28
The Northern Expedition

Stephen Long’s observations of the fur trade in 1823 began at Fort Wayne, Indiana. There, the party halted for three days to inquire into the manners and customs of the local Indian tribes. A village had grown up in the shelter of the square palisade fort, which had long since ceased to hold any troops but now served as the residence of a US Indian agent. The village population consisted mostly of Indians and French Can­adians engaged in the fur trade. The explorers were surprised to pass so suddenly from the American settlements in Ohio to this predominantly French-speaking community in neighboring Indiana. Most of the French Canadians appeared to be part Indian, and what with the numerous Indian languages they spoke, the place was a veritable Babel. It was as if the explorers had entered a foreign country even though they were still within the United States.

The Fort Wayne community impressed them much the way Prairie du Chien had affected Long six years earlier. Just as Long had found the mixed-race people of Prairie du Chien in a state of “degeneracy,” Keating, the expedition’s journalist, described the inhabitants of Fort Wayne as being in a “degraded condition.”

Keating noted with particular disgust the sight of a French Canadian dressed in breechcloth and blanket stooping to weigh the hides that he and his Indian partner had brought to the trader. The French Canadian was an engagé, an employee of the fur-trade outfit, whose role was to accompany Indians on their summer hunts and provide them with equipment, while making sure they did not betray the outfitter by taking their peltries to another trading house somewhere else. What Keating found offensive about this scene was that the “little Canadian” kept making vain attempts to adjust his breechcloth so that it would properly cover his private anatomy as he maneuvered his bundle of hides onto the trading-house scales. The Indian hunter who accompanied this man stood “in an erect and commanding posture” off to one side, while a number of Indian women and children who were looking on snickered over the French Canadian’s difficulty with his native garb. For Keating, Long, Say, and Seymour, the sight of numerous French Canadians walking around Fort Wayne, Indiana, in Indian dress just seemed wrong. There was no place for that kind of cultural crossover in American society, not even on the frontier. It was, Keating wrote, as ridiculous and disgusting as “the Indian who assumes the tight body coat of the white men.”¹

The explorers’ response to seeing white men in breechcloths reflected a hardening of American attitudes toward Indian culture that began in the 1820s. Essentially the explorers were troubled because they saw the white men’s use of Indian clothing as a sign of cultural degeneracy. They were unable to perceive this example of cultural exchange in neutral terms but judged it by the moral standards of savagery and civilization. Since “civilized” ways were superior to “savage” ways, they condemned what they saw. Logically, the mirror image of the Indian in ill-fitting white man’s clothes that Keating conjured up by way of comparison should have been a positive rather than a negative image; the fact that he found both images “ridiculous” and “disgusting” was telling. He felt shame for the white man in a breechcloth and mistrust toward the Indian in a waistcoat. Writ large, this was the emotional foundation for a policy of apartheid. As more Americans came to believe that the two races should be kept apart, it led in a few short years to broad public support for “Indian removal,” or government-directed expulsion of all Indian peoples from areas settled by whites to an “Indian territory” lying west of the Mississippi River.

Not that Long or the other explorers were themselves advocates of Indian removal at this time. Long still supported the program of Indian assimilation. Like many of his countrymen, however, he put less and less stock in the traders and believed that Christian missionaries must take the lead in civilizing the Indian. A few days after leaving Fort Wayne, the expedition visited a mission recently founded by the Baptist Missionary Society. The establishment consisted of a residence for the mission family, a one-room school house, and a blacksmith shop. The log buildings were set in about fifty acres of cleared land, with forty acres or so being fenced and planted with corn. The mission school served some forty to sixty Indian children, of whom fifteen were females. The plan of the mission was to instruct the children in the arts of civilization rather than attempt to bring Christianity to the Indian families at the outset. The explorers thought this was a sensible plan. To attempt to Christianize the Indians before they had been civilized would be to expect “a maturity of reasoning” far beyond what they presently had. “In his present state of wildness and ignorance,” Keating wrote, “it is impossible for the Indian to appreciate the vast difference which exists between his heathen superstitions and the pure morality of the gospel.” In due time, after the Indian acquired a taste for civilized life, he would recognize the superiority of the Christian faith to his own religion.²

Long and his companions saw the trader as an obstacle to the Indian acquiring civilized values. In contrast to the missionary’s mostly charitable nature, the trader was typically avaricious. The trader only reinforced the Indians’ tendencies toward cunning and artifice. The trading house itself was “one of the worst schools for morals,” a sink of iniquity where the Indians got drunk and were swindled, abused, and injured. During the three days that the expedition spent at Fort Wayne, two Indians received grave tomahawk wounds to the head. The first assault was by a French Canadian engagé during a so-called drunken frolic on the night of the expedition’s arrival; the second incident occurred the next morning, when an intoxicated Indian man struck his wife. In the view of the explorers, these Indians were victims of the trader who sold them liquor.

