The Mammoth Book of the West (6 page)

Such an object lesson was not lost on the rest of the party. There were few other breaches of discipline.

Slowly the party inched northward, Clark generally supervising the navigation, while Lewis hunted the riverbanks, making notes and collecting specimens. The men were constantly in wonderment at the beauty of the pristine Western landscape and the profusion of animals: “the whole face of the country,” Lewis wrote on one occasion, “was so covered with herds of Buffaloe, Elk and Antelope . . . [they] are so Gentel that we near them while feeding . . .”

At the end of July the explorers passed the mouth of the Platte. On 3 August at Council Bluffs they held their first
parley with Indians, members of the Oto, Missouri and Omaha tribes. In a scene which would be repeated many times in the months to come, Lewis and Clark urged the Indians to live in peace with the White man and gave them medals bearing the likeness of Jefferson, the Great Father who lived in Washington. Lewis also fired off a few exhibition shots from an air-gun (“which astonished those natives”) he had brought along.

The Teton Sioux encountered at Bad River were considerably less tractable. On 25 September three Teton chiefs were invited for a council aboard the keelboat. After much drinking of whiskey, Clark escorted them to the bank, whereupon he was suddenly surrounded by warriors with bows drawn. “I felt My Self Compeled”, Clark recorded later, “to Draw my Sword.” He also signalled to the men in the boat to raise their guns. There were several minutes of stand-off, before one of the chiefs ordered the warriors away.

The chill blasts of autumn found the expedition at the Mandan villages in North Dakota, where they built a log fort and went into winter quarters. During the long icy months at “Fort Mandan”, Lewis and Clark made copious notes and maps, supervised the building of dug-out canoes, and held counsel with numerous Indian visitors, from whom they learned much about the territory before them. The Mandan Indians made life tolerable for the party by regal hospitality, which included beaver tail, a considerable delicacy. The Mandan were amused by the White men’s dancing, especially that of a Frenchman who could spin on his head.

Not until the end of March 1805 did the ice on the Missouri break up sufficiently for the explorers to recommence travel. After watching the spectacle of Indians killing buffalo floating past on ice floes, the Voyagers moved out from the villages. The keelboat was sent back
to St Louis with expedition records and specimens. The remaining party – those most “zealously attached to the enterprise”, according to Lewis – headed upriver to the Great Unknown. With them went three new recruits, a fur trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau, his Lemhi Shoshoni squaw, Sacajawea, and their baby. Sacajawea had been captured as a child by Hidatsa Indians, and knew the way back to the Rocky Mountains, where the Shoshonis lived.

A week later they reached the furthest point known to White traders, the mouth of the Yellowstone. The party pushed on, their light canoes skimming through the shallows. At the mouth of the Marias (named by Lewis in honour of a lover) they made a mistaken detour, before continuing their progress up the Missouri. The hills grew steeper, and on 13 June the expedition reached the Great Falls of the Missouri. To get around them required a back-breaking 25-day portage through rattlesnake-plagued land. By the time they were waterborne again they had reached the foothills of the Rockies. To make progress the canoes had to be dragged through the icy water. Lewis and Clark became anxious to find the Shoshoni, from whom they hoped to secure horses for the passage over the Rockies. At Three Forks they took the northernmost stream, the Jefferson, which Sacajawea informed them led to the Shoshoni villages. For days the party toiled on, but failed to spot a single Indian. Anxious that the Shoshoni might be scared off by the size of the expedition, Lewis went on ahead with a small advance party, following the Indian trail through the Beaverhead Range and crossing the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass. Soon after, they captured two Shoshoni squaws who agreed to lead them to their village near the headwaters of the Salmon. As Lewis neared the camp, a band of 60 warriors rushed to intercept him. Their hostility abated when they saw that the women were unharmed:

. . . these men then advanced and embraced me very affectionately in their way which is by putting their left arm over you[r] wright sholder clasping your back, while they apply their left cheek to yourws and frequently vociferate the word
ah-hi-e, ah-hi-e
that is, I am much pleased, I am much rejoiced. bothe parties now advanced and wer all carresed and besmeared with their grease and paint till I was heartily tired of the national hug. I now had the pipe lit and gave them smoke; they seated themselves in a circle around us and pulled of[f] their mockersons before they would receive or smoke the pipe . . . after smoking a few pipes with them I distributed some trifles among them, with which they seemed much pleased particularly with the blue beads and vermillion.

