•
Over the next week, in the southerly winds of early fall, the expedition sped ahead, making twenty-three, then twenty-five, then thirty-three miles in one day. The captains finally shot a coyote and added a mule deer to their list. On Sunday, September 23, they made twenty miles and camped on the starboard side in a cottonwood grove. As some men set up tents, others gathered firewood, and the cooks got their kettles ready, three teen-age Teton Sioux swam across. With Drouillard exchanging messages with them via the sign language, they said there was a band of eighty lodges camped at the mouth of the next river, and a second band of sixty lodges a short distance above the first. The captains gave the boys two carrots of tobacco and told them to inform their chiefs that the expedition would come up tomorrow for a council.
The expedition proceeded in the morning past a two-mile-long island where Colter, with the last horse belonging to the expedition, had camped for the night and killed four elk. He had hung them on trees along the shore. Lewis sent a pirogue to pick up the meat. As it was being loaded, Colter ran up the bank to shout that Indians had stolen his horse. Soon after, the captains saw five Indians on the bank. They anchored the keelboat and “Spoke to them,” either through signs flashed by Drouillard or by using “the old frenchman,” Pierre Cruzatte, who could speak a bit of Sioux, as interpreter.
The captains were stern. They said they came as friends, but were ready to fight if need be, and warned that “they were not afraid of any Indians.” They told a little lie, saying that the stolen horse had been sent by the new father of the red children as a present for the chief of the Tetons. They said they would not speak to any Tetons until the horse was returned.
The expedition arrived at the mouth of the next river, at the site of present Pierre, South Dakota,III late in the afternoon. As a defensive precaution, the party anchored the keelboat off the mouth of the river. The captains put the party on full alert, with one-third ashore on guard, the other two-thirds camping on board the boat and pirogues.
In the morning, the captains raised the flagstaff, set up the awning, and prepared for a council, taking the precaution to leave a majority of the party on board, with the keelboat anchored seventy yards off shore so that its swivel gun commanded the site. At 11:00 a.m., three chiefs and many warriors came in, bearing large quantities of buffalo meat as a gift. The captains offered some pork. Then it was time to talk.
To their dismay, the captains quickly discovered that Cruzatte could not speak the language beyond some simple words. Nor could Drouillard convey via the sign language the relatively complex thoughts and proposals Lewis was making in his basic Indian speech. Recognizing the difficulty, Lewis cut the speech short and began putting on the traveling medicine show. It started with a close-order drill by uniformed troops marching under the colors of the republic. Then came the air gun, magnifying glass, and the rest. Finally, Lewis handed out medals and gifts to the chiefs. He designated Black Buffalo as the leading chief present and gave him a medal, a red military coat, and a cocked hat. The other two chiefs, named the Partisan and Buffalo Medicine, got medals. As far as the captains were concerned, they had completed their part.
That’s all? the Tetons demanded, unbelieving. Some worthless medals and a silly hat?
Sensing the discontent, especially from Black Buffalo’s rivals the Partisan and Buffalo Medicine, the captains invited the chiefs on board the keelboat, where they gave each a quarter-glass of whiskey. The chiefs were “exceedingly fond of it, they took up an empty bottle, Smelted it, and made maney Simple jestures and Soon began to be troublesom.”
Clark detailed a party of seven men to help him put the chiefs ashore. The chiefs resisted and had to be forced into the canoe. When it landed, three warriors seized the bowline while another hugged the mast. The Partisan “pretended drunkeness & staggered up against us, Declaring I should not go on, Stateing he had not recved presents Suffient from us.” His insults became personal. He demanded a canoe load of presents before he would allow the expedition to go on.
Clark would take no more. He drew his sword and ordered all hands under arms. On the keelboat, Lewis ordered the men to prepare for action. The swivel gun was loaded with sixteen musket balls; the blunderbusses were loaded with buckshot; the men threw up the lockers as breastworks, loaded their rifles, and prepared to fire.
