In October, passing through North Dakota, they noted that the Indians were so impressed by the white men’s power that they offered them their wives in the hope of gaining some of their magic.* They had, however, already gained an acquaintance with this dubious magic: from French traders they had contracted venereal disease (which they passed back to Lewis’s men); whole villages were still empty after a smallpox epidemic in 1780; and they were unimpressed when it came to Lewis’s whisky, being ‘surprised that their father should present to them a liquor which would make them act like fools’.
On the 13th yet another man was arraigned for mutiny (or perhaps just discontent). He was dropped from the Corps and given 75 lashes. In a telling example of noble savagery, the Indians protested – as the South Pacific Islanders did when Cook ordered his men to be flogged – explaining to Clark that while they understood the need to make an example, they preferred death to humiliation: as a nation they did not even strike their children. Lewis paid them little attention. He and his men – who sat in jury on every offender’s trial and decided the penalty – seem to have been by nature floggers.
They spent that winter with the Mandan tribe, some 100 miles from the Canadian border. The Mandans were friendly and seemed delighted to have the white men stay with them. They were disappointed at the scale of Lewis’s gifts, but proved receptive to his speech, one of their leaders going so far as to say he might visit Washington in the spring to meet the ‘great father’. Soon, however, Lewis was lost in the intricacies of Indian diplomacy. On visiting a nearby tribe, the Hidatsas, his attempts to persuade them to live peaceably with their neighbours produced only puzzlement. They didn’t like his claim that he belonged to a nation of great warriors, and they didn’t like the meagreness of his presents. When two other neighbours, a tribe of Sioux and a tribe of Arikaras, joined forces to raid the Mandans, Lewis’s reaction confused the Indians still further. He advocated a counterstrike in which his men would join the Mandans to chase down the raiders. The Mandans were baffled. At one moment he preached peace, at the next he was advocating war. They did not support his move and let it be understood that in the future they would rather he did not meddle in their affairs.
Despite his firepower, Lewis had yet to gain influence: for all his speeches and flag-waving, the Indians beyond the Missouri were loyal to those who produced the goods. Lewis, who had been charged with travelling to the Pacific and back, had been niggardly with his gifts – understandably, given the distance he expected to cover and the small budget he had been allotted. But it had not helped his cause. Why should the Indians bother with the US when they could deal with Canadians, whose reputation was well established and who attached no moral qualifications to their commerce? Lewis met two of these traders in October 1804. Their names were François-Antoine Larocque and Charles Mackenzie, who had come 150 miles to do business with the Missouri Indians. The officers greeted them with as much warmth as their position allowed – which is to say that Lewis spent a whole day mending the French-speaking Larocque’s compass, but was distant towards his companion, Mackenzie, a Scot. As Mackenzie wrote, ‘Mr. Larocque and I ... lived contentedly and became intimate with the gentlemen of the American expedition, who on all occasions seemed happy to see us, and always treated us with civility and kindness ... It is true, Captain Lewis could not make himself agreeable to us. He could speak fluently and learnedly on all subjects, but his inveterate disposition against the British stained, at least in our eyes, all his eloquence.’ More profitable from Lewis’s point of view was the arrival of a French hunter named Toussaint Charbonneau, who offered his services as interpreter. Hitherto the expedition had got by with sign language, and Charbonneau, who could not speak English, was not an obvious asset. However, his 15-year-old wife Sacagawea was. Born near the source of the Missouri, she had been captured by marauding Hidatsas before being acquired by Charbonneau as the result of a bet. She and Charbonneau shared Hidatsa; Charbonneau and a member of the Corps shared French; and in this tortuous way communication could be established. That she was a Shoshone, a tribe whose friendship and services Lewis would need if he were to cross the Rockies, clinched the deal. They were hired at once.