After several days in the Shoshoni camp, Lewis asked the Indians to accompany him back to the main party of the explorers, who were still at the Jefferson. The Shoshoni became suspicious, and suggested that Lewis was in league with the Minataree and wanted to lead them into an ambush. Only after much haranguing from their chief, Cameahwait, would the Shoshoni warriors go with Lewis to the Jefferson. There, Shoshoni edginess turned to joy. Sacajawea was Cameahwait’s long-lost sister.

Furnished with Shoshoni horses, the expedition began its arduous traverse of the Rockies, heading north over Lost Trail Pass, and then down Bitterroot Valley. At the mouth of Lolo Creek in Montana, they went west, struggling through the snow flurries and soaking rain. “I have been wet and cold in every part as I ever was in my life,” wrote Lewis. After ten days of misery, they emerged into the open valley of the Clearwater River, where they gave their horses over to the Nez Perce Indians. Pausing only to build new dug-out canoes, the party took to the water on 7 October. For three days they ran rapids, before plunging
into the Snake, and more whitewater. By now the explorers were exhausted and malnourished, Clark noting in the journal on 10 October: “Our diet . . . bad haveing nothing but roots and dried fish to eate, all the Party have greatly the advantage of me . . . as they all relish the flesh of the dogs.” Soon after they emerged into the Columbia, the great river of the Far West, which poured them into the Pacific Ocean on 15 November 1805. “Men appear much Satisfied with their trip beholding with estonishment . . . this emence Ocian,” wrote Clark in the journal.

The Corps of Discovery wintered on the south bank of the Columbia, building a post which they named after the nearest Indian tribe, Fort Clatsop. After months made disagreeable by constant rain, pilfering Indians and a scarcity of game, on 23 March 1806 the explorers started for home. They retraced their route to the mouth of the Lolo Creek where, on 3 July, the party split. Clark, heading one group, explored the Yellowstone River and followed it to its confluence with the Missouri. Lewis, with nine men, went directly across country to the Falls of the Missouri. Before descending the Missouri he explored up the Marias as far as Cut Bank Creek in northern Montana. And there, on 27 July, the expedition’s long good luck with the Indians finally ran out. A meeting with eight Piegan (Algonquian-speaking Blackfoot) turned quickly and confusingly sour. The Indians tried to steal the White men’s guns, and in the ensuing argument a brave was stabbed. At this, the Piegans tried to make off with Lewis’s horse. Lewis ran after them:

I called to them [Indians] as I had done several times before that i would shoot them if they did not give me my
horse and raised my gun, one of them jumped behind a rock and spoke to the other who turned arround and stoped at the distance of 30 steps from me and I shot him through the belly, he fell to his knees and on his wright elbow from which position he partly raised himself up and fired at me, and turning himself about crawled in behind a rock which was a few feet from him. he overshot me, being bearheaded I felt the wind of the bullet very distinctly.

Fearful of Piegan revenge, the expl orers immediately started east, riding their horses hard for a hundred miles before they dared rest. But the bodies behind them would not be forgotten. Henceforth the Blackfoot would always have a hatred for the White man.

Near the junction of the Yellowstone and the Missouri the two parties reunited and hastened for home. They reached the earth-lodges of the Mandan on 15 August, where they stopped long enough only to bid goodbye to one of the party, John Coulter, who wanted to go trapping, and to persuade the local Chief, Shaka, to return with them to the United States.

The small band of explorers was back in St Louis on 23 September 1806. They had been given up for dead by everyone except Jefferson.

Lewis and Clark had been gone for two years, four months and ten days. They were the first White men to cross the continent within the limits of the present-day USA. On that entire journey only one man, Sergeant Charles Floyd, had lost his life, and that probably due to a ruptured appendix (untreatable in those years, even in an Eastern hospital). Even Lewis’s black Newfoundland dog, Seaman, made it home alive. While they did not find a Northwest Passage – for none existed – they did discover several routes through the Rockies, established friendly
relations with half a dozen tribes, and vastly increased the knowledge of the West’s topography, flora and fauna. The Voyage was a giant leap in the opening up of the trans-Mississippi West.

