The expedition’s progress was so slow that Long assigned half of the men to a shore party—both to lighten the load and to give the scientists more opportunity to observe the country. Under the leadership of Major Biddle, Long’s second in command, the shore party traveled up the Kansas River, where it was welcomed by the Kansa Indians at their main village. However, a few days after leaving the Kansa village the shore party was robbed by a group of about 140 Pawnee warriors. Although the men got through this incident unscathed, it caused them to abandon their plan of continuing overland to the mouth of the Platte River. Instead, they beat a retreat back to the Missouri to catch the lumbering Western Engineer. Finding that the steamboat had already passed upstream, Biddle divided the shore party in two, sending the stronger members ahead to overtake the steamboat while the slower group followed behind. When the faster group at last caught up with the Western Engineer, Long called a halt to await the remainder of the ill-fated shore party.13
Before the expedition reached Council Bluffs, Long had to contend as well with the loss of one scientist and the insubordination of his second in command. Baldwin became so ill he had to remain behind in the frontier settlement of Franklin, Missouri. This left the expedition without a surgeon and botanist. Baldwin hoped to work on reports while he convalesced and then rejoin the expedition later, but his condition only worsened and he died two months later.14
Major Biddle, meanwhile, had decided that Long’s idea to navigate the Missouri by steamboat was ill conceived. He believed Long was so stubbornly wedded to the idea that he was unfit for command. Moreover, Biddle blamed Long for the shore party’s humiliating “defeat” by the Pawnee, which he believed might prejudice his own chances for promotion in the officer corps. At one point Biddle even challenged Long to a duel. (He was deadly serious; the hot-headed army major met his end a decade later in a duel with another man.) Long avoided a duel, but his relationship with Biddle was irreparably damaged. Faced with such an unending string of setbacks and frustrations, Long felt profoundly discouraged as the summer drew to an end, so much so that other members of the expedition noted it and observed that his seemingly indomitable spirit of optimism had finally deserted him.15
Reaching Council Bluffs in September, Long and his men made winter quarters at a point on the river about five miles below where Colonel Atkinson established his own winter quarters. With the men’s quarters built and the Western Engineer safely tucked away in a cove for the winter, Long prepared to float back down the Missouri in a canoe with one soldier and Jessup (who decided he had had enough). He gave instructions to the remaining scientists to pursue their studies in the surrounding area through the winter; meanwhile, he would travel back to the nation’s capital to report on the expedition’s travails and set new objectives for the coming year. He left the engineers’ cantonment in the middle of October, visited his family in Philadelphia at Christmas, and was back in Washington around the first of the year.16
By the time Long reported to the War Department, he had recovered his characteristic enthusiasm. On January 3, 1820, he gave Calhoun an account of the expedition’s numerous setbacks during the past summer: the steamboat’s many defects at the outset of the journey, the surprising force of the Missouri River (“far greater than the most exaggerated accounts had authorized us to expect”), the plundering of the shore party by the Pawnee, the illness and eventual death of Dr. Baldwin, the insubordination of Major Biddle. Yet in spite of all those mishaps, he proposed an ambitious plan for the coming year. First, he wanted to return to his men by way of a more northerly route. He would set off at the head of Lake Superior, travel overland to the mouth of the St. Peter’s River, proceed up that river and overland again to the Great Bend of the Missouri, and float down the Missouri to Council Bluffs. Once reunited and supplied with horses and provisions, the expedition would then follow the Platte River to its source in the Rocky Mountains, head south to the source of the Red River of the South, and down that river to the Mississippi, and finally homeward by way of New Orleans. As for the Western Engineer, he no longer thought it the preferred “mode of service” for exploring the West.17
Long soon learned that his plan was far too expansive. With the nation’s economy still in a sharp downturn, Congress aimed again at slashing the War Department budget. On December 21, 1819—just two weeks before Long submitted his report—the House committee on military affairs began an investigation of the Yellowstone expedition and its costs, starting with the botched contract with Johnson for steamboat transportation. Calhoun duly assembled this information during the month of January and submitted it to the House committee on February 3, 1820. Calhoun did not begrudge Long for the army’s problems with steamboats the previous summer; indeed, the secretary of war still wanted Colonel Atkinson to use steamboats on the upper Missouri in the coming year, for he believed that they would add color to the expedition and impress both the British and the Indians with the power of the United States. But in the following weeks, as Congress moved to slash the expedition’s funding, Calhoun became convinced that the whole military operation must be recast. The original objective of establishing a fort at the mouth of the Yellowstone was too ambitious. He apprised Long that the scientific expedition would have to be scaled down as well.18
Long worked with the secretary of war to develop a plan that would keep the scientific expedition going and still meet with Congress’s approval. In the meantime, he forged ahead with preparations. First, he had to attend to the unpleasant duty of delivering Baldwin’s personal letters and other effects to Baldwin’s widow. Then he turned to finding a junior officer to replace the insubordinate Biddle, who had been quietly transferred to Colonel Atkinson’s command. The man he chose was Captain John R. Bell, an instructor of tactics at West Point Military Academy. Long also required a single individual to replace the two scientists no longer with the expedition. He made an excellent choice in his selection of Dr. Edwin James of Vermont. Although just twenty-two years of age, James had studied medicine and had published papers in both geology and botany. He not only filled the roles of surgeon, geologist, and botanist, he would eventually assume the role of lead author and editor of the official account of the expedition.19