Traders were the main suppliers of liquor, but US Indian agents imported quantities as well, using it to obtain the Indians’ friendship or to placate them when they begged for it. Long and his companions felt the US government could do much more to suppress the trafficking of liquor to Indians. “All Indians concur in considering intoxication as improper, and as the source of every evil,” Keating wrote. On this expedition, Long refused to provide Indians with any liquor whatsoever, even if it was customary to offer small quantities as a gift. The expedition carried a supply of tobacco for that purpose instead.³

If Long held a jaundiced view of the trader as a corrupting influence on the Indians, he was still keen to learn how the American traders as a group were faring economically. He found the fur trade in decline from Fort Wayne to Prairie du Chien. Deer skins now made up the bulk of the product, as the valuable beaver was largely depleted. More important, the Indian populations were ravaged. Wherever the number of Indians fell, the traders faced a shortage of labor, for they relied almost entirely on Indian hunters to bring in the animal pelts. When Long reached the prairie lands in what is now western Minnesota, he encountered a different situation. There, beaver was still abundant and the supply of big game was greatly enhanced by the presence of buffalo. The region belonged to the Sioux nation, a powerful and numerous people who were still peaceably disposed to the Americans. Following the rapid withdrawal of the North West Company from the area two years earlier, an American outfit called the Columbia Fur Company had formed to take its place.⁴

Entering this new country, Long’s expedition was accompanied by a military escort of one officer and a dozen enlisted men, together with two interpreters, one who spoke Sioux and the other Ojibwa. The party was also joined by an enigmatic Italian adventurer, Giacomo Beltrami, who was on a personal quest to find the source of the Mississippi River. All of these men joined the expedition at Fort Snelling, the last military installation on the upper Mississippi River, set on the high bluff overlooking the junction of the Mississippi and St. Peter’s rivers. The fort occupied a site Long had surveyed in 1817. In the middle of July, the expedition started up the St. Peter’s River. They traveled up this river valley in two detachments, one in canoes and the other on horseback and foot, the better to observe the surrounding country as well as scout for Indians. But they saw no Indians; the Sisseton Sioux, considered potentially troublesome and with whom Long hoped to parley, were absent from their village on a buffalo hunt. Two weeks after leaving Fort Snelling the expedition arrived at Lake Traverse, situated just north of the low continental divide between the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson Bay watersheds. It was here the Columbia Fur Company had its principal establishment.⁵

One of Long’s two interpreters, Joseph Renville, was a mixed-blood Sioux, a former Nor’ Wester, and a partner in the newly formed Columbia Fur Company. Renville invited Long and his companions to inspect the retired North West Company post returns. Examining the large bound ledgers of the former company, Long could see that the region lying south of the forty-ninth parallel had been highly productive in recent years. The returns included some 4,000 buffalo hides, which accounted for a fourth of the total dollar value of all furs and hides shipped out of the area. In addition, the meat of the buffalo could be made into pemmican and sold to the Hudson’s Bay Company to supply that company’s operations in the Far Northwest. In coming years, Renville explained, the new company hoped to expand its operations east to the headwaters of the Mississippi and west to the Mandan villages despite its rather small capital stock. Long thought the Columbia Fur Company showed good prospects for success, providing it could stay on amicable terms with the much larger American Fur Company.⁶

After meeting with the Columbia Fur Company, Long and his men visited a band of Yanktonai Sioux who were encamped nearby. The chief, Wanatan, invited them to partake in a dog feast. Long’s men observed how their host treated the cooked dog carcasses with reverence, each bone being meticulously cleaned in preparation for burial. The Sioux buried the bones to show respect for the species and to encourage more dogs to come into the world. After eating copious amounts of the greasy dog stew, Long and his men watched a dance.⁷

