Lewis and Clark

by Ralph K. Andrist

  The captains agreed that Clark should reconnoiter the Lemhi River as a possible canoe route to the Pacific while Lewis organized the transport of their supplies to the Shoshone village, forty miles away.

  On August 18, Clark set out with eleven men, while Lewis and the main party began repacking provisions into bundles suitable for carrying on horseback. What they could not take they cached, and the empty canoes were filled with rocks and hidden in a pond.

  August 18 was also Lewis’s thirty-first birthday, which he celebrated by catching trout and reflecting solemnly in his journal that: “I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this . . . world . . . that I had as yet done but little, very little, indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race or to advance the information of the succeeding generation . . . and resolved in future . . . to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.”

  The captains asked Cameahwait about the topography of the area. By drawing lines on the ground to represent rivers and heaping up sand for mountains, the chief explained that the Lemhi River, on which his village stood, flowed into a large stream about eighteen miles away. In mapping the area, Clark would label this stream Lewis’s River; later, it became known as the Salmon River. Sometimes, it was referred to by a more ominous name: The River of No Return.

  Passing between the mountains, Cameahwait said, the Salmon River was so hemmed in by cliffs that there was no shore to walk on. Furthermore, the mountains there were so high that neither man nor horse could cross them.

  Ahead, Clark was finding this out for himself. Struggling along the Salmon River led by an old Indian guide, the captain became convinced that it would be impossible to take canoes through the turbulent, rock-filled water. They would have to rely on horses, but the mountains edging the Salmon were too precipitous to cross. The guide, whom Clark called Old Toby, then told him of a difficult trail that led a long distance north and then turned west over the mountains to another river flowing westward. This was the route used by the Nez Percé Indians, who lived farther west, when they crossed the mountains to hunt buffalo on the plains.

  When Clark returned to the Shoshone village on August 29, Lewis and the main party were waiting for him. Despite their best trading, the captains could obtain only twenty-nine horses, not quite one for each member of the party. However, Clark’s Shoshone guide and his son agreed to be their escorts over the Nez Percé trail. The next day, they set out after saying goodbye to the friendly Shoshones, who had delayed their annual hunting trip to the buffalo plains to bid them farewell. They would never see them again.

  Much has been written about Sacagawea and how she guided Lewis and Clark to the Pacific. In truth, the only place she recognized any landmarks was near her birthplace, and of course she did help as an interpreter with the Shoshones. Nevertheless, her presence was instant proof to any native tribe that the expedition had only peaceful intentions. This alone made her a valued member of Lewis and Clark’s party. Now, rather than stay with her tribe, with which she had been so gratefully reunited, she continued on with the expedition. She carried her six-month-old son on her back, determined to see the Pacific Ocean.

  The trail led north through the Bitterroot Mountains, along hillsides so steep that their horses were constantly falling. The men were too busy cutting a trail through the thick brush to have time to hunt. The weather was miserable: rain, snow, and sleet sent the men to bed at night weary, hungry, and cold.

  On September 4, they came down into a wide valley. There, they met a friendly band of Indians, the Salish, who shared their food - berries and roots - and sold them fresh horses. “These natives are well dressed, decent looking Indians; light complectioned,” noted Private John Ordway. “. . . They have the most curious language of any we have seen before. They talk as though they lisped or have a bur on their tongue. . . .”

  The party continued north along the Bitterroot River, a little east of the present Montana-Idaho boundary, and a week after meeting with the Salish, stopped for a day on a creek, which they named Traveler’s Rest. There, the hunters stocked up on food before attempting the worst part of the trail, where their guides warned them no game could be found.

  Then they turned west and for ten miserable days followed the difficult Lolo Trail over the Bitterroot Mountains – “the most terrible mountains that I ever beheld,” according to Gass. Their Shoshone guide, Old Toby, had told them that the crossing would take five days, but he lost the trail, and the party wandered for two days before he regained his bearings.

