Frequent storms made the going even more difficult. An especially violent one on June 29 brought hail so fierce it knocked down and bloodied some of the men. Clark was out with Sacagawea, the baby, Charbonneau, and York when the storm struck, and they took shelter in a ravine under an overhanging rock. “The rain fell like one voley of water falling from the heavens and gave us time only to get out of the way of a torrent of water which was Poreing down the hill . . . with emence force tareing everything before it takeing with it large rocks & mud,” Clark wrote later. Pushing Sacagawea in front of him while she clutched the baby, Clark scrambled out just as fifteen feet of water poured over the spot they had just been. They lost a number of items, including Clark’s umbrella and Sacagawea’s papoose board. The next day, the men searched the ravine and found the expedition’s compass, the one item they could not afford to lose.
The first load to come up the portage was the iron framework of Lewis’s boat, the Experiment. Now was the time to put it to the test. Since there was no suitable bark to cover its frame, Lewis sent hunters to bring in elk and buffalo skins to use instead. But the sinew used to sew the hide to the frame left holes larger than Lewis had expected, and there were no evergreen trees to make pitch for caulking the leaks. The charcoal-and-tallow mixture he substituted would not stick to the hides, and as a result, the Experiment leaked mightily. “I therefore relinquished all further hope of my favorite boat,” he wrote. Lewis ordered it to be taken apart, and the frame buried; its rusty remains are undoubtedly still in Montana.
With the failure of Lewis’s boat, Clark sent a party in search of timber for two dugout canoes to take the Experiment’s place. In the country around the Great Falls, there were few trees of any size. The woodcutters kept breaking their ax handles and had to stop to whittle new ones. One day, four men broke thirteen handles. A month had passed since they left the Marias River, and Lewis was impatient to move on.
The expedition set off again on July 15. Two men were still sick, but were able to hike along the bank. The river had become so swift that the men poled or towed the canoes most of the time.
It was important to meet the Shoshone Indians, Sacagawea’s tribe, to obtain horses and guides to take them across the mountains. But the Shoshones, persecuted by the Blackfeet and Minnetarees, had grown wary of strangers.
The captains feared the Shoshones might hear the expedition’s hunters shooting at game and flee. To avoid this, Clark and four men took gifts and began traveling ahead of the main party to greet the Shoshones. Lewis ordered the men to fly American flags on the canoes to show that they came in peace.
On July 22, Sacagawea began to recognize landmarks and told the captains that the place where the Missouri divided into three branches was not far ahead. “The Indian woman recognizes the country and assures us that this is the river on which her relations live,” Lewis wrote, “and that the three forks are at no great distance. This piece of information has cheered the sperits of the party, who now begin to console themselves with the anticipation of shortly seeing the head of the Missouri, yet unknown to the civilized world.” Three days later, Clark’s party reached the Three Forks of the Missouri and found the river split into three streams, each nearly ninety yards wide.
Although he was coming down with a high fever, Clark spent a couple of days looking for signs of Indians. He had found a campfire still burning, but no Indians in sight. On July 27, he rejoined Lewis and the main party, which had reached the Forks. Lewis gave Clark a dose of Dr. Rush’s pills and made him rest and bathe his feet, which were full of prickly pear thorns. The expedition was being slowed by other ailments and injuries, Lewis noted: “We have a lame crew just now, two with tumers or bad boils on various parts of them, one with a bad stone bruise, one with his arm accedently dislocated but fortunately well replaced, and a fifth has streigned his back by sliping and falling backwards on the . . . canoe.”
To let Clark recover and to rest the men, Lewis decided to stay at the Three Forks for a few days. He used the stars to calculate the latitude and longitude of the spot, which he considered “an essential point in the geography of this western part of the continent.”
Sacagawea said their camp was on the precise spot where her band of Shoshones had been five years earlier when the Minnetarees had attacked, killing and capturing a number of her tribe and taking her prisoner.
“I cannot discover that she shews any immotion of sorrow in recollecting this event,” Lewis wrote, “or of joy in being restored to her native country; if she has enough to eat and a few trinkets to wear I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere.” But Lewis had never had much sympathy or understanding for Sacagawea.
