On the night of October 26, two chiefs and fifteen men crossed the river in a canoe, bringing presents of deer meat and cakes of bread made of roots. The captains gave medals to the chiefs, trinkets to the men. Private Cruzatte brought out his violin. York danced for the Indians, to their delight. The hunters had brought in five deer that day, so there was plenty of meat. One of the men gigged a steelhead trout, which he fried in some bear oil given him by one of the Indians. Clark pronounced it “one of the most delicious fish I have ever tasted.” The visiting chiefs spent the night. Altogether, it was a good start for U.S.-Chinookan relations.
As always, Lewis took a vocabulary of the Indians, although how he accomplished it without a translator is unclear. On October 30, the party set out again, to a point two miles above the last great drop, the Cascades of the Columbia (the “Great Shute” to Lewis and Clark), where it made camp in anticipation of a reconnaissance in the morning.
Lewis took a party of five men to visit a nearby Indian town. Along the way, he shot unsuccessfully at a California condor, which he correctly judged to be the largest bird in North America. At the village, he got a friendly reception. The Indians gave him berries, nuts, and fish to eat. But, he told Clark, “he could get nothing from them in the way of Information,” because of the language barrier.
The reconnaissance revealed a section of river some four miles long filled with rapids passing through a series of chutes and falls, “the water passing with great velocity forming & boiling in a most horriable manner.” But beyond the Great Shute the river widened “and had everry appearance of being effected by the tide,” which was great news.
On November 1–2, the party made its way through this final barrier. At times the men had to portage the canoes and the baggage; at other places it was possible to run the canoes through, using elk-skin ropes to lower them. The following day, moving downstream, the party came to Beacon Rock, the beginning of tidewater.
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The expedition had entered a much-changed world. The banks were covered with fir, spruce, ash, and alder, contrasting sharply with the treeless semidesert country upstream. Migrating waterfowl were everywhere. Fog was frequent and often thick; many days, the party could not set out until afternoon. Indian villages dotted the banks. Indian visits were frequent. The natives made a poor impression on Lewis and his party, except as canoeists, where their superiority over the white men was obvious and duly acknowledged. Otherwise, they were judged to be “low and ill-shaped . . . badly clad and illy made,” petty thieves and objects of suspicion.
James Ronda points out that one reason for the overwhelmingly negative view the captains and their men had of the Indians near the mouth of the river was that the natives were “accustomed to hard bargaining with whites in the sea otter trade,” and therefore “expected to drive equally hard bargains with the hungry explorers.” Clark’s journal is full of complaints about the inflated prices charged for roots and fish.3
The captains did not look forward to wintering with or near these Indians. They recalled, with nostalgia, the winter with the Mandans. They would have gladly traded the rainy weather for the bitter cold of Fort Mandan, especially if they could also have the honest and friendly Mandans for their winter companions, and buffalo to eat. But it was not to be, and they determined to make the best of their situation.
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Their immediate concern was getting to the ocean. Not until that was accomplished could they begin to decide where to spend the winter. On November 2, the expedition passed the mouth of Sandy River, which had been the highest point upriver reached by European or American explorers.III The following day, it reached present Vancouver, Washington, and camped opposite the mouth of the Willamette River (although they did not know it, since the mouth was hidden by an island and they were on the north bank). For the first time since April 1805, the expedition was in country previously explored and mapped by whites. Here the maps from west and from east came together.
The party camped on an island. Lewis borrowed a small canoe from local Indians and with four men took her to a lake on the island, where they enjoyed an after-dark hunt. The lake was teeming with swans, brants, geese, and ducks. Lewis’s party killed three swans, eight brants, and five ducks.
On the night of November 4, several canoe-loads of Indians from the village upstream came down for a visit. They were colorful, with scarlet-and-blue blankets, sailor’s jackets, shirts, and hats, and apparently friendly. But they also brought along a show of weaponry that included war axes, spears, bows at the ready, quivers of arrows at their sides, some muskets and pistols.
Lewis’s sketch of three canoes and a paddle, in his journal. (Courtesy American Philosophical Society)
It was a situation fraught with danger. Two groups of armed young men, from different cultures, unable to communicate with words, facing each other. The captains were up to the challenge. Even though “Those fellows we found assumeing and disagreeable,” Clark wrote, “we Smoked with them and treated them with every attention & friendship.”