During the dance, the expedition’s artist, Samuel Seymour, took out his drawing materials and made a sketch of Wanatan. Keating later wrote of him: “We have never seen a nobler face, or a more impressive character, than that of the Dacota chief, as he stood that afternoon, in this manly and characteristic dress, contemplating a dance performed by the men of his own nation.” Thankful for Wanatan’s friendship, Long invited him and his people to accompany the party for the next two days as it marched from Lake Traverse to the Bois des Sioux River, the northern edge of the Sioux’s hunting territory.⁸

On the morning of its departure from Lake Traverse, the party made its first buffalo sighting. A ripple of excitement passed through the whole command as Long dispatched three mounted soldiers to give chase and secure fresh meat for everyone. On the following day excitement rose again as the buffalo herd reappeared on the prairie hills all around them. This time, Wanatan offered to take some of the soldiers with him and demonstrate the use of his bow and arrow. After the hunt and another night camped with Wanatan and his band, Long and his men were once more on their own, marching north. Early the next morning they crossed the Bois des Sioux. As Wanatan had said before they separated, the Sioux never went north of this river without being prepared for war with their enemies, the Ojibwa.⁹

Entering the southern reaches of the Red River valley, the expedition encountered more and more “tree islands,” or patches of forest intermingled with open prairie. Soon they sighted their first herd of elk, numbering sixty to eighty head. Long sent Colhoun and two soldiers to kill and butcher one elk from the herd while the rest of the party continued on.

Late in the afternoon, and before the party was reunited, Long and his men were riding quietly across the prairie with their eyes on some distant buffaloes when their attention was suddenly diverted by the crack of a gun and the sight of two Indian braves running their way. Soon others appeared, about a dozen tribesmen dressed for war, wearing nothing but breechcloths, each armed with bow and arrows or a gun or both. Despite what Wanatan had said, these were Sioux.

Their initial greeting was friendly, but the braves soon adopted a more belligerent tone as more men came running up. By this time, the Sioux outnumbered the Americans. They wanted Long and his men to detour and spend the night at their encampment. As an inducement, they offered that the men could sleep with their women. The offer convinced the explorers that this was a degenerate band of Sioux, for they understood from Wanatan and other informants that in general the Sioux Nation scorned the practice of sharing its women with strangers. When Long declined the offer, their leader pointed to the setting sun and then to a cottonwood grove and insisted that he and his men make camp in the nearby wood. While this conversation was taking place, other Indians were overheard talking about the expedition’s horses, admiring the bigger ones, and inquiring as to which might be the best to ride. Say observed that as they did so they slyly positioned themselves so that at least two of their number surrounded each member of the party. Long presented them some tobacco, but at the earliest possible moment he mounted his horse and gave the command to march. As the expedition moved out the Indians did not oppose but followed behind on foot.¹⁰

A short distance farther on, about forty mounted Sioux warriors came over the horizon up ahead. The group on foot signaled them that these were white men, whereupon those on horseback approached. Long halted his men to exchange greetings with these additional warriors. But upon learning that their chief was not present, he once more set his expedition in motion. This time several of the Indians who had been following the Americans on foot ran to the front of the column and fired warning shots in the air. The Indians on horseback formed a crescent in front of the Americans’ path. Outnumbered as well as surrounded, Long had no choice but to reopen the parley about where his party would camp that night. He pointed to a large wood in the distance, and after some taut back and forth he agreed that the Americans would camp there while the Indians would camp at their present location. Then, in the morning, the Americans would accompany them to their main encampment and meet their chief.

But as the men began to march they were confronted again. One of the warriors stepped in front of the lead soldier in the column and cocked his gun. This soldier immediately responded by cocking his own gun. Long spurred his horse to the head of the column and brushed past the belligerent warrior to lead his men forward himself. The Indians, observing his courage and recognizing that his men would not surrender their horses without a fight, chose to let them go.¹¹

Long and his men reached the wood after dark. Placing sentinels around the camp, he had all arms examined and loaded in case of attack, and the horses staked with short ropes. Still worried about Colhoun and the two soldiers, who had gone elk hunting prior to their encounter with the warriors, he had a beacon fire built to draw them to their camp. He was greatly relieved when they arrived shortly afterwards without having stumbled into the Indian camp first. As soon as the men had cooked and eaten the fresh elk meat, they extinguished the fire. They were aware that a number of Indians had followed them to their camp and were concealed nearby. Long reckoned that if the Indians wanted to steal their horses they would attempt to do so just before dawn. Therefore, they rested the horses until midnight and then stealthily loaded up for an early departure. One Indian who had gone to sleep in their camp awoke as they were packing, saw what was happening, and trotted off, apparently with the purpose of arousing his compatriots. The men watched anxiously as this solitary figure receded across the prairie and was swallowed up in the darkness. Then all was quiet; the lone man was the last they saw of the Sioux war party.¹²

