The men took to flight. The bear pursued down to the river, where two men got away in the canoe while the remainder took to hiding places in the willows, to reload and fire. They hit the bear several more times, but that only let him know where they were hidden. He routed two of the men, who threw away their rifles and pouches and dived into the river, from a perpendicular bank of near twenty feet.
The bear jumped in after them. He was about to reach one of the swimmers when a soldier on the bank finally shot him through the head and killed him. Examination revealed that eight balls had passed through the bear.
•
While that adventure was taking place, Lewis had one of his own, so dangerous to the enterprise that he later wrote, “I cannot recollect [it] but with the utmost trepidation and horror.”
The incident took place while the two captains were on shore, contrary to their own orders and established routine, and for reasons neither ever explained. Charbonneau was at the helm of the white pirogue—despite his near-disaster on April 13, and despite Lewis’s judgment of him as “perhaps the most timid waterman in the world.” The pirogue was under sail when a sudden squawl struck and turned her. Charbonneau, in a panic, instead of putting her bow into the wind, turned with it. The wind drew the brace of the sail out of the hands of the man attending it “and instantly upset the perogue and would have turned her completely topsaturva, had it not have been from the resistance made by the oarning against the water.”
Watching from shore, the captains were in a state of near-panic themselves. They fired their rifles to attract the attention of the crew and hollered out to cut the halyards and haul in the sail—but the crew, on the far side of the river, could not hear either the shots or the shouts. Meanwhile, Cruzatte (perhaps the best waterman on the expedition) was shouting at Charbonneau to take up the rudder and turn the boat into the wind, but Charbonneau was crying to God for mercy and could not hear.
Before Charbonneau and the crew could recover their wits sufficiently to bring in the sail, the pirogue was filled to within an inch of the gunnels. Articles were floating away. Meriwether Lewis watched in the most awful agony and fearful anticipation.
Reacting instinctively, he dropped his rifle, threw aside his shot pouch, and began tearing off his coat. His idea was to swim unencumbered out to the pirogue to save what he could. But before he dived into the river, “I recollected the folly of the attempt I was about to make.” The waves were high, the boat was three hundred yards away, the water was excessively cold, and the current strong. “There was a hundred to one but what I should have paid the forfit of my life for the madness of my project,” he wrote that evening in his journal. But, considering that the white pirogue carried the journals, maps, instruments, and other invaluable items, “had the perogue been lost, I should have valued [my life] but little.”
It all took but an instant. Prudence and common sense won out over rashness.4 Fortunately, Cruzatte was able to force Charbonneau to do his duty by threatening to shoot him instantly if he did not. Charbonneau took up the tiller and the boat righted. Cruzatte put two men to work bailing with kettles, while with two others he paddled her toward shore, where she arrived scarcely floating.
All this time, Sacagawea was calm, collected, and invaluable. As Lewis put it the following day, “The Indian woman to whom I ascribe equal fortitude and resolution, with any person on board at the time of the accedent, caught and preserved most of the light articles which were washed overboard.” Whether he praised her, or upbraided her husband, he did not say. He did record that, after the battle of the bear and the near-loss of the white pirogue, “we thought it a proper occasion to console ourselves and cheer the sperits of our men and accordingly took a drink of grog and gave each man a gill of sperits.”
•
During the last week of May, the expedition entered a section of the river dominated by high, rugged bluffs composed of all shades of brown set off by the pure blue sky and blazing sun. It remains one of the most isolated parts of the United States, a stretch of almost 160 miles from the western end of today’s Fort Peck Lake to today’s Fort Benton, Montana, that has been designated a Wild and Scenic River by Congress and is the least changed part of the Missouri. The first (eastern) section is called the Missouri River Breaks, the second portion is designated the White Cliffs Area. The river continues to run mostly west-east through the breaks, then flows almost straight south and then southeast through the cliffs—for Lewis, that meant traveling west, then northwest, then north, and finally southwest.
Clark called the breaks “the Deserts of America” and declared, “I do not think it can ever be settled.” Lewis spoke of “a desert, barren country,” and for once he found no redeeming virtue. “The air of the open country is asstonishingly dry as well as pure,” Lewis wrote.5 A lifelong resident of the humid eastern third of the continent, he could scarcely believe how quickly his inkstand ran dry. By experiment, he discovered that a tablespoon of water would “avaporate in 36 hours.”
On May 25, Lewis described at length the first specimen of the bighorn sheep the expedition had collected. Clark copied the entry, almost word for word. This was the first time Clark had done such a thing, but it quickly became habitual. As part of the small library Lewis had brought along, there was an edition of Linnaeus, and a four-volume set, A New and Complete Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences. In his May 25 entry, Clark for the first time indicates that he had been thumbing through what he called, in a marvelous spelling even for Clark, the “Deckinsery of arts an ciences.”
