miles west of the expedition when it passed the mouth of the Platte River on September 9th. The soldiers, commanded by Lieutenant Facundo Melgares, were being detained at the Pawnee Indian village on the Republican River near Red Cloud, Nebraska. The Pawnee chief had refused to allow the soldiers to continue on their march to the Missouri, where they almost certainly would have caught Captain Merry and his men.
It seems quite likely the detention of the Spanish force had been prearranged by General Wilkinson with the Pawnee chief. It would have been a major international incident if the Spanish had arrested Lewis and Clark. Only a few weeks later, in October, 1806, Captain Zebulon Pike and his men arrived at the same village and were allowed to continue on a reconnaissance mission into Spanish Texas. Wilkinson’s son, Lieutenant James Biddle Wilkinson, was a member of Pike’s expedition. After leaving the Pawnee village, Pike and Wilkinson split up and Wilkinson’s son and his exploring party returned safely to St. Louis before Pike’s party was captured by the Spanish.391
The general organized three exploring expeditions into the former Spanish Louisiana during this time—the Pike and Wilkinson, Dunbar and Allis, and Freeman and Custis expeditons. These were the expeditions for which the president requested funding of $10–12,000 from Congress.
The expedition wintered at Wood River in Illinois Territory at a place they called Camp Dubois. (“Bois,” pronounced bwa, means wood in French.) Wood River was 18 miles north of St. Louis, northeast of the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Clark was in charge of the camp while Lewis spent much of his time at Cahokia and St. Louis. The men arrived at Wood River on December 12th and the next day began clearing land and cutting logs for their huts. Clark’s cabin was ready by December 30th. The weather was sleety with mixed rain and snow and the Mississippi was covered with running ice.
The reconstructed Camp Dubois, an Illinois State Historic Site in Hartford, IL. Although the historic site is enclosed like a fort, the name “Camp” indicates the original site had no walls. www.campdubois.org (Photo by Rick Blond)
George Drouillard arrived with eight soldiers from the Tennessee army post on the 16th. Some were unsuitable, but Hugh Hall, Thomas Howard, and John Potts became members of the permanent party. Drouillard was satisfied by what he saw at the camp, and on Christmas Day announced he would return to Fort Massac to settle his affairs and join the expedition.
The days were a routine of completing the living quarters and hunting for deer and turkeys. Clark had to deal with drunkenness, fighting, insubordination and going AWOL (absent without leave). Matters of discipline would occupy the captains until the men settled down into the tight knit group that became the permanent party going to the Pacific Coast.
Storage lockers were built for keelboat, lining both sides of the boat. Their lids could be raised to provide a shield in case of attack. The men practiced target shooting, competing against local men in the neighborhood. At first the locals won the matches, but by April 27th, Clark was able to report:
Several Country men Came to win my mens money, in doing So lost all they had, with them.393
Meanwhile, Lewis was busy getting to know the St. Louis leaders. The Louisiana Purchase would soon take effect, and the United States needed information about the people living there. After unsuccessful attempts to obtain census data and maps from Spanish officials, Lewis wrote to Jefferson that the government officials and residents of St. Louis feared Colonel Delaussus more than God because—
… he has for very slight offences put some of the most wealthy among them into the Carraboose; this has produced a general dread of him among all classes of the people.
He had no doubt that once Americans came into power that many of the best informed people would be coming forward with information, but until then “every thing must be obtained by stealth.” Nevertheless Lewis had already managed to learn a great deal about the country and its inhabitants which he passed along to Jefferson. 394
Lewis stayed in Cahokia as a guest of John Hay, the Cahokia postmaster. Hay, who served in a variety of government posts, was called “the generalissimo of the pen” for his ability to help people with contracts and deeds. He had come to Cahokia as a merchant representing the British Canadian trading company of Todd & Hay, and he advised Lewis and Clark on their Indian goods—what additional goods to purchase, and how to select the gifts for the individual tribes.
Hay was the son of Jehu Hay, second in command to the “Hair Buyer” General Henry Hamilton who had surrendered to George Rogers Clark at Vincennes in 1789. Both men had been imprisoned in Virginia by Thomas Jefferson. After his release in 1781, Jehu Hay served as Lieutenant Governor of Detroit. In 1785, when John Hay was 16 years old, his father died.395
How would John Hay deal with Clark, the brother of the man who had captured his father, and Lewis, who worked for Jefferson, who imprisoned him? The answer is treacherously, as historian Thomas Danisi has documented. Lewis, who became Governor of Louisiana Territory in 1807 after his return from the expedition, had great difficulties with the postal service.396 This was the world of Louisiana and Illinois Territories—the loyalty of its residents to the new American government could not be taken for granted.
On March 9th, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark attended the ceremonies in St. Louis in which Louisiana was transferred from Spain to France. The flag of France flew over St. Louis for one day. The next day, Upper Louisiana was transferred to the United States. Captain Amos Stoddard, the Kaskaskia commander, was named military commandant for Upper Louisiana and acting governor. A year later in March, 1805, General Wilkinson was named the first governor of Louisiana Territory, while retaining his position as commanding general of the United States Army. Three years later, in March, 1807, Meriwether Lewis would become the second governor.
On the 26th of March, the Secretary of War wrote to Lewis notifying him that William Clark could receive no appointment higher than second lieutenant in the Corps of Artillerists, and enclosed his commission. He assured Lewis that Clark’s military grade would have no effect on his compensation, which would be as Lewis requested.
After the expedition, Nicholas Biddle, the editor of the journals, asked Clark to clarify the matter of his rank, and Clark wrote that when he received his appointment as second lieutenant instead of the captain’s rank he was promised—
My feelings on this Occasion was as might be expected. I wished the expidetion suckcess, and from the assurence of Capt. Lewis, that in every respect my situation Command &c. &c. should be equal to his viewing the Commission as mearly Calculated to autherise punishment to the soldiers, if necessary, I proceeded…. Be so good as to place me on equal footing with Cap. Lewis in every point of view without exposeing any thing … 397
Clark was extremely hurt by this action, and viewed his commission as simply authorizing his ability to discipline the men. He returned the commission as soon as the expedition ended. Lewis and Clark never revealed that Clark had not received a captain’s commission. In 2001, President William Jefferson Clinton promoted William Clark to the rank of captain posthumously.
The expedition set out from Wood River on May 14th, going only as far as St. Charles, where they waited for Lewis to join them from St. Louis. At St. Charles, a small riverfront village on the Missouri River, they were joined by two experienced boatmen, Pierre Cruzatte and François Labiche, who had earlier been enrolled as privates in the U. S. Army. Cruzatte was half French-half Omaha Indian. Labiche was half French-half African American, or “mulatto.”398
Cruzatte was a fiddle player, as most bowmen were. (“Bow” is pronounced like “cow.”) The bowman stayed at the bow, or front of the boat, and directed the course of the boat through the water, paddling with the bow oar. With his fiddle playing and singing, he set the pace for the men rowing with oars or pushing the boat along with iron-tipped poles. Cruzatte would have taken the lead in call and response songs.
In today’s world we can scarcely imagine the importance of singing in performing manual labor—particularly timed and coordinated labor. So as we imagine the three boats going up the Missouri, we should include their music. In the evening the men often danced. They would have danced contra dances (similiar to square dancing) and jigs and reels. It was a chance to get moving after a day in the cramped conditions of the boats.
Labiche served as an interpreter for the expedition, as he spoke both French and English. Like Cruzatte, he was an experienced river man and Indian trader. Labiche and Cruzatte alternated between the larboard oar (left side of the ship, or port) and the bow oar in their duties. Cruzatte, however, was the better navigator and was called upon for the more challenging navigation problems.
The boat was a keelboat, but of an unusual design. It was similiar to the Spanish war vessels that Clark had observed on the Mississippi. The keel is a piece of sturdy wood running underneath the entire length of the boat, to which the rest of the boat frame is attached. Lewis and Clark usually referred to their boat as a barge, rather than a keelboat. A keelboat was generally a long narrow boat with a cabin the middle, used for hauling goods. With a keel, you could go up river against the current. Flat boats, without a keel, could only travel downriver. Their barge had a captains’ cabin at the stern.
Keelboat replica built by Butch Bouvier at Lewis and Clark State Park, Onawa, Iowa. The rudder tiller is seen at the rear, on top of the cabin. The men rowed with single oars standing up, in the center deck. There would have been oarlocks to hold the oars in position. It was a 22 oar boat, 11 men on a side. The boat measured 55 x 8 feet. The cabin and foredeck were 10 feet each; the main deck was 35 feet. It drew three feet of water.399 (Photo by Kira Gale)
The three sergeants, Charles Floyd, John Ordway, and Nathaniel Pryor, were assigned to the front, center, and rear of the boat. The bow sergeant used a setting pole to help the bowman navigate. He kept a look out for all danger, enemies, Indian camps, and obstructions and notified the sergeant at the center, who notified the commanders. The sergeant at the center managed the sail and all matters relating to the crew—rowing, break times, spiritous liquors, and guard duties at the campsites. He was to keep a look out for all notable places, such as rivers, creeks and islands, and notify the captains immediately. The sergeant at the rear, or helmsman, steered the boat, and saw that all baggage on the quarterdeck was stowed away with no loose articles. He was also to “attend to the compass when necessary.”