  The ground, already strewn with fallen timber, was covered with snow; several horses were hurt by rolling down steep slopes. They managed to shoot a few pheasant, but when their food gave out, they killed and ate first one colt, then a second, then a third, “which we all Suped hartily on and thought it fine meat.” A nearby stream was named “Colt killed Creek.”

  The men woke on September 16 to two inches of snow, which had all but obscured the trail, noted Whitehouse. “We mended up our mockasons,” he noted. “Some of the men without Socks, wrapped rags on their feet, and loaded up our horses and Set out without anything to eat.” Captain Clark had spotted a deer off the trail and shot, but failed to kill it.

  By September 18, the last colt was gone, and supplies were reduced to “a skant proportion of portable soupe [a kind of instant broth that Lewis had purchased in Philadelphia] . . . a little bears oil and about 20 lbs. of candles.” In desperation, Clark and six men went ahead to try to kill some game while the rest of the party struggled on, growing weaker each day. They camped by a stream that Clark named “Hungery Creek, as at that place we had nothing to eate.”

  On September 20, Clark’s party came to more level country, where there was a village of Nez Percé Indians. They called themselves the Nimipu, which meant “the people,” but in sign language their name was indicated by a motion that Clark interpreted as “pierced nose.”

  Tribal legends later suggested that the natives’ first instinct was to kill the Europeans and take their weapons and supplies. To Lewis and Clark, they seemed frightened; like the Shoshone, most had never encountered white men before. But a woman in the tribe called Watkuweis – meaning “Returned from a Far-away Country” – had been captured as a young girl by a rival tribe on the Great Plains. She was sold to another tribe farther east, and eventually befriended by white people in Canada before escaping and making her way back. Now she was old and dying, but she came to the explorers’ defense, saying, “These are the people who helped me. Do them no harm.” A Nez Percé Indian called Many Wounds later recounted: “She told history about the whites and every Nez Percé listened . . . told how the white people were good to her, treated her with kindness. That is why the Nez Percés never made harm to the Lewis and Clark people. . . . We ought to have a monument to her in this far West. She saved much for the white race.”

  The men of the expedition seem to have had no notion of the danger they had faced. “These Savages were verry glad to see us,” Private Joseph Whitehouse noted in his journal. “The men, women & children ran meeting us & Seemed rejoiced to See us.” The Indians offered them dried salmon and pounded camass root, which promptly made the white men terribly sick. The Nez Percé chief was Walammottinin, meaning “Hair Bunched and Tied;” Clark called him Twisted Hair. The chief drew a map for Clark on a white elk skin, showing their location on the Clearwater River, with the Columbia seven days’ journey away. Clark considered the chief “a cheerful man with apparent sincerity.”

  On September 22, Lewis’s exhausted party arrived, and like Clark’s, fell ill. It took Lewis nearly two weeks to recover.

  As the men grew able, Clark put them to work making canoes. Twisted Hair showed them to a grove of ponderosa pine trees along the Clearwater and taught the tired men a method of using fire to hollow out the thick trunks. By October 6, they had completed four large dugouts and one small one.

  They branded their thirty-eight horses with “U.S., C
apt. M. Lewis,” and turned them over to some of Twisted Hair’s relations, who promised to take care of them. Twisted Hair and a lesser chief named Tetoharsky volunteered to guide them to the Columbia, and on October 7, they set off down the Clearwater. A day later, their Shoshone guides, intimidated by the Nez Percés in the party, vanished.

  The current, for the first time, was at their backs, but they were rocked by rapids that kept their progress to twenty or thirty miles a day. On October 8, one of their canoes was tossed against the rocks and sank. “The waves roared over the rocks and Some of the men could not Swim,” wrote Private John Ordway. There “they stayed in this doleful Situation untill we unloaded one of the other canoes and went and released them. 2 Indians went in a canoe to their assistance also.”

  The loss in supplies was considerable, according to Clark: “All our roots was in the Canoe that Sunk. . . . Our loose powder was also in the Canoe. . . .” The explorers were forced to break an unwritten rule: “We have made it a point at all times not to take any thing belonging to the Indians, even their wood,” Clark wrote. Timber that the Indians had split to construct a house was taken for firewood, “as no other is to be found in any direction.”