Up the bank, twenty yards from Clark and the pirogue, some warriors saw Lewis preparing the swivel gun and began to back away, but others strung their bows and took out their arrows from their quivers, or began to cock their shotguns.
•
It was a dramatic moment. Had Lewis cried “Fire!” and touched his lighted taper to the fuse of the swivel gun, the whole history of North America might have changed. Here is one possible scenario:
The cannon roared, spitting out sixteen musket balls. The blunderbusses roared, spitting out buckshot. The muskets roared, spitting out aimed lead bullets. Sioux warriors were mowed down in the dozens.
But there were still hundreds of warriors on the bank, and even as the smoke lifted they filled the air with arrows, and kept them coming, for they could reload and fire at a much faster pace than the American soldiers. Lewis and Clark, prime targets, went down. With the captains incapacitated or dead, Sergeant Ordway rallied the survivors, got into the keelboat, pushed off and retreated downriver.
In short, had that cannon fired, there might have been no Lewis and Clark Expedition. The exploration of the Missouri River country and Oregon would have had to be done by others, at a later time.
Meanwhile, the Sioux would have been implacable enemies of the Americans, and in possession of the biggest arsenal on the Great Plains. For some time to come, they would have had the numbers and the weapons to turn back any expedition the United States could send up the Missouri. They would have increased their trade with the British North West Company coming out of Canada. In the War of 1812, they would have been British allies, perhaps strong enough to wrest Upper Louisiana away from the Americans and make it part of Canada. Improbable, certainly. Impossible, almost certainly. Still . . .
Aside from the possible long-range consequences, the confrontation on the riverbank was threatening to make it impossible for Lewis to carry out his orders with regard to the Sioux: to make a good impression on them and make them into friends of the United States. This was the moment Jefferson had had in mind when he told Lewis in his formal orders to exercise caution.
•
If Lewis recalled that order, he ignored it. He refused to back down, and continued to hold the lighted taper over the swivel gun. Nor would Clark decline combat. He kept his sword out of its scabbard. Their blood was up. They were Virginia gentlemen who had been challenged. They were ready to fight.
So the white leaders pushed the moment to its crisis. Luckily for them, one of the red leaders stepped forward to avert hostilities. Black Buffalo seized the towline from the three warriors and motioned to the warrior hugging the mast to go ashore.
As they did so, the Partisan, sulking, joined his warriors on the bank, twenty yards off. The Indians kept their bows strung. Lewis remained at full alert, ready to fire. Disaster had been avoided, but the crisis continued.
Clark turned on the Indians. “I felt my Self warm & Spoke in verry positive terms,” he wrote in his journal. He made dire threats. He said he had “more medicine on board his boat than would kill twenty such nations in one day.” He told Black Buffalo that the expedition “must and would go on.” He said his men “were not squaws but warriors.”1
How much of the threat the Indians understood from Drouillard’s sign language and Cruzatte’s simple words cannot be known—but surely Clark’s body language spoke plainly enough.
While he was haranguing the Indians, the crew took the pirogue back to the keelboat, where a dozen soldiers jumped in. When the reinforcements got to the bank, some warriors backed off. Then the three chiefs went into conference. Clark awaited the outcome, justifying his actions to himself: “Their trea
tment to me was verry rough,” he wrote, “and I think justified roughness on my part.” But then he managed to quiet his emotions sufficiently to walk over to the chiefs and offer his hand.
The chiefs refused to take it.
Clark turned on his heel, ordered his men to join him, and waded out to the pirogue. Before he could set off for the keelboat, Black Buffalo and two warriors waded after him. They indicated that they wanted to sleep aboard the boat. Clark nodded his consent.
“We proceeded on about 1 mile,” Clark recorded, “and anchored out off a willow Island placed a guard on Shore to protect the Cooks & a guard in the boat, fastened the Perogues to the boat, I call this Island bad humered Island as we were in a bad humer.”
The first meeting between the Sioux and the Americans had gone badly. Certainly Lewis and Clark had failed to make the favorable impression on the Sioux that Jefferson had ordered them to do. But, short of giving away almost a fifth of their total stock, the contents of one pirogue, there was nothing the captains could do to make that favorable impression. At least no shots had rung out, no arrows had been launched.