The sergeants were in charge of the messes, in which the privates were divided into three squads of 8–9 men each. Each mess camped together and had its own cook. The French engagés in the red pirogue and the American soldiers on loan from Kaskaskia in the white pirogue formed their own messes. Altogether there were at least 46 men on the expedition going up river to the Mandan villages in today’s North Dakota. The exact number is unknown as the engages also went by their “dit” names, or nicknames. Pierre Cruzatte, for example, was called “St. Peter.”400
William Clark had the responsibility of map-making and maintaining course and distance records. He most likely used a slate during the day and transferred his notes to his field journal and maps in the evening. He recorded compass directions, distance between points, landmarks, and miles traveled each day. The notes appeared like this for June 4th:
| N. 30° W. | 4 | ms. a pt. on S. Sd. psd. a C & 2 Isd. |
| N. 25° W. | 3 | ms. to a pt. on S. Sd. psd. Seeder C. |
| N. 58° W. | 7½ | ms. to pt. on L.S. a Creek on L. S. |
| N. 75° W. | 3 | Ms. to a pt. on S. Sd. opsd. Mine Hill |
| 17½ |
S. Sd. was Starboard Side, or right. L. S. was Larboard or left side, looking towards the front of the boat. The miles would be measured from landmarks or “points.” Geographer John Logan Allen has written that Clark’s—
coordinate positions are accurate to within 5%, an accuracy level that would not be matched by many cartographers until the advent of mapping aided by aerial photography in the early 20th centry.
Clark calculated the miles from the mouth of the Missouri River to the mouth of the Columbia River at 4,142 miles. Today’s National Historic Lewis and Clark Trail is 3,700 miles long.
The Missouri has been channelized by the Corps of Engineers, so it is no longer the river they experienced. Lewis wrote to his mother—when he was 1609 miles up river at Fort Mandan—that the Missouri River was more dangerous than any Indians they encountered. He described the force of the river as being so strong from the mouth of the great river Platte to the mouth of the Missouri at St. Louis, that they couldn’t use oars or poles to travel in the center’s fast current and had to stay close to the river banks. The banks were often collapsing and bringing trees down with them. Floating trees were hazards, but others anchored in the river bed were hidden from sight in the muddy waters. Sawyers were trees which bobbed up and down and planters were firmly fixed in the river bed. Both could destroy a boat. Sandbars and quick sands could overturn a boat.
On June 9th, William Clark wrote that—
the Sturn of the boat Struck a log which was not proceiveable the Curt. [current] Struck her bow and turn the boat against some drift & Snags which [were] below with great force; This was a disagreeable and Dangerous Situation, particularly as immense large trees were Drifting down and we lay immediately in their Course,—Some of our men being prepared for all Situations leaped into the water Swam ashore with a roap, and fixed themselves in Such Situations, that the boat was off in a few minits, I can Say with Confidence that our party is not inferior to any that was ever on the waters of the Missopie
On June 15th, he described the “worst part” of the river—
we wheeled on a sawyer which was near injuring us Verry much … passed between two Islands a verry bad place, Moveing Sands, we were nearly being Swallowed up by the roleing Sands over which the Current was so Strong that we Could not Stem it with our Sales under a Stiff breese in addition to our ores, we were compelled to pass under a bank which was falling in, and use the Toe rope occasionally.401
They stopped to rest for a couple of days and to make oars and a tow rope from cable Lewis had purchased in Pittsburgh. Two thirds of the men were suffering from boils and ulcers, caused by bacterial infections from the dirty water. Some had 8 or 10 of these “tumers.” The “Mesquetors verry bad.” Despite this, the men were in “Spirits.” The journals are filled with interesting descriptions of their daily lives. Always some men were out hunting. George Drouillard was on permanent duty as a hunter, and exempt from camp duties. He brought in a bear, deer, and turkeys. 402
The sergeants had been ordered to keep journals. Ordway’s and Floyd’s journals are available, but Pryor’s journal hasn’t been found. Ordway was the most faithful journal keeper. He made entries for all 863 days of the expedition from St. Louis to the coast and back (May 14, 1803 to September 23, 1806). Four privates also kept journals. Robert Frazier’s journal is lost, but Patrick Gass’s and Joseph Whitehouse’s journals are published. Gass’s journal—the first to be published in 1807—was edited and his original journal entries are lost. The fourth writer is unknown.403
How did these journal keepers see the dramatic events of June 9th? Ordway wrote: “we got fast on a log Detained us half a hour.” Floyd wrote: “this is a butifull Contry of Land the River at this place is 300 yards. wide the current Strong.” Gass wrote: “This day going round some drift wood the stern of the boat became fast, when she immediately swung round, and was in great danger; but we got her off without much injury.” Whitehouse wrote: “The day proving stormy, we were obliged to waite for our hunters who were on the opposite side of the River, and it being unsafe to venture across in the Pettiauger [pirogue] for them.” Their journals are online at the University of Nebraska Press, with daily journal entries grouped together for readers who like to read original sources. (www.lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu).
Lewis wrote he was sending journals by separate routes—
in order as much as possible to multiply the chances of saving something. We have encouraged our men to keep journals, and seven of them do so, to whom in this respect we give every assistance in our power.404
When the men sat around the camp at night writing up their accounts of the day’s happenings, was Lewis—the president’s former secretary—also writing his daily account, or was he working on his scientific observations?
There are no daily journal entries by Lewis for the journey from St. Louis to the Mandan villages, except for fragments, dated May 15 and May 20 and September 13 &14, 16 & 17, 1804. They were pages torn from a journal that were found fastened to a later journal with sealing wax. Historian Donald Jackson described the paper as being “worn and discolored.” Jackson, the editor of Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, has suggested that Lewis’s journal was lost in a boating accident on May 14th, 1805, five weeks after they left Fort Mandan. By then the keelboat was on its way back to St. Louis and the captains were traveling in the white pirogue westward towards the mountains.405
Both captains were on shore hunting buffalo when a violent gust of wind turned the pirogue on its side, filling it with water. Only the boat’s awning and sail prevented it from turning over. Sacagawea, who was in the rear of the boat, managed to retrieve “nearly all” of the articles as they floated by. Lewis wrote:
in this perigue were embarked, our papers, Instruments, books medicine, a great part of our merchandize and in short almost every article indispensibly necessary to further the views, or insure the success of the enterprize …
He was preparing to jump in the water and swim to the boat when he realized he would almost certainly lose his life in the attempt. The boat was 300 yards distant, the waves exceedingly high and the water very cold. Private Whitehouse wrote:
We found that most part of her loading was wet, the Medicine damaj’d, & part of it Spoiled—We also found that some of the papers and books had got wet, but not so much as to be spoiled.
Gass wrote: “we found a great part of the medicine, and other articles spoiled.” Ordway wrote: “we opened the goods &c. to get them dry before we packed them up.” Clark simply copied Lewis’s account as he often did. If Lewis’s journal was spoiled in the boat accident, no one was going to reveal it.
When they left Fort Mandan on April 7, 1805 Lewis wrote a letter to Jefferson, sending it back with the keelboat. The keelboat was starting on its return journey to St. Louis bearing articles and specimens for Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society, including live magpies—large and noisy birds—and a live “barking squirrel” (prairie dog). Both arrived safely at the President’s House and then were sent to Philadelphia where they were put on exhibit at Peale’s museum.406
Lewis wrote that he was sending Clark’s journal to Jefferson, which would “serve to give you the daily detales of our progress,” but before copies were distributed to others, Clark wanted his spelling and grammer errors corrected. Lewis wrote that he planned to send a canoe back from the “extreem navigable point of the Missouri” with three or four men, and at that time would send his own journal back with one or two of the best journals being kept by the men.407
Since this letter predates the boat accident, it appears to confirm that Lewis kept a journal en route to Fort Mandan—certainly the pages for six days of entries support this idea. Donald Jackson offers one final bit of evidence in support of his theory. After the boat accident, Clark, who had been simplifying Lewis’s scientific descriptions of plants and animals, began copying the descriptions word for word in his own journal.
The captains split the science duties. Clark had the task of recording course and distance so he could make his maps, which required his steady attention throughout the day. Lewis was responsible for daily weather records and writing descriptions of noteworthy features of the landscape—mineralogy, geology, soil, seasonal changes, etc. He collected plants new to the United States and described them using a botanical text for reference. He did the same for animals and preserved specimens to be sent back to Peale’s Museum. He created a chart of rivers and creeks on the Missouri. They had a library of travel journals, scientific references, and maps in their boat cabin, including the Mackay-Evans map and Evans’s Indian notes.
The captains collaborated on the task of making celestial observations in order to determine the latitude and longitude of river junctions and other points. The position of the North Star at night was used to determine their latitude by measuring its angle to the horizon with a sextant. The position of the sun at its high point was used to compare the local noon hour with the time on the chronometer clock to find their longitude. The chronometer’s time had been set at Pittsburgh. Their latitude readings were accurate, but when their chronometer clock ran down and had to be recalibrated by guesswork, errors crept it. These observations required the mathematical calculations that Lewis had been trained in before leaving on the expedition.
As they encountered Indian tribes they sought answers to the questions proposed by Jefferson and others—the tribe’s life style, population, geography, number of warriors, enemies, cultural traditions, health practices, and trade networks. The commercial fur trade was a major focus. What kinds of furs were available, what were the best places to build trading forts, and what were the most desirable articles to exchange for furs? During the winter at Fort Mandan, Lewis and Clark prepared an elaborate chart, which they called “Estimate of Eastern Indians.” The chart provided data on nearly 50 tribes and bands from information they had obtained either first hand, or from reports by other Indians and fur traders.
Jefferson and his fellow American Philosophical Society members were fascinated with comparing Indian languages to European and Asian languages, believing it might hold the key to discovering common ancestries. Lewis recorded the vocabularies of twenty three different Indian tribes on blank vocabulary sheets with 250 English words printed on them. Lewis intended to publish his scientific information and the Indian vocabularies in the third volume of his planned three volume account of the expedition. Unfortunately, these vocabulary sheets were lost after his death and the third volume was never published.408
First Council with the Otoe and Missouria, woodcut from Patrick Gass’s published journal.
