the transfer of Louisiana had not reached the Spanish commandant, who
would not permit their passage westward. They passed the winter in camp
opposite the mouth of the Missouri, where they built a barge with
sail-power and two smaller boats, with which they started up the
Missouri River on May 14, 1804.
The expedition, commanded by Captain Lewis, with Lieutenant Clark as
second, comprised thirty-four selected men, eleven being watermen, a
negro servant, and a hunter, who was also an interpreter.
The valley of the lower Missouri was well known to the French Canadians,
who, pushed westward by the irruption of English settlers in the
Illinois region, sought isolation and freedom from foreign restraint in
the country west of the Mississippi. St. Louis was their headquarters,
but the Missouri was their field of fortune. The village of St. Charles,
with its single street, had about five hundred souls, who lived by
hunting and trade with the Indians, agriculture being quite neglected;
and an outpost of seven poverty-stricken families existed at La
Charrette, the advance guard of civilization. But the typical French
trader and trapper disdained the shelter of a roof and the restraint of
communities. His adventurous spirit pushed his frail bark into the quiet
waters of the upper Kansas, through the shallows of the Platte, under
the overshading trees of the beautiful James, along the precipitous
red-clay cliffs of the Big Sioux, and, in search of the beaver, even
penetrated the winding narrows of the Cheyenne and Little Missouri. They
did not even stop at transient visits, but, fascinated by the roving,
aimless life of the savage, took up abode with him, shared his tepee and
wanderings, adopted his customs, took his squaw to wife, until longings
strange and uncontrollable drew them back in old age to the home and
religion of their youth. One of these venturesome wanderers named
Durion, who had lived twenty years among the Sioux, was picked up on the
river and accompanied Lewis to the mouth of the James, as a much-needed
interpreter.
The mouth of the Platte was passed on July 21st, and on the next day
Lewis camped on the site of the present city of Council Bluffs, thus
named by Lewis on account of his council with the Ottoes and Missouri
Indians at this point. Here the first of a continuing series of presents
was given to the grand chief: an American flag, a large medal, which was
placed around his neck as a mark of consideration, paint, garters, cloth
ornaments, a canister of powder, and the indispensable bottle of
whiskey. The subordinate chiefs received inferior medals and presents
according to their importance. These presents were made with much form
and ceremony, wherein an important part were speeches setting forth the
transfer of the territory to the United States, the benefits of peace,
and the advantages of trade at the new post to be occupied by Americans.
Both Lewis and Clark had been accustomed to Indian life on the Eastern
frontiers, but they found much that was strange and striking among the
denizens of the great interior plains. Beyond the breech-cloth a loose
buffalo robe usually kept the savage from nudity. The necklace of
grizzly bear-claws, the ornaments of porcupine and feathers, the
scalp-poles, the conical teepes covered with gayly-figured skins, the
blue smoke up-curling from the open tent-top, the hoop-tambourine or
half-drum, the queer whip-rattle of the hoofs of goats and deer, the
bladder-rattle full of pebbles, the shaven heads of the men, the
white-dressed buffalo robe with its jingling rows of porcupine quills
and uncouth painted figures, emblematic of the brave's war-history, the
hawk-feather or eagle-plume head-dress worked with porcupine quills,
the polecat skin trailing from the young brave's moccasins, the
deer-paunch tobacco-pouch, and a score of other novelties met their
observing eyes. Among the Rickarees the octagonal earth-covered lodges,
the picketed villages, the cultivated patches of corn, beans, and
potatoes, the basket-like boats of interwoven boughs covered with a
single buffalo skin, in which squaws paddled unconcernedly over high
waves, were unknown phases of savage life.
Even the earth gave up its treasure, and they found the first of the
famous petrifactions of the trans-Missouri region in the back-bone of a
fish forty-five feet long, in a perfect state.
[Illustration: A Blackfoot Tepee.]
