Reed dismissed in disgrace. Sergeant Floyd dead. Shannon missing. The expedition was almost 10 percent reduced in fighting strength as it moved toward the heart of Sioux territory.
•
But hope rather than fear was the main emotion felt by the captains as they entered Sioux country. This was the one tribe singled out for specific mention by Jefferson in his orders. It controlled the river, and had turned back previous traders coming up from St. Louis, and it was the largest of the tribes. Lewis hoped to make the Sioux the centerpiece of the vast American trading empire he was trying to establish, and he thought this was such a good deal for the Sioux that they couldn’t say no.
On August 27, as the keelboat approached today’s Yankton, South Dakota, old Dorion informed the captains that they were now in the territory of the Yankton Sioux, with whom he had lived for many years. Lewis ordered the prairie set afire as a signal to the Yanktons, inviting them to a council. A few hours later, as the boat passed the mouth of the James River, a teen-age Yankton boy swam out to one of the pirogues. He gestured that he wished to talk.
The expedition put ashore. Two more teen-agers appeared. Through Mr. Dorion, they said a large band of Yanktons were camped nearby. The captains delegated Sergeant Pryor, a voyager, and Mr. Dorion to go to the camp and invite the chiefs to come to council at Calumet Bluffs, near present Gavins Point Dam, on the Nebraska side.
•
On August 29, the expedition was in camp at Calumet Bluffs. As they waited for the Yanktons to come to council, they worked. Tracks along the riverbank had led Lewis to conclude that Shannon was ahead of them but thinking himself behind—so Shannon was pressing on to catch up to the expedition that was behind him. Lewis detailed a soldier to go look for Shannon. Reflecting his worry, Lewis told the private to take along some extra rations for Shannon, who might well be starving. He was not considered to be one of the expedition’s better hunters.
Captain Clark put some men to work making a tow rope of elk skin, then sat at his field desk, dipped his quill into the inkstand, and began to write some remarks for the Yanktons. At 4:00 p.m., Mr. Dorion showed up on the opposite bank, at the head of a party of some seventy Yankton warriors. The Indians went into camp, while Dorion and Sergeant Pryor crossed over on a canoe sent by the captains.
Pryor reported that the Yanktons were extremely friendly, had even tried to carry him into their camp on a painted buffalo robe, thinking he was the leader of the expedition. He said the camp “was handsum made of Buffalow Skins Painted different Colour, all compact & handSomly arranged, their Camps formed of a Conic form Containing about 12 or 15 persons each and 40 in number.”
Sergeant Pryor had just become the first American to describe the classic Plains tepee.
The Yanktons had cooked a fat dog for a feast; Pryor “thought it good & well flavored.” They had provided him with a “Snug aptmt for to lodge.” The Plains through which he had marched, Pryor said, were “covered with game.”
The captains had presents packed into one of the canoes to send over to the Yanktons. They put in tobacco, corn, and some iron kettles and told Pryor and Dorion to ask the Indians to cross over in the morning for a council.
At 10:00 a.m., the captains sent a canoe to bring over the Indians. They had signified the importance of this first meeting with one of the Sioux bands by putting on their dress uniforms and putting up a flagstaff, near a large oak, running up the flag, and firing the bow swivel gun.
The Yanktons had a sense of drama too. They were in full regalia. As they came up from the riverbank, the chiefs were preceded by four musicians, singing and playing as they made their way to the flagstaff. The soldiers made ritual payments of tobacco to the musicians; the conferees shook hands and sat down.
With Dorion interpreting, Lewis gave his basic Indian speech. When he finished, the chiefs said they would respond in the morning—obviously they would need time to confer on this business of accepting a new father and becoming part of a new trade system. Lewis recognized that patience was not just a virtue in dealing with Indians, it was a necessity, and handed out medals to five chiefs. He pronounced a chief named Weuche the first chief—by what authority, on what basis, cannot be said—and gave him a red-laced military coat, a military cocked hat, and an American flag.