Their first council with Indians was held with the Otoe and Missouria Indians at Council Bluffs on August 3rd, 1804. The Otoe lived near the junction of the Platte and Elkhorn Rivers in an earth lodge village. Their kinfolk, the Missouria had joined them there, after warfare and disease had driven them from their home on the Grand River in Missouri. The two tribes had gone off on their annual summer buffalo hunt, leaving the village deserted.
Cruzatte and Drouillard had been sent to invite them to come in for a council. Cruzatte was half Omaha and knew the area well. He had operated a trading post for the Omaha near Council Bluffs for two years. It seems likely that he had accompanied MacKay’s expedition up river in 1796–97 and decided to remain. Some days after finding the village deserted, Drouillard heard gun shots and encountered a group of Missouria out hunting elk. Messengers were sent to find the Otoe and bring them in for the council.
The Otoe chiefs arrived bringing gifts of “water millions.” Speeches were made and medals, a flag, and presents given out. The French trader who came with them said the Otoe traded with the Spanish at Sante Fe, a journey of 25 days. The captains recommended that a trading post be built at Council Bluffs and Fort Atkinson was established there in 1819.
The expedition traveled much more easily on the Missouri River after passing the mouth of the Platte. The river no longer rushed downstream at a rate of 5–6 miles per hour, but moved along at a leisurely 3 miles per hour. However, the bends of the river could make it a frustrating day’s travel. One bend measured a little more than half a mile (973 yards) by land, but it was a day’s journey, 18 3/4 miles, by water.
The Otoe chiefs had asked the captains for help in arranging a peace between themselves and the Omaha, and it was agreed they would come up for another council at the Omaha village, some eighty miles up the Missouri. As they left Council Bluff, Private Moses Reed deserted the expedition, and Joseph Barter, “La Liberte,” a French engagé, also deserted. Drouillard was sent with three men to find them, with orders to kill Reed if he didn’t come in peaceably and to bring back La Liberte from the Otoe village, where it was presumed he had gone.
As they neared the Omaha village they stopped to climb the hill where Omaha Chief Blackbird was buried, and planted a white flag at his gravesite. Blackbird and 400 members of his tribe had perished in a small pox epidemic four years earlier. The next day they passed the location of MacKay’s old trading post, Fort Charles, and formed a camp 5 miles further up river. They called it “Fish Camp” because they caught about 1,100 fish, using a brush barrier dam on a creek, while waiting there.
The Omaha village, like the Otoe village, was deserted. The Omaha were away on their summer buffalo hunt. When the three Otoe chiefs, accompanied by 8 lesser chiefs and warriors, arrived with Drouillard at the camp on August 18th, there was no chance to arrange a peace with the Omaha. Drouillard and his party had found both Moses Reed and La Liberte. However, en route to the Omaha village, La Liberte had escaped again.
August 18th was a memorable day. It was Meriwether Lewis’s 30th birthday. William Clark had celebrated his 34th birthday at Council Bluffs on August 1st with a feast of game and ripe fruit. Lewis’s birthday, however, was definitely mixed. The deserter Reed was ordered to run the gauntlet four times, and received about 500 lashes from the men. Clark wrote that they were “as favorable to him as they could be, consistent with their oaths.”409 Before his punishment, the Otoe chiefs requested his pardon. After the captains “explained the customs of their country,” the chiefs were satisfied. Reed was dismissed from the permanent party, and would return with the soldiers from Kaskaskia to St. Louis in the spring. After the court martial and punishment, they held a dance. The dance, celebrating Lewis’s birthday, lasted until 11 that night.
The next day it became obvious that Sergeant Charles Floyd was seriously ill. The captains were still meeting with the chiefs counseling with them about their altercations with the Omaha and Pawnee. Clark wrote:
Sergt. Floyd was taken violently bad with the Beliose Cholick and is dangerously ill … nature appear exosting fast in him every man is attentive to him (york prlly) [York, primarily].410
Floyd, apparently, was suffering from a ruptured appendix and peritonitis. He had not been feeling well for more than a month. He wrote on July 31st:
I am verry sick and Has ben for Somtime but have Recovered my helth again.411
If he was treated with Dr. Rush’s Bilious Pills—laxatives called “Thunderclappers”—it could have irritated an already inflamed appendix in the days before his death. They may have bled him, another treatment promoted by Dr. Rush, who urged removal of blood, from a few ounces to 80 ounces (about half the blood in the body), as a cure for illness.412
Sergeant Floyd was only 21 years old when he died. As they proceeded up river the next day, they stopped to make a warm bath for him. But, before they could get him into the bath, he died. Clark wrote:
Serj. Floyd Died with a great deel of Composure, before his death he Said to me, “I am going away” I want you to write me a letter”—We buried him on top of the bluff ½ Miles below a Small river without a name to which we Gave his name, he was buried with the honors of War much lamented; a Seeder post with the name Sergt. C. Floyd died here 20th of August 1804 was fixed at the head of his grave—This man at all times gave us proofs of his firmness and Deturmined resolution to doe Service to his Countrey and honor to himself after paying all the honor to our Decesed brother we Camped in the mouth of floyds river about 30 yards wide, a butifull evening.—413
The Sergeant Floyd Monument at Sioux City, Iowa on Sergeant Floyd’s Bluff. It became America’s first National Historic Landmark in 1960. (photo by Kira Gale)
Captain Lewis read the funeral service, and the bluff was named Sergeant Floyd’s Bluff. He was the only man to die on the expedition. On August 26th, by a vote of a large majority of the men, Patrick Gass was chosen to replace Floyd. In his orders appointing Sergeant Gass, Lewis used the term “the corps of volunteers for North Western Discovery” for the first time in the journals.
On the very same day, August 26th, a new crisis was about to develop. Drouillard and George Shannon were sent out to look for lost horses. The expedition had a small number of horses accompanying them, used by the men in hunting game. There were now ripened grapes, and three kinds of plums of “delicious flavor” in the fields ready to eat. They had been checking out the fruit as hungrily as birds for weeks.
It was fortunate for George Shannon that the fruit was ripe, because he became lost after separating from Drouillard. Shannon believed he was behind the boats and hurried to catch up with them—but, instead, he was in front of the boats. Shannon was lost for 16 days until the boats finally caught up with him on September 11th. He had eaten only grapes and one rabbit—which he shot with a hard stick from his gun—for twelve days. He still had his horse, which he would have killed and eaten as a last resort.They saw from his horse tracks that he was ahead of the boats, but the men sent after him couldn’t overtake him. During Shannon’s absence he missed some big events—the election of Patrick Gass, the council with the Yankton Sioux, and catching a live prairie dog.
The council with the Yankton Sioux took place at Calumet Buffs on August 30–31. Coming up river they had acquired the services of Pierre Dorion, Sr. a long time trader with the Yankton Sioux. They realized they needed someone who could interpret for them with the Sioux. However, once they met in council with the Yankton, they decided Dorion could be more usefully employed in escorting a delegation of Sioux chiefs to Washington in the spring of 1805. Dorion remained with the Yankton, and it meant they would be without the services of a skilled interpreter when they encountered the more hostile Teton Sioux up river.
They spent most of September 7th trying to catch a prairie dog. The village of underground tunnels of the “barking squirrels” covered three acres. First they dug through six feet of hard clay in an attempt to reach their lodges. Then they resorted to a bucket brigade, pouring gallons of water down a hole, to flush one out. Seaman, the dog, must have been eager to help. The little creature was put in a cage and lived with the captains for months before it was sent to Washington.
They were seeing a great many buffalo by now. Clark killed a male pronghorn, which they called an antelope or wild goat, on September 14th. On the same day, John Shields killed a prairie hare, or jack rabbit. Lewis measured the leap of one hare at 21 feet, noting “the ground was a little descending.” They stuffed the pronghorn and hare to send back to Peale’s Museum. Among the pages of Lewis’s notes that were found for September 13 & 14, 16&17, was this observation by Lewis on September 16th—
… these extensive planes had lately been birnt and the grass had sprung up and was about three inches high. vast herds of Buffaloe deer Elk and Antilopes were seen feeding in every direction as far as the eye of the observer could reach.414
The Indians practiced fire burning in the spring to create new grass for the animal herds. They also set the prairies on fire as signals—to bring in other tribes, to warn of danger, or to announce the presence of a buffalo herd. The prairies were not naturally treeless—regular burning destroyed all trees except those near creeks and rivers.415
On the 17th, Lewis killed a female pronghorn to send back. These animals were new to science. The pronghorn is the fastest quadruped in America; it can run up to 60 miles per hour and Lewis said it could smell a hunter at a distance of three miles. He estimated he saw 3,000 buffalo in one view that day.
Naturalist Paul Cutright wrote that zoologically this area was the “most important and most exciting of the entire trip.” From the Niobrara River in Nebraska to the Bad River in South Dakota, a distance of 263 miles, they discovered and named nine animals for science—the pronghorn, coyote, plains gray wolf, prairie dog, mule deer, white-tailed jack rabbit, black-billed magpie, sharp-tailed grouse and desert cottontail.416
On September 20th, they arrived at the Big Bend of the Missouri River—30 miles by water and 1¼ miles by land. The next day, the bank of the sand bar on which they were camping began to give way during the night and would have swallowed their boats within minutes. They rushed to the boats and the bank caved in before they reached the opposite shore. They passed Loisel’s trading post on Cedar Island with a number of Indian camps around it on the 22nd. No one was there.
On the 23rd, three Sioux boys swam the river and informed them the Brulé Sioux (Teton or Lakota Sioux) were camped a short distance above. Some Sioux stole Colter’s horse while he was out hunting on the 24th. Two thirds of their party stayed on board the boats that night, and the rest stayed with the guard on shore. On the morning of the 25th they raised a flag on a staff, and set up the sail for a shade awning to council with the Brulé chiefs.