After studying the Three Forks area, the captains decided that none of the three nearly equal branches could be considered the Missouri’s continuation. In naming these tributaries, Lewis chose to honor three men without whom the expedition would have never taken its first step. He called the southeast branch the Gallatin River for Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, who had helped finance the Louisiana Purchase; the middle fork the Madison River for Secretary of State James Madison, who had helped win its approval; and the southwest branch the Jefferson River for President Thomas Jefferson, “the author of our enterprize.”
On July 30, they started up the Jefferson River, convinced it would lead them directly into the mountains. Clark’s fever had subsided, but he was nearly crippled by what he called “the rageing fury of a turner on my anckle.” Captain Lewis came down with dysentery. Private Joseph Whitehouse’s leg was badly bruised when his canoe overturned and ran over him; “had the water been two inches shallower,” Lewis noted, “it must inevitably have crushed him to death.” On August 1, the expedition passed a small stream that Lewis named Birth Creek in honor of Clark’s thirty-fifth birthday, but the gesture was of little consolation to the captain.
To add to their troubles, George Shannon, the youngest member of the Corps of Discovery, had gotten lost - something he did frequently. The previous summer he had been lost for sixteen days and kept himself alive by eating wild grapes and, according to Clark, one rabbit “which he Killed by shooting a piece of hard Stick in place of a ball.” This time, the party spent three days searching for the eighteen-year-old before he returned to camp, exhausted but unhurt.
Clark had sent Shannon to scout a tributary of the Jefferson River that Lewis had named Wisdom River, which was thought to be the preferred route. After hiking nearly twenty-five miles up the Wisdom, Shannon had determined the stream was not navigable by canoe and turned back to rejoin the expedition. But the main party had missed a note that scouts had pinned to a pole – it had been felled by beavers – and taken the wrong fork. The confusion caused the expedition to be delayed a couple of days.
The river became increasingly rapid each day. The men struggled in the white water, poling or wading, and dragging the canoes. At times, they had to grasp the bushes on the banks to pull themselves against the swift current, dragging the heavy craft over sand bars, bruising their feet on the sharp stones.
On August 8, Sacagawea recognized a rock formation in the shape of a beaver’s head; it was Beaverhead Rock, near present-day Dillon, Montana. The Indian guide told the captains that her people used to cross the mountains nearby to a river that flowed to the west. This meant the Shoshones must not be far. There had been other signs of Indians - smoke, trails by the river, a fresh moccasin print - but the explorers had not yet seen a person. It was vital they cross the mountains before the snow, and they could not hope to find a route without help. The next day, Lewis set out overland with Drouillard, John Shields, and Hugh McNeal, determined not to return until he had met Indians. “In short,” Lewis wrote, “it is my resolution to find them, or some others who have horses, if it should cause me a trip of one month.”
After Lewis’s party had climbed the valley alongside the Jefferson for a day, the river divided into two equal branches, both impassable for canoes. At the fork, Lewis left a note a
dvising Clark to wait there until he returned.
The next morning they pushed on, walking some distance apart, with Drouillard and Shields posted right and left and Lewis and McNeal in the center. Suddenly, an Indian appeared on horseback on the plain in front of them. Through his telescope, Lewis could see that he belonged to no nation they had met before, so he concluded the stranger was a member of the Shoshone tribe.
Lewis and the Indian stopped when they were about a mile apart. The captain brought out a blanket. Holding it by two corners, he tossed it into the air three times and pulled it down to earth. This was a universal sign of peace among Missouri River and Rocky Mountain Indians.
Drouillard and Shields kept walking. They were too far to hear Lewis call, and Lewis was afraid to make any signal for fear of alarming the Shoshone. It was an agonizing situation. All he could do was to leave his gun with McNeal and walk forward, holding up trinkets as gifts. In anticipation of this meeting, Lewis had questioned Sacagawea, who told him that the Shoshone word for white man was tab-ba-bone. But as the Shoshones had never met a white man before, tab-ba-bone was actually their word for “stranger” - a nuance that was lost on Lewis. He wrote about the encounter: “. . . [the Indian] remained in the same stedfast poisture untill I arrived in about 200 paces of him when he turn his ho[r]se about and began to move off slowly from me; I now called to him in as loud a voice as I could command repeating the word tab-ba-bone, which in their language signifyes white-man. But lo[o]king over his sholder he still kept his eye on Drewyer and Shields who wer still advancing. . . .”