But the atmosphere changed when Clark discovered that one of those fellows had “Stold my pipe Tomahawk which They were Smoking with.” Though Clark searched every man and the Indians’ canoes, he could not find his pipe. To add to the injury, while the search was being carried out, an Indian stole Drouillard’s capote (a long blanket coat, hooded, made of heavy wool, long popular in the Canadian fur trade). More angry words, and another search. The capote was found, but not the pipe.
The captains showed their contempt and outrage, or, as Clark so nicely put it, “we became much displeased with those fellows, which they discovered and moved off.”
At this time, the expedition was making better than thirty miles a day down the lower Columbia. On November 5, it met the first coastal canoes, a flotilla of four of different sizes. The largest had a bear’s image carved into the bow and a man’s image on the stern. The design so impressed Clark that he did a sketch of the craft. On the 6th, another flotilla came out from a village, bringing roots, trout, and furs for sale at bargain prices. Clark bought two beaver skins for five small fishhooks. The Indians said there was a white man living below, with whom they traded. Encouraging news, and a good day.
But that night, the campground was scarcely sufficient. The men had to move large stones to make a place among the smaller stones where they could lie down on the level. All was wet and disagreeable.
In the morning, fog. As it slowly lifted, the expedition set off. By midafternoon, the sky was clear.
A shout went up. In his field notes, William Clark scribbled his immortal line, “Ocian in view! O! the joy.”
The men dug in, putting everything they had into the race to the ocean. The canoes sped along; they made thirty-four miles that day. Once again, the campsite was barely sufficient to lie on and composed of small stones. It was raining. Despite the conditions, Clark wrote, “Great joy in camp we are in view of the Ocian, this great Pacific Octean which we been So long anxious to See.” They could distinctly hear waves breaking on rocks.
Without comment (but there must have been some pride in it), Clark added up the miles since the first falls (Celilo, 190 miles upriver). Then he wrote, “Ocian 4142 Miles from the Mouth of Missouri R.”
There was no celebration: it was raining too hard for Cruzatte to bring out his violin. But in their ragged, all-but-rotten clothes, and under their good-for-nothing covers, each man’s heart must have been warm with satisfaction, each man’s mind soaring with a sense of triumph.
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One longs for Lewis’s emotional reaction to the triumph of crossing the continent. He had been at it for two and a half years, ever since he left Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1803. One supposes that he shared that “Great Joy in camp” that Clark wrote of, but he never expressed it himself. He had not written in his journal since meeting the Nez Percé in September, and with minor exceptions would not again until the New Year.
For the biographer, Lewis’s s
ilence is a frustrating and tantalizing mystery. It was not that he didn’t have time, or example—every day he saw Clark writing in his journal. Yet he did not lift his quill.
Except for his severe illness when he first met the Nez Percé, Lewis had been active, coping successfully with the various challenges the party had to face. There is no hint in Clark’s journal, or in the journals of the enlisted men, that he was depressed, downcast, muttering to himself, or otherwise showing symptoms of the melancholia Jefferson had observed in Lewis’s father and in Lewis when they lived together in the President’s House.
He was in a world filled with people, bays, weather, flora and fauna all new to him, a situation that usually sent his quill flying over the pages, but he did not write.
Was he depressed? Not so depressed as to neglect his duties, but enough to keep him from taking quill in hand to set down the day’s events? If so, what caused the depression?
With manic-depressives, there is no agreement as to the cause of the disorder—whether biological or psychological—or what triggers either a manic or a depressed state. In many if not most cases, a wave of euphoria, a surge of energy, and a feeling that “I can do anything” just comes on, followed by a wave of nausea, a draining of energy, and a feeling that “I can’t do anything.” How long each state lasts depends on the individual—weeks, months, years.
In many cases, patients in a depressed state are almost incapable of acting. They have no energy, no sense of self-worth. They feel that nothing they do will matter to anyone.
Lewis would come to such a point, but he certainly didn’t feel that way in the fall of 1805—he knew the importance of what he was doing, and he had the willpower to summon up the energy to operate at peak efficiency. Jefferson later