_Ignorance of the American People regarding the Territory called
New France and that called Louisiana.--Civilization's Cruel March
into Louisiana.--Lewis and Clark, Leaders of the Expedition to the
Far West, already Trained Soldiers.--Its Aim not Conquest, but the
Advancement of Knowledge and Trade.--Some Previous Explorers.--The
Make-up of Lewis and Clark's Party.--Fitness of the Leaders for
the Work.--The Winter of 1804-1805 spent at Fort Mandan.--First
Encounter with the Grizzly Bear.--Portage from the Missouri to
the Columbia, 340 Miles.--Down the Columbia to the Coast near
Point Adams.--The Return Journey begun, March, 1806.--British
Traders blamed for the Indians' Hatred of Americans.--The
Americans thus driven to Deeds which made them despised by the
British.--Arrival of the Explorers at St. Louis.--News of this
Exploration starts the Rush of Emigrants to the West.--Zebulon M.
Pike's Ascent of the Mississippi, 1805.--He explores the Leech
Lake Region.--Ordered to the Far West, he reaches the Republican
and Arkansas Rivers.--Sufferings of his Party travelling toward
the Rio Grande.--He sets up the American Flag on Spanish Territory
and is sent away.--The West regarded as the Home of Patriotism._
LEWIS AND CLARK: EXPLORERS OF LOUISIANA
[Illustration]
WHEN the vast region known as Louisiana was purchased by President
Jefferson, a century ago, the American people knew as little about it
as the American colonies knew about the great territory called New
France which came under English sovereignty at the end of the French
War, fifty years earlier. But however great Louisiana was, and whatever
its splendid stretch of gleaming waterway or rugged mountain range,
it was sure that the race which now became its master would not shirk
from solving the tremendous problems of its destiny. In 1763 the same
race had taken quiet possession of New France, including the whole
empire of the Great Lakes and all the eastern tributaries of the
Mississippi River; in the half-century since that day this race had
proved its vital powers of successful exploitation of new countries. In
those fifty years a Tennessee, a Kentucky, an Ohio, and an Indiana and
Illinois had sprung up out of an unknown wilderness as if a magician's
wand had touched, one by one, the falling petals of its buckeye
blossoms. Thus, New France had been acquired by a great kingdom, but
the power of assimilation lay in the genius of the common people of
England's seaboard colonies for home-building and land-clearing. Soon
the era of brutal individualism passed from the Middle West and the old
Northwest; weak as it was, the young American Republic, in the person
of such men as Richard Henderson and Rufus Putnam, threw an arm about
the wilderness, while George Rogers Clark, "Mad Anthony" Wayne, and
William Henry Harrison settled the question of sovereignty with the
red-skinned inhabitants of the land.
Civilization often marched rough-shod into the American Middle West,
bringing, however, better days and ideals than those which it harshly
crushed. After Anthony Wayne's conquest of Northwestern Indiana at
Fallen Timber (near Toledo, Ohio) in 1794 the burst of population
westward from Pittsburg and Kentucky to the valley of the Mississippi
was marvellous; by the time of the purchase of Louisiana in 1803
the rough vanguard of the race which had so swiftly opened Kentucky
and Ohio and Tennessee to the world was crowding the banks of the
Mississippi, ready to leap forward to even greater conquests. What
these irrepressible pioneers had done they could do again. Those who
affirmed that the purchase of Louisiana must prove a failure had
counted without their host.
Nothing is of more interest in the great Government expedition of
exploration which President Jefferson now sent into the unknown
territory beyond the Mississippi than this very fact of vital
connection between the leaders of the former movement into the eastern
half of the Mississippi Basin and this present movement into its
tremendous western half. In a previous story we have shown that the
founders of the old Northwest were largely heroes of the French and
Indian and the Revolutionary wars; it is now interesting indeed to
note that these leaders in Far Western exploration--Meriwether Lewis
and William Clark--were in turn heroes of the British and Indian wars,
both of them survivors of bloody Fallen Timber, where, on the cyclone's
path, Anthony Wayne's hard-trained soldiers made sure that Indian
hostility was never again to be a national menace on the American
continent.