The Indian was growing suspicious of the party’s intentions. Although the captain succeeded in halting Drouillard, Shields kept plodding ahead. At last, the fearful Indian turned his horse, jumped a creek, and vanished into some willows. “. . . and with him,” Lewis lamented, “vanished all my hopes of obtaining horses for the present. I now felt quite as much mortification and disappointment as I had pleasure and expectation at the first sight of this Indian.”
Lewis was furious with Shields for ruining their chance to meet the Shoshones and decided not to risk alarming the tribe. Instead of following the Indian’s trail, he had the men build a fire, and they ate breakfast. He put up a pole with small gifts on it to show their peaceful intentions should any Indians return. Later, with McNeal carrying a United States flag on a stick, they took up after the Shoshone horseman.
A moderate rise ahead led to a gap in the mountains which they followed to “a handsome bold running Creek of cold Clear water,” wrote Lewis. “[H]ere I first tasted the water of the great Columbia river.” Since the stream was flowing westward, Lewis realized they had crossed the Continental Divide. They had, in fact, come over Lemhi Pass, on the border between Montana and Idaho, and were quenching their thirst in the Lemhi River, whose waters eventually reach the Columbia River. Since the Divide was the western limit of the Louisiana Territory, this also meant they had left the United States and entered Oregon country.
That same day, the shipment from Fort Mandan reached Jefferson, who sifted through the specimens and read Lewis’s letter. Jefferson would plant the Indian corn in his garden at Monticello, and hang the elk antlers on the wall of his home. Two animals – a magpie and a prairie dog – had survived the journey; Jefferson sent these to the natural science museum he had established at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
On August 13, Lewis’s party saw Indians again, this time two women and a man. The women fled, but the man let them approach to within 100 yards before retreating. A mile farther on, however, they came upon three women in a ravine. One young woman hid among the rocks, but an elderly woman and a twelve-year-old girl, seeing no opportunity to escape, bowed their heads as if to receive a deathblow.
Lewis took the woman’s hand and raised her to her feet, repeating “tab-ba-bone” and pulling up his sleeve to prove that he really was white. The explorers pulled gifts out of their packs - beads, mirrors, and face paint - which were eagerly accepted. The young woman who had fled was called back, and Lewis painted the women’s cheeks with vermilion, which Sacagawea had told him her people used as a symbol of peace. Then they made their way to the Shoshone camp.
They were intercepted by sixty warriors, armed with bows and arrows and a few primitive muskets. Lewis laid down his gun and went forward with his flag, while the women explained what had happened and showed their presents. Lewis recorded the meeting: “These men then advanced and embraced me very affectionately in their way which is by puting their left arm over you[r] wright sholder clasping your back, while they apply their left cheek to yours and frequently vociforate the word âh-hí-e, âh-hí-e that is, I am much pleased, I am much rejoiced, bothe parties now advanced and we wer all carresed and besmeared with their grease and paint till I was heartily tired of the national hug.”
In the Shoshone camp, Lewis sat down with Cameahwait, their chief, for the parley on which so much depended. The chief’s name meant “the One Who Never Walks.” Now Drouillard used his sign language skills to make the chief understand that Lewis’s party came as friends. Before smoking a peace pipe, the chief and his warriors took off their moccasins, and indicated that Lewis and his men should do the same. Cameahwait explained that this was to show how seriously they took this ceremony of friendship, since it implied that if they broke their obligation, they would go barefoot.