Game gradually grew plentiful as they ascended the river. Buffalo was
not seen till the Big Sioux was reached, but later fifteen herds and
three bands of elk were visible at one time, and near Mandan large
flocks of goats were seen crossing from their summer grazing grounds to
find west of the Missouri winter shelter in the hilly regions. As they
passed the Indians drove large flocks of migrating goats into the river,
where even boys killed the helpless animals by scores with sticks.
Indeed, the Missouri then appears to have been a hunter's paradise, for
there are mentioned among the regular game antelope, bear, beaver,
buffalo, badger, deer, elk, goats, and porcupine. Three thousand
antelope were seen at one time, and of this animal Lewis accurately
remarks: "The antelope possesses most wonderful swiftness, the acuteness
of their sight distinguishes the most distant danger, the delicate
sensibility of their smell defeats the precautions of concealment, and
when alarmed their rapid career seems more like the flight of birds than
the movements of an earthly being."
The river furnished abundant supply of cat and buffalo fish, and
feathered game, such as plover, grouse, geese, turkeys, ducks, and
pelican, also abounded; among the vegetable products are enumerated
several kinds of grapes, currants and plums, wild apples, billberries,
cherries, gooseberries, mulberries, raspberries, acorns, and hazel-nuts.
As regards the voyage thus far, it was true that the sail could rarely
be used, that the labor of propelling the boats by oar or pole was most
laborious, and that the shallows gave great trouble; but the Indians,
save a single threatening occasion, were most friendly, and the only
death, that of Sergeant Floyd, was from acute disease. Indeed, the
journey had been most attractive and free from special hazard, and when
rapidly advancing winter obliged them to go into permanent quarters, on
October 27th, it seemed rather a long hunting excursion than a dangerous
voyage of discovery.
Their winter quarters, called Fort Mandan, were on the eastern side of
the Missouri, sixteen hundred miles from St. Louis, and in latitude 47°
22´ N., a short distance above the present city of Bismarck. The
buildings were wooden huts, which joined and formed two sides of a
triangle, while the third side was of pickets. As the huts opened
inward, they had a stockaded place easy of defence.
On his arrival at Fort Mandan, Lewis found a Mr. McCracken, of the
Hudson Bay Company, engaged in trading for horses and buffalo robes.
During the winter ten or twelve different traders of this company
visited Mandan, and although one bore a letter from the chief factor,
Mr. Charles Chabouilles, offering any service in his power, yet it was
evident to Lewis that these traders were cultivating sentiments
unfriendly to Americans among the Indians, and Chaboneau, the
interpreter was tampered with; but the prompt and judicious action of
Lewis resulted in apologies and promises to refrain from such conduct in
future. Laroche, one of the Hudson Bay traders, desired to go west with
the expedition, but it was thought best to decline the offer. At this
time the nearest English trading-post was at the forks of the
Assiniboin, about one hundred and fifty miles distant by the way of
Mouse River.
The stay at Fort Mandan was marked by two sad experiences for the
Indians encamped near the post: an autumnal prairie fire which burned
two Indians to death, and an attack of the Sioux, wherein one Mandan was
killed and two wounded. A Frenchman, Jesseaume, living with the Indians,
served as interpreter, and they learned much of the Mandans, Rickarees,
and Minnetarees. The Rickarees appeared in a very sensible light by
refusing spirits, with the remark that they did not use it, and were
surprised that their father should present to them a liquor which would
make them fools. The sensibilities of these Indians in their peculiar
way appeared in a chief who cried bitterly at seeing a court-martial
sentence of flogging carried out on a soldier. The chief acknowledged
the necessity of exemplary punishment, and said that for the same
offence he had killed his braves, but that he never whipped any one, not
even children.
The Mandans, through intervention, made peace with the Rickarees, and
restored traps and furs which they had taken from French hunters. During
the entire winter these Indian tribes were most friendly, and their
stores of corn, obtained by the expeditionary force by trade or
purchase, were of material benefit to the party. The negro was a
constant source of wonder to the crowds of Indians who visited them. The
one-eyed great chief of the Minnetarees said that some foolish young men
had told him there was a person quite black. When York, the negro,
appeared, the one-eyed savage, much surprised, examined the negro
closely, and spitting on a finger rubbed the skin in order to wash off
the paint, and it was not until the negro showed his curly hair that the
Indian could be persuaded he was not a painted white man.