At last, in early March, Long received his new orders from Calhoun. He was to return to Council Bluffs by way of St. Louis and the Missouri River. After sending the Western Engineer back down the Missouri for repairs and purchasing horses for the expedition’s further travels, he was to proceed up the Platte River to its source in the Rocky Mountains, then explore southward to the Arkansas River. From that point the expedition would split up, with one party continuing southward to the Red River. The two separate parties would then head eastward across the southern plains, descending the Arkansas and Red rivers respectively, rejoining on the Mississippi.20 Calhoun did not need to remind Long of the geographical significance of the Arkansas and Red rivers. Each formed a section of the transcontinental boundary between the United States and New Spain under the terms of the Adams-Onís Treaty signed in February 1819. Besides compiling topographical and scientific data about the West, the expedition would be surveying the new territorial limits of the United States.21
26
To the Rocky Mountains
Long’s expedition of 1820 shared important features with the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–6. Fundamentally, both expeditions were aimed at strengthening the young Republic’s claim to territory in the Far West. In each case, the explorers were expected to make important geographical discoveries. For Lewis and Clark, the principal objective was to find a useable water route across the continent to the Pacific Ocean. For Long, the main objectives were to trace the course of the Platte, Arkansas, and Red rivers across the central plains and, if possible, to find the source of each river. Lewis and Clark focused on the Missouri and Columbia rivers, the greatest rivers on either side of the Rocky Mountains, while Long’s explorations focused on the next three largest rivers draining the eastern slope of the
Rocky Mountains. Since rivers formed the principal corridors of travel and commerce across continents in the early nineteenth century, they were vital to sovereign claims of territory under the doctrine of discovery.
This doctrine, recognized by European states for hundreds of years and embraced by the United States as well, held that the discovery of territory by one Christian state before any other state had knowledge of it gave that state a sovereign claim to the territory. Included in this claim were all the indigenous, non-Christian, non-European peoples who inhabited the area. The doctrine was another aspect of that Eurocentric worldview that divided all of humanity into civilized and savage peoples, and it posited that indigenous peoples, being in a “savage state,” had no comparable sovereign interests of their own.1 It provided a rationale for European colonization of the rest of the world and a system for managing imperial rivalries. While the Lewis and Clark expedition was aimed at preempting a potential British claim to the Pacific Northwest, Long’s expedition of 1820 aimed to challenge the Spanish claim to the Southwest. Long himself would urge that the United States lay claim to as much of the Rocky Mountains as possible.2
Another strong parallel between the two expeditions was their commitment to scientific as well as geographical discovery. President Jefferson’s instructions to Lewis were famously expansive, requesting that the expedition collect information on soils, minerals, climate, plants, animals, and much more.3 “Taken altogether,” historian Stephen E. Ambrose has written, “the instructions represented a culmination and a triumph of the American Enlightenment.” Although Lewis was not a scientist, Jefferson found him a good observer of natural phenomena, and the president saw to it that he received considerable scientific preparation, mostly under his own tutelage, before setting out.4 Clark, the expedition’s second in command, had less formal education than Lewis, but he too was a keen scientific observer. As the more skilled cartographer of the two, Clark made many significant contributions to the expedition’s study of Indian tribes and its recording of new animal species, among other things.5
Long’s expedition and the Lewis and Clark expedition also took similar account of the fur trade and Indians. Jefferson, like Calhoun, perceived a long-term threat to US interests if Britain achieved control of the fur trade and thereby secured a dominant influence over the western Indian tribes. Early in the planning of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Jefferson wrote to Lewis: “The commerce which may be carried on with the people inhabiting the line you will pursue, renders a knolege [sic] of these people important.” And in his final instructions: “You will readily conceive the importance of an early and friendly intimate acquaintance with the tribes that inhabit the country.” As diplomats, Lewis and Clark were to convey to the Indians that the United States was a rising power and a worthy supplier of trade articles for them.6 With a view to giving American citizens a stronger entry into the fur trade, Lewis and Clark were instructed to learn the names of the various tribes and their numbers, the extent of their possessions, their relations with other tribes, their languages and customs, their means of subsistence and material conditions, and most pointedly, “articles of commerce they may need or furnish, & to what extent.”7
The avid pursuit of both scientific knowledge and cross-cultural understanding that Jefferson envisioned for the Lewis and Clark expedition set a standard for subsequent army exploration of the West for decades to come. Long’s primary contribution as an army explorer was his almost single-handed effort to renew the government’s commitment to scientific exploration in the era following the War of 1812. In the words of his biographers, Nichols and Halley, “Long hoped to rekindle the spark of curiosity” embodied in Jefferson’s instructions to Lewis and Clark.8