[Illustration: MERIWETHER LEWIS
_Of the Lewis and Clark Expedition_]
The proposed exploration of Louisiana by Lewis and Clark is interesting
also as the first scientific expedition ever promoted by the
American Government. For it was a tour of exploration only; the party
did not carry leaden plates such as Céloron de Bienville brought fifty
years back in those days of gold interwoven with purple, to bury
along the tributaries of the Ohio as a claim to land for his royal
master and the mistresses of France. There was here no question of
possession; Lewis and Clark were, on the contrary, to report on the
geography, physiography, and zoölogy of the land, designate proper
sites for trading stations, and give an account of the Indian nations.
It is remarkable that little was known of Louisiana on these heads.
Of course the continent had been crossed, though not by way of the
Missouri River route, which had become the great highway for the fur
trade. Mackenzie had crossed the continent in the Far North, and Hearne
had passed over the Barren Grounds just under the Arctic Circle. To
the southward from the Missouri the Spaniards had run to and from the
Pacific for two centuries. The commanding position of St. Louis showed
that the Missouri route was of utmost importance; the portage to the
half-known Columbia was of strategic value, and a knowledge of that
river indispensable to sane plans, commercial and political, in the
future.
In May, 1804, the explorers were ready to start from St. Louis. They
numbered twenty-seven men and the two leading spirits, Lewis and
Clark; fourteen of the number were regular soldiers from the United
States army; there were nine adventurous volunteers from Kentucky; a
half-breed interpreter; two French voyageurs and Clark's negro servant
completed the roster. The party was increased by the addition of
sixteen men, soldiers and traders, whose destination was the Mandan
villages on the Missouri, where the explorers proposed to spend the
first Winter.
There is something of the simplicity of real grandeur in the
commonplace records of the leaders of this expedition. "They were
men with no pretensions to scientific learning," writes Roosevelt,
"but they were singularly close and accurate observers and truthful
narrators. Very rarely have any similar explorers described so
faithfully not only the physical features, but the animals and plants
of a newly discovered land. ... Few explorers who did and saw so much
that was absolutely new have written of their deeds with such quiet
absence of boastfulness, and have drawn their descriptions with such
complete freedom from exaggeration."
The very absence of incident in the story is significant to one who
remembers the countless dangers that beset Lewis and Clark as they
fared slowly on up the long, tiresome stretches of the Missouri;
surprises, accidents, misunderstandings, miscalculations, and mutinies
might have been the order of the day; a dozen instances could be cited
of parties making journeys far less in extent than that now under
consideration where the infelicities of a single week surpassed those
known throughout those three years. These splendid qualities, which can
hardly be emphasized save in a negative way, make this expedition as
singular as it was auspicious in our national annals. Good discipline
was kept without engendering hatred; the leaders worked faithfully with
their men at the hardest and most menial tasks; in suffering, risking,
laboring, they set examples to all of their party. In dealing with the
Indians good judgment was used; even in the land of the fierce Dakotas
they escaped harm because of great diplomacy, presenting a more bold
and haughty front than could perhaps have been maintained if once it
had been challenged. With all Indian nations conferences were held, at
which the purchase of Louisiana from France was officially announced,
and proper presents were distributed in sign of the friendship of the
United States.
The Winter of 1804-1805 was spent at Fort Mandan, on the Missouri
River, sixteen hundred miles from its junction with the Mississippi.
In the Spring the party, now thirty-two strong, pressed on up the
Missouri, which now turned in a decidedly westward direction. Between
the Little Missouri and the upper waters of the Missouri proper, game
was found in very great quantities, this region having been famous in
that respect until the present generation. One game animal with which
white men had not been acquainted was now encountered,--the grizzly
bear. Bears in the Middle West were, under ordinary circumstances, of
no danger; these grizzlies of the upper Missouri were very bold and
dangerous. Few Indians were encountered on the upper Missouri. Fall had
come ere the party had reached the difficult portage from the Missouri
to the Columbia; the distance from the Mississippi to the Falls of the
Missouri, at the mouth of the Portage River, the point near which the
land journey began, was 2,575 miles. The Portage to the Columbia was
340 miles in length. Having obtained horses from the Shoshones, the
Indians on the portage, the explorers accomplished the hard journey
through the Bitter Root Mountains.
The strange white men were received not unkindly by the not less
strange Indians of the great Columbia Valley, though it needed a bold
demeanor, in some instances, to maintain the ground gained. Yet on the
men went down the river and encamped for the Winter on the coast near
Point Adams,--the end of a journey of over four thousand miles. Here
the brave Captain Gray of Boston, thirteen years before, had discovered
the mouth of the Columbia and given the river the name of his good
ship. The Winter was spent hereabouts, the explorers suffering somewhat
for lack of food until they learned to relish dog-flesh, the taste for
which had to be acquired. By March, 1806, they were ready to pull up
stakes and begin the long homeward journey.
