Lewis and Clark (4 page)

Shortly after, they crossed into Montana, and three days later met their first grizzly bears - two at once. Lewis and another man fired. One wounded animal fled; the other chased Lewis but was so badly hurt that the captain was able to reload and kill the animal. “In the hands of skillfull riflemen they are by no means as formidable or dangerous as they have been represented,” he boasted. He would later learn how lucky they had been.

A cold snap in early May froze the water on the oars. Clark noted “a verry extraodernarey climate, to behold the trees Green & flowers spred on the plain, & Snow an inch deep.” They were now in territory no European had ever seen, and they were wary of hostile natives. Although they constantly passed deserted Indian hunting camps, they encountered no one.

On May 5, Clark and Drouillard killed a grizzly bear. “It was a most tremendious looking anamal,” wrote Lewis, measuring more than eight and a half feet from the tip of its nose to its hind feet. He called it “a monster.” Clark estimated that it weighed 500 pounds, but Lewis guessed it must be at least 600. Clark and Drouillard fired ten shots before it fell dead.

The same day, Charbonneau nearly ruined the expedition a second time. Again he was at the helm of the white pirogue, under sail, when a storm struck. Just as he had before, he turned it the wrong way as it heeled over. As Lewis described it: “Such was their confusion and consternation at this moment, that they suffered the perogue to lye on her side for half a minute before they took the sail in. The perogue then wrighted but had filled within an inch of the gunwals; Charbono still crying to his god for mercy, had not yet recollected the rudder, nor could the repeated orders of the Bowsman, Cruzat, bring him to his recollection untill he threatend to shoot him instantly if he did not take hold of the rudder and do his duty.”

Two men grabbed kettles and bailed enough water to keep the boat afloat until they could row it ashore. Lewis wrote about the incident passionately, for the pirogue contained “almost every article indispensibly necessary to further the views, or insure the success of the enterpize in which we are now launched to the distance of 2200 miles.” He noted, however, that while Sacagawea’s spouse had been frozen with fear, she had “caught and preserved most of the light articles which were washed overboard.”

From the back of the boat, Sacagawea hauled in the cargo as it floated past. Over the next two days, the party unpacked, dried and repacked the soaked supplies, but some medicine, gunpowder, and seeds were unrecoverable. In a later journal entry, Lewis seemed to have forgiven Charbonneau, writing that he was not totally at fault for the mishap; “the waves [were] so high that a pirogue could scarcely live in any situation.”

On May 8, the expedition’s boats entered a tributary of the Missouri that Lewis named Milk River, “for its peculiar whiteness, being about the colour of a cup of tea with the admixture of a tablespoonful of milk.” The appearance was the result of fine-grained clay and silt sediments, eroded from the rich basin, which were suspended in the water. Lewis was forced to get more creative in naming the myriad of new landmarks they came upon. He had exhausted the names of the men in the Corps – affixing them to creeks and streams and bends. Even Sacagawea – the Soshone interpreter, whom Lewis liked much less than Clark – got her own river, about five miles above where the Musselshell River converged with the Missouri. Lewis would name another stream Seaman’s Creek, after his beloved dog; much later in the nineteenth century, it would be renamed Monture Creek, after Hudson’s Bay Company interpreter and trader George Monteur.

Now names were conjured based on striking attributes – a stream bed “as wide as the Missouri . . . or half a mile wide, and not containing a single drop of water” was called Big Dry Creek – or from the imagination – Roloje Creek, Clark wrote, was “a name given me last night in my sleep.” Other names were the product of frustration. A large creek the party passed on May 20, Lewis wrote, “we [c]all Blowing Fly Creek, from the emence quantities of those insects which geather on our meat in Such numbers that we are obledged to brush them off what we eate.”

By May 17, the men had to tow the pirogues. “We employed the toe line the greater part of the day; the banks were firm and shore boald [bare] which favoured the uce of the cord.” The landscape was growing steeper, and on May 26, Lewis climbed a hill and “beheld the Rocky Mountains for the first time.” He felt a surge of elation at seeing the distant snow-covered peaks glistening in the sun, both at “finding myself so near the head of the heretofore conceived boundless Missouri” and reflecting “on the difficulties which this snowey barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and party in thim.”

On May 29, a buffalo charged through camp in the middle of the night and nearly put an end to the expedition. Ignoring the sentry’s attempts to scare it away, the animal charged the captains’ tent, which was surrounded by rows of sleeping men. Seaman saved the day, however, by barking furiously. The buffalo swerved, missing a row of sleeping men by inches and “leaving us . . . all in an uproar with our guns in o[u]r hands, enquiring of each other the ca[u]se of the alarm,” Lewis wrote.

