In the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark
Page 6
Clark and Lewis were leery of the Teton Sioux (Lakota). Missouri traders operating out of St. Louis had warned them about the risks of encountering Teton bands, which did not want upriver tribes to gain direct access to weapons and other trade goods. By 1804 the western Sioux had begun to use their military power both to expand the region within which they could control access to buffalo herds by other tribes and to maintain a role as middlemen in trade among tribes as well as with whites. By the mid-eighteenth century the Sioux dominated an area that comprised most of North and South Dakota, portions of eastern Montana and Wyoming, and western Nebraska.9 Regarding Sioux expansion, President Jefferson had asked Lewis and Clark to take special pains to “make a friendly impression” on the powerful Sioux.10 So despite their uneasiness, the two captains agreed to hold council with the Brulé Teton band near the mouth of the Bad River, across from the present-site of Pierre, South Dakota.
The first and third days of the expedition’s stay with the Brulé were the most dangerous. The officers and men of the Corps of Discovery began by distributing gifts to the Sioux leaders and putting on their now practiced demonstrations of power in full uniform. They seemed not to have been aware of political rivalries within the Brulé band. According to Ronda, two other chiefs shared authority with Black Buffalo, whom the explorers treated as the headman.11
The initial council was followed by a tense situation involving the boats, exacerbated by the surly behavior of one of the slighted chiefs, called “the Partisan.” His men grabbed hold of the pirogue cable and mast, and the Partisan told Clark that the expedition would not be permitted to advance up the river. For a few moments it looked as if a fight would break out. Clark drew his sword, and Lewis threatened to fire the swivel guns onboard the keelboat. The danger passed, however, and the following day it was Lewis and Clark’s turn to be feasted and regaled with demonstrations. But the Partisan was not finished trying to impress the band with his defiance of the expedition. By the third day, the captains had begun to believe the Brulé would do whatever was necessary to turn them back, while many of the Sioux were expressing disappointment at how miserly the gifts had been from an obviously rich store of trade goods and voicing their suspicion that Lewis and Clark intended to trade upriver with tribes that had come to depend on the Sioux for access to European goods. As the crew prepared to leave, the Partisan demanded more gifts, and his followers again seized a boat cable to prevent the expedition’s departure. Although Black Buffalo managed to soothe the situation, bitter words were exchanged. The Corps of Discovery left the Brulé band on bad terms, having largely failed to make the requested friendly impression.12
On October 8, around 150 miles upstream from Pierre, the expedition came upon the first of several deserted Arikara villages near Mobridge, South Dakota. The Arikaras, who lived in earth lodges in towns protected by ditches and bristling palisades of sharpened poles, derived much of their food supply and tradable goods from agriculture. They tended to cluster at the mouths of tributaries, such as the Cheyenne, Grand, and Moreau rivers flowing into the Missouri from the west. By the time the Corps of Discovery arrived, the once numerous Arikaras had been reduced by smallpox and Sioux raids and been forced to abandon some of their towns in order to consolidate. The Arikara had a curious symbiotic relationship with the Sioux, trading food for horses, buffalo meat and hides, and European manufactured goods, but sometimes the Tetons simply took what they wanted in raids on Arikara villages. The trader Pierre Antoine Tabeau, who lived among the Arikaras, told Lewis and Clark that the Sioux purposely drove buffalo away from the vicinity of Arikara villages so the tribe would remain dependent on the Sioux. As a result, the explorers came to view the situation as a case of Sioux enslavement of their Arikara victims and resolved to establish alliances with upriver tribes that would help free them. The captains were gratified by the Arikaras’ willingness to make peace with the Mandans and Hidatsas. Lewis and Clark spent several days in the Arikara village before continuing upstream.13
It was now mid-October, and the captains hoped to spend the winter at the Mandan Villages, a well-known trading center on the upper Missouri. On the 21st they passed the present-day cities of Bismarck and Mandan, North Dakota, and intersected today’s Interstate 94. A week later they were camped opposite the mouth of the Knife River and had arranged a counsel with chiefs from the nearby Mandan and Hidatsa villages. Winter quarters were established as Fort Mandan, a triangular-shaped structure built of cottonwood logs and located a few miles downstream near Washburn, North Dakota, across the Missouri from the village of the Mandan chief Sheheke (Big White). The winter spent among the Mandans and Hidatsas in 1804–1805 gave Clark and Lewis an opportunity to study their cultures. As was the case with the Arikaras, these tribes were largely sedentary and tended extensive fields of squash, beans, and corn. They traded agricultural products with other Indians, who often attended trade fairs at this strategic location—central to the Cree, Assiniboin, Crow, and Cheyenne bands, as well as the Sioux.
