Even the dullest of travelers out there may find, if nothing else, increased sociability. Fifty-thousand square-miles of the illimitable can make for loneliness, and at the end of a day on the Llano, a mere bowl of beans on a dusty, café table set with conversation can be a gift of considerable price. Once the wayfarer can sing—and comprehend—“O bury me not on the lone prair-ee,” civilization comes to mean something invigoratingly different, because we begin truly to grasp it by having looked into its absence.
If only the young student of design had reached the Llano before he delivered the first of his eighteen explosive missives to some stranger who, hopeful only for a letter from the daughter in Montana or that check from the Florida sweepstakes, instead got a face full of tenpenny nails. I wish it because I believe in the power of such a grand topographic vastness to set us straight about the significance of the ordinary and seemingly monotonous land and one of its messages: Life, all life, can be at the same time less meaningful yet more worthy than we perceive.
Had the RFD nail-carrier traveled that great tableland before dropping off his fulminating messages, he might have found the beginnings of ways to connect himself to something larger than his own wishes and dogmas. Perhaps he could have clarified confusions as the Llano belittled them into their proper proportion in the cosmic scheme he tried to address with a two-thousand-mile-wide smiley face. I think he might even have encountered what Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, an early settler there, wrote about the Staked Plain:
It’s a lonely land because of its immensity, but it lacks nothing for those who enjoy Nature in her full grandeur. The colors of the skies, of the hills, the rocks, the birds and the flowers, are soothing to the most troubled heart. It is loneliness without despair. The whole world seems to be there, full of promise and gladness.
I have no certainty, of course, that the young Minnesotan would have discovered these things, but I believe he might have because they have happened to me. In my half-century quest to memorize the face of America, I’ve come to value the communities of fellow travelers, even those who get no farther than over to the next hollow or across to the other side of the river.
A journey into the land is an opening to escape limitations of inadequate learning and go beyond bonds of prejudice and get past restrictions of ignorance. Such a trip is an invitation to listen to new voices—within and without—that will speak and inform. It’s an opportunity to put a face on a country, a face composed of smiles, grins, scowls, of concerns, hopes, and dreams, all of them more useful on a human visage than on a yellow lapel-button or a road map.
ASSONANCE FROM THE UPPER MISSOURI
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, as American foreign policy in the Middle East became ever more destructive and costly to several nations, I thought I saw a kind of historical assonance in some diplomacy and negotiation practiced two-hundred years earlier by a wise President and a little expeditionary troop he sent into the upper Missouri River country, territory anything but hospitable.
(The encounter with the Tetons in this story appears more fully in River-Horse.)
The Pencil Makers
In June of 1995 I was traveling by rivers, lakes, and the Erie Canal from New York City to the Pacific Ocean west of Astoria, Oregon, on a voyage I would later describe in River-Horse. In ascending the Missouri River from its mouth above St. Louis to the headwaters close to the Continental Divide in Montana, my copilot and I were laboring our way twenty-five hundred miles up the Missouri against the springtime current. That portion happened to be the same route the expedition of Lewis and Clark—the Corps of Discovery—followed nearly two centuries earlier on their way to the great western sea. Over the lower stretches we traveled in a twenty-two-foot, flat-hulled vessel called a C-Dory that I named Nikawa (from two Osage words meaning “river” and “horse”). The long ascent was at times slowed to the point of tedium as the Missouri carried us back a portion of each mile we sought to gain.
One afternoon in central North Dakota we tried to dispel the onerous passage by pulling the boat up alongside a makeshift dock so we might disembark and walk about and eat a sandwich. Before we could, from a thick copse suddenly and quietly appeared five Indians: two men, a woman, and two children. Their earthen skin gleamed, and they were broadly built, with large, round heads like ollas. Different from so many Indians one meets today—even in the Far West—they clearly had not a jot of European ancestry. Physically, facially, they seemed to come from another time in spite of their denims and T-shirts.
We were on Teton land so I assumed they were about to accost us for trespassing. Holding cans of beer, the adults approached Nikawa slowly and asked in English where we had come from. At first they doubted such a small boat could make it from the Atlantic Ocean into the middle of the Great Plains, but curiosity overcame their suspicion. Of the few words I know in Osage, one is the name for the Missouri River—Ni-sho-dse—and I spoke it in the middle of a sentence otherwise in English in hopes context might help communication. Their name for the river was similar enough that the woman understood and laughed and nodded and gave the Teton pronunciation and waved toward the Missouri. It was as if I’d spoken a password, and with it they asked to step aboard.
The stern dipped deeply as all of them climbed over. The children bounced around the cabin, and the men peered at the depth finder, turned the wheel, tapped the compass, and the woman in entwined Teton and English asked for a ride. Our fuel was precariously low with miles of isolated country between us and the next gasoline, so I had to decline. To temper their disappointment I pulled out T-shirts imprinted with our boat emblem and name. The people were pleased and, to my surprise, promised for later what one of them wore: a shiny jacket lettered HUNKPAPA, their tribe, a division of the Teton Sioux. The Hunkpapas were such formidable fighters in resisting white encroachment, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, an Indian agent spoke of them as “now the most dreaded on the Missouri.” Sitting Bull was a Hunkpapa.
