Lewis and Clark (5 page)

Filling their stomachs made the Shoshones slightly more confident, but Lewis now began to worry that Clark might not have had time to make it to the forks. If the Europeans were not at the rendezvous as Lewis had promised, the Indians might panic again, and the mission might be ruined.

Seeing no sign of Clark’s party at the forks, Lewis resorted to deception. He sent Drouillard to pick up the note he had left Clark six days earlier, then reassured Cameahwait by telling him that this was a note from his “brother Chief’ informing him that Clark was coming slowly up the river. To prove his good faith, the captain suggested that Cameahwait send an escort with Drouillard to meet Clark, leaving Lewis, Shields, and McNeal behind with the main band of Shoshones.

The chief agreed, and Drouillard set out at sunrise with a hasty note from Lewis to Clark. Lewis tried to cheer the nervous Cameahwait, whose warriors hid themselves in the bushes, convinced there would be an enemy attack. In another gesture meant to calm the Indians, Lewis put on a Shoshone cape, symbolizing that if there was an attack, he would fight with them. He also gave Cameahwait his hat and gun.

With the chief beside him, Lewis rigged his mosquito net and lay down, as worried as his hosts. “I slept but little as might be well expected,” he wrote, “my mind dwelling on the state of the expedition which I have ever held in equal estimation with my own existence, and the fait of which appeared at this moment to depend . . . upon the caprice of a few savages who are ever as fickle as the wind.”

Early the next day, August 17, Drouillard and his guides met the canoe party struggling up the river two miles below where Lewis was waiting. Sacagawea began to dance with delight and suck her fingers, which in sign language meant that these were her people, who had nursed her as a baby. It was a joyous meeting, and the Shoshones sang as they escorted Clark and his party up to Lewis’s camp.

At the forks of the river, Sacagawea and one of the Shoshone squaws recognized and embraced each other with much emotion. The childhood friends had both been taken prisoner by the Minnetarees and had shared captivity until the friend had escaped and found her way home. Neither had ever expected to see the other again.

Once Lewis had welcomed Clark, Cameahwait led Clark to a seat of honor and tied pearly shells in his red hair. When they began their council with the Shoshones, an even more astonishing meeting occurred. Sacagawea, called in to interpret, suddenly recognized Cameahwait as her brother. Running over, she threw her arms around him and wept. Even after she had resumed interpreting, she was so moved that she broke into tears from time to time.

The council was a success. The Shoshones desperately needed the white men’s guns to kill game and keep their enemies at bay, and Cameahwait was willing to sell the expedition horses. Lewis bought three horses for an old uniform coat, a pair of leggings, a few handkerchiefs, and three knives.

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., Capt. 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.”