Following this encounter Long took the precaution of posting sentinels each night as they continued in a northerly direction down the Red River valley. These were bright, moonlit nights that all of the men experienced with heightened senses, straining eyes and ears to catch anything strange or threatening coming across the prairie. One night they seemed to hear voices amidst the lowing of the buffalo, another time they mistook a wolf for a man in animal hides on hands and knees. But each night passed uneventfully, and after eleven days’ travel they arrived at the settlement of Pembina on the international border. On this leg of the journey, a solid march, they managed to cover an average of twenty-three miles per day, sometimes setting off so early that they walked by the light of the moon.¹³

When they arrived at Pembina they found the place nearly deserted, all but a few of the inhabitants being away on a buffalo hunt. Whole families—men, women, and children, together with horses and dogs—had been out on the prairie for forty-five days. An old man, a Mr. Nolen, ferried the expedition across the Red River and invited Long and his men to make use of his home. Nolen lived in a log cabin like most other residents of Pembina. Altogether the settlement had about sixty log cabins together with a number of tepees. Long, together with his two officers, the scientists, and Mr. Beltrami, made use of one tepee, while the enlisted men pitched their tents around it. Confident that this camp was located just south of the ­forty-ninth parallel, Long planted a flagstaff, hoisted the colors, and named the place Camp Monroe in honor of the president.¹⁴

Since a primary object of the expedition was to ascertain the location of this settlement relative to the forty-ninth parallel, Long and Colhoun lost no time in taking astronomical readings. They took two measurements, one at Mr. Nolen’s house and the other at Camp Monroe, and determined that the community lay within a whisker of the international line on US territory. They marked the line with two oak posts, each bearing the initials “U.S.” on one side and “G.B.” on the other. Long read a proclamation, and the soldiers discharged their weapons in a national salute.¹⁵

Earlier that year the Hudson’s Bay Company had determined the same thing using its own astronomers. Resigned that the Americans would soon take control of the area, it had closed its Pembina trading post and taken everything transportable downriver to Fort Douglas (the site of modern Winnipeg). At the same time it had persuaded the Catholic priest in Pembina to remove his mission downriver as well. Ostensibly the company acted to save its property, but its larger motivation was to encourage the population of Pembina to relocate north of the border, as it feared that these settlers, once under US jurisdiction, would all go over to the American fur-trading outfits. Some of the residents had duly followed the priest to the Red River settlements around Fort Douglas, but most of the population still remained at Pembina in the summer of 1823.¹⁶

On their second day in the village, Long and his men were treated to the spectacle of almost the entire population returning home en masse, joyous at the conclusion of their successful hunt. To behold such a large number of settlers in that distant and empty prairie-land came as a surprise to the explorers. They counted 115 carts loaded with dried buffalo meat, and they estimated the number of horses at 200. Twenty mounted hunters rode abreast leading the procession. The Pembina settlers, having heard in advance of the visit by the American expedition, proudly fired a salute as they passed the Americans’ camp.¹⁷

Most of the settlers were of mixed race, descended from European fathers and Indian mothers. Later known as Métis, they were identified to Long as Bois brulé (Burnt Wood), so named for their dark complexions. Although Long and his companions were not well informed on the Métis, they recognized that they were a unique people, combining different elements from their paternal and maternal lines. Keating noted, for example, that their dress was “singular, but not deficient in beauty . . . a mixture of the European and Indian habits.” Every man wore a long, blue cloak secured around the waist by a military sash, a shirt of calico or painted muslin, and leather moccasins and leggings fastened around the leg by garters that were ornamented with beads. The men were also distinct in physical appearance: their eyes were “small, black, and piercing; their hair generally long, not infrequently curled, and of the deepest black; their nose short and turned up; their mouth wide; their teeth good; their complexion of a deep olive.” Even as Keating recognized the Métis as a distinct people, he could not resist commenting on what he perceived to be the ill effects of racial mixing. “The great mixture of nations, which consist of English, Scotch, French, Italians, Germans, Swiss, united with Indians of different tribes, viz. Chippewas, Crees, Dacotas, &c. has been unfavorable to the state of their morals; for, as is generally the case, they have been more prone to imitate the vices than the virtues of each stock; we can therefore ascribe to this combination of heterogeneous ingredients, but a very low rank in the scale of civilization. They are but little superior to the Indians themselves.” As evidence of the Métis’ cultural deficiency, the explorers noted the state of agriculture in Pembina: several households had small garden plots, but the residents did all of their gardening by hand. Not a single oxen or plow was observed. For the farm-oriented Americans, that was enough to stamp the Métis as an inferior people.¹⁸