I stood there, remembering Lewis and Clark: More forcefully than any other tribe, the Tetons threatened the passage of the Corps of Discovery in 1804. A council between the American captains and Teton chieftains began well enough, but soon the Indians grew dissatisfied with gifts proffered, finding them inconsequential recompense for the passage the Corps wanted, so the captains made an invitation. Clark wrote in his journal:
Envited those Cheifs on board to Show them our boat and such Curiossities as was Strange to them. we gave them 1/4 a glass of whiskey which they appeared to be verry fond of. Sucked the bottle after it was out & Soon began to be troublesom. one [of] the 2d Cheif[s] assumeing Drunkness as a Cloake for his rascally intentions.
Clark began the delicate, difficult, and dangerous task of getting the Tetons back onto the banks. Once again onshore, the second chief deliberately staggered into Clark, made aggressive gestures, and spoke deprecatingly of the presents and said the expedition should not continue upriver. The captain drew his sword, Lewis ordered the swivel guns on the keelboat readied, the soldiers picked up their muskets, and the Indians drew arrows from their quivers. Clark, through an inadequate interpreter, told the chiefs the expedition would indeed continue onward and to understand the white explorers “were not squaws but warriors,” to which Chief Black Buffalo answered they too were warriors and could easily pursue the expedition and pick off the men “by degrees.” Standing, staring, trying to face each other down, the two sides calmed, and eventually Lewis resolved the issue by inviting Black Buffalo and two others to reboard the keelboat and travel on it five miles upriver to a council feast the next morning. And so came a politic conclusion to a volatile issue, one driven by economic concerns but at the moment more a question of pride than right of passage through Indian land.
As my copilot and I talked with the Hunkpapas aboard the Nikawa, I looked into the Teton faces and saw in our encounter overtones of an episode from two centuries earlier, albeit conducted in better humor. While things over the last eight gene
rations had changed by the time we arrived, still, the Lewis and Clark Expedition seemed surprisingly immediate. In trying to fulfill President Jefferson’s directions of making a “friendly impression” on the native peoples and bringing them into a new political and economic relation with the United States, Lewis and Clark patently failed with the Tetons. Recalling Clark’s later description of the tribe as “the vilest miscreants of the savage race [who] must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri,” Jefferson—could he have been there with us—might have nodded appreciatively at seeing a couple of downstream people and the Tetons talking and trading and smiling aboard a little twentieth-century boat.
Not far from our meeting place with the Hunkpapas, Clark wrote his untypically severe and stringent “miscreants” comment when the expedition overwintered near the villages of the Knife River Mandan and Hidatsa, people who amicably and materially helped the Corps of Discovery survive the difficult Great Plains winter. The five palisaded earth-lodge settlements close to the log fort the Americans built were a grand nexus of commerce among the two resident tribes and the neighboring Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Assiniboin, as well as white traders; it was a place where the men of the expedition could witness and share the diversity of Indian life and culture existing across the northwest plains.
With each new stretch of their ascent up the Missouri, Lewis and Clark encountered a different tribe whose distinctive culture and disposition toward them required continually modified responses and approaches, a necessity the captains came to grasp and practice more wisely as they “proceeded on.” For most of the upriver peoples, the soldier-explorers were not the first whites the Indians had met. For nearly three generations Europeans had been coming to trade with tribes, each having well formed if distinct notions about eastern strangers and their purposes, notions expressive of their ways of dealing with foreigners. For Lewis and Clark, it was up to them to discover means to overcome a negative or hostile response and to encourage warmer receptions. Given both the limited information they received before departure and their narrow understanding of the western Indian trading-network, the captains did not immediately fathom the welter of economic and political presumptions and expectations the various tribes held, a complexity furthered by differing tongues and by interpreters often struggling to translate among three languages—or sometimes four, if we count signing. And there was also the continual problem of conflicts among the tribes themselves. Just as the river presented new challenges with every riffle and snag-ridden bend, so did the native peoples.
The expedition, to be sure, was not one of simple exploration for the sake of scientific knowledge; whether we like it or not, the journey was also incursive and smacked of imperialism. After all, Jefferson and a majority of the Congress wanted to take complete and unchallenged possession of the huge territory just purchased from France and to open a commercial route to the Pacific. Among the various influences informing and shaping the goals of the Corps of Discovery were a chauvinism and presumption toward peoples whom whites wanted to remold into, as Clark wrote, “our Dutiful Children.” Not surprisingly, such attitudes and expressions sometimes gave offense to proud and independent residents native to their land for at least twelve-thousand years. At Fort Mandan, British-Canadian trader Alexander Henry the Younger would later write that Hidatsa chiefs did not respond well to “the high-sounding language the American captains bestowed upon themselves and their nation, wishing to impress the Indians with an idea that [the Americans] were great warriors and a powerful people who, if exasperated, could crush all the nations of the earth.” Such an attitude has been long in dying.