That winter, the two captains prepared for Jefferson a summary of their discoveries. They waxed lyrical on the fertility of the land, which had topsoil up to 20 feet deep. They described 72 different tribes, from the warlike Sioux (‘the vilest miscreants of the savage race ... the pirates of the Missouri’), to the Mandans (‘the most friendly, well-disposed Indians’). They recommended the installation of garrisons, both to maintain peace and to dissuade British traders. They drew maps of the regions they had traversed. And, to give the expedition a scientific gloss, they sent home 108 botanical specimens, numerous animal skins and skeletons (including five live birds and a prairie dog), plus an eclectic assortment of 64 mineral samples ranging from a handful of Missouri pebbles, and a pint of its water, to lead ore, pumice and fossils. They also appended an outline of the country ahead, as gleaned from descriptions given by the Indians: it was rich in furs, watered by numerous rivers and, some 540 miles from their present position, the Missouri split into three branches, the northernmost of which was navigable ‘to the foot of a chain of high mountains, being the ridge that divides the waters of the Atlantic from those of the Pacific Ocean’. Apparently, it was but half a day’s journey to cross the ridge; and on the other side lay a navigable river (the Columbia) that flowed west. Moreover, the land to the west of the mountains was said to be as fertile as that to the east. Lewis was excited – and even more so was Jefferson when he received the report – to think that a transcontinental passage really did exist.
The expedition continued upriver, finding everything as the Indians had described, until on 26 May they caught their first glimpse of the Rockies. The triumph was offset by weariness. They had encountered no great natural hazard, had not crossed a desert or an ice-cap, had never been far from human contact and had rarely been short of food. By the standards of global exploration they had an easy time. Indeed, they were explorers mostly on paper, for the areas they visited were already known to Canadian traders. But the journey had been hard, and the crossing of new ground had been a strain. Since leaving the Mandans they had been attacked by grizzly bears, had nearly lost one of their pirogues in a storm, and could never be sure that their guns could hold off a serious attack in numbers. Moreover, they were in poor health, suffering from dysentery, mild scurvy and, in many cases, syphilis.
A week later, the Missouri was joined from the north by another river of almost equal size and depth. The Indians had made no mention of this fork. Which of the two should they follow? Most of the men were convinced that the northernmost river was the Missouri, but Lewis and Clark were uncertain. There was one way to tell. When describing the Missouri the Indians had mentioned a mighty cascade, not far from their present position. Lewis therefore set out on foot to scout the southern branch. On 13 June he was proved correct when he sighted rising above the plains a column of spray from which came ‘a roaring too termendious to be mistaken for any cause short of the great falls of the Missouri’. He took 700 words to describe what he summarized as ‘the grandest sight I ever beheld ... sublimely grand’, and even then felt he had not done it justice. Which was just as well, for the next day he met a second fall that produced further rhapsodies. ‘[I] was again presented by one of the most beautifull objects in nature’, a perpendicular cascade 50 feet high that stretched a quarter of a mile from side to side of the river. ‘I now thought that if a skillfull painter had been asked to make a beautifull cascade that he would most probably have presented the precise immage of this one.’ There were more falls, five in total, interspersed with rapids that covered a stretch of 12 miles. Hurrying back to camp, Lewis led the others to this natural marvel.
Leaving the pirogues at the bottom of the falls with a cache of supplies for the return journey, they dragged the smaller canoes overland to the top of the cascade. This was prec
isely the point where Lewis had anticipated his Experiment would come in handy. Sure enough, the frame fitted together perfectly, and once it had been covered with hides Lewis declared that his design ‘in every rispect completely answers my most sanguine expectation’. But it was impossible to make the boat watertight. They had no pitch, and the makeshift substitute, created by mixing charcoal with tallow and beeswax, did not adhere to the hides. Lewis thought he knew how to fix it – by sewing the hides together with a different needle and by leaving the hair on to provide a key for the beeswax ‘pitch’ – but they had already spent a fortnight on the boat and could not spare the time. ‘Mortifyed’, Lewis left his pet project on the bank, and turned instead to a nearby stand of cottonwoods, from which they fashioned two dugouts, three feet wide and about 30 feet long. They were neither as light nor as capacious as the Experiment, but they served the purpose.