•
In the morning, the captains set out early and proceeded some four miles. The banks were lined with hundreds of curious but anxious Indians. At Black Buffalo’s request, the expedition came to and anchored, near his village. The captains invited some men, women, and children to come aboard. Black Buffalo invited Lewis to visit his village. The chief “appeared disposed to make up and be friendly,” so Lewis consented.
George Catlin, Sioux Encamped on the Upper Missouri (1832), depicting the dressing of buffalo meat and robes. (National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C./Art Resource, N.Y.)
The village Lewis visited was a classic nomadic town, based on a buffalo-and-horse economy, numbering about a hundred tepees with a population of around nine hundred. These were the Brule band of the Tetons, and they were in high spirits, having only two weeks previously won a great battle against the Omahas. The Sioux had killed seventy-five Omaha warriors and taken forty-eight women and children prisoners. Cruzatte, who was with Lewis, could speak Omaha fluently; Lewis told him to find out what he could from the prisoners.
Black Buffalo was insistent on showing Lewis the greatest courtesies, including repeated invitations to take a squaw. The Indians made “frequent selicitations” for Lewis to remain one night longer so that they could “Show their good disposition towards us.” Lewis agreed.
In the late afternoon, Clark and the entire party came to the village. Clark saw the Omaha prisoners and judged them “a retched and Dejected looking people. The Squars appear low & Corse but this is an unfavorable time to judge of them.”
At dusk, Clark and Lewis were carried with much ceremony on a decorated buffalo robe to the great council lodge in the middle of the village. Fires glowed through translucent tepees as the women prepared a feast. Slabs of buffalo meat roasted over hot coals. Inside the council lodge, seventy elders and prominent warriors sat in a circle. The Americans sat beside Black Buffalo. In front of them a six-foot sacred circle had been cleared for holy pipes, pipe stands, and medicine bundles.
After smoking, Black Buffalo spoke with “Great Solemnity.” The captains could not make out what he was saying, beyond that the Sioux were poor and the Americans should have pity on them and give them something. Clark answered that the Sioux should make peace with the Omahas, and as a gesture of their good will release the prisoners they held. If Black Buffalo understood the translation of that idea, he must have thought Clark mad. Why should he give up valuable prisoners just to please the white man? And anyway, his people were about to hold a scalp dance, displaying those so recently acquired from the Omahas.
It was the first Sioux scalp dance ever seen by Americans. Clark described it: “A large fire made in the Center, about 10 musitions playing on tamberins made of hoops & skin stretched. long sticks with Deer & Goats Hoofs tied So as to make a gingling noise and many others of a Similer kind, those men began to Sing & Beet on the Temboren, the women Came forward highly Deckerated in theire way, with the Scalps an Trofies of war of ther father Husbands Brothers or near Connection & proceeded to Dance the war Dance. Women only dance—jump up & down. . . . Every now and then one of the men come out & repeat some exploit in a sort of song—this taken up by the young men and the women dance to it.”
The Americans tossed presents of tobacco and beads to the dancers and singers. When one warrior thought he had not received his due, he flew into a rage and broke one drum, threw two others into the fire, then stormed out of the dance line. The drums were retrieved and the dancing went on. Sergeant Ordway found the music “delightful,” and said it was done “with great Chearfullness.”2
The dance broke up at midnight. Black Buffalo offered the captains young women as bed partners. Clark, who understood the meaning of the offering, wrote later that “a curious custom with the Sioux is to give handsom squars to those whome they wish to Show some acknowledgements to,” but the captains said no. Black Buffalo and the Partisan then accompanied the captains to the boat, where they slept for the night.
During the night, Cruzatte came to the captains to report that the Omahas had told him that the Tetons intended to stop the expedition and rob it. The captains agreed they would show no sign of “a knowledge of there intentions,” but they slept poorly. It apparently failed to occur to them that the Omaha prisoners had an obvious motive for stirring up the Americans, and might well be lying.