From Pembina, Long expected to march due east on the forty-ninth parallel to Lake Superior. His local informants quickly talked him out of that plan. The country to the east was an impenetrable maze of lakes, rivers, and swamps. The only practical way to travel through this region was to follow its waterways. Long needed to trade the expedition’s horses for canoes and make a short but necessary excursion through British territory. They would descend the Red River to Lake Winnipeg and then ascend the Winnipeg River to Lake of the Woods. At that point the route of the expedition would intercept the international line, which left the forty-ninth parallel to follow the main water route used in the fur trade up the Rainy River to Rainy Lake and beyond.¹⁹

Now there was a change in the composition of the expedition. The Italian, Beltrami, bought two of the expedition’s horses and, with a guide, set out to find the source of the Mississippi. The officer of the escort who had joined the expedition at Fort Snelling turned back with three of the enlisted men. Long sold the remaining horses for an excellent price, purchased three canoes, and hired the services of a river pilot, nine voyageurs, and a new interpreter—one Charles Brousse. Altogether the party now numbered twenty-nine men.²⁰

The canoes were of the variety known as canot du nord (northern canoe), a vessel thirty feet long and four feet wide at the beam. After his experiences with steamboat navigation, Long took particular interest in the northern canoe. Perfectly adapted for the needs of the fur trade for transporting people and goods on the vast interior network of rivers and lakes, it was made of large pieces of birchbark spread over a skeleton of cedar ribbing, the sections of bark sewn together with long fibrous threads derived from the root of the spruce tree, and the seams caulked with pitch to make them watertight. Each one could carry up to 3,000 pounds yet was light enough to be lifted and carried over the head by two men. This was important because the canoe had to be hauled out of the water at frequent intervals during travel, both for portaging around obstacles and for drying out the birchbark periodically. Piloting the canoe took great skill, for the bark was easily torn or punctured if it struck logs or rocks.²¹

On August 8, they set out down the Red River, entering the territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company. A week later they were at the former Fort Douglas, renamed Fort Garry, where the expedition paused to resupply. Long purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company 1,000 pounds of pemmican and four bushels of wheat flour, along with vegetables, buffalo fat, and other victuals. Continuing down the Red, they entered Lake Winnipeg and followed its southern shore around to Fort Alexander, where they delayed for a day to repair the canoes. On August 20, the party started up the Winnipeg River.

As they penetrated the geologic province known as the Canadian Shield, Long was impressed by the amount of exposed bedrock and the number of falls and rapids. Both the Winnipeg River and Lake of the Woods, which they traversed on August 27 and 28, were “among the most singular and curious of Natures works in the formation of rivers and Lakes,” he wrote in his journal. Everywhere, they saw shorelines of gently tilting bare rock, clear streams cascading over polished slabs, and conifer trees growing on boulders. “The country, both main and islands, is so cased and covered with rocks that no part of it appears susceptible of cultivation,” Long marveled. It was hard to imagine how men could ever plow and fence such a land. He predicted that the rockbound wilderness would yield slowly, if at all, to white settlement, remaining of little use other than for sustaining the fur trade.²²

It was on their way down the Red and up the Winnipeg rivers that Long and his men began to pick up curious pieces of information and gossip about “the American,” a onetime captive of the Indians and citizen of the United States who had recently returned to the area to reclaim his two half-­Indian daughters. They were told the fellow had been ambushed and gravely wounded by a young Indian man while he paddled his canoe up a rapid. When the assault happened, he was making his retreat from Indian country with his daughters and their mother. It seemed the man who attacked him was somehow in league with the girls’ mother. Now the American convalesced at Rainy Lake House—a few days ahead on their journey.