That autumn they encountered the Shoshone, from whom, thanks to Sacagawea (who, it transpired, was the long-lost sister of the Shoshone chief), they bought horses to carry them over the mountains. It was a longer journey than they had anticipated: the western rivers were too tumultuous for canoes and passed through hills too steep for overland travel, so they were forced to make a 160-mile detour to the south. The weather was freezing, there was little game to be had, the horses stumbled and slipped, and their food began to run out. On 22 September 1805, after not the half-day journey they had expected but ten days’ hard slog during which they ‘suffered everything Cold, Hunger & Fatigue could impart... [and felt] the Keenest Anxiety... for the fate of [our] Expedition in which our whole Souls were embarked’, they reached the villages of the Nez Percé, or Pierced Nose, Indians. ‘The pleasure I now felt in having triumphed over the rocky Mountains and descending once more to a level and fertile country where there was every rational hope of finding a comfortable subsistence for myself and party can be more readily conceived than expressed,’ Lewis wrote.
The Nez Percé were welcoming, but their food – consisting mainly of fish and roots – upset the Americans’ stomachs. For several days the party was gripped by dysentery. Clark reported vividly that on 4 October ‘Capt. Lewis & my Self eate a supper of roots boiled, which filled us So full of wind, that we were Scercely able to Breathe all night felt the effects of it’. As they continued west, to the limits of Nez Percé territory, the effort of staying on their horses was more than several members of the Corps could manage. They dismounted and lay on the ground, clutching their stomachs until the crisis had passed. Lewis himself spent the best part of a fortnight ‘sick feeble & emaciated’ before he regained his strength. Nevertheless, by 13 October they had fashioned some dugouts and, having secured the promise of the Nez Percé to look after their horses until they returned, were travelling down the River Clearwater, which soon led to the Columbia itself.
For some time Lewis had been aware that the Columbia would be troublesome. He knew the position of the Pacific thanks to previous explorers, among them Britain’s Captain George Vancouver who in 1762 had charted much of the north-west coast, including the mouth of the Columbia. He also knew, thanks to his own observations, the position of the Rockies. Between the two, there was not space for a slow-moving river such as the Missouri. The Columbia, therefore, had to be steep and hazardous, at least in its early stages. This was proved on 23 October when they encountered a series of violent rapids, 55 miles long and in places flanked by cliffs 3,000 feet high. They were so hazardous that even the local Indians, who were expert canoeists, did not dare attempt them. The Americans were too tired to care. While Lewis took the rifles, ammunition, trade goods and other valuables over dry ground, the rest of the Corps tried the rapids. The Indians lined the banks, expecting the white men to drown, but to their astonishment the dugouts emerged intact on the other side. On 2 November the expedition reached the Sandy River, the furthest Vancouver’s men had penetrated upstream, and four days later Clark was able to write in his journal, ‘Ocian in view! O! the joy.’ By his calculations they had travelled 4,142 miles from the mouth of the Missouri. Their travails were not quite at an end: for more than a week they were pinned by bad weather on the shores of the Columbia estuary, and it was not until 18 November that they were able to put a full-stop to their transcontinental odyssey. They did so on a tree. At their westernmost point, with the Pacific Ocean slapping against the rocks, Lewis and Clark carved their names, followed by the immortal words, ‘By Land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805’.
The tree stood on the coast of what Lewis dubbed Cape Disappointment, a name that reflected less a sense of failure than one of foreboding. Lewis had hoped to find a trading station near the Columbia – or if not a station then at least white traders – where he and his men could buy food and gifts for the return journey. In anticipation, Jefferson had given him a letter of credit, redeemable on the US Government. But there was nobody to take his credit. Although the Columbia was visited by traders, they stayed only from April to October and did not establish a land presence, preferring to conduct business aboard ship. The Corps of Discovery had therefore to rely on their diminishing supply of trade goods to see them home.
They spent that winter at Fort Clatsop, named after the Indians who lived in the vicinity and who seemed reasonably friendly, if tough bargainers and occasional pilferers. The dark months were easy but dull. Their diet consisted entirely of elk, and they spent their time sewing moccasins, sleeping with Indian women – syphilis again manifested itself – and keeping half-hearted guard against the Clatsops. The main diversion came in January when they heard that a whale was stranded on a beach to the south. Clark went with 11 men to examine it, taking also Sacagawea, who insisted forcefully that she be included because, as she explained, it was not only the whites who were interested in exploration. ‘The Indian woman was very impotunate to be permited to go, and was therefore indulged,’ Lewis wrote. ‘She observed that she had traveled a long way with us to see the great waters, and now that monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard that she could not be permitted to see either.’ The carcase had already been stripped by the time they got there, but Clark was able to buy 300 pounds of blubber and several gallons of oil: ‘We prize it highly, and thank the hand of providence for directing the whale to us, and think him much more kind to us than he was to jona.’