Lewis did all this with the utmost seriousness. It never occurred to him that his actions might be characterized as patronizing, dictatorial, ridiculous, and highly dangerous. From what he knew from old Dorion, these Yanktons were peaceable, at least compared with their neighbors and relatives, the Teton Sioux, farther upriver. But his idea of how to make them into allies was to give them worthless medals and wardrobe trappings rather than the guns and powder they needed. And to make one chief the big chief was to meddle in intertribal politics about which he knew nothing. In general, it would be impossible to say which side was more ignorant of the other.
The desire for friendship overrode ignorance. The men of the expedition had come to the Northern Plains as outsiders, but as James Ronda writes, “that night the explorers became part of a prairie community.”10 After the council, Indian boys showed off their skill with bows and arrows, to the delight of the soldiers, who handed out prizes of beads. At dusk, three fires were built in the center of camp. Indians in gaudy paint came leaping into the firelight, to sing of their great feats in battle and in the chase. They danced to music coming from deer-hoof rattles and a drum.
Sergeant Ordway recorded that the warriors began “with a houp and hollow and ended with the same.” An individual would sing “of what he had done in his day and what warlike actions he had done. This they call merit. They would confess how many horses they had Stole.” At Dorion’s suggestion, the soldiers threw the dancers gifts of tobacco, knives, and bells.
Captain Clark was impressed. “The Souix,” he wrote, “is a Stout bold looking people (the young men hand Som) & well made. The Warriors are Verry much deckerated with Pain Porcupin quils & feathers, large leagins & mockersons, all with buffalow roabs of Different Colours. The Squars wore Peticoats & and a white Buffalow roabes with the black hair turned back over their necks & Sholders.”
That was the first American description of the ceremonial dress of the Plains Indians. The captains were doing pathbreaking ethnology. Clark wrote, “I will here remark a Society which I had never before this day heard was in any nation of Indains.” It was a group of Indian warriors who had taken a vow “never to give back let the danger be what it may.” That refusal to retreat had cost the society dreadfully; in the past year, eighteen of the twenty-two members had been killed. Clark was impressed by the survivors: “They stay by them Selves, fond of mirth and assume a degree of Superiority—Stout likely fellows.”
Ethnology, however, was very much secondary to establishing the American system along the Missouri. What the Indians looked like was entertaining; what the chiefs said about Lewis’s proposals was critical. In the morning, the chiefs gave their reply.
Weuche spoke first. His refrain was, “We are pore and have no powder and ball, our Women has got no cloathes.” But if Mr. Dorion were with him, he would go to Washington in the spring—welcome news.
The other chiefs then spoke. They suffered from stage fright. “I am young and Cant Speek,” Struck by the Pana confessed. “I am a young man and inexperienced, cannot say much,” White Crane Man explained. But they all managed to make it clear that what they wanted was powder and ball, and perhaps some whiskey.
Clark and Lewis could not meet those needs. They could do one thing all the chiefs wanted: leave Mr. Dorion with them for the winter. He could arrange peace with other tribes and organize an expedition of chiefs to go to Washington in the spring. The captains gave each chief a carrot of tobacco and Mr. Dorion a bottle of whiskey, and had the Indians ferried across the river to their camp on the other side. Thus the first encounter with a band of Sioux ended on a hopeful note, despite Yankton disappointment with the presents received.
The last chief to
speak, Arcawechar, had also apologized: “I do not Speak verry well, I am a pore man.” But if he did not speak well, he spoke with the voice of a prophet. It was all very well for the Yanktons to open their ears, he said, “and I think our old Friend Mr. Durion can open the ears of the other bands of Soux. But I fear those nations above will not open their ears, and you cannot I fear open them.”
Arcawechar spoke not only prophetically but bluntly. He said the captains had given the Indians five medals. “I wish you to give five kegs of powder with them.”
The captains did not, could not comply. As Arcawechar had warned them, where they were going they would need all their powder.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Encounter with the Sioux
September 1804
In the first two of weeks of September, the expedition gradually entered the country where the short-grass prairie of the drier High Plains predominated. The wildlife became even more abundant than below. There were herds of elk in every copse of woods along the riverbank. Deer were as plentiful as birds. Buffalo became a common sight. The men pointed out a “goat” which no one could identify but no one could catch either. Captain Clark pronounced the plums the “most delisious” he had ever tasted, the grapes “plenty and finely flavered.”
On the 3rd, the captains sent Colter to chase Shannon again. Two days later, tracks along the riverbank indicated that Colter was still trying to catch up and that Shannon had lost one of the two horses he had with him. Private John Shields came in from a hunt to report another wonder, a deer with a black tail. Lewis saw more wild goats on a hill, but they ran off before he could even describe their color. The hunters brought in three bucks and two elk.
Moving the keelboat and pirogues upriver required a tremendous effort from each man; consequently, they ate prodigiously. In comparison with beef, the venison and elk were lean, even at this season. Each soldier consumed up to nine pounds of meat per day, along with whatever fruit the area afforded and some cornmeal, and still felt hungry.
On September 7, in present Boyd County, Nebraska, the captains took a stroll. To their astonishment, they found themselves in the middle of an extensive village of small mammals that lived in tunnels in the ground. Here, there, everywhere around them, the little mammals would pop up, sit up on their hind legs, and chatter.
The captains brought some men to the site and tried to dig to the bottom of one of the tunnels, but after digging six feet and running a pole down the rest they discovered they were not halfway to the animal’s bed. They had five barrels of water fetched to the site and poured into a tunnel, which forced one animal out. He was killed and brought back to the keelboat so that a proper description could be written.
The voyagers informed the captains that these animals were “Petite Chien,” or prairie dogs. The animal was new to science; the captains gave the prairie dog his first formal description.
On September 8, Clark went ashore to look for goats, with no success. Lewis went hunting, and on that day killed his first buffalo. All together, the hunters brought in that evening two buffalo, one large elk, one elk fawn, three deer, three wild turkeys, and a squirrel.
The following day, Lewis again went hunting, this time with Private Reubin Field along, and shot another buffalo. Field got one too, as did Clark. Drouillard killed three deer. York killed a buffalo, at the invitation of his master. The captains were amazed to see five hundred buffalo in one herd, grazing near the river.
On September 11, as the keelboat moved past a bend in the river, the bowman spotted Shannon sitting by the bank. The keelboat came to and Shannon came aboard. He was extremely weak—indeed, nearly starved to death. As his comrades gave him jerked meat, he related his story.
He had been sure the boat was ahead, so he had been chasing it for sixteen days. For the past twelve days, he had been without bullets. During that time, he had managed to kill one rabbit by shooting a long, hard, straight stick in place of a bullet. Otherwise, he had lived for nearly two weeks on grapes and plums. He had finally concluded that he was too weak ever to catch up with the keelboat and had decided to sit by the riverbank and hope for a trading boat coming down from the Mandan villages headed toward St. Louis. He had saved his horse as his last resort. Clark was astounded that “a man had like to have Starved to death in a land of Plenty for the want of Bulletes or Something to kill his meat.”
On the 14th, Clark killed a goat. Lewis weighed, measured, and described it—the first scientific description of the pronghorn, or antelope, as it is usually but wrongly called. That afternoon, Private Shields brought in “a hare of the prarie,” giving Lewis a second opportunity in a single day to measure and describe a new species—in this case, the white-tailed jackrabbit. Intrigued by the animal, Lewis went looking for the jackrabbit in its native habitat a couple of days later. He found one, chased it, and made notes: “It resorts to the open plains, is extreemly fleet and never burrows or takes shelter in the ground when pursued. I measured the leaps of one which I surprised in the plains and found them 21 feet. They apear to run with more ease and to bound with greater agility than any anamal I ever saw.”
•
That is one of three Lewis documents written between September 14 and 17, 1804. They constitute almost all of his known writings for a full year. This adds to the mystery of the lost (or never written?) journals of Meriwether Lewis. The passage quoted above comes from Lewis’s field notes, which exist but in an obviously incomplete form. All his celestial measurements, hundreds and hundreds of them, are preserved. But there are only two journal entries, one on the 16th and the next on the 17th of September, 1804. The way they are written indicates that he almost had to have been writing regularly. There is no introduction, no “Sorry I’ve been away, here is what has happened since last I wrote” quality whatsoever to the entries. He picks up, apparently, at where he left off the previous evening and gives every sense at the conclusion of his second entry that more will follow in the morning. But until new journal entries are discovered, their existence remains speculative.
Writing as a biographer rather than an archivist or a historian—that is, on the basis of the internal evidence of the September entries—I am convinced that there once existed—and still may—an important body of Lewis journal entries. The pain of the loss is doubled by the quality of what Lewis wrote that September. He walks you through his day and lets you see through his eyes; what he saw no American had ever seen before and only a few would see in the future.
•
“This morning set out at an early hour,” Lewis opened the entry for Sunday, September 16. “Come too at 11/2 after 7 A.M. on the Lard. Shore 11/4 miles above the mouth of a small creek which we named Corvus, in consequence of having kiled a beautiful bird of that genus near it.”I The captains decided to lie by for two days, to dry the baggage and to lighten the keelboat by transferring a part of her load to one of the pirogues. “While some of the men were imployed in this necessary labour,” Lewis wrote, “others were dressing skins washing and mending their cloathes &c. Capt. Clark and myself killed each a buck immediately on landing, the deer were very gentle and in great numbers.”
After a detailed description of the trees in the river bottom, he regretted that clouds during the day and night “prevented my making any observations.” He reported on what had been related to him by scouts who had gone up Corvus Creek to have a look around. “Vast herds of Buffaloe deer Elk and Antilopes were seen feeding in every direction as far as the eye of the observer could reach.”
Lewis went to see for himself. “Having for many days past confined myself to the boat,” he opened his September 17 entry, “I determined to devote this day to amuse myself on shore with my gun and view the interior of the country.” He set out before sunrise, accompanied by six hunters. They encountered a grove of plums. Lewis described the trees, then wrote, “This forrest of plumb trees garnish a plain about 20 feet lelivated.” The whole of the plain—nearly three miles by three miles—was
&
nbsp; intirely occupyed by the burrows of the barking squril [prairie dog]. This anamal appears here in infinite numbers. The shortness of the grass gave the plain the appearance throughout it’s whole extent of beatifull bowlinggress in fine order.
This senery already rich pleasing and beatiful, was still farther hightened by immence herds of Buffaloe deer Elk an antelopes which we saw in every direction feeding on the hills and plains. I do not think I exagerate when I estimated the number of Buffaloe which could be comprehended at one view to amount to 3000.”
At 8:00 a.m., Lewis and his companions “rested our selves about half an hour, and regailed ourselves on half a bisquit each and some jirk of Elk.” Then they set off to kill a pronghorn. Lewis found the pronghorns to be “extreemly shye and watchfull insomuch that we had been unable to get a shot at them. . . . I had this day an opportunity of witnessing the agility and superior fleetness of this anamal which was to me really astonishing. I pursued a small herd of seven. . . . bad as the chance to approach them was, I made the best of my way towards them, frequently peeping over the ridge with which I took care to conceal myself from their view. . . . I got within about 200 paces of them when they smelt me and fled; I gained the top of the eminece as soon as possible from whence I had an extensive view of the counry. The antilopes had disappeared in a steep revene now appeared at the distance of about three miles.”
Lewis was struck by “the rapidity of their flight. . . . It appeared reather the rappid flight of birds than the motion of quadrupeds. I think I can safely venture the asscertion that the speed of this anamal is equal if not superior to that of the finest blooded courser.”II
And with that, the entry suddenly breaks off. There is no ending describing the campfire that night, with the men talking of the strange and wonderful things they had seen. Either Lewis put down his quill, not to take it up again until April 1805—or what he wrote is lost.
Undaunted Courage Page 23