  On October 10, the expedition rode the waters of the Clearwater to the larger Snake River, which came up from the south and swung to the northwest, crossing from the future state of Idaho into Washington. On October 16, they passed from the Snake River into the Columbia.

  The party camped at the confluence of the rivers and was soon joined by 200 Indians from a nearby village, singing and beating drums. Chanting, they formed a semicircle while their chief smoked a ceremonial pipe with the captains and their Nez Percé guides. Indicating that they wanted to be friends, the captains passed out medals and what gifts they could spare from their dwindling supply of trading goods.

  Like all the Indians living on the great Columbia and its tributaries, these people, the Sokulks, depended on the salmon that came up the river in incredible numbers. But at that season, the salmon had stopped running, and the river was filled with dead and dying fish. Clark recorded: “those which was offerd to us we had every reason to believe was taken up on the shore dead [so] we thought proper not to purchase any, we purchased forty dogs [to eat] for which we gave articles of little value, such as beeds, bells & thimbles.”

  Travel became increasingly perilous as the icy, swift-flowing river began hurtling through a long series of canyons. On October 22, reaching the rapids above the Great Falls of the Columbia, known afterward as Celilo Falls, they were forced to portage their canoes and stores separately and to lower the canoes on ropes made of elk hide.

  Reconnoitering two days later, Clark encountered new difficulties. A couple of miles downstream was what he called “The Dalles of the Columbia” – the Columbia River Gorge: “. . . a tremendious black rock Presented itself high and Steep appearing to choke up the river; . . . at this place the water of this great river is compressed into a chanel between two rocks not exceeding forty five yards wide and continues for a 1/4 of a mile when it again widens.”

  Clark saw at once that they could not possibly portage the heavy canoes over the difficult rock, but Cruzatte, their most experienced waterman, agreed with him that with good handling, the canoes could be taken through the dangerous waters: “. . . accordingly I deturmined to pass through this place notwithstanding the horrid appearance of this agitated gut swelling, boiling & whorling in every direction, which from the top of the rock did not appear as bad as when I was in it; however we passed Safe to the astonishment of all the Inds. . . .”

  Their progress was watched by local Indians from the rocks above. Once safely through, the Americans were entertained by another group of Indians who lived below The Dalles. These Indians wore clothes made from cedar bark, Clark noted, and lived in “the first wooden houses in which Indians have lived since we left those in the vicinity of Illinois.” They had no horses at all and navigated the river in canoes - hewn from the tallest trees the explorers had yet seen, and carved with intricate designs. Clark observed that their principal food was dried and pounded fish, and he counted “107 stacks . . . in different places on those rocks which must have contained 10,000 lb of neet fish.”

  The captains held peace talks between these Indians and their two Nez Percé guides, while the men danced to Cruzatte’s violin. Clark noted only one problem the next morning: “I could not sleep for the noise kept [up] by the swans [and] ducks. They were so immensely numerous and their cries horrid.”

  After they passed The Dalles area, Twisted Hair and Tetoharsky said goodbye to the captains, explaining that they could be of no further service because they did not understand the language of the tribes downriver. They bought horses from a nearby village, and after a parting smoke, set off for home.

  The expedition spent two days repairing the canoes, but was water-borne again on October 28. By November 2, they had passed the splashing waterfalls of the Cascade Mountains and were at last on tidewater, where they could feel the ebb and flow of the Pacific. But the fog and mist on the river was so dense the men could scarcely see past the end of their canoes.

  On November 7, the fog lifted, and Clark wrote in the notebook he kept open constantly on his knee: “Ocian in view! O! the joy!” That night he recorded in his journal: “Great joy in camp we are in view of the Ocian, this great Pacific Octean which we been so long anxious to See. And the roreing or noise made by the waves brakeing on the rockey Shores (as I suppose) may be heard disti[n]ctly.”

  It was not the ocean he had spotted, in fact, but the eastern end of Gray’s Bay, still more than twenty miles from the coast. The men’s elation did not last long.