They gave out medals and presents and invited the 3 chiefs and a warrior to come on board the keelboat to view the “many Curiossites.” After a small drink of whiskey the 2nd chief, Partisan, became troublesome, pretending he was drunk. He was a rival to the 1st chief, Black Buffalo, and resented the more splendid presents he had been given. Clark got them into a pirogue to take them back to shore. At the shore they were met by three young Sioux, who seized the cable rope of the pirogue, while one warrior held fast to the boat mast. Partisan was insulting and threatening, saying he wouldn’t get off the boat until he received more presents. Clark wrote: “I felt my Self warm & Spoke in verry positive terms.”
Clark drew his sword and the men in the pirogue took up arms, while Captain Lewis and his men took up arms and loaded the 3 swivel guns on the boats for action. The Indians on shore had their bows and arrows and guns ready to fire. At this point, the 1st chief of the Brulé Sioux, Black Buffalo, took hold of the rope from the young men and defused the situation. After some time on shore, Black Buffalo, two of his warriors, and the 3rd chief, came on board the keelboat to escort them to a new campsite, which the captains named “bad humered Island as we were in a bad humer.” This is how the Bad River in South Dakota got its name.
The next day Black Buffalo and his entourage stayed with the keelboat as it proceeded five miles up river to his own camp, with Indians lining the shore to observe the boats progress. Black Buffalo’s camp had about 100 tipis, all made of white colored buffalo hides, arranged in a circle around a large council tipi. Captains Lewis and Clark were carried into the village on white buffalo robes, a mark of great esteem. There was feasting and a dance that evening, with food sent out to the men in the boats. A council was held in the central lodge with about 70 elders and warriors. An elder and Black Buffalo “spoke approvingly of what we had done.” That evening Black Buffalo slept on the boat with them.
The Sioux had lately been at war with the Omaha and had killed 75 men. They had also captured 48 women and boys, held captive in two villages. Pierre Cruzatte, who spoke Omaha, learned from them that the Sioux intended to stop the expedition. At the council, the chiefs had promised to deliver the Omaha captives to Pierre Dorion, the Yankton trader.
The Indians wanted the expedition to stay for several more days, as they expected the arrival of more Sioux to see the Americans. After another night of feasting and dancing, Partisan and one principal man were accompanying William Clark in the pirogue, going back to the keelboat. Through bad steering, the pirogue cut the cable holding the keelboat anchor. The keelboat anchor sunk and the pirogue sprung a leak. All of this alarmed the Indians. Black Buffalo and about 200 warriors came down to the river bank, armed for action. Seeing that it was a false alarm, they left, but about 20 warriors remained on shore and Black Buffalo came on board again.
The next day, after searching in vain for the anchor, the captains decided it was time to leave.There were theatrics. The 2nd chief, Partisan, wanted tobacco and a flag, which they refused to give him, and some young men held the keelboat cable, demanding tobacco. The captains reluctantly gave Black Buffalo two twists of tobacco, which he gave to the men, and took the cable from them. It was a face saving maneuver. Tempers were frayed on both sides. As they continued up river, Black Buffalo stayed with the boat for two more days until announcing that all things were clear for them and they would not see any more Tetons.
The Sioux were a roving tribe, the warriors of the plains. They were the tribe that Jefferson most wanted to conciliate and establish trade relationships with. They had a long connection with British traders. Jefferson had enclosed excerpts from the journal of Jean-Batiste Truteau in a letter to Lewis. Truteau, who traded with the Upper Missouri tribes, had written:
The Sioux inhabit the Northern part of the Mississipi, and are hostile to the Ricaras, Mendanes, big-bellies and others. Others of them live on the river St. Pierre. They have from 30 to 60,000 (?) men and abound in fire-arms. They are the greatest beaver hunters; and could furnish more beavers than all the other nations besides, and could bring them to a depot on the Missouri, rather than to St. Pierre, or any other place. Their beaver is worth double of the Canadian for its fineness of it’s fur and parchment.417
The rivalry between the two chiefs had complicated matters, but it allowed Black Buffalo to establish a relationship with the Americans which would later have a great impact on the War of 1812. In 1813, after Lewis’s death, William Clark was serving as both the Governor of Missouri Territory and Superintendent of Indian Affairs. At the start of the war, he appointed Manuel Lisa a sub-agent for Indian Affairs, and provided trade goods to send up to Lisa’s new post on Cedar Island to keep the Brulé Sioux out of the war.
Black Buffalo sent a messenger to the Santee Sioux of the Minnesota River (St. Pierre River) to stop fighting for the British in Michigan and come home, or he would burn their villages. The Santee had been recruited by the British trader Robert Dickson. After the war, at a British court of inquiry, Dickson blamed the Sioux defection for the American victory on Lake Erie, the loss of Amherst and Detroit, and the subseqent capture of General Proctor’s army. About 2,000 warriors returned to their homes after the Siege of Fort Meigs, reducing Tecumseh’s Indian army to about half its size.418
Lewis and Clark’s diplomacy with the Indians of the Missouri was continued by Manuel Lisa, who employed former members of the Lewis and Clark expedition in his fur trading empire. Lisa observed at the end of the war:
The Indians of the Missouri are of those to the Upper Mississippi as four to one. Their weight would be great, if thrown into the scale against us. They did not arm against the Republic; on the contrary, they armed against Great Britain, and struck the Ioways, the allies of that power.
Lisa arranged for both Yankton Sioux and Omaha war parties to attack the Ioway. The Ioway didn’t care about a peace treaty ending the war and were continuing to attack settlers.
At the end of the War of 1812 in the summer of 1815, Manuel Lisa brought 33 chiefs and important men of the Missouri tribes to William Clark’s treaties council at Portage des Sioux at the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers near St. Louis. Over 2,000 Indians attended and at least 19 tribes signed peace treaties with the United States.
Both Partisan and Black Buffalo came with Lisa’s delegation. Black Buffalo died suddenly of an unknown cause at the council. Was he assassinated? He was surrounded by Indians who had fought for the British; he was a known collaborator; and Partisan was his enemy. His death was marked by great ceremonies.
Omaha Chief Big Elk delivered the funeral oration. Big Elk’s daughter was married to Manuel Lisa. The English translation of his speech, “Big Elk’s Funeral Oration on the Death of Black Buffalo,” was immediately published in books by John Bradbury and Henry Brackenridge and it remains a classic of Indian oratory. It begins—“Do not grieve—misfortunes will happen to the wisest and best men …” and eloquently described the ceremonies honoring Black Buffalo: “a noble grave with a flag raised over it, a grand procession, rolling music, and a thundering cannon—”.419
On October 1st, near the Cheyenne River, they visited with Jean Valle at his trading post for the Sioux. He came on board and stayed with them for a day. It was turning cold and the geese were flying south in large flocks. Small groups of Teton Sioux were still following them, begging for tobacco. On October 6th, near the Grand River, they saw a deserted Arikara village of about 80 lodges made of earth, each lodge 20–60 feet in diameter. They were packed closely together and surrounded by a picketed stockade fence. Squashes of three different kinds were growing at the village. On the 8th they passed another deserted village of about 60 lodges, which apparently had been used the last winter.
Finally they came to an inhabited Arikara village on an island three miles long, where they were growing corn, beans, squash and tobacco. They met the trader, Joseph Gravelines, who had lived with the Arikara for over 20 years, and Pierre Tabeau, a trader from St. Louis. They saw their first bull boats in the water—bowl-shaped boats made from buffalo skins. Clark remarked:
I saw at Several times to day 3 squars [women] in single Buffalow Skin Canoes loaded with meat Cross the River, at times the waves were as high as I ever Saw them in the Missouri—
On October 10th, they raised the flag and set up the awning to hold a council with the Arikara chiefs. They designated three chiefs, one for each village. and gave medals to them. A Sioux attended the council and they were told he had come to the Arikara to persuade them to stop the expedition.
York was the first black man the Arikara had ever seen. They called him “the big medison.” York took great delight in his new celebrity. Clark wrote:
the Inds. much astonished at my black Servent, who made himself more turrible in thier view that I wished him to Doe as I am told telling them that before I cought him he was wild & lived upon people, young children was verry good eating Showed them his Strength &c. &c.
The next day they took on board the two chiefs whose villages were up river from the island. These villages—surrounded by picketed stockade fences and located across the river from each other—would prove the downfall of the Missouri River fur trade in the years to come. Any expedition attempting to come up river was completely vulnerable to an Arikara attack.
Three years later in 1807, some of Lewis and Clark’s men, who were part of a new expedition led by Nathaniel Pryor, were attacked by the Arikara. Two were wounded and one most likely lost his life. George Shannon lost a leg, George Gibson was wounded, and Joseph Fields was probably killed, as William Clark listed him as “killed” in 1807. In 1823, another battle took place between the Arikara and the Ashley-Henry expedition. After that, the fur trade avoided the Missouri River and switched to the rendezvous system, hauling goods back and forth by wagon along the Platte River to the mountain men who remained in the West year round.
Tabeau reported that the Arikara once lived in 18 villages along the Missouri, but their population had been drastically reduced by small pox epidemics and war with the Sioux. In the three villages, there were at least ten different bands of Indians and more than 42 chiefs. The bands did not all speak the same language, and intense rivalries and jealousies hindered any cooperation. They relied on trading their agricultural products with the hunting tribes of the plains for meat and hides. They also acted as middlemen—trading in horses, obtained from Indians of the Southern Plains, and trading in guns, ammunition, and manufactured goods, obtained from the Assiniboins and Sioux who got them from British traders.