Donald Jackson speculates that, when the white pirogue all but sank, some important papers were lost. (Private Joseph Whitehouse wrote in his journal, “Some of the papers and nearly all the books got wet, but not altogether spoiled.”)6 Jackson thinks it possible that the near-disaster made the captains more careful than they had been to have two sets of all written scientific descriptions.III
•
On the afternoon of May 26, at the eastern end of the breaks, Lewis climbed the surrounding bluffs, a “fortiegueing” task, but he thought himself “well repaid for any labour” when he reached the highest point in the neighborhood, because “from this point I beheld the Rocky Mountains for the first time.”
Clark thought he had seen distant mountains the previous day; Lewis’s confirmation made them the first two Americans to see the Rockies. “These points of the Rocky Mountains were covered with snow and the sun shone on it in such manner as to give me the most plain and satisfactory view.”
The sight brought joy to his heart: “While I viewed these mountains I felt a secret pleasure in finding myself so near the head of the heretofore conceived boundless Missouri.”
The sight also brought dismay: “when I reflected on the difficulties which this snowey barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and party in them, it in some measure counterballanced the joy I had felt in the first moments in which I gazed on them.”
The sight brought forth his characteristic resolution and optimism: “As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am conpelled to beleive differently.”
•
With the mountains in view, the urge to get to them and over them became even greater, but, alas, progress was slower than ever, because of the numerous bends in the river, the way the bluffs came right down to the water’s edge, the usually head-on wind, and the abundance of protruding rocks in the shallow water. For the most part, the men pulled the pirogues and canoes, using worn-out elk-skin ropes that were constantly getting wet, then drying in the sun, growing progressively weaker and rotting. Often they would snap; if they snapped when the men were working a craft through a rock garden, there was a great danger of the vessel’s turning broadside and getting carried downstream out of control, to bump into a rock, which would surely overset her.
So progress was made, in Lewis’s apt description, “with much labour an
d infinite risk.” The water was cold on the men’s legs, the sun hot on their bare backs. The footing was either slippery mud or sharp rocks that cut and bruised their feet.
They passed a point where rotten, stinking buffalo were piled up in incredible numbers. Lewis thought it was a pishkin, or buffalo jump. In one of his best-known passages, he described the way Indian boys wearing buffalo robes would lure the buffalo to their death as the tribe pressed from behind. He had his information from the Hidatsas, and he had it right—except that this place was not a buffalo jump, but a bend in the river where buffalo who had drowned in the river when the ice broke had piled up. Wolves were there in such number, and were so stuffed with putrid meat, that Clark walked up to one and killed it with his espontoon. Lewis named the nearby stream Slaughter Creek (later changed to Arrow Creek).
A couple of miles farther on, a stream came in on the south side. Clark walked up it and named it Judith’s River, after his cousin Julia Hancock.
By May 31, the party was well into the White Cliffs Area. The river was worse than ever. For the men, that meant “their labour is incredibly painfull and great, yet those faithfull fellows bear it without a murmur.” There was a terrible scare in the forenoon, when the tow rope of the white pirogue, the only rope made of hemp, broke at a bad place. The pirogue swung and just barely touched a rock, yet was near oversetting.
So relieved were the captains at the narrow escape, and so much did they feel for the men because of their incredible labor, that at noon they “came to for refreshment and gave the men a dram which they received with much cheerfullness, and well deserved.” Lewis’s heart was still thumping that night at the narrow escape of the white pirogue and her contents, which he valued as much as his own life. He wrote, “I fear her evil gennii will play so many pranks with her that she will go to the bottomm some of those days.”
As for the White Cliffs themselves, Lewis’s description is one of the classics of American travel literature: “The hills and river Clifts which we passed today exhibit a most romantic appearance,” he began. They were two to three hundred feet high, nearly perpendicular, shining pure white in the sun. “The water in the course of time in decending from those hills . . . has trickled down the soft sand clifts and woarn it into a thousand grotesque figures, which with the help of a little immagination and an oblique view . . . are made to represent eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings . . . statuary . . . long galleries . . . the remains or ruins of eligant buildings . . . some collumns standing . . . others lying prostrate an broken . . . nitches and alcoves of various forms and sizes. . . . as we passed on it seemed as if those seens of visionary inchantment would never had and end . . . vast ranges of walls of tolerable workmanship, so perfect indeed that I should have thought that nature had attempted herre to rival the human art of masonry had I not recollected that she had first began her work.”IV
There were swallows in uncountable numbers, nesting in the banks. After putting ashore, while the men made camp and cooked, Lewis went for a stroll. When he returned, he told Clark he had just seen “the most butifull fox in the world.” Its colors were a fine orange, yellow, white, and black. Lewis shot at it but missed.7
On June 1, the river made a great bend, causing the expedition to change direction from a north-northwest course to southwest. Lewis spent most of the day walking on shore with hunters, looking for elk. He anticipated getting to the Great Falls of the Missouri any day now, based on the appearance of the mountains and on information gathered from the Hidatsas, and he was going to need elk skin to cover the iron-frame boat he had been hauling from Harpers Ferry the past two years. The party collected six elk, along with two buffalo, two mule deer, and a bear (the bear almost got Charbonneau, but Drouillard killed it with a shot to the head just in time).
