Adding to the joyous mood, the hunters brought in four deer and a pronghorn. After the feast, the captains asked Cameahwait for more information “with rispect to the country.” He repeated what he had already told Lewis, who by now was convinced of the truth of his description.
Even though he regarded Cameahwait as “a man of Influence Sence & easey & reserved manners, appears to possess a great deel of Cincerity,” Clark wanted to see for himself before accepting Cameahwait’s alarming description of the Salmon River route. He and Lewis conferred. Lewis agreed that in the morning Clark should set out with eleven men carrying axes and other necessary tools for making canoes. They would make a reconnaissance of the Salmon, accompanied by Charbonneau and Sacagawea. They would stay the first night at the Shoshone village, to hasten the return of the band to Camp Fortunate to make the portage.
If Clark found the river navigable, he would set to making canoes. Lewis, meanwhile, would bring on the remaining eighteen members of the party and the baggage to the Lemhi River. He figured the move would take a week or more, enough time for Clark to make his reconnaissance and determine whether the expedition was to proceed by land or water. If by land, “we should want all the horses which we could perchase.”
Whatever the route, Lewis had cause for satisfaction. The expedition was once more united and would soon be on the move. He slept better than the previous night.
•
In the morning, August 18, while Clark prepared for his reconnaissance, Lewis traded for some horses. He intended to provide Clark with two, to transport his baggage, and keep one for his hunters, to transport whatever meat they obtained. He got what he wanted: three very good horses in exchange for a uniform coat, a pair of leggings, a few handkerchiefs, three knives, and some trinkets “the whole of which did not cost more than about 20$ in the U’States.” (Not counting in the transportation costs!) “The Indians seemed quite as well pleased with their bargin as I was.” One of the privates also purchased a horse, for an old checked shirt, a pair of old leggings, and a knife. At such prices, Lewis could count on obtaining quite a herd from the main village on the Lemhi River.
A problem emerged. The two lesser chiefs were “a little displeased” at not getting more presents. Clark thereupon gave them a couple of his old coats, and Lewis promised that “if they wer active in assisting me over the mountains . . . I would give them an additional present.” With that, at 10:00 a.m., Clark set off, accompanied by all the Indians save the two lesser chiefs, Jumping Fish, and another woman.
Lewis prepared for the portage. He had all stores and baggage opened and aired, and had the men begin the process of forming packages into proper parcels for transport over Lemhi Pass. He had rawhides put in the water in order to cut them into thongs proper for lashing the packages, “a business which I fortunately had not to learn on this occasion.”
Drouillard brought in a deer. One of the men caught a beaver. Lewis had a net arranged and set to catch some trout. He brought his journal up-to-date.
He concluded his August 18 journal entry with an oft-quoted passage of introspection and self-criticism. “This day I completed my thirty first year,” he began. He figured he was halfway through his life’s journey. “I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended.”
He shook the mood, writing that, since the past could not be recalled, “I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me . . .” and here he seems to have lost his train of thought. Whatever the cause, he forgot to name those “two primary objects of human existence,” and instead ended, “in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.”
Much has been made of this remarkable passage, perhaps too much. It was not unusual for men of the Enlightenment to write such stuff—come to that, a thirtieth or thirty-first birthday leads to such thoughts for men of the late twentieth century—and Jefferson sometimes wrote in a similar mood and vein.
Among other things, the passage is a reminder of how young Lewis was to be carrying so heavy a burden of command. Physically tired and emotionally exhausted after the tension of the past few days, he was in what is still today one of the most remote places on the continent, with only eighteen enlisted men, Drouillard, and four Indians as companions. He had reached the source of the Missouri River, but he still had those tremendous mountains to cross and was dependent on the whims of Cameahwait and his people to make that crossing.
If he was halfway through his life’s journey—always a gloomy thought for a young man—he was also only halfway through his journey of exploration from the Mandan village to the Pacific Coast, and the season was getting on. To him it seemed natural at this point to rededicate himself to doing better.
•
Lewis spent six days at Camp Fortunate. It gave him an opportunity to write some extended descriptions of the Shoshones. In addition, he oversaw the breaking up of boxes and the cutting off of the paddle blades to make enough boards for twenty wooden saddles. He established another cache, to lighten the burden of the portage. He made some celestial observations.
On August 22, an hour before noon, Cameahwait, Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and some fifty Shoshone men accompanied by women and children arrived at Camp Fortunate. After they set up camp, Lewis held a council. He distributed presents, especially to the second and third chiefs. Noting “these poor devils half starved,” Lewis had the men prepare a meal of corn and beans, which he served after the council.
Cameahwait said he “wished that his nation could live in a country where they could provide such food.” Lewis gave him a few dried squashes. He had them boiled “and declared them to be the best thing he had ever tasted except sugar, a small lump of which it seems his sister Sah-cah-gar Wea had given him.”
The trout net yielded 528 fish, most of which Lewis distributed among the Indians. He purchased five good horses for six dollars in trade goods each. Though he wanted to get going first thing in the morning, Cameahwait requested that he wait another day, so that a friendly band of Shoshones could join them.