The Arikara had 500 warriors and a great quantity of arms. The Sioux, while trading with them, took what they wanted, set prices, stole horses, and sometimes murdered them. The Arikara had been at war with both the Sioux and the Mandan. One of Lewis and Clark’s diplomatic goals was to arrange a peace between the Arikara and their neighbors, in order to “clear an open road” for American traders. An Arikara chief joined the expedition and accompanied them up to the Mandan villages, hoping to arrange a peace which would allow them to present a united front against the Sioux. But because of internal rivalries and the military power of the Sioux, the alliance proved unworkable. 420
The Arikara, like the Sioux and Mandan, offered their women to white men as sex partners. They encouraged sex as a way of extending hospitality, receiving presents, and building business relationships. They believed that spiritual power was transferred in the sexual act, and this power would be passed onto the husbands of the wives who engaged in it. Indian women followed the boats as they left the Sioux, and again as they left the Arikara. Patrick Gass wrote approvingly of “a great number of smart and handsome women and children” among the Arikara. As they left the Arikara, they took on board two women. Clark wrote:
a curious Custom with the Souix as well as the receres is to give handsom Sqars to those whome they to Show Some acknowledgements to—the Seauix we got Clare of without taking their Squars, they followed us with Squars 13th two days. The Rickres we put off dureing the time we were at the Towns but 2 Handsom young Squars were Sent by a man to follow us, they Came up this evening and persisted in their Civilities.421
Clark spoke more honestly about these matters in talking with Nicholas Biddle, the editor of the journals, and told him that “the men by means of interpeters found no difficulty in getting women” at the Arikara villages.422
The two young women came on board on October 12th. On October 13th Private John Newman was “Confined for mutinous expression” and a court martial was held the same day. He was charged with “having uttered repeated expressions of a highly criminal and mutinous nature.” A jury of his peers, two segeants and seven privates, unanimously judged him guilty. Two-thirds of them concurred with his sentence of 75 lashes on his bare back. It may, or may not, be relevant that at least one of the young women stayed on board the boat until October 15th.
He was discharged from the permanent party and ordered to labor on the red pirogue with the Frenchmen. Both John Newman and the deserter Moses Reed returned to St. Louis with the keelboat in the spring. The Arikara chief cried out loud as he witnessed Newman’s whipping on October 14th. Clark wrote:
I explained the Cause of the punishment and the necessity He thought examples were also necessary & he himself had made them by Death, his nation never whiped even their children, from their birth.
Later, Lewis wrote to the Secretary of War stating that Newman had performed valuable services at Fort Mandan and saved the keelboat from harm on several occasions on the return journey. He urged that Newman receive his full pay, and wrote that Newman had begged to accompany them on the journey to the coast, but he thought it “impolitic to relax from the sentence altho’ he stood acquitted in my mind.”423
The captains had devised their own, irregular, form of a court martial, as they had no access to a court composed of the required minimum of three commissioned officers. They could have administered punishments themselves, but instead chose to use a jury of enlisted men in every case except one—the captains sentenced Alexander Willard to 100 lashes for sleeping on duty on July 12, 1804. John Collins was sentenced twice to receive whippings, once for disrespect to an officer and going AWOL at St. Charles on May 17th (50 lashes); the other time for drunkeness and allowing Hugh Hall to open a barrel of whiskey on June 29th (100 lashes). Hall received 50 lashes. Clark wrote that the men were always “found verry ready to punish such crimes.” On February 9th, 1805 Thomas Howard was punished for violating security at Fort Mandan. He received a sentence of 50 lashes for climbing over the stockade fence, which was not carried out.
There were no more corporal punishments and they worked together as a team under extraordinary circumstances. At the end of the expedition Whitehouse wrote—
… the manly and soldier-like behavior; and enterprizing abilities; of both Captain Lewis and Captain Clark … and the humanity shown at all times by them, to those under their command, on this perilous and important Voyage of discovery.424
Robert Hunt, writing about crime and punishment on the expedition, raised an interesting question about the captains asking the men to decide matters by a vote. Is Patrick Gass the only sergeant in the history of the United States Army to have been elected by a vote of the men? 425
Immense herds of pronghorns were now swimming across the Missouri heading west to their winter grounds in the Black Hills. Near the mouth of the Cannonball River—named for the round stones in its waters—they met two French trappers who complained about being robbed of their beaver traps by the Mandans. The trappers joined the boat flotilla, hoping to get their traps back.
On October 19th Clark counted 52 “gangues” of buffalo and 3 of elk as he walked on shore. He also saw the ruins of an old Mandan village with a “high strong watchtower” on top of a 90 foot high hill. The Arikara chief said they would see several old Mandan villages ahead near the Heart River, which the “Troubleson Seauex” had forced them to leave.
They had their first encounter with a grizzly bear, recorded by Lewis in his natural history notes for October 20th. It was the first of many encounters to come. Lewis wrote:
Peter Crusat this day shot at a white bear he wounded him, but being alarmed at the formidable appearance of the bear he left his tomahawk and gun; but shortly after returned and found the bear had taken the opposit rout.—
Clark wrote, “I saw Several fresh tracks of that animal double the Sise of the largest track I ever saw.” 426
On the 21st, Clark saw a sacred stone boulder, the “Medicine Rock” of the Indians, marked with petroglyphs and a ceremonial oak tree on the open prairie. The chief told Clark that Mandan warriors suspended themselves from the tree, by piercing the skin of their necks and threading cords through the holes, “to make them brave.” They saw a war party of 12 naked Sioux on their way to attack the Mandans.
On October 24th they met a grand chief of the Mandans camping on an island with a hunting party. Lewis went with an interpreter and the chief to his village, located a mile up the river. The next day, the British trader Hugh McCracken greeted them and on the following day they met René Jessaume, the long time resident trader, whom they hired as an interpreter. Jessaume was the trader who had tried to kill John Evans.
The expedition remained with the Mandan and Hidatsa for over five months. They left on April 7th, 1805. The two tribes lived in five villages. There were two Mandan villages along the Missouri near the Knife River, and three Hidatsa villages along the Knife. After the Mandans were decimated by small pox and attacks by the Sioux, they had moved from their villages on the Heart River, where they had lived for two hundred years, to join forces with the Hidatsas in the 1780’s. The Hidatsa were also known as the Minatarees or the Gros Ventre of the Missouri. They were three related tribes who spoke different dialects. The Hidatsas roamed more widely than the Mandans, although both were agricultural people.
The five villages had a combined population of 3,000 to 4,000. (Washington D. C.’s population was 3,210 and St. Louis’s, 795.) Clark in his “Estimate of Eastern Indians” reported the Mandans numbered between 1,250–1,500; the Awaxawis at the first village of the Hidatsa, 200–300; and the Minetarees of the upper two villages, 2,500. The report described the Mandans as “the most friendly, well disposed Indians inhabiting the Missouri. They are brave, humane, and hospitable.”427
The villages were the trading center of the Northern Plains, with a network of trade stretching thousands of miles. They traded their corn, beans, squash and tobacco with the Cree and Assiniboin of Canada, who provided manufactured goods obtained from British and Canadian traders. The nomadic tribes of the plains, the Cheyenne, Crow, and Arapahoe, brought buffalo meat and hides to the market. The Cheyenne brought Spanish horses and mules and fancy leather clothing. The most prized trade goods were English trade guns and ammunition.428
North Dakota Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center, Fort Mandan; Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, Knife River and Hidatsa earth lodge at Sakakawea village site (Photos by Rick Blond) www.fortmandan.com and www.nps.gov/knri
On the 29th of October, they held a council under the sail awning and gave out medals to the village chiefs. The head chiefs received medals with a likeness of Jefferson and presents of coats, hats and flags. The lesser chiefs received medals with images of weaving, domestic animals, and a man sowing wheat. The ceremonies ended with the airgun demonstration. Its ability to fire without making a loud sound always astonished the Indians.
Big White, the chief of the first village, had been out hunting on the council day. The next day they met with him and gave him a medal. Big White, whose Mandan name was Sheheke, or White Coyote, was tall, fat, and white-skinned. They would come to know Big White well in the years after the expedition, because he went to Washington with them to meet the president and then lived in St. Louis while awaiting his return to his village.
The Mandan chief of the second village, Black Cat, was the main chief. They met with him the following day, and he gave them back the two traps stolen from the French trappers, a robe, and 12 bushels of corn. Black Cat spoke in favor of the peace negotiations they had promoted at the council, and said he believed the road was open and that peace would give him and his people great satisfaction, because—
they Could hunt without fear, & ther womin Could work in the fields without looking everry moment for the Enemey, and put off their mockersons at night.429
He offered to send some brave men to accompany the Arikara chief back to his village and smoke the pipe with them.
Big White came the next day and said he would send men and “we will make a good peace.” He promised, “if we eat you Shall eat, if we Starve. you must starve also.” If they had accepted his offer to live at his village, he would have fed them as his guests, but since they were building their own living quarters, it was a very generous offer.430
On November 2nd, Clark found a woodland, three miles below Big White’s town, and the men began cutting down cottonwood trees to build Fort Mandan.The Arikara chief departed for his village, accompanied by several Mandans and Minatarees. On November 3rd, they discharged the French hands. Biddle’s notes say Clark told him that 9 engagés built a pirogue and returned to St. Louis, but 2 or 3 stayed with them until they left in the spring. Five engagés received pay in St. Louis in 1805.431
René Jessaume and his wife and children moved into the camp, so he could serve as their interpeter. The next day they were visited by Toussaint Charbonneau (“Shar-bone-oh”), a trader who lived with the Hidatsa and had two young Shoshone wives. They hired him to accompany them and bring one of his wives to serve as an interpreter when they left in the spring. They were relying on the Shoshone to supply the horses they needed to cross the Rocky Mountains. The Shoshone wives had been captured by Hidatsa warriors on raiding parties and sold to Charbonneau. One of them was Sacagawea, who was pregnant with their first child. She was 14–15 years old. Charbonneau brought his wives to live at the camp on November 11th.