At dusk, the party put in on the south shore. Across the water they could see a considerable river flowing into the Missouri. What was this? According to the Hidatsas, whose information had so far been more or less correct, they had passed already the last northern tributary of the Missouri. The Great Falls were supposed to be the next landmark after “The River Which Scolds at All Others,” the one the captains had named the Milk River.
It was nearly dark, too late to examine the unexpected river that night. They would look it over in the morning.
* * *
I. When Clark was gone on a hunting expedition from early February to the 13th, Lewis made daily journal entries—a strong indication that he was not writing in his journal when Clark was present. As to when Lewis wrote his April 7 entry, his verb tense is more tantilizing than conclusive. “We were now,” he wrote at one point, not “we are now,” making it seem he wrote it days or weeks or months later. But he also wrote (in what was a copy of a paragraph he had written to Jefferson, evidently that morning to give to Warfington), “The party are in excellent health and sperits, zealously atached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed,” which makes it seem he wrote it that night.
II. Today’s Poplar River. Lewis and Clark had been naming streams and creeks ever since they left Mandan, but few of their names appear on today’s maps, because of the long delay in the publication of their journals. Early-nineteenth-century trappers and miners, not knowing what Lewis and Clark had called the rivers, gave them names.
III. Jackson’s further speculation is more difficult to accept. He thinks it may be that, when the white pirogue almost went down, Lewis lost his journal for the period May 1804 through March 1805. But if Lewis kept a journal during that period, why didn’t he send a copy of it to Jefferson with Corporal Warfington on the keelboat?
IV. It is today as Lewis saw it. The White Cliffs can be seen only from small boat or canoe. Put in at Fort Benton and take out three or four days later at Judith Landing. Missouri River Outfitters at Fort Benton, Montana, rents canoes or provides a guided tour by pontoon boat. Of all the historic and/or scenic sights we have visited in the world, this is number one. We have made the trip ten times.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
From Marias River to the Great Falls
June 3–June 20, 1805
On the morning of June 3, the party crossed the Missouri and set up a camp on the point formed by the junction of the two large rivers. “An interesting question was now to be determined,” Lewis wrote in his journal: “Which of these rivers was the Missouri?”
It was a difficult as well as a critical call. According to the Hidatsas, the Missouri ran deep into the Rocky Mountains to a place where it approached to within a half-day’s portage of the waters of the Columbia River. So far, their description of the Missouri had been accurate. But they had said nothing about a river coming in from the north after passing Milk River. How could they have missed this one? But they had also said nothing about a great river coming into the Missouri from the south. That the Indians had not mentioned such a river “astonishes us a little,” Lewis wrote.I
Jefferson’s orders were explicit: “The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river.” The Hidatsas were explicit: the Missouri River had a Great Falls as it came out of the mountains, after which it penetrated those mountains almost to the Continental Divide, at which place lived the Shoshone Indians, who had horses, essential to getting over the Divide, and whose language Sacagawea spoke as her native tongue.
The right-hand or north fork came in on an almost straight west-east line, meaning that going up that river was heading directly toward the mountains. The left-hand or south fork came in from the southwest. The right fork was 200 yards wide, the left fork 372. The right fork was deeper, but the left fork’s current was swifter. Lewis described the north fork as running “in the same boiling and roling manner which has uniformly characterized the Missouri throughout it’s whole course so far; it’s waters are of a whitish brown colour very thick and terbid, also characeristic of the Missouri.” The water of the south fork “is perfectly transparent” and ran “with a smoth unriffled surface.”
As Lewis suummed it up, �
�the air & character of this river [the north fork] is so precisely that of the missouri below that the party with very few exceptions have already pronounced the N. fork to be the Missouri; myself and Capt. C. not quite so precipitate have not yet decided but if we were to give our opinions I believe we should be in the minority.”
Lewis reasoned that the north fork had to run an immence distance through the Plains to pick up enough sediment to make it so cloudy and turbid, whereas the south fork must come directly out of the mountains. The bed of the south fork was composed of smooth stones, “like most rivers issuing from a mountainous country,” and the bed of the north fork was mainly mud. He and Clark talked it over, without reaching a precipitate conclusion. “Thus have our cogitating faculties been busily employed all day,” Lewis wrote.II
The captains sent Sergeant Pryor up the north fork to scout; he returned in the evening to report that at ten miles the river’s course turned from west to north. They sent Sergeant Gass up the south fork; he reported that at six and a half miles the river continued to bear southwest. “These accounts being by no means satisfactory as to the fundamental point,” Lewis wrote, “Capt. C. and myself concluded to set out early the next morning with a small party each, and ascend these rivers untill we could perfectly satisfy ourselves. . . . it was agreed that I should ascend the right hand fork and he the left. . . . we agreed to go up those rivers one day and a halfs march or further if it should appear necessary to satisfy us more fully of the point in question. . . . We took a drink of grog this evening and gave the men a dram.”
Lewis packed his “happerst,” or knapsack, and had it ready to swing on his back at dawn. He commented that this was “the first time in my life that I had ever prepared a burthen of this kind” (meaning, apparently, that since his childhood a slave, later an enlisted man or a servant, had carried his backpack), “and I am fully convinced that it will not be the last.”
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