Fig 2.1 Replica of Fort Mandan near Washburn, North Dakota. Here, next to the Missouri River, the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1804–1805 among the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians. Courtesy, U.S. Army Center of Military History.
Both the Mandan and the Hidatsa also hunted buffalo, and Hidatsa parties rode as far west as the Great Falls of the Missouri River in northwestern Montana. The captains thus sought information from Hidatsa leaders about the country through which they planned to pass in the spring. They also wanted to conduct diplomacy with both the Native Americans and the Canadian traders in the area around the Mandan Villages. More important, perhaps, they came in contact with Sacagawea, whose husband, Charbonneau, was taken on as an interpreter. Sacagawea was pregnant, and she gave birth to Jean Baptiste, whom Clark would refer to as “Pompy,” on February 11, 1805—a little less than two months before he and his parents left to accompany the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific Coast and back.14
On April 7, 1805, a smaller group—consisting of the two captains, thirty men including Charbonneau and York, plus Sacagawea and her child—set out from Fort Mandan to seek the headwaters of the Missouri River and, they hoped, to cross into the Columbia River watershed before winter. The keelboat had departed downstream carrying the members of the original party who were returning to St. Louis. Six dugout canoes and a pair of pirogues would be used for the remainder of the Missouri route. Near the site of Garrison Dam, which today backs up Lake Sakakawea, the Missouri River begins to flow generally from the west. They were still in North Dakota, but further upstream they would move into Montana a few miles west of the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. They were still in the Great Plains, a windswept land of short grass and little rain, and would remain so until midsummer as they followed the Missouri River through western North Dakota and northern Montana.
The Great Plains in this area is a vast extent of glaciated hills, buttes, and shallow coulees, where the only timber is bunched in isolated copses or hugs the bottoms of streams and rivers that cut their way through deep ravines. From the river, Lewis described the North Dakota “upland [as] extremely broken, consisting of high [eroded] nobs as far as the eye can reach on ether side, and entirely destitute of timber” but covered with sagebrush and juniper. Walking along the shore on April 20, Lewis noted within the underbrush of the ubiquitous cottonwood, ash, and box elder trees a variety of rosebushes and currant, gooseberry, and serviceberry shrubs. On the northern fringe of the Dakota badlands the explorers noted sulfurous smoke from fires burning lignite coal seams under the ground. These fires in the Sentinel Butte Formation begin spontaneously and can burn unchecked for years. [IV, 18n5; 21n3].
They soon passed the mouth of the Little Missouri River, which flows out of the Black Hills to the southwest, and proceeded through today’s Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Two weeks out from Fort Mandan the expedition passed the mouth of Little Muddy Creek—where Williston, North Dakota, is located today—and reached the c
onfluence with the Yellowstone, just inside the North Dakota border, on April 25. This river junction became highly important to the upper Missouri fur trade over the next half century. Four trading posts would be built in its vicinity, including the most famous, Fort Union, constructed in 1829. The Yellowstone River, which rises in Yellowstone National Park and flows north to Livingston, Montana, before crossing the southern part of the state and angling up to the Missouri, provided a return path for part of the expedition in 1806.15
For the next forty-five days the expedition moved up the Missouri River, westerly through northern Montana. Eventually, the men hoped to make contact with mountain Shoshone—Sacagawea’s people—so they could obtain horses to cross over to the Columbia River watershed, but here, between the mouths of the White Earth River in the east and the Milk River in the west, they were skirting the southern edge of Assiniboin hunting territory. They did not particularly wish to encounter these Northern Plains Indians. Since the Assiniboin did little to raise horses, they often raided the Hidatsas and Mandans or traded guns for mounts. Like the Sioux, they were jealous of their middleman trading status. Clark and Lewis regarded them as victimizing the Mandans, just as they saw the Tetons as victimizing the Arikara. Although Clark came across signs of recent Indian encampments while walking along the river’s bank in eastern Montana, no actual encounter with the Assiniboins took place.