This was almost as barren of adventure as the outward passage, though
a savage attack by a handful of Blackfeet,--henceforward to be the
bitter foes of Rocky Mountain traders and pioneers,--and the accidental
wounding of Lewis by one of his party, were unpleasant interruptions
in the monotony of the steady marching, paddling, and hunting. It is
remarkable that, throughout the western expansion of the United States
after the Revolution, our northern pioneers from Pennsylvania to Oregon
should have felt--in many cases bitterly--the tricky, insulting
hatred of British traders and their Indian allies. As Washington in
1790 laid at the door of British instigators the cause of the long war
ended by Wayne at Fallen Timber, so, all the way across the continent
our pioneers had to contend with the same despicable influence, and
were driven by it to deeds which made them, in turn, equally despised
by their northern rivals. "I was in hopes," wrote an early pioneer,
"that the British Indian traders had some bounds to their rapacity ...
that they were completely saturated with our blood. But it appears
not to have been the case. Like a greedy wolf, not satisfied with the
flesh, they quarrelled over the bones.... Alarmed at the individual
enterprise of our people ... they furnished [the Indians] with ... the
instruments of death and a passport [horses] to our bosom." Even at the
very beginning these first Americans on the Columbia and the Bitter
Root range had a taste of Indian hatred from both the Blackfeet and the
Crows.
On the way back to the Mandan villages the explorers had an experience
which was by no means insignificant. As they were dropping down the
upper Missouri, one day two men came into view; they proved to be
American hunters, Dickson and Hancock by name, from Illinois. They had
been plundered by the fierce Sioux, and one of them had been wounded;
it can be imagined how glad they were to fall in with a party large
enough to ward off the insults of the Sioux. The hunters did remain
with Lewis and Clark until the Mandan villages were reached, but
no longer. Obtaining a fresh start, the two turned back toward the
Rockies, and one of Lewis and Clark's own soldiers, Colter (later the
Yellowstone pioneer), went back with them. These three led the van of
all the pioneer host under whose feet the western half of the continent
was soon to tremble.
Holding the Sioux safely at bay during the passage down the Missouri,
Lewis and Clark in September were once again on the straggling streets
of the little village of St. Louis, then numbering perhaps a thousand
inhabitants.
From any standpoint this expedition must rank high among the tours
of the world's greatest explorers; a way to the Pacific through
Louisiana, which had just been purchased, was now assured. Knowing as
we do so well to-day of Russia's determined effort to secure an outlet
for her Asiatic pioneers and commerce on the Pacific Ocean, we can
realize better the national import of Lewis's message to President
Jefferson giving assurance that there was a practicable route from
the Mississippi Basin to the Pacific by way of the tumbling Columbia.
Without guides, save what could be picked up on the way, these men had
crossed the continent; and as the story told by returning Kentucky
hunters to wondering pioneers in their Alleghany cabins set on foot the
first great burst of immigration across the Alleghanies into the Ohio
Basin, so in turn the story of Lewis and Clark and Gass and the others
set on foot the movement which resulted in the entire conquest of the
Rockies and the Great West.
But as the stories of others besides Kentuckians played a part in
the vaulting of the first great America "divide," so, too, others
besides Lewis and Clark influenced the early movement into the Farthest
West. One of these, who stands closest to the heroes of the Missouri
and Columbia, was Zebulon M. Pike, a son of a Revolutionary officer
from New Jersey, the State from which the pioneers of Cincinnati and
southwestern Ohio had come. During Lewis and Clark's adventure this
hardy explorer ascended the Mississippi, August, 1805, in a keel-boat,
with twenty regular soldiers. The Indians of the Minnesota country were
not openly hostile, but their conduct was anything but friendly. The
Winter was spent at the beautiful Falls of St. Anthony, at Minneapolis.
Pike explored the Leech Lake region but did not reach Lake Itasca.
He found the British flag floating over certain small forts built by
British traders, which he in every case ordered down. An American flag
was raised in each instance, and the news of the Louisiana purchase was
noised abroad. The British traders treated Pike's band with all the
kindness and respect that their well-armed condition demanded. The
expedition came down the Mississippi in April, 1806, to St. Louis.