Spain provided a curious footnote. Between August 1804 and August 1806 no fewer than four Spanish expeditions were sent out to stop Lewis and Clark. All were forced to turn around, either by hostile Indians or through desertions in their own ranks. The last penetrated as far north as Nebraska, coming within 150 miles of the Americans without either party knowing it.

Such was Jefferson’s zeal for Western exploration that he sent out other explorers into Louisiana even as Lewis and Clark still trudged towards the setting sun. For Jefferson the destiny of the United States lay beyond the Mississippi, in an easy portage to the Pacific, in prime earth for farmers. Congress was less certain, and had to be tugged and prodded into voting more funds for the President’s preoccupation. Two arduous expeditions up the Red River, in 1804 and 1806, were halted by the Spanish, who resented US activity so close to their Texas border.

Frustrated by the Spanish in the South, Jefferson decided to unleash his exploratory enthusiasm elsewhere, in the discovering of the source of the Mississippi. This task was entrusted to a 26-year-old whose name would become synonymous with the conquest of the West, Lieutenant Zebulon Montgomery Pike. Born in Lamberton, New Jersey, Pike had been a soldier since the age of 15, and had served under General Wayne in the Old Northwest. His formal learning was meagre but his appetite for learning was prodigious, and he had taught himself Spanish
and French. Above all he desired to be famous. His chance came with the presidential order to reconnaissance the headwaters of the ‘Father of all Waters’.

With a party of 20 soldiers to accompany him, Pike set off upriver from St Louis in a 70-foot keelboat on 9 August 1805. By September he had reached Minnesota, where he stopped to parley with the Sioux. Abandoning the keelboat at Prairie du Chien, the expedition continued in smaller craft. Although winter was pressing, Pike journeyed on until he reached Little Falls, where he built an encampment for some of the men. After the snow fell, he set out with a dog sled and the remainder of the men into the lake-dotted forests of Minnesota to find the Mississippi’s source. The party was only saved from a frozen grave by a string of trading posts of the North West Company, all manned by Canadians flying the Union Jack. If the Canadians expected thanks for their rescue of Pike, they were to be disappointed. An undisclosed part of Pike’s mission was to show the Indians and British in the area who was sovereign. Accordingly, Pike ordered his hosts to pay American duties and haul up the Stars and Stripes. When one commander refused, Pike ordered his men to shoot down the British flag.

Soon after this episode Pike stumbled upon Lake Leech, wrongly assuming its drainage system to be the true source of the river.

In the spring of 1806, Pike and his soldiers floated back down the Mississippi. By the last day of April they were in St Louis. The expedition had been only a moderate success. The Senate refused to ratify the treaty he had negotiated with the Sioux, and he was mistaken in the source of the Mississippi (which is Lake Itasca, on a branch of the river Pike did not take). He did, however, produce the first accurate cartographical knowledge of the Upper Mississippi.

No sooner had Pike written his report than he was dispatched as the escort to a party of Osage Indians who were returning to their home in the Southwest, after being freed by the US military from their captivity in the hands of the Pottawattamie tribe. Ascending the Osage River as far as it was navigable, Pike’s expedition traded their barges for horses, and took off across country to the Pawnee villages on the Republican River. The Pawnee were hostile, having just been goaded into an anti-American fervour by a detachment of Spanish military sent out to stop the Americans in this region of debatable ownership. An angry Pike told the Pawnee that “the warriors of his Great American father were not women to be turned back by words.” Impressed by Pike’s determination, the Pawnee duly hoisted the American flag.

From the Pawnee villages, Pike headed south across the Great Plains to the Arkansas River, then along that stream towards the Rockies. To Pike the plains seemed a treeless wasteland, an opinion which would be instrumental in establishing the myth of the Great American Desert. By late November Pike’s company was in mountainous Colorado. On Thanksgiving Day, he and three companions made an attempt in zero temperatures to scale the 14,147 ft peak that would ultimately bear his name.