Almost at the site of Fort Peck Dam, the river runs close to U.S. Highway 2, once known as Roosevelt International Highway. At Big Muddy Creek the expedition moved along the southern boundary of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation and passed the towns of Poplar and Wolf Point. On May 2, near Poplar, an inch of snow fell, coating flowers and leafed-out trees. Clark remarked that it was “a verry extroadernaley Climate.” [IV, 101] On May 8, south of Glasgow, they encountered the Milk, the “River Which Scolds All Others.” It flows out of Glacier National Park and into southern Alberta before sweeping back into Montana. Beyond the Milk River, which U.S. 2 turns northwest to follow, lay a 180-mile portion of the river now covered by Fort Peck Lake. In the vicinity of Sticklodge Creek on May 14, the group had one of its most disconcerting encounters with a grizzly bear. That evening some of the men spotted a large brown bear lying in the open ground about 300 paces from the river, and six of them set out to shoot it. They were able to sneak up fairly close to the bear, but despite a volley from four muskets, they could not bring it down and were forced to scatter for their lives. Eventually, after being hit by eight musket balls, the bear succumbed, but not before he had driven the hunting party into the river and attempted to pursue one of the men in the water. [IV, 151]
About thirty miles south of Sticklodge Creek (now called Hell Creek) is the town of Jordan, centered and virtually isolated within the immense Garfield County, Montana. Jordan is one of very few communities along the eastern reaches of State Highway 200. That highway, which runs across central Montana between the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, has a more direct relationship to the Lewis and Clark trail west of the Continental Divide, where it follows the Blackfoot River to Missoula. In late May, still on the portion of the Missouri now inundated by Fort Peck Lake, the explorers killed their first bighorn sheep and spied what Clark assumed was evidence of the Rocky Mountain cordillera but which turned out to be relatively isolated ranges of the Little Rocky, Bear Paw, Judith, and Highwood mountains. Beyond what is now slack water at the foot of Fort Peck Reservoir, the Corps of Discovery passed the future sites of James Kipp State Park and Fred Robinson Bridge. No roads or highways follow the river in this portion of the upper Missouri. They approach from the north and the south and cross at McClellan Ferry and Judith Landing, where the Judith River empties in from the south.
Beyond Judith Landing, the river tends to the northwest before making a great bend southward. As it moved upstream through north-central Montana, the expedition encountered a diminishing supply of firewood and an increasing number of troublesome plants, including prickly pear cactus and thorny greasewood. All journal entries agreed that this was barren desert. This is the region of the Missouri Breaks and the White Cliffs, which must be viewed from watercraft on the river. The area now lies within the Upper Missouri Wild and Scenic River segment. As the expedition passed the “nearly perpendicular” White Cliffs on May 31, Lewis marveled at the intricate formations within the 200- to 300-foot-high bluffs. From a distance, he wrote in his journal, they exhibited “a most romantic appearance.” Over time, water trickling down the white sandstone had carved columns, niches, statuettes, and “a thousand grotesque figures” that could appear—with some use of the imagination—to be the work of human hands. [IV, 225]16
Fig 2.2 The White Cliffs, at which Meriwether Lewis marveled as the expedition passed en route up the Missouri River on May 31, 1805, are now part of the Upper Missouri Wild and Scenic River segment. Photo by Donnie Sexton. Courtesy, Travel Montana.