Long’s feelings of kinship with the Lewis and Clark expedition were not just intellectual but personal. Although Long never met Lewis, he considered Clark to be a mentor. When Long reached St. Louis on his way to Council Bluffs in the late spring of 1820, he took Dr. James and Captain Bell to meet the venerable explorer. Clark, then in his last year as governor of the Missouri Territory, was fifty years old. The young and impressionable Captain Bell described their meeting, and in his eager recitation there is a glimmer of the emotional bond between Long and Clark: “The Govr who is very sociable and pleasing in his manners, shew us the rifle, powder horn, bullet pouch, hunter knife etc—which he carried on his tour with Capt. Lewis from this place to the Pacific ocean. . . . I looked upon them with more veneration, than any other of his curiosities—because I was about commencing such a journey. . . . He conversed freely with the Major of the incidents of his tour, and particularly described the manner of constructing and managing a skin canoe of buffalo hide.”9
Long’s expedition to the Rockies never acquired the fame of the Lewis and Clark expedition. It lacked the epic sweep of Lewis and Clark’s journey across the continent and back. More importantly, the members of the 1820 expedition came back with an overall negative assessment of the country they explored, announcing that the plains were parched, barren, and impossible to farm. Long is most often remembered in history as the explorer who described the western plains as the “Great American Desert.” He inscribed this unfortunate misnomer boldly across the map of the western territories he produced in 1822, and it has stuck to his reputation like tar. The truth of the matter is more complex. Long based that negative characterization of the region on his assessment that its arid climate and dearth of timber would be an obstacle to the westward advance of agricultural settlement. “I do not hesitate in giving the opinion,” Long wrote after the expedition, “that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.” Since American farmers would not experiment with irrigated or dry farming methods until several decades later, it was not an unreasonable assessment at the time. So, criticism of Long for describing the southern Great Plains as a “Great American Desert” did not emerge until many years after his lifetime.10
Historians have rightly pointed out the 1820 expedition’s many other shortcomings. In the first place, Long did not find the source of the Arkansas River. This was a significant omission, since the Adams-Onís Treaty defined the border between US and Spanish territory as running along the south bank of the Arkansas to its source. To trace the river all the way to its source would have required the expedition to penetrate the Rocky Mountains more than a hundred miles, and Long decided there was not enough time for that. (Calhoun’s instructions allowed him that discretion, calling for him to find the source or explore to the West as far as he could “with safety.”) The expedition’s second major shortcoming occurred on the homeward journey. After dividing the expedition into two parties and putting Bell in charge of the party that was to follow the Arkansas down to Fort Smith, Long headed on to find the source of the Red River of the South. What he thought was the Red turned out to be the Canadian, a fork of the Arkansas. The Red River lay farther to the south. By the time he realized his mistake, they were low on provisions and there was no time to look for the elusive stream. Long pushed the expedition along at a furious pace even as his men grew weak from hunger.
In some respects, the expedition fell short in its scientific objectives. To hold down expenses, Calhoun gave Long just four months to explore the central plains. This prevented the scientists from making more than cursory observations over much of the territory they covered. Adding insult to injury, the scientists in Bell’s detachment lost their journals and scientific notes when three soldiers in the escort deserted and mistakenly made off with the scientists’ packhorses instead of other packhorses that might have been more useful to them. Long offered a reward for the lost journals, but they were never recovered.11
Historians have pointed out in Long’s defense that he completed the expedition under very trying circumstances. Funds that were promised him by the War Department failed to reach him in time, which forced the expedition to take off from Council Bluffs late in the season and
short of provisions. Some members of the Otoe tribe who were present at the departure remarked that the party was too small (the soldier escort was a fraction of what Long requested) and grimly predicted that the major and his men would be wiped out by hostile Indians before they reached the mountains.12
Long responded to these challenges with courage and ingenuity. To defend against night attack, he had the men regularly pitch the expedition’s three tents in a line, all facing the same direction, with the baggage placed in heaps to the left and right of each of the tent entrances to serve as breastworks. Occasionally, “to test the coolness and self-possession of the party,” he ordered the sentinel to sound the alarm in the night, waking the men from a dead sleep, whereupon they scrambled to take up their weapons and positions. And to thwart predawn attacks, he had everyone rise long before sunrise each day so they were on the march by five o’clock in the morning.13
As for provisions, the men started out with a light supply of sea biscuit and parched maize, which they expected to supplement with game. Long paid close attention to rationing, having learned from his experience on the upper Mississippi. First the sea biscuit was distributed, starting with three shares per day to each man, then two, then one; then one for two days; and at last one for three days, until the stock was exhausted. Then they resorted to the parched maize, beginning with one pint per day for four men and slowly cutting back according to a similar formula. The officers and scientists always received the same quantities as the soldiers and interpreters. Meat was never as plentiful as had been anticipated, and on their return trip they endured terrible hunger.14
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