Big White came to visit with his wife who carried about 100 pounds of meat on her back for them. They gave her a small axe as a present, which “much pleased” her. The swans were flying south and the weather was turning very cold. Big White visited with them, relating Mandan history. Clark observed that the Mandans spoke “a language peculial to themselves (verry much).” Clark wrote:
The Mandans are at War with all who make war on them, at present with the Seauex only, and wish to be at peace with all nations. Seldom the agressors—432
They began to move into their rooms on the 13th. Black Cat brought a delegation of Assiniboin to meet them. Clark called them a “bad disposed set” who could raise about 1,000 warriors. It snowed all day. About 70 lodges of Assiniboin and Cree had come to trade and warned the locals they couldn’t rely on the Americans to supply guns and ammunition. John Evans had promised to do so, but it hadn’t happened. On the 20th, Lewis and Clark moved into their rooms at the fort.
A quarrel involving an Indian woman took place. She had sex with Sergeant Ordway with the consent of her husband. But then her husband beat and stabbed her, so she came to stay with the interpreters’s wives. Lewis told Ordway to give the husband gifts and Black Cat came and lectured the husband, who took his wife home. Ordway kept silent about it in his journal.
A new trouble came when seven traders arrived from the British Northwest Company. Their interpreter spread the rumor the Americans were going to join forces with the Sioux and attack the Minatarees. Two Minataree chiefs came to see for themselves. Clark reported they were much pleased by the treatment they received and the men had danced to amuse them. Ordway wrote that François Rivet danced on his head. The captains warned the Northwest trader François Larocque not to give out any British flags or medals.
Some Sioux and Pawnee attacked a Mandan hunting party. A young chief was killed, two men were wounded, and nine horses were stolen. Clark took 23 men and went to Big White’s village to collect men from the villages to fight. The chiefs were impressed to find the Americans were speaking the truth and would fight for them, but said it was too cold and the snow was too deep for the horses to go after the Sioux. They would send out a war party in the spring. The captains replied they could only help while they were in residence, but when the Mandans and Hidatsas had arms and ammunition from American traders they wouldn’t have to take any insults. Clark reported the chiefs “frequently thanked” him for coming to their aid, and “the whole village appeared thankful.” They sent a message to the traders at the Arikara villages to tell them of the attack and discover what they knew about it. The father of the young man killed brought them a present of dried pumpkins.
Lewis went out with a hunting party. They killed eleven buffalo, but the wolves got most of them, leaving only five. The thermometer was at 12 degrees below zero and several of the men were bady frostbitten. By mid December the temperature was 21 degrees below zero and the snow was 10 inches deep. Two chiefs brought in loads of meat as gifts. They had been accepted as friends and hunting partners by the Indians.
The fort had many visitors, most bringing corn to trade. The Indian who wanted to murder his wife came with his two wives to apologize to Ordway. Lewis treated an Indian child for an abcess on his back and was paid in corn. Indian women and some Indian men dressed in women’s clothing came to sell corn. The Mandan chiefs liked to stay at the fort and sleep overnight. A chief’s wife made a kettle of boiled pumpkins, beans, corn and choke cherries as a treat.
On Christmas day they were awakened before dawn by the men firing three volleys. The men were given taffia, a rum drink. The three cannons were fired and the flag raised. Clark wrote:
Some men went out to hunt & the Others to Danceing and Continued until 9 oClock P.M, when the frolic ended &tc.433
Etcetera (&tc) appears to have been used sometimes by Clark as a shorthand for unmentionables.
On the 27th of December, the Indians made an important discovery—they saw John Shields at work at his forge, and learned that “sundery articles of iron” could be made by the expedition’s blacksmith. More Indians soon came to observe even though the temperature was 20 degrees below zero.
On New Years Day, 1805 they fired off two cannons, and sixteen dancers and musicians went over to Big White’s village to give a dance exhibition. Clark went with them and wrote:
I ordered my black Servent to Dance which amused the Croud verry much, and some what astonished them, that So large a man Should be active &c. &c.444
As Clark was about to leave, two chiefs came in with the news that 150 Gros Ventres (“Big Bellies”) camped above the villages were demanding the return of a Gros Ventre girl who had been stolen by a Hidatsa chief. The girl had sought refuge at the fort. On January 3rd, her husband came for his wife, “who had been much abused, & come here for protection.” The Gros Ventre lived in northern Montana and were called the Gros Ventre of the Prairies. They did not have “big bellies.” It was a misinterpretation of sign language. They had lived on the southern branch of the Saskatchewan River, which was full of water falls, and they passed their hands down their body like water falling. The Hidatsas were known as the Gros Ventre of the Missouri.445
On January 4th they sent a man to the Medicine Dance, who had sex with four girls, in order to ensure the buffalo would return and come near so they could kill them.The medicine dance was held at Big White’s village for three nights. The young men offered their wives, naked, except for a buffalo robe to old men. Very often the old men could scarcely walk, let alone perform. They were also offered to white men. An unknown member of the expedition volunteered his services.
A boy of about 13 years old came to the fort with his feet frozen. He had been out all night without fire, and only a small robe. It was 40 degrees below zero. Another Indian, barely clothed and also without fire, had stayed out all night without being frostbitten. Lewis was eventually forced to amputate the boy’s toes. Clark wrote that the Indians were able to bear more cold than he thought it was possible to endure.
Several men now had venereal disease, caught from the Mandan women. One man had syphilis, or the “pox.” By the end of their stay, Clark wrote on March 30th:
All the party in high Spirits they pass but fiew nights without amuseing themselves dancing possessing perfect harmony and good understanding towards each other Generally healthy except venerial complains which is verry Common amongst the natives and the men Catch it from them.
The men with gonorrhea were treated with copaiba oil taken orally, or sugar of lead mixed with water injected into the urethra with a penile syringe. The men with syphilis were treated with mercury ointment, calomel, and the universal remedy, Dr. Rush’s “Thunderbolts.” As an experienced army officer, Captain Lewis had laid in a good supply of medicines, with 15% of his total purchases for venereal disease.446
The next incident came about when Clark had York give Sacagawea, who was sick and eight months pregnant, some stewed fruit and tea. This made the interpreter René Jessaume’s wife jealous and she left her husband and returned to the village.
On the 3rd of February, it was a fine day and the blacksmiths, John Shields and Alexander Willard, resumed work at the forge. Clark set out with a hunting party and was gone for ten days. Many natives came bringing corn in payment for iron work. They wanted iron blades for their battle axes, and pieces of sheet iron to be cut into arrow points and hide scrapers. For each 4 inch square piece of sheet iron, they traded 7–8 gallons of corn. The natives thought they had the better of the bargain.
Lewis took over Clark’s journal entries, indicating that Clark’s journal was the daily record of fort life. Lewis found out the wives of the interpreters were unlocking the fort gates and admitting visitors during the night, and he ordered the practice stopped. Then Thomas Howard, an old soldier who ought to have known better, was caught climbing over the stockade fence to enter the fort at night. He was court martialed, but mercy was recommended and his sentence of 50 lashes was forgiven. That was the last official disciplinary measure of expedition.
On February 11, 1805, Sacagawea gave birth to her baby, a “fine boy.” Lewis wrote that it was her first birth and “her labour was tedious and her pain violent.” René Jessaume advised Lewis that a small portion of rattlesnake rattles would hasten the birth, and ten minutes after she was given a portion in a drink of water, she gave birth. The baby was named Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, but he was called “Pompey” or “Pomp.”
Clark and his men built two closed-in shelters to store the meat from the animals they killed. Wolves, magpies and ravens would devour any meat left in the open. After reaching the fort, he sent four men back with horses and sleighs on the 14th. They were attacked by 100 Sioux, who stole two horses. The next day, Lewis set out at sunrise with 24 men to apprehend the Sioux. Most of the Indian men in the villages were away on hunting trips, but several accompanied Lewis. It was 16 degrees below zero. The robbers were so far ahead they couldn’t be overtaken, but discarded moccasins indicated they were Sioux. Lewis returned on the 21st with 2,400 pounds of meat. The Sioux had burned one of Clark’s “meat houses,” but they hadn’t discovered the other one. Clark learned they had seen him, but were afraid to attack his party.
Jessaume and his wife returned from the village, and several Hidatsa chiefs came to visit. Gravelines, the trader at the Arikara villages, arrived and said the Sioux were determined to kill “every white man they see” and were assembling several bands to attack the Mandans. Gravelines reported the Sioux chief Black Buffalo was on the side of the Americans and the Arikara had refused to give the Sioux anything to eat when they came to their villages after attacking the Americans. On March 1st, Clark wrote:
a fine Day I am ingaged in Copying a map, men building perogues, makeing Ropes, Burning Coal, Hanging up meat & making battle axes for Corn 447
On their departure, Lewis wrote to Jefferson, saying that although he had promised to send his vouchers and reports back with the soldiers from Kaskaskia in September, it would have risked the safety of the expedition to proceed without their additional manpower. He was now sending the papers with the keelboat, manned by ten able-bodied men. He had little doubt they would be fired upon by the Sioux, but they had pledged “they will not yeald while there is a man of them living.”
He was sending 18 boxes and 8 large trunks containing skins, skeletons, painted Indian robes and other Indian goods; 61 specimens of salts, minerals, earths; and 60 plants. They were labeled with descriptions and the date and place where they had been acquired. Clark’s “Estimate of Eastern Indians” and maps showing the expedition’s campsite locations were going to the Secretary of War. There were three cages of living animals—four magpies in one cage; a “live burrowing squirrel” in another; and a prairie hen in the third. Lewis also enclosed a personal letter to Jefferson, but its contents are unknown. The materials either went to the American Philosophical Society, Charles Willson Peale’s Museum, or were retained by the president.