  Although they had nearly reached the Pacific, the captains and their men were far from the end of their troubles. They were still miles from the mouth of the Columbia, but the river was now so wide – some half a dozen miles - that the heaving and rolling ocean reached into the estuary, making the canoes bob like corks, and the men seasick.

  On November 8, the day after Clark mistakenly reported seeing the ocean, the expedition paddled another eight miles downriver but was finally forced ashore on the north bank of the estuary. They found little refuge there; the hills were so steep, they could not leave the beach, and the water was too salty to drink. To add to their misery, the rain that had been falling for days continued all night.

  The next day was worse. It continued to rain, and a brisk southerly wind sent waves directly into the mouth of the estuary. Not only was their camping place flooded, but the high tide and waves brought churning driftwood - dead trees as much as 200 feet long and seven feet thick - into the Columbia, nearly crushing their canoes. Clark’s optimism was already fading; “at this dismal point, we must spend another night” he wrote, “as the wind and waves are too high to proceed.”

  The third day, they moved a short distance and camped in a gully, where the drifted logs had jammed into a solid pile just above water level. “The logs on which we lie is all on flote every high tide,” Clark wrote miserably. All they had to eat was dried pounded fish they had bought from the Indians at the Great Falls. Private Joseph Field went out to hunt for his famished comrades, but the hills were so steep and the undergrowth so dense that he could do nothing. The continuing downpour loosened stones on the steep hillsides that rolled down on the unhappy party.

  On the fifth morning, lightning, thunder, hail, and violent rain encouraged the expedition to take advantage of a low tide to move half a mile to a small brook where they were slightly better protected. Captain Clark’s enthusiasm was completely sapped. “It would be distressing to a feeling person to see our situation at this time,” he wrote, “all wet and cold with our betting etc. also wet, in a cove scarcely enough to contain us, our Baggage in a small holler about 1/2 mile from us, and the canoes at the mercey of the waves & drift wood. . . . Our Situation is dangerous.”

  The next day, November 13, Captain Clark climbed the steep heights behind them to scout for a b
etter location, but when he reached the top, he could see nothing because of the heavy clouds. On his return, he sent scouts John Colter, Alexander Willard, and George Shannon downriver in a canoe to look for a safer campsite because the waves were again sending driftwood surging dangerously near their present spot.

  The next morning, five Indians in a canoe managed to land despite the rain and high waves. Shortly afterward, John Colter strode along the shore and accused the Indians of stealing his fishing gear. The Indians would not give up the stolen articles until a gun was aimed at them. This kind of thievery was to be a constant problem in Oregon.

  Colter reported that he and his comrades had found a “butifull Sand beech” around the point, and that Willard and Shannon had gone ahead to check out the land. That afternoon, Lewis and a party of four set out to look for a sheltered bay at the mouth of the Columbia where, according to the natives, white-sea captains usually anchored their vessels. Five men took Lewis’s party by canoe as far as the beach Colter had found; they struggled back at dusk with their craft almost foundering in the waves.

  At camp, Clark made some unhappy observations about the condition of the expedition’s supplies: “The rain &c. which has continued without a longer i[n]termition than 2 hours at a time for ten days past has distroyd the robes and rotted nearly one half of the flew clothes the party has, perticularley the leather clothes. If we have cold weather before we can kill & Dress Skins for clothing the bulk of the party will Suffer . . .”

  Soon after parting from Colter, Willard and Shannon met twenty natives so excessively friendly that the two explorers grew suspicious. After sitting up late around the campfire with their unwelcome guests, the two finally laid down with their rifles under their heads.

  In the morning, the guns were gone. When the Indians refused to return them, Shannon picked up a club and was about to use it on a man he suspected when another Indian began to load a musket. Shannon put his weapon down and warned the men that if they did not return the stolen rifles, a party of white men would come down the river and kill them. Just then, Lewis and his comrades appeared on their way to the ocean, and the terrified Indians gave the guns to Willard and Shannon.