The Corps left Fort Clatsop on 23 March 1806. Their trade goods were near exhausted, consisting of 11 ‘robes’ (five of which were made out of a flag), an artillery officer’s coat and hat, plus a length of ribbon. As for their trinkets, ‘Two handkercheifs would not contain all the small articles of merchandize which we possess.’ They were too impoverished to buy a canoe for the return trip up the Columbia so, reluctantly, they stole one. It carried them as far as the rapids, whereupon they bought horses – at an extortionate price – and made their way to the Nez Percé settlements. Here they found themselves financially embarrassed. Without the means to pay for their food, Clark set up surgery, accepting payment in kind for medical treatment. He had very few drugs, and those he dispensed were usually placebos. He did, however, have a doctor’s authority, and his patients seemed on the whole to appreciate his ministrations. He scored a notable success when he constructed a steam bath with which he cured a chief who was paralysed from the neck down. His medical fees, coupled with the sale of the brass buttons from their jackets, kept the Corps fed for several months.
However impressive Clark’s doctoring, the expedition could not stay with the Nez Percé indefinitely. They wanted to get home that year, and to do so they had to cross the Rockies and reach the Missouri before it froze. But it had been a hard winter, and by June, when the pass would normally have been clear, the Rockies were still covered with snow. The Nez Percé told the white men to wait a bit – and then a bit longer, until Lewis’s patience snapped. They all dreaded ‘the Rocky Mountain, where hungar and cold in their most rigorous forms assail the waried traveller; not any of us have yet forgotten our sufferings in those mountains in Se
ptember last, and I think it probable we never shall.’ Regardless, Lewis attempted the crossing, first unassisted and then, having been driven back by the snow, with Nez Percé guides. They reached the other side, at a point they called Travelers’ Rest, on 30 June. The traverse was shorter than the one out – 156 miles in six days – and the men and horses were in considerably better condition, a fact that Lewis credited entirely to the skill of his guides.
At this point Lewis could have led his men safely and swiftly to the Missouri. But he chose to do a bit more exploring. Following a plan they had hatched at Fort Clatsop, he and Clark divided the Corps. Lewis would take nine men overland on a short-cut to the head of the Missouri Falls; thereupon three of his party would retrieve the cache beneath the Experiment and carry the supplies to the bottom of the falls. Lewis, meanwhile, would lead the others on another overland trek to investigate the Marias River – that mysterious northern offshoot of the Missouri they had encountered the previous May – before returning to the base of the falls. As for Clark, he would take a party overland to the head of the Missouri. Here one segment would proceed downriver to the falls to meet Lewis’s men, while he himself would cross the watershed to the Yellowstone River and follow it as far as the Missouri where, it was agreed, all parties would meet.
It was a complicated and dangerous plan, and an unnecessary one too: they had fulfilled their instructions to cross the continent; they were not required to undertake additional journeys; and the smaller groups were at far greater risk from hostile Indians than if the Corps had stayed together. But Lewis and Clark were convinced it was worthwhile. If Clark went down the Yellowstone he would open whole new areas to American commerce. And if Lewis went north up the Marias he might dissuade a tribe of Indians, the Blackfeet, from trading with the British and bring them within the fatherly fold of Washington. Clark’s expedition was a success. Lewis’s was not. He did meet the Blackfeet, but they were too numerous and too well-armed for his liking. A group of outriders stole his horses and, for the first time, the white men’s temper got the better of them. One of Lewis’s men stabbed an Indian in the heart, and Lewis shot another in the stomach – which did not stop the injured Blackfoot levelling his musket. ‘I felt the wind of his bullet very distinctly,’ Lewis recorded. In the knowledge that there were several hundred Blackfeet hunting buffalo beyond the horizon, Lewis and his men ran for the Missouri falls.
Off the Map Page 29