Game, though at some distance, was abundant, and seventy head of large
animals were obtained in a hunt of ten days. With regard to the Indians
Lewis says: "A camp of Mandans caught within two days one hundred goats
a short distance below us. Their mode of hunting them is to form a large
strong pen or fold, from which a fence is made of bushes gradually
widening on each side; the animals are surrounded by the hunters and
gently driven toward this pen, in which they imperceptibly find
themselves enclosed, and are then at the mercy of the hunters.
"When the Indians engage in killing buffalo, the hunters mount on
horseback and, armed with bows and arrows, encircle the herd and
gradually drive it into a plain or open place fit for the movement of
horse; they then ride in among them, and singling out a buffalo, a
female being preferred, go as close as possible and wound her with
arrows till they think they have given the mortal stroke; when they
pursue another till the quiver is exhausted. If, which rarely happens,
the wounded buffalo attacks the hunter, he evades the blow by the
agility of his horse, which is trained for the combat with great
dexterity."
The winter proved to be of unusual severity, and several times the
temperature fell to forty degrees below zero, and proof spirits froze
into hard ice. The fortitude with which the hardy savages withstood such
extreme cold, half naked as they often were, impressed our explorers.
Spring opened early, and on April 7, 1805, Fort Mandan was abandoned,
one party of ten with the barge going down the river with despatches and
specimens. Lewis and Clark with their party of thirty started up the
Missouri in six canoes and two large open boats, which had been
constructed by them. They had three interpreters--Drewyer, Chaboneau,
and his wife. Drewyer was a Canadian half-breed who had always lived in
the woods, and while he had inherited from his mother the intuitive
sagacity of the Indian in following the faintest trail, he had also
acquired to a wonderful degree that knowledge of the shifts and
expedients of camp life which is the resource and pride of the frontier
huntsman. Chaboneau's life had been largely spent among the Blackfeet,
by whom his wife, a Snake Indian, had been taken in war and enslaved
when a young girl.
At the mouth of the Little Missouri the three French hunters, who had
ventured to follow the party, stopped for trapping, as they found beaver
very plentiful. Chaboneau Creek, the farthest point on the Missouri yet
visited by white men, was passed, and on April 26th they arrived at the
mouth of the Yellowstone. Lewis was here particularly pleased with the
wide plains, interspersed with forests of various trees, and expressed
his opinion that the situation was most suitable for a trading
establishment.
Spring had now fairly opened, the trees were in leaf, a flower was seen,
and despite the scanty verdure of the new grass, game was very abundant.
In many places, however, the barren banks and sand-bars were covered
with a white incrustation of alkali salts, looking like frost or newly
fallen snow, which were present in such quantities that all the small
tributaries of the Missouri proved to be bitter and unhealthy water.
Signs of human life became rarer, but now and then they passed an old
Indian camp, and near one saw the burial place of an Indian woman. The
body, carefully wrapped in dressed buffalo robes, rested on a high
scaffold, with two sleds and harness over it. Nearby lay the remains of
a dog sacrificed to the shades of his dead mistress. In a bag were
articles fitting for women--moccasins, red and blue paint, beavers'
nails, scrapers for dressing hides, dried roots, a little Mandan
tobacco, and several plaits of sweet-smelling grass.
The oar was plied unceasingly save when a favoring wind filled their
sails and facilitated their progress. In early May they drew up their
canoes for the night at the mouth of a bold, beautiful stream, and in
the abundant timber found feeding on the young willows so many clumsy
porcupines that they called it Porcupine River. Game was present in vast
quantities; the elk were tame, and the male buffalo would scarcely quit
grazing at the approach of man. As Lewis remarks: "It has become an
amusement to supply the party with provisions."
On May 8th they dined at the mouth of a river flowing from a level,
well-watered, and beautiful country. As the water had a peculiar
whiteness they were induced to call it Milk River. The Missouri now
turned to the southwest and south, the country became more open, and
timber, of pine mostly, small and scanty.