That day, they passed a 120-foot cliff over which Indians had stampeded a buffalo herd. At the bottom of the precipice by the river’s edge, the wolves were devouring the hundred or more rotting carcasses. Lewis noted in his journal that tribes on the Missouri regularly destroyed buffalo herds by decoying them to a precipice and then stampeding them over the side. It was an easy way of getting plenty of buffalo meat - except for the decoy. Disguised in a buffalo hide, this man ran in front of a herd until he reached the cliff and then, if he was lucky, jumped aside. Lewis named a nearby stream Slaughter River.

On May 31, the men spent much of the day in the water towing the boats. They were passing through an area of constant riffles and rocky bars, and the river bluffs were too close and too slippery to allow them a foothold. There was one consolation, however; the cliffs had been worn by erosion “into a thousand grotesque figures, which with the help of a little immagination . . . are made to represent eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having their parapets well stocked with statuary [and] collumns of various sculpture,” Lewis marveled.

Two days later, they arrived at an unexpected forking of the river into two large streams. Most of the men were certain the northern branch was the right one because it was brown and muddy like the Missouri, but the captains believed that the south fork, flowing clear over a bed of stones, was the correct one, since it had obviously come from the mountains. No one changed their mind after Lewis led a party up the north branch, and Clark led another up the south fork for two or three days. Lewis named the north fork the Marias River, after his cousin, whose “celestial virtues and amiable qualifications” he admired. When the captains returned, they remained confident that the south fork was the continuation of the Missouri. Lewis wrote: “[The men] said very cheerfully that they were ready to follow us any wher we thought proper to direct but that they still thought that the other was the river and that they were affraid that the South fork would soon termineate in the mountains and leave us at a great distance from the Columbia.”

Although this was in no way a challenge to their leadership, the captains humored the men: Lewis would take one party and push ahead until he reached the waterfalls that the Indians at Fort Mandan said they would find on the Missouri River.

To lighten the load and provide more hands to work the oars and tow-lines, Lewis and Clark decided to leave the red pirogue and the spare supplies at the fork of the rivers. Cruzatte organized the making of a cache. First, he removed a circle of sod about twenty inches in diameter. The men then dug a hole straight down about a foot, and gradually widened it to make a kettle-shaped area six or seven feet deep. They floored the hole with three or four inches of dry sticks covered with grass and piled the goods in, taking care to keep them away from the earth walls.

In two of these caches, the men stored excess food, salt, scientific specimens, blacksmith tools, part of the powder and lead, and other extra baggage. They hauled the red pirogue to a small island in the Marias River and lashed it to trees to prevent it from being swept away by floods. Although the captains hoped that some of the party would be able to sail from the Columbia and go back around the world, they prepared for a return trip that would follow their outgoing route.

On June 11, Lewis and four men set off on foot, leaving Clark and the rest of the party to follow the endless bends of the Missouri by boat. On their third day out, Lewis and his party heard the distant roar of falling water and saw a column of rising spray that looked like smoke. The waterfall was a majestic sight, some 300 yards wide, by Lewis’s first estimate, and eighty feet high (it was actually ninety or more).

They realized that they were on the right river; the natives at Fort Mandan had told them they would find a series of large waterfalls on the river that led to the mountains. The Great Falls of the Missouri was the highest of a series of falls and rapids extending over a ten-mile stretch of the river. Lewis celebrated “the grandest sight I ever beheld” and wrote in his journal: “My fare is really sumptuous this evening; buffaloe’s humps, tongues and marrowbones, fine trout parched meal pepper and salt, and a good appetite; the last is not considered the least of the luxuries.”

The next morning, Lewis sent Joseph Field to carry the good news back to Clark, who was struggling. He had “two men with the Tooth ake 2 with Turners [boils], & one man with a Tumor & a slight fever.” Sacagawea, who had complained of sickness at the Marias River fork, was critically ill. Once Clark’s party reached the falls, Lewis took over and administered doses of quinine and opium. Water from a nearby sulphur spring helped; Sacagawea began to recover and was soon demanding all the broiled buffalo “and rich soope of the same meat” that Lewis would give her.

Because the cascades and rapids of the Great Falls meant eighteen miles of portaging over rough ground covered with cactus, the captains ordered their men to go through their baggage and winnow out everything that could be spared. They made another cache at the foot of the portage and hid the white pirogue in the willows, cutting its mast to make axles for a pair of rough four-wheeled trucks to haul the canoes. The men eventually found a large cottonwood tree which they felled to cut rounds for wheels; Lewis doubted there was another one that size within twenty miles.

The portage was heartbreaking work. Although the men had double-soled their moccasins against the prickly-pear cactus, many of the spines still penetrated, and the uneven earth hurt their feet. They had to grab rocks and clumps of grass to help pull the trucks up the slopes and were so close to exhaustion when they stopped that they would fall asleep in a moment.

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 advising 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.