As they smoked the pipe in turn, the women and children clustered around to stare at the first white men they had ever seen. Once the ceremonies were over, Lewis distributed the rest of his gifts among the onlookers. A Shoshone man the explorers called Faro later recalled: “They were unlike any people we had hitherto seen, fairer than ourselves, and clothed with skins unknown to us. . . . They gave us things like solid water, which were sometimes as brilliant as the sun, and which sometimes showed us our own faces. . . . We thought them the children of the Great Spirit. . . . [And] we soon discovered that they were in possession of the identical thunder and lightning that had proved in the hands of our [enemies] so fatal to our happiness.”
That night, there was a celebration with dancing lasting nearly all night, but Lewis went to bed at midnight. Enough horses were tethered around the camp – as many as 700, by the captain’s count - for Lewis to feel sure they could purchase as many as they needed. Profoundly relieved and utterly exhausted, he slept too soundly to hear more than an occasional yell from the Shoshone entertainment in his honor.
After resting a day to give Clark and his party time to come up the Jefferson, Lewis and his men set off to meet them on August 15, accompanied by Cameahwait and a small group of Shoshones. As they traveled, the Indians began to worry that the strangers were leading them into a trap. Lewis sent Drouillard to hunt, hoping to calm them by providing food, but Drouillard came back empty-handed.
The next morning, however, Drouillard shot a deer. The Indians instantly made a mad dash to the spot where the hunter was cutting up his prize. Once there, they lunged at the parts Drouillard was discarding, “like a parcel of famished dogs each seizing and tearing away a part of the intestens.” It was the first meat the Shoshones had seen for days, and Lewis was happy to share it with them.
Filling their stomachs made the Shoshones slightly more confident, but Lewis now began to worry that Clark might not have had time to make it to the forks. If the Europeans were not at the rendezvous as Lewis had promised, the Indians might panic again, and the mission might be ruined.
Seeing no sign of Clark’s party at the forks, Lewis resorted to deception. He sent Drouillard to pick up the note he had left Clark six days earlier, then reassured Cameahwait by telling him that this was a note from his “brother Chief’ informing him that Clark was coming slowly up the river. To prove his good faith, the captain suggested that Cameahwait send an escort with Drouillard to meet Clark, leaving Lewis, Shields, and McNeal behind with the main band of Shoshones.
The chief agreed, and Drouillard set out at sunrise with a hasty note from Lewis to Clark. Lewis tried to chee
r the nervous Cameahwait, whose warriors hid themselves in the bushes, convinced there would be an enemy attack. In another gesture meant to calm the Indians, Lewis put on a Shoshone cape, symbolizing that if there was an attack, he would fight with them. He also gave Cameahwait his hat and gun.
With the chief beside him, Lewis rigged his mosquito net and lay down, as worried as his hosts. “I slept but little as might be well expected,” he wrote, “my mind dwelling on the state of the expedition which I have ever held in equal estimation with my own existence, and the fait of which appeared at this moment to depend . . . upon the caprice of a few savages who are ever as fickle as the wind.”
Early the next day, August 17, Drouillard and his guides met the canoe party struggling up the river two miles below where Lewis was waiting. Sacagawea began to dance with delight and suck her fingers, which in sign language meant that these were her people, who had nursed her as a baby. It was a joyous meeting, and the Shoshones sang as they escorted Clark and his party up to Lewis’s camp.
At the forks of the river, Sacagawea and one of the Shoshone squaws recognized and embraced each other with much emotion. The childhood friends had both been taken prisoner by the Minnetarees and had shared captivity until the friend had escaped and found her way home. Neither had ever expected to see the other again.
Once Lewis had welcomed Clark, Cameahwait led Clark to a seat of honor and tied pearly shells in his red hair. When they began their council with the Shoshones, an even more astonishing meeting occurred. Sacagawea, called in to interpret, suddenly recognized Cameahwait as her brother. Running over, she threw her arms around him and wept. Even after she had resumed interpreting, she was so moved that she broke into tears from time to time.
The council was a success. The Shoshones desperately needed the white men’s guns to kill game and keep their enemies at bay, and Cameahwait was willing to sell the expedition horses. Lewis bought three horses for an old uniform coat, a pair of leggings, a few handkerchiefs, and three knives.
Lewis and Clark Page 5