Lewis realized that he had no choice, but it brought on a new worry. The Shoshones were gathering for their annual excursion onto the buffalo plains, and Cameahwait’s band showed “a good deel of anxiety” to get going. When the other group came in, during the afternoon, Lewis managed to trade with them for three horses and a mule.
On the morning of August 24, Lewis was once again on the road, this time with eighteen of his own men, Charbonneau, Sacagawea and Drouillard, nine horses and a mule, and Cameahwait’s band. He gave Charbonneau some articles to trade for a horse for Sacagawea, which was done. He was going to need still more horses; much of the baggage was being carried by Shoshone women.
But, notwithstanding future problems, he was happy, because “I had now the inexpressible satisfaction to find myself once more under way with all my baggage and party.”
His joy didn’t last long. On August 25, when the hunters brought in three deer and the party stopped for a noon meal, Charbonneau casually mentioned to Lewis that he expected to meet the whole of Cameahwait’s band coming over Lemhi Pass on the way to the buffalo country.
Why? Lewis asked.
Charbonneau explained that Sacagawea had overheard Cameahwait say to some of his young men to tell the band to meet him the next day, so that together the reunited band could go to the Missouri River.
If that happened, Lewis and his men would be left literally high and dry, halfway up Lemhi Pass, with only a dozen or so horses, and no guide for the Nez Percé trail.
Another gut-t
ightening crisis. Lewis’s temper flared, but he was too good a diplomat to direct it at the cause, Cameahwait. Instead he cussed Charbonneau, who had been in possession of the information for some hours before divulging it to Lewis. Then he called Cameahwait and the two lesser chiefs for a smoke and a talk.
“I asked them if they had not promised to assist me with my baggage to their camp. . . . They acknowledged that they had.” Then why were they preparing to abandon him to go to the buffalo country? The Indians hung their heads.
Lewis said that, had they not promised to help with the portage, “I should not have attempted to pass the mountains but would have returned down the river and that in that case they would never have seen anymore white men in their country.”
In truth, he was going to try to get over those mountains come hell or high water, a resolution he frequently put into his journal. Still, he took the high moral ground, instructing the chiefs that “they must never promis us anything which they did not mean to perform.” He concluded by directing the chiefs to send a young man over the pass to the village to tell the people to stay where they were until Lewis, Cameahwait, and the others arrived.
The two lesser chiefs spoke up. They wanted to help and be as good as their word, they said, and it was not they who had instructed the band to cross to the Missouri River side of the Divide. Cameahwait had done it, and they had not approved. This was a handsome payoff for Lewis’s seeing their unhappiness a couple of days earlier and distributing more presents to them.
“Cameahwait remained silent for some time,” Lewis wrote; “at length he told me that he knew he had done wrong but that he had been induced to that measure from seeing all his people hungary, but as he had promised to give me his assistance he would not in future be worse than his word.”
His people were starving. The buffalo country was not much more than a day’s march away. Other bands of Shoshones were already meeting with Flathead villages to go on the hunt. But he had given his word, and Lewis shamed him into keeping it. A pity that Lewis never showed the slightest gratitude, or gave any indication that he understood what a difficult position Cameahwait was in.
He did realize that the Shoshones had to eat. In the afternoon, the party marched almost to the pass. The hunters brought in but one deer. Lewis ordered it distributed to the women and children “and for my own part remained supperless.”
At dawn on August 26, the temperature was at the freezing point, a sharp reminder where none was needed that the season was getting along. During the day’s march, Lewis saw the women collecting roots “and feeding their poor starved children; it is really distressing to witness the situation of those poor wretches.”
That evening, Lewis and his men and baggage made it to the camp on the Lemhi River. Private John Colter was already there, with a letter from Clark (who was in camp downstream) in which Clark described the Salmon River route as impassable.
Lewis was not surprised. He told Cameahwait that in the morning he wished to purchase twenty additional horses. Cameahwait pointed out that his people had lost a great number of their horses to the Blackfeet, but said he would see what he could do. He also said he thought the old man who had once crossed the mountains with the Nez Percé would be willing to guide Lewis and Clark.
“Matters being thus far arranged,” Lewis ended his journal entry for the day, “I directed the fiddle to be played and the party danced very merily much to the amusement and gratification of the natives, though I must confess that the state of my own mind at this moment did not well accord with the prevailing mirth as I somewhat feared that the caprice of the indians might suddenly induce them to withhold their horses from us without which my hopes of prosicuting my voyage to advantage was lost.”
The Indians were ready to sell, but the captains discovered over the next few days that the price had gone up considerably. The Shoshones had a captive, desperate market. It was perfectly clear to them that the white men had to have horses, come what may. On August 29, Clark found that he had to offer his pistol, a knife, and one hundred rounds of ammunition for one horse. The captains had tried to make it a strict rule never to reduce their arsenal, but now they had no choice.