Only one magpie and the prairie dog survived the journey. When they arrived in Washington, Jefferson was in residence at Monticello. His French steward wrote to him that the staff was airing out the skins in the sun and—
The magpie and the kind of squirrel are very well; they are in the room where Monsieur receives his callers.449
The keelboat arrived in St. Louis on May 20th, with a flotilla of boats carrying 45 chiefs of the Arikara, Yankton Sioux, Ponca, Omaha, Otoe and Missouria tribes, who were bound for Washington to meet the president. Pierre Chouteau advised that they should remain in the St. Louis area until the fall or winter, when it was a better season for them to travel.
Wilkinson was now in St. Louis, serving as the first Governor of Louisiana Territory. He was worried about the expense of sending Indian delegations to Washington. Pierre Chouteau was escorting a delegation of Osage and Republican Pawnee chiefs to Washington and Captain Amos Stoddard was escorting 26 chiefs from 11 nations, including the Indians of the Missouri.
On October 8th, 1805 Wilkinson wrote to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn reporting the Otoe and Arikara chiefs were dangerously ill and wanted to return to their homes, saying—
Their safe return is deemed an Object of great Magnitude, not only to the safe return of Capt. Lewis, but to our future negotiations among the distant nations of the Missouri.
He was sending them back with a escort of 25 soldiers led by his son Lieutenant James Biddle Wilkinson. If the Otoe would permit it, they were going to build a fort at the mouth of the Platte. However, after one soldier was killed by Kansas Indians they returned to St. Louis. By late December, the Arikara chief had recovered his health sufficiently to go to Washington.
Wilkinson wrote to Jefferson that the chief was a learned savage because he spoke 11 different languages and was a “Master of the Language of Arms, Hands & Fingers.” He was a great traveler, warrior and geographer, who attended the annual grand council of 10 to 15 Indian nations. The chief was to be returned to his own people, without regard for the other Indian delegates, with a military escort loaded with presents. He had gone on the trip “contrary to the will of his whole people.”
Three months later, Henry Dearborn informed Wilkinson that on April 7, 1806 the “very respectable and amiable Ricara Chief” had died in Washington. Joseph Gravelines, who had accompanied the chief as his interpreter, returned to the villages with the news that Ankedoucharo had died. No amount of presents or expressions of sympathy could appease his people, and the chief’s death was the cause of the attack on the expedition led by Pryor in 1807, and the subsequent hostilities which continued for many years to come.450
The expedition got underway on April 7, 1805. They traveled in the two large red and white pirogues and six small canoes carved out of cottonwood tree trunks. Lewis wrote:
This little fleet altho’ not quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs … the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one. entertaining (now) as I do, the most confident hope of succeading in a voyage which has formed a da[r] ling project of mine for the last ten years (of my life), I could but esteem this moment of my (our) departure as among the most happy of my life. The party are in excellent health and sperits, zealously attached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed; not a whisper of murmur or discontent to be heard among them, but all act in unison and with the most perfect harmony.
This was the start of what is known as the “permanent party” of the U. S. Army Corps of Volunteers for Northwestern Discovery—two captains, 26 enlisted men, the hunter and interpreter George Drouillard, the slave York, the interpreter and interpretress, Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea, and their two month old baby, Pompey. Thirty three people and one dog would cross the Rocky Mountains, reach the Pacific Ocean, and return to the villages by August 14th, 1806, with no loss of life and their mission accomplished.
But from this time forward, they didn’t know what to expect, and as Lewis wrote—
we were now about to penetrate a country of at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man has never trodden; the good or evil it has in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessells contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves.451
Without being aware of it, they had the best defense of all—a woman and a baby traveling with them. They were not considered a war party because of them. They saw no Indians until meeting with Sacagawea’s Shoshone tribe near the headwaters of the Missouri. Assiniboin bands watched them and made no contact. The oral history of the Assiniboin on You Tube relates they watched the corps travel up river with strong winds against them. The men were tired, and the Assiniboin could have easily attacked them but they didn’t because there was a woman and baby with them.452 The captains moved from army tents into larger quarters to share with the Charbonneau family and George Drouillard. They lived in a tent of dressed skins, made in the Indian style—in other words, a tipi.
They were beginning to see the the immense tracks of the “white bear” as they called the grizzly bear. They were anxious to meet one. The Indians, who hunted them in parties of six to ten hunters, had only bows and arrows and “indifferent” trade guns.
1. Fort Mandan, 2. Reunion Bay, 3. Decision Point, 4. Blackfeet fight, 5. Great Falls, 6. Portage Route, 7. Blackfoot River, 8. Clark’s Fork River, 9. Three Forks of the Missouri, 10. Big Hole River.
On April 14th, they named a creek for Charbonneau, who had camped on it for several weeks on a previous trip. As far as they knew, it was the highest point on the Missouri ever reached by a white man. They were seeing Assiniboin camps all along the river. The Assiniboin were excellent hunters, and provided dried meat and grease to British traders in exchange for liquor. Their camps could be identified by the remains of rum kegs.
There were days when the wind blew so hard, with high waves and rough waters, that it was unsafe to travel. The swans and geese were flying south, and the beaver were abundant and with the best fur they had ever seen. Seaman doesn’t often rate a mention in their journals—however, on the 24th of April he stayed out all night and was presumed “lost,” but rejoined them in the morning. The country was covered with herds of buffalo, elk and antelope, who were so gentle they could pass among them as they walked on shore, and the animals would follow them.
On the 26th of April they reached the mouth of the Yellowstone, and stopped to take latitude and longitude readings. They thought it was a “most eligible site” for a trading post. Lewis wrote they all were “much pleased at having arrived at this long wished for spot.” After giving out a dram of whiskey, the fiddle was brought out and the evening was spent in “much hilarity, singing & dancing.” On the return trip, they split into five different groups as they left the mountains, with everyone reuniting at “Reunion Bay,” east of the Yellowstone near New Town, N. D.
It was a “verry extroadernaley Climate” wrote Clark. The winds and waves were so violent the canoes couldn’t travel, and then it snowed, one inch of snow on May 2nd. Clark and Drouillard killed the largest bear they had seen on May 5th, “a turrible looking animal,” weighing 500–600 pounds. He had five balls through his lungs and five in other parts of his body, before he died. He was 8 feet 7½ inches tall. Seaman outran and killed a young antelope. Clark climbed a hill near the mouth of the Milk River and saw buffalo herds on the plains for sixty miles. When they walked among them they had to throw sticks and stones to clear a path. There were a great number of beaver on the river, and they passed four acres of trees cut down by beavers.
The country was covered with prairie turnip, or white apple, a staple of Indian food. Sacagawea showed them how to harvest the underground bulbs. Their main season was in July and August. Lewis loved a treat prepared by Charbonneau, called boudin blanc, or white sausage made from buffalo gut. He called it “white pudding,” which “all esteem one of the greatest delacies.” The men were suffering from boils and abscesses, caused by malnution because they lacked vitamin C. 453
An Assiniboin dog was seen on May 10th and Lewis wrote:
… we still believe ourselves in the country usually hunted by the Assiniboins, and as they are a vicious illy disposed nation we think it best to be on our guard, accordingly we inspected the arms and accoutrements of the party and found them all in good order.454
They were unaware they were often being watched by Assiniboin hunters. 455
William Bratton, walking on shore because of a sore hand, shot a grizzly who pursued him for half a mile. Lewis wrote:
these bear being so hard to die reather intimidates us all; I must confess I do not like the gentlemen and had reather fight two Indians than one bear.456
May 14th was their unlucky day, but it could have been much worse. It was the day of the boat overturn when Lewis’s journal was lost. Sacagawea and Cruzatte saved the day when she rescued the articles that floated by and Cruzatte managed to bring Charbonneau to his senses and make him steer the boat, while they bailed out water and rowed despite the boat being nearly filled with water. Both captains were on shore, contrary to their usual strict policy of one captain remaining in the boat.
On that same day, six hunters shot a grizzly who pursued them vigorously. Two of the hunters put their guns down and jumped off a 20 foot cliff into the river, and the bear came into the water after them. Finally a shot through his head killed him. A bullet in the brain was the only certain way to kill a grizzly. They counted eight balls when they butchered him.
On the night of May 28th they had another close call. A large buffalo bull swam across the river, and became alarmed when he hit the white pirogue anchored at the water’s edge. He climbed over it and bolted through the camp at top speed, coming to within 18 inches of the heads of the men sleeping near the fires. He was headed for the captains’ tipi when Seaman’s barking scared him off and he changed course. They discovered the next morning that he had bent York’s rifle, which had been left in the pirogue.
On May 29th, Clark named the Judith River for the girl he would marry, Julia Hancock of Fincastle, Virginia. Julia at that time was 13 years old. They would get married a year after his return in January, 1808, when she was 17.
They were using the tow ropes. The river was too deep to use poles, and the current too strong to row against. The river banks were continuing to fall in. The men were in the water up to their armpits pulling the boats by ropes. About one quarter of their day was spent in the water. The banks were slippery and muddy, and it was rainy and cold. The men couldn’t wear their mocassins because of the heavy mud and sometimes had to walk on sharp fragments of rock. Lewis wrote:
in short their labour is incredibly painfull and great, yet these faithful fellows bear it without a murmur.457
They were traveling through the White Cliffs, 200–300 feet high, soft sand stone cliffs worn into a “thousand grotesque figures” which they imagined to be the ancient ruins of elegant buildings. It was at the end of the month of May.
On June 3rd they came to a place they named “Decision Point.” A look at the map will explain their uncertainty. The Marias (“Mah-rye-a’s”) River continued northwest and looked like the waters of the Missouri. The Missouri itself turned south and its waters were clearer. If they were mistaken, choosing the wrong river would cost them a season of travel. Two canoes and land parties were sent out to investigate. The captains strolled to the top of a hill and saw a most “inchanting view.” There were snow covered mountains to the south and innumerable buffalo herds on the vast plains. The plains were covered with prickly pear, chokecherry bushes, and wild roses in full bloom.