One assignment of the expedition was to help establish an economic and political hegemony under the “great father in Washington” by lessening the influence of Canadian traders and by making St. Louis the economic capital of the upper Missouri River country. As did Jefferson, Lewis and Clark believed political sovereignty and economic control would march west together, and it would be the Corps of Discovery to initiate those changes. On that, they were right.
And the Indians? Tribe after tribe saw the party as newcomer traders rather than explorers practicing rudimentary scientific inquiries to help “open” and hold the West for the young United States. What the indigenous people cared about, of course, wasn’t ethnological inquiry—it was gifts and trade goods and the promise of increased barter. Although the Indians were curious about the strangers (especially Clark’s black slave, York) and about their gadgets (Lewis’s air rifle and spyglass, Clark’s compass, and even writing paper), their greatest interest was an economic one: How could they obtain goods like those? Remove this primitive form of consumerism from the expedition and one can only imagine how differently—perhaps calamitously—the journey might have gone.
Despite the occasional fractious moments, the overall peaceful nature of those twenty-eight months of passage was much the result of immediate economic imperatives reasonably well comprehended by red and white alike with both sides seeking material benefits, a situation scarcely different from international diplomacy today. That a tribe or several in alliance did not wipe out the little American troop after one of its displays of pomp and mostly bluffing military muscle reveals the Indian desire for tangible goods. Indeed, as the affray with the Tetons shows, when gifts or the number of trade items failed Indian expectations, relationships became testy and occasionally dangerous.
The winter among the Mandan and Hidatsa villages gave the Corps a lengthy opportunity for closely observing two cultures to see how the people lived: their loves, quarrels, meals, beliefs, aspirations. During the nearly half-year the expedition laid over in North Dakota, the depth of the captains’ understanding increased measurably. The whites attended ceremonies and feasts, practiced intimacies with the women, traveled with the bison hunters, watched births and deaths, learned what made a Mandan laugh, a Hidatsa distrustful. That winter the expedition at last had both enough time and an excellent location to examine and record ways of living they had grasped only haphazardly months before; they used those opportunities to reduce some eastern biases that earlier hindered the savvy necessary to fulfill their mission. A thousand miles into the voyage, the expedition journal keepers at last began to answer questions about Indian life Jefferson laid out in his 1803 instructions that effectively turned formally uneducated soldiers into part-time ethnographers whose learning would soon carry tremendous economic import. The president wrote Lewis: “The commerce which may be carried on with the people inhabiting the line you will pursue, renders a knolege of those people important.” Among other questions, Jefferson specified inquiries into native traditions, foods, clothing, dwellings, diseases, remedies, and “peculiarities in laws, customs & dispositions.”
The influential Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, an advisor to the Corps, gave Lewis an even more pointed—and peculiar—list:
How long do they suckle the Children? At what time do they rise—their Baths? Is suicide common among them?—ever from love? How do they dispose of their dead?
That emphasis on research during the long winter on the plains helped educate Lewis and Clark and make them more effective in dealing with Indians for the remaining months of the trip. How much the new knowledge did to bring the tribes into mutually enriching commerce is problematic. Nevertheless, only two Indians died at the hands of the Corps (Reuben Field stabbed one Blackfoot and Lewis shot another when a raiding party tried to steal guns and horses), an outcome as remarkable as the survival of the expedition itself (only Sergeant Charles Floyd died, brought down by an apparent appendicitis) and eventual safe return.
On the remainder of their westward trip, until reaching the Pacific, the explorers encountered tribes having little experience with white men so that relations and gaining safe passage through scarcely hospitable territory became trickier. Today, one can visualize failure or a disaster had that crucial education at Fort Mandan been missing. The captains’ use of Indian instruction during the enforced layove
r at the Knife River villages benefited the expedition and later the country. (How many modern leaders truly value learning about a culture for mutual benefit rather than for domination?)
The nature of the North Dakota encampment was the key difference between the Corps of Discovery journey and those of many later expeditions having an intent too often solely commercial or imperial, with operations conducted by ill-prepared soldiers or avid entrepreneurs woefully short on comprehension of and sympathy for native ways. Understood as a military probe, the entrance of the Corps into the northwest quadrangle of the United States was the beginning of the numerous campaigns that would eventually bring down George Armstrong Custer and his cavalry in 1876 before finally terminating armed Indian resistance with the battle at Wounded Knee in South Dakota in 1890, eighty-four years after the two Blackfeet fell to Field and Lewis.
There is more logic than irony that I’ve written these words with my favorite first-draft implement, a cedar pencil made by the Blackfeet of Montana. The logic is this: After Lewis, Clark, Jefferson, and Benjamin Rush, far too few people of forbearant intelligence directed the American entry into the West. Jefferson’s grand hope, revealed in his instructions to Lewis, looks today around the globe sadly empty:
Considering the interest which every nation has in extending & strengthening the authority of reason & justice among the people around them, it will be useful to acquire what knolege you can… as it may better enable those who may endeavor to civilize and instruct them, to adopt their measures to the existing notions & practices of those on whom they are to operate.
What Jefferson and the Corps began so promisingly soon collapsed almost utterly, an indictment of a nation claiming to believe in progress and to revere building upon humane wisdom and informed and compassionate behavior.
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