There were other regions, however, in Louisiana where the United States
flag ought to go now, and General Wilkinson, who had sent Pike to the
North, now ordered him into the Far West. Pike's route was up the Osage
and overland to the Pawnee Republic on Republican River. His party
numbered twenty-three, and with him went fifty Osages, mostly women and
children, who had been captured in savage war by the Pottawattomies.
The diplomatic return of these forlorn captives of course determined
the attitude of the Osage nation toward Pike's company and his claims
of American sovereignty over the land. And it was time for America
to extend her claim and make it good. Already a Spanish expedition
had passed along the frontier distributing bright Spanish flags and
warning the Indians that the Spanish boast of possession was still good
and would be made better. Pike travelled in the wake of this band of
interlopers, neutralizing the effect of its influence and raising the
American flag everywhere in place of the Spanish.
[Illustration: WILLIAM CLARK
_Of the Lewis and Clark Expedition_]
Reaching the Arkansas, Pike ascended that river late in the Fall, and
when Winter set in the brave band was half lost in the mountains near
the towering peak which was forever to stand a dazzling monument to the
hardihood and resolution of its leader. At the opening of the new year,
near Canyon City, where deer were found wintering, a log fort was built
in which a portion of the party remained with the pack animals, while
Pike with twelve soldiers essayed the desperate journey to the Rio
Grande.
"Their sufferings were terrible. They were almost starved, and so
cold was the weather that at one time no less than nine of the
men froze their feet.... In the Wet Mountain Valley, which they
reached in mid-January, ... starvation stared them in the face.
There had been a heavy snow-storm; no game was to be seen; and
they had been two days without food. The men with frozen feet,
exhausted by hunger, could no longer travel. Two of the soldiers
went out to hunt but got nothing. At the same time Pike [and a
comrade] ... started, determined not to return at all unless they
could bring back meat. Pike wrote that they had resolved to stay
out and die by themselves, rather than to go back to camp 'and
behold the misery of our poor lads.' All day they tramped wearily
through the heavy snow. Towards evening they came on a buffalo,
and wounded it; but faint and weak from hunger, they shot badly,
and the buffalo escaped; a disappointment literally as bitter as
death. That night they sat up among some rocks, all night long,
unable to sleep because of the intense cold, shivering in their
thin rags; they had not eaten for three days. But ... they at
last succeeded, after another heartbreaking failure, in killing a
buffalo. At midnight they staggered into camp with the meat, and
all the party broke their four days' fast."[4]
Pike at length succeeded in his design of reaching the Rio Grande, and
here he built a fort and threw out to the breeze an American flag,
though knowing well that he was on Spanish territory now. The Louisiana
boundary was ill defined, but in a general way it ran up the Red
River, passed a hundred miles northeast of Santa Fé and just north
of Salt Lake, thence it struck straight west to the Pacific. By any
interpretation the Rio Grande was south of the line. The Spaniards, who
came suddenly upon the scene, diplomatically assumed that the daring
explorer had lost his way; he suffered nothing from their hands, and
was sent home through Chihuahua and Texas.
All the hopes of the purchasers of Old Louisiana and of its
flag-planters have come true, and, with them, dreams the most feverish
brain of that day could not fashion. History has repeated itself
significantly as our standard-bearers have gone westward. When the
old Northwest was carved out of a wilderness, there was no fear in
the hearts of our forefathers that was not felt when Louisiana was
purchased. The great fear in each case was the same--the British at the
north and the Spaniard at the south. And in each case the leaven of
the East was potent to leaven the whole lump. Great responsibilities
steady nations as well as men; the very fact of a spreading frontier
and a widening sphere of influence--bringing alarm to some and fear to
many--was of appealing force throughout a century to the conscience and
honor of American statesmen. As, in the dark days of the Revolution,
the wary Washington determined, in case of defeat, to lead the fragment
of his armies across the Alleghanies and fight the battles over again
in the Ohio Basin, where he knew the pioneers would forever keep
pure the spirit of independence, so men in later years have looked
confidently to the Greater West, to the Mississippi Basin and old
Louisiana, for as pure a patriotism (though it might appear at times in
a rough guise) as ever was breathed at Plymouth Rock.
FOOTNOTE:
[4] Theodore Roosevelt, "The Winning of the West," IV, 337, 338.