Highway access to the expedition’s route picks up again at Loma, Montana, where U.S. 87 crosses the Marias River near its mouth. Here the two captains made camp on June 2 and paused to consider whether to follow the Marias fork northwest or to continue on the southward-tending fork. For several days small groups carried out a reconnaissance of the two forks of the river. Lewis led one group perhaps sixty miles up the Marias, which flows in from the northwest, while Clark took another group up the southerly fork. The Marias was narrower but seemed to carry a greater volume of water. After weighing the evidence, the two captains determined that the main stem of the Missouri River must be the south fork, although their followers disagreed. Once the decision had been made, the men dug a cache to deposit equipment, supplies, and specimens they would not need for the final dash to the Pacific Coast and also hid one of the pirogues.
As preparations for departure continued at the Marias camp, Meriwether Lewis and four other men set out to look for the Great Falls of the Missouri, which the Hidatsas had told them would require a short portage to circumvent. Moving upstream above the river bluffs, they could see two massive flat-topped buttes to the west and beyond them the Rocky Mountains and the crest of the Great Divide. On June 13, 1805, Lewis, who was alone while his companions searched for game on the plains south of the river, came upon the Great Falls. This confirmed that he and Clark had taken the right course. What Lewis call a “sublimely grand specticle” was located approximately thirty miles upstream from the future Fort Benton. He described “a sheet of the whitest beaten froth for 200 yards in length and about 80 feet” in height. The outcrop where Lewis stood seemed “to reverberate” as the water pounded against it. As the torrent fell, it swelled “into half formed billows of great hight which rise and again disappear in an instant.” Below the falls Lewis noticed the skeletons and remains of many buffalo that had fallen into the river while drinking and been precipitated over the cascade. In his description of the lower and largest of the waterfalls, Lewis is the most eloquent in his observations of nature. [IV, 283–285] But there were four more beautiful waterfalls upstream: Crooked Falls, Rainbow Falls (current name), Colter Falls (no longer visible), and Black Eagle Falls, which lies within the present-day city of Great Falls, Montana. [IV, 296n2, 3] Between Rainbow and Black Eagle falls was the eight-foot-high Giant Spring, described by Clark as the “largest fountain or Spring I ever Saw,” boiling up from under the rocks near the edge of the river and emptying into the Missouri. [IV, 307]
Fig 2.3 Big Falls on the Missouri River, twelve miles east of Great Falls, Montana, photographed in 1910, long before it partially disappeared underwater behind a hydroelectric dam. Photo by G. V. Barker. Courtesy, Montana Historical Society Research Center, Helena.
It was necessary to portage around all of the cascades, a task that consumed three weeks and involved building axles and solid wheels cut from cottonwood trunks on which to pull the dugout canoes. This portage route swung south of the river, passing through Malmstrom Air Force Base and the southwestern edge of Great Falls before returning to the river at the White Bear Islands. Thes
e islands, three miles upstream from the mouth of the Sun River (which Lewis and Clark called the Medicine River), provided a base for refitting before the expedition continued southward up the Missouri toward the Three Forks.
At the White Bear Islands, Lewis put together the iron skeleton for a shallow draft boat. The portage, which began on June 22, was often excruciatingly difficult and painful. The men pulling the dugout canoes and their cargo suffered especially from mosquitoes, hailstorms, and the spines of prickly pear cactus that often had to be removed from the soles of their feet at the end of each day. During one cloudburst, Clark, Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and the baby Baptiste almost perished from a flash flood in the ravine where they had sought shelter. Clark described the countryside as having a “romantick appearance [with the] river inclosed between high and Steep hills Cut to pieces by revines but little timber and that Confined to the Rivers & Creek.” There were so few trees that his men had to gather driftwood to light their campfires. Along the river below the red bluffs was a profusion of chokecherries, currants, and gooseberries. [IV, 332] Thousands of bison roamed the area, and the grizzly bears (“white” bears) attracted by the animals’ drowned corpses constituted a frequent nuisance, if not a menace, to the men working in the vicinity of the island camp.