[Illustration: Captain Meriwether Lewis.]
Although the buffalo were so tame and harmless that the men drove them
out of their way with sticks, yet the grizzly bear never failed to be a
dangerous and vicious visitor. One day six good hunters attacked a
grizzly, and four firing at forty paces, each lodged a ball in the body,
two going through the lungs. The animal ran at them furiously, when the
other hunters fired two balls into him, breaking a shoulder. The bear
yet pursued them, driving two into a canoe and the others into thickets,
from which they fired as fast as they could reload. Turning on them, he
drove two so closely that they dropped their guns and sprang from a
precipice twenty feet high into the river followed by the bear, who
finally succumbed to a shot through the head after eight balls had
passed completely through his body. Another bear, shot through the
heart, ran a quarter of a mile with undiminished speed before he fell
dead.
On the 20th, twenty-two hundred and seventy miles from St. Louis, they
came to the greenish-yellow waters of the Musselshell, and a short
distance beyond Captain Lewis caught his first glimpse of the Rocky
Mountains, the object of his hope and ambition. Beyond the Musselshell
their experiences were less pleasant: the country became more barren,
game and timber scarce, mosquitoes annoying; the high dry winds, full of
sand, made their eyes sore; the sun of midday burned, while almost every
night ice or frost chilled them.
The clear waters of the Judith River and its woods beautiful with
multitudinous mountain roses, the fragrant honeysuckle, and the tiny red
willows delighted their eyes; but the sight of a hundred and twenty-six
lately abandoned lodge-fires caused some uneasiness, as indicating a
late camping-place of a war-party of vicious northern Minnetarees or
Blackfeet.
A few miles farther, as they passed a precipice a hundred and twenty
feet high, they saw evidence of the cunning and wasteful methods of
hunting by Indians, for the remains of over a hundred buffalo were
scattered around, though the stream must have washed many away. Lewis
adds: "These buffaloes had been chased down the precipice in a way very
common on the Missouri, and by which vast herds are destroyed in a
moment. The mode of hunting is to select one of the most active and
fleet young men, who is disguised in a buffalo skin round his body. The
skin of the head, with the ears and horns, are fastened on his own head
in such a way as to deceive the buffalo. Thus dressed he fixes himself
at a convenient distance between a herd of buffalo and any of the river
precipices, which sometimes extend for several miles. His companions, in
the meantime, get in the rear and side of the herd, and at a given
signal show themselves and advance toward the buffalo. They instantly
take the alarm, and finding the hunters beside them they run toward the
disguised Indian or decoy, who leads them on at full speed toward the
river, when suddenly securing himself in some crevice of the cliff,
which he had previously fixed on, the herd is left on the brink of the
precipice. It is then in vain for the foremost to retreat or even to
stop; they are pressed on by the hindmost ranks, who, seeing no danger
but from the hunters, goad on those before them till the whole are
precipitated and the shore is strewed with their dead bodies. Sometimes
in this perilous seduction the Indian himself is either trodden under
foot or, missing his footing in the cliff, is urged down the precipice
by the falling herd."
The river now took the form of frequent rapids, which made the work of
dragging the heavy canoes very painful, and the narrative runs: "The
banks are so slippery in some places, and the mud so adhesive, that the
men are unable to wear moccasins. One-fourth of the time they are
obliged to be up to their arm-pits in the cold water, and sometimes walk
for yards over sharp fragments of rocks."
On June 3d they came to where the river divided into two large streams,
and it became of vital importance to the expedition to determine which
was the Missouri or Ahmateahza, as the Minnetarees called it, and which
they said approached very near to the Columbia. The success of the
expedition depended on the right decision, so Captain Lewis concluded to
encamp until reconnoitering columns could examine the two forks.