“Seens of Visionary enchantment”—the White Cliffs of Montana. (photo by Rick Blond)
The captains were alone in believing that the river heading south was the Missouri. The men were convinced the Marias River was the real Missouri because it looked the same. The captains believed the clearer waters of the south bend meant it originated in the mountains. The problem was their Indian informants hadn’t told them they would see another river at this location, or that the Missouri would bend. Lewis wrote:
… thus have our cogitating faculties been busily employed today. Those who have remained at camp today have been busily engaged in dressing skins for cloathing, notwithstanding that many of them have their feet so mangled and bruised with stones and rough ground over which they passed barefoot, that they can scarcely walk or stand; at least it is with great pain they do either…. they still remain perfectly cheerful.458
“Perfectly cheerful” indicates they were being medicated with some of the half pound of Turkish opium Lewis carried in his medicine chest. He also had four ounces of laudanum, which is a tincture of opium, or 1% morphine.459 The journals mention using laudanum, but are almost silent on the opium. Opium is still the basis of pain medications today, and laudanum was made from 10% opium powder mixed with alcohol.
The exploring parties returned with inconclusive reports and on the next day, June 4th, the captains decided to see for themselves. Lewis chose the north fork, and Clark the south. Lewis took six men and Clark five. Lewis wrote it was the first time he ever carried a backpack, but he doubted it would be the last. The prickly pear thorns were “extreemly troublesome” and could pierce a mocassin with ease. They saw a barking squirrel (prairie dog) town that covered seven miles. By June 6th, Lewis was convinced the river was going too far north and they turned back. It rained day and night, it was cold, and they had no shelter.
On June 7th, Lewis nearly lost his life. He was walking on slippery clay on top of a bluff and nearly fell off the 90 foot cliff, but he used his espontoon to dig into the wet ground and save himself. An espontoon is a walking stick with a sharp spear point, a weapon. Scarcely had he recovered when the man following him cried out, “god god Capt. what shall I do.” Windsor had slipped and was hanging over the cliff’s edge. Disguising his feelings, Lewis spoke very calmly and advised him to use his knife to dig a hole in the cliff and place his foot in the hole to climb up to safety, and then crawl on his hands and knees over the rest of the ground. The men following them took to the river, wading breast deep.
Everyone in Lewis’s party still believed the river was the Missouri, except for Lewis. He named it Maria’s River, in honor of his cousin, Maria Wood. The river’s edge was “one continued garden of roses.” They left the red pirogue at Decision Point. Its crew of seven men were better employed in helping the others. The pirogue was tied to trees on a small island near the Marias.
Lewis’s branding iron is 5.5 x 4 x 1.5 inches. Ir is on display at the Oregon Historical Society. It was found near the Hood River in the 1890’s. (www.ohs.org and www.lewis-clark.org)
Lewis had a branding iron and branded trees near the boat. Blacksmith tools, extra ammunition, and other heavy goods were concealed in cache pits. A cache pit is a hole in the gound, wider at the bottom, with its opening carefully cut out and put back in place to look natural. Pierre Cruzatte knew how to build them because traders used caches to hide goods from robbers.
Cruzatte had accompanied Lewis on his tour of the Marias, and the experienced river navigator remained convinced it was the Missouri. The men trusted him, and not the captains. Lewis and Clark agreed between themselves that a new exploring party would continue until it reached either the Great Falls of the Missouri or the Snowy Mountains, and the boats would follow.
On June 11th, Lewis, who had been sick with dysentery for two days, set off with a party of four men. After suffering from violent stomach pains and fever, he improvised a “very bitter and astringent” remedy of chokecherry twigs boiled in water which cured him. He may have had a parasitic roundworm infection, Trichinella, caused by eating infected grizzly meat.460
The next day they saw the Rocky Mountains and realized there were several ranges of snow-covered mountains. Lewis called it an “august spectacle” and “formidable.” He climbed a hill on June 13th and saw fifty to sixty miles of buffalo, “infinitely more” than he had ever seen before in one view, and on the same day he heard the tremendous roar of the Great Falls of the Missouri. When they reached it, the falls were the “grandest sight he had ever beheld” and wished he had the skill of a great artist to record it. He made a sketch, but it hasn’t been found.
Clark was following behind Lewis with the boats. On the first day after leaving camp, three of the six canoes were in great danger. Lewis wrote he was going to take the land party because Clark was the “best waterman.” Sacagawea was very ill, and Clark bled her the day before they left camp. She and the baby rested under the awning of the white pirogue as they traveled.
On June 14th, Lewis very nearly lost his life again. He was alone, exploring the area around the Medicine (Sun) River, when he encountered a herd of at least a thousand buffalo. He shot one and before he had a chance to reload his gun, a bear had crept up to about 20 steps from him. The bear chased him open mouthed and at full speed for about 80 yards until Lewis thought to get into the water—forcing the bear to swim—and use his espontoon to defend himself. When he turned around with his espontoon raised, the bear retreated.
Clark on the river was encountering a great number of dangerous places. The current was rapid and—
… the fatigue which we have to encounter is incretiatable the men in the water from morning until night hauling the Cord & boats walking on Sharp rocks and on round Slippery Stones which alternately cut their feet & throw them down, not with Standing all this difficuelty they go with great chearfulness, added to those dificuelties the rattle Snakes innumerable & require great caution to prevent being bitten.461
Meanwhile, Sacagawea, was “sick and low spirited.” He gave her a poultice of Peruvian bark and laudanum to apply to “her region.” She was suffering from pelvic inflammatory disease, and had no doubt acquired a venereal disease from her husband.462
When Lewis rejoined the boats on June 16th, he found the Indian woman “extreemely ill.” He was concerned for her, with her child in her arms, and for the help they needed from her in obtaining horses from the Shoshone. He decided to camp near a sulphur springs on the river, hoping its mineral waters would cure her. This camp became known as the Lower Portage Camp. With Lewis’s prescription of opium and barks, and drinking sulphur water, Sacagawea recovered and was walking about and fishing by June 20th.
The Great Falls consist of a series of five waterfalls, ranging from the Great Falls height of 87 feet to 6 feet, extending for almost 20 miles. The boats would have to be portaged—that is brought over land—until they reached the place where the waterfalls ended. Clark mapped and staked out an 18¼ mile route that crossed two creeks and went over hills covered with prickly pear cactus to reach the new camp.
The white pirogue was left at the Lower Portage Camp with another cache and the swivel gun hidden behind rocks. A large cottonwood tree supplied the wood to make eight truck wheels. The canoes on wheels were loaded with goods and dragged to the Upper Portage Camp at White Bear Islands. Sometimes they were able to use the sails because the winds were so strong—“sailing on dry land” Lewis called it. It was exhausting labor; the men would collapse and be “asleep in an instant” from fatigue. The ground was covered with sharp points of hard mud, from the hooves of the buffalo as well as the prickly pear cactus. The portage took 12 days, from June 21st to July 2nd.
Clark, York, and the Charbonneaus left the camp on June 29th to walk to the Upper Camp. Clark needed to revisit the falls while en route, because some of his notes had been lost. They were traveling along the river’s edge towards the Great Falls when a tremendous storm came up and Clark and the Charbonneaus took shelter under a rock ledge in a deep ravine. York was out hunting. There was a huge torrent of rain and large hail and suddenly the ravine was filling up with water, threatening to drown everyone. Charbonneau pulled Sacagawea, carrying the baby, from above, and with Clark pushing from below, they managed to reach safety. They lost a few items, including Pompey’s baby carrier and his clothing. Clark lost his umbrella and his large compass. The next day, the men found the compass in the mud and discovered that the ravine was now filled with huge rocks. Lewis wrote about their escape—
one moment longer & it would have swept them into the river just above the great cataract of 87 feet where they must have inevitably perished.463
They returned to camp to get some dry clothing, and found the men had returned also, leaving the baggage on the plains. Lewis wrote:
the men who were nearly all naked and [no] covering on the head were sorely mawled with the hail which so large and driven with such force by the wind that it nocked many of them down and one particularly as many as three times most of them were bleeding freely and complained of being much bruised….Capt. C. gave the party a dram to console them in some measure for their general defeat.464
Grizzly bears very nearly caught Willard and Colter at the Upper Camp. Seaman barked continually, patrolling the grounds and sounding the alarm during the night. The men traveled in pairs around the island and slept with their rifles. Fortunately, the bears did not climb trees.
Lewis was still very hopeful about his iron boat, The Experiment, whose iron parts had been crafted at Harpers Ferry and carried across the country. He was proud of the concept—a lightweight, portable, metal boat frame that could be assembled on the spot and covered with animal skins. They began putting the boat together at Upper Portage Camp. It was 36 feet long, 4½ feet wide, and 26 inches deep.465 The Experiment failed because he hadn’t brought along a supply of pitch, or pine tar, to seal the skins, and they couldn’t find any pine trees to supply the sticky resin. The boat’s frame was reinforced with wood and bark, and covered with elk skins. When they tried it out in the water, it sank. They blamed it on making holes that were too large in sewing the skins together, and having makeshift glue.
It was a blessing in disguise. When Lewis and Jefferson dreamed up the idea of an iron boat, they expected the Rocky Mountains to be like the Allegheny Mountains. It was called “symmetrical geography.” They imagined the Rockies would be one range of not very tall mountains with the Columbia River on the other side flowing down to the ocean. It would have been impossible to portage a 36 foot boat across the Rockies to the Clearwater River in Idaho where, three months later, they began traveling on water again. The boat was intended for use by the 10–12 men authorized by the initial instructions. It didn’t begin to answer the needs of the 33 member expedition.
Great Falls, Montana: Exhibit at Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, Prickly Pear Cactus, Iron Boat replica. (Photos by Rick Blond)