Eventually, the captains bought twenty-nine horses, but, as James Ronda puts it, “The Shoshonis had proven to be better Yankee traders than the Americans.” When Clark examined the horses in his corral, he found them to be “nearly all Sore Backs [and] several Pore, & young.” The captains had bought the castoffs of the Shoshone herd.5
* * *
I. Jefferson later grew them in his garden and introduced them into Philadelphia gardens and the horticultural trade. Lewis compared the snowberry to the honeysuckle of the Missouri, or wolfberry; Gary Moulton notes, “Lewis’s ability to distinguish between species based on leaf and fruit characteristics again demonstrates his remarkable botanical powers of observation” (Journals, vol. 5, p. 85).
II. All this is nicely summed up in the modern nickname for the Salmon, River of No Return.
III. “Nez Percé” meant “Pierced-Nosed” Indians. Whether they actually pierced their noses is a subject of dispute. See Moulton, ed., Journals, vol. 5, p. 94.
IV. Today’s Horse Prairie Creek.
V. The site, later known as Camp Fortunate, is now under Clark Canyon Reservoir, just beside Interstate 15, twenty miles south of Dillon, Montana.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Lewis as Ethnographer: The Shoshones
If the Shoshones were fascinated by the men and equipment of the expedition, Lewis was no less fascinated by them. The first Indians he had seen since the Mandans, they were about as close to being untouched by contact with white men as it was possible for any tribe to be at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Cameahwait’s people had perhaps seen a Spaniard or two; they had some trade goods of European manufacture, not much; they had three indifferent rifles.
The biggest change the white man effected among the Shoshones was the introduction of horses, brought to the New World by the Spanish. Next came rifles, provided by the English and French to their trading partners on the Plains, the Blackfeet, Hidatsas, and some others. As Cameahwait so movingly noted, the arms trade with the enemies of the Shoshones put his people at a terrible disadvantage and regulated their lives. They had to sneak onto the Plains, make their hunt as fast as possible, and retreat into their mountain hideaway, or, as Lewis put it, “alternately obtaining their food at the risk of their lives and retiring to the mountains.”
The civilized world knew nothing about the Shoshones. In describing them, Lewis was breaking entirely new scientific ground. His account, written during his stay at Camp Fortunate, is therefore invaluable as the first description ever of a Rocky Mountain tribe, in an almost precontact stage.
Lewis’s ethnography, if not up to the standards of academic ethnographers of the late twentieth century, was wide-ranging. His curiosity, his catholic interests, and his responsibility for reporting to Jefferson on the tribes he met combined to create an informative, invaluable, and altogether enchanting picture of Cameahwait’s people. Lewis covered their appearance, personal characteristics, customs, population, clothing, health, economy, the relations between the sexes, and politics. The richness of detail can only be hinted at here; interested readers are urged to go to the original journals for the full account.
•
The Shoshones were “deminutive in stature, thick ankles, crooked legs, thick flat feet and in short but illy formed, at least much more so in general than any nation of Indians I ever saw.” Their complexion was darker than that of the Hidatsas or the Mandans. As a consequence of the losses they had suffered in the spring to the Blackfeet, men and women alike had their hair cut at the neck: “This constitutes their cerimony of morning for their deceased relations.” Cameahwait had his hair cut close all over his head.
As to their demeanor, “notwithstanding their extreem poverty they are not only cheerfull but even gay, fond of gaudy dress and amusements; like most other Ind
ians they are great egotists and frequently boast of heroic acts which they never performed.” They loved to gamble. “They are frank, communicative, fair in dealing, generous with the little they possess, extreemly honest, and by no means beggarly.”
Cameahwait’s band numbered about one hundred warriors, three hundred women and children. There were few old people among them, and so far as Lewis could tell the elderly were not treated with much tenderness or respect. As to relations between the sexes, “the man is the sole propryetor of his wives and daughters, and can barter or dispose of either as he thinks proper.” Most men had two or three wives, usually purchased as infant girls for horses or mules. At age thirteen or fourteen, the girls were surrendered to their “soverign lord and husband.”
Sacagawea had been thus disposed of before she was taken prisoner, and her betrothed was still alive and living with this band. He was in his thirties and had two other wives. He claimed Sacagawea as his wife “but said that as she had had a child by another man, who was Charbono, that he did not want her.”
That was lucky, because Sacagawea was accompanying the expedition to the Pacific. Neither Captain Lewis nor Captain Clark ever thought to discuss the matter in his journal, so it is unclear whether she chose to leave her people after a reunion of less than a month, or Charbonneau forced her to come along. Since she had never been in the territory they were entering, and so could recognize no landmarks, and since her linguistic abilities would be of little help with the Nez Percé or any other tribe west of the mountains, the captains had no pressing need to bring her along. One would like to think that the question whether she should stay with the expedition never came up, that she was by now so integral a member of the party that it was taken for granted that she would remain with it.
Lewis noted, with disapproval, that the Shoshones “treat their women but with little rispect, and compel them to perform every species of drudgery. They collect the wild fruits and roots, attend to the horses or assist in that duty, cook dreess the skins and make all their apparal, collect wood and make their fires, arrange and form their lodges, and when they travel pack the horses and take charge of all the baggage; in short the man dose little else except attend his horses hunt and fish.”
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