Lewis following up the north branch, two days' march, decided that it
was not the Missouri, and named it Maria's River. In returning he
narrowly escaped slipping over a precipice some ninety feet high. Lewis
had just reached a spot of safety when, says the narrative,
"He heard a voice behind him cry out, 'Good God, Captain, what shall I
do?' He turned instantly and found it was Windsor, who had lost his
foothold about the middle of the narrow pass and had slipped down to the
very verge of the precipice, where he lay on his belly, with his right
arm and leg over the precipice, while with the other leg and arm he was
with difficulty holding on to keep himself from being dashed to pieces
below. His dreadful situation was instantly perceived by Captain Lewis,
who, stifling his alarm, calmly told him that he was in no danger, that
he should take his knife out of his belt with the right hand and dig a
hole in the side of the bluff to receive his foot. With great presence
of mind he did this, and then raised himself on his knees. Captain Lewis
then told him to take off his moccasins and come forward on his hands
and knees, holding the knife in one hand and his rifle in the other. He
immediately crawled in this way till he came to a secure spot."
One of Lieutenant Clark's party, on the south fork, at the same time,
ran great danger from a grizzly bear which attacked near camp a man
whose gun, being wet, would not go off. The man took to a tree, so
closely followed by the animal that he struck the hunter's foot as he
was climbing. The bear showed his intention of waiting until the man
should be forced to descend, but fortunately alarmed by the cries and
signal-shots of a searching-party decamped.
While Lewis and Clark concurred in believing the south fork to be the
true Missouri, the rest of the party were unanimous in thinking the
north the right course. Finally caching their heaviest boat and all the
supplies which could well be spared, the entire party followed the south
fork.
Lewis, pushing on confidently with four men, confirmed his opinion by
reaching, on June 13th, the great falls of the Missouri, which by their
sublime majesty and stupendous magnitude fascinated him. The description
of these falls at the time of their first view by civilized man is
worthy of reproduction. The river, three hundred yards wide, was shut
in by precipitous cliffs, and "for ninety yards from the left cliff the
water falls in one smooth sheet over a precipice of eighty feet. The
rest of the river precipitates itself with a more rapid current, but
received as it falls by the irregular and projecting rocks below, forms
a splendid prospect of white foam two hundred yards in length.... This
spray is dissipated in a thousand shapes.... As it rises from the fall
it beats with fury against a ledge of rocks which extend across the
river." On examination Lewis found that "the river for three miles below
was one continued succession of rapids and cascades, overhung with
perpendicular bluffs from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet
high; in short, it seems to have worn itself a channel through the solid
rock." At the main falls, five miles above the first, "the whole
Missouri is suddenly stopped by one shelving rock, which without a
single niche and with an edge as straight and regular as if formed by
art, stretches itself from one side of the river to the other for at
least a quarter of a mile. Over this the river precipitates itself in an
even, uninterrupted sheet to the perpendicular depth of fifty feet,
whence, dashing against the rocky bottom, it rushes rapidly down,
leaving behind it a spray of the purest foam across the river. The scene
was singularly beautiful, without any of the wild irregular sublimity of
the lower falls." In a cottonwood tree, on a small island in the middle
of the rapids, an eagle had fixed its nest, a solitary bird which had
not escaped the observation of the Indians, who had previously
described it to Lewis.
[Illustration]
On leaving the falls Lewis saw a herd of a thousand buffalo, and killed
one for supper. In his eagerness he failed to reload his rifle, when he
beheld a grizzly bear stealing on him and not over twenty paces distant.
"He felt that there was no safety but in flight. It was in the open,
level plain, ... so that there was no possible mode of concealment....
As soon as he turned the bear ran, open mouthed and at full speed, upon
him. Captain Lewis ran about eighty yards, but finding that the animal
gained on him fast ... he turned short, plunged into the river about
waist deep, and facing about presented the point of his spontoon. The
bear arrived at the water's edge within twenty feet of him, but as soon
as he put himself in this posture of defence, the animal seemed
frightened and retreated with as much precipitation as he had pursued."
The means and route for portage presented difficult problems for the
exhausted party, as it was clearly evident that the men could not carry
the boats on their shoulders such great distances. Fortunately a creek
was found at the foot of the falls, where the banks afforded easy access
to the highlands. It was first necessary to cross the Missouri, and here
the party went into camp while preparations were made for the portage.