In the morning, Clark and Lewis went back to the village. They trod cautiously, suspecting treachery, and therefore “are at all times guarded & on our guard. They again offered me a young woman,” Clark wrote, “and wish me to take her & not Dispise them, I wavered the Subject.”
That evening, there was another scalp dance. It broke up about 11:00 p.m., with both captains scarcely able to stay awake. The Partisan and one of his warriors accompanied them back to the bank. Clark got into a pirogue, to be ferried out to the boat, while Lewis stayed on shore with a guard. Some clumsy steering brought Clark’s pirogue slamming broadside into the keelboat’s anchor cable. It broke. The boat began to swing dangerously.
Clark called out in a loud voice, “All hands up! All hands up and at their oars!”
The shouted orders and the hustle and bustle that immediately followed alarmed the Partisan. He began hollering that the Omahas were attacking. In ten minutes, the bank was lined with some two hundred warriors, led by Black Buffalo, prepared for anything but believing that the Omahas really were attacking, since they had genuine cause to want to make a surprise raid, and half-suspecting that the Americans were in an alliance with their enemies.
Misunderstanding cut both ways. Lewis, on shore with a small guard, was convinced that the Partisan’s shouting was the signal for the intended treachery. He had his men on full alert, rifles primed.
Fortunately, the potentially explosive situation quickly resolved itself. When the warriors realized it was a false alarm, they returned to their beds. Lewis returned to the boat, which because of the lost anchor had to tie up to a tree under a falling bank, much more exposed than the captains would have liked. Clark concluded his journal entry for the day, “All prepared on board for any thing which might hapen, we kept a Strong guard all night in the boat. No Sleep.”
In the morning, after a long fruitless search for the anchor, the expedition prepared to set out. At that moment, the Tetons appeared on the bank in great number, well armed. Black Buffalo came on board and asked the captains to stay one more day. Simultaneously, several warriors grabbed the bowline. Clark complained to Black Buffalo, who hurried forward to tell Lewis that the warriors only wanted some tobacco and then the expedition might proceed.
He wasn’t asking for much—a carrot or two of tobacco was all, a trifle merely. But as a symbol, Black Buffalo was demanding what the captains thought of as a high price. It was an acknowledgment of the right of the Sioux to exact a toll from white men using their river.
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bsp; Lewis’s patience broke. He said he would not be forced into anything, ordered all hands ready for departure, had the sail hoisted, and detailed a man to untie the bow cable. As the soldier began to untie it, several warriors again grabbed the rope. The Partisan demanded a flag and some tobacco as the price of their letting go.
Clark threw a carrot of tobacco onto the bank, “saying to the chief you have told us you are a great man—have influence—take this tobacco and shew us your influence by taking the rope from your men and letting go without coming to hostilities.”
Clark backed his sarcasm with action—he lit the firing taper for the swivel gun and moved toward it.
Black Buffalo stepped forward. He declared the expedition free to go, if only the captains would give some tobacco. Again the captains refused, Lewis saying they “did not mean to be trifled with.”
It was Black Buffalo’s turn for a bit of sarcasm. He said that “he was mad too, to see us stand so much for one carrot of tobacco.” Perhaps stung by the remark, but still trying to retain his own sense of dignity and control, Lewis contemptuously threw some carrots of tobacco to the warriors holding the bowline. With that, Black Buffalo jerked the line from their hands and the boat cast off. The Teton confrontation was over.3
The expedition left breathing hard and breathing fire. Clark hollered out to a young Indian ashore to pass the word, “if they were for war or were Deturmined to Stop us we were ready to defend our Selves.” But behind the bravado there was no sense of triumph. The captains had not made a favorable impression, they had just barely avoided a disastrous exchange of fire, they were exhausted and still nervous. They came to on “a verry Small Sand bar in the middle of the river & Stayed all night.”
“I am Verry unwelle for want of Sleep,” Clark concluded the day’s entry. “Deturmined to Sleep to night if possible.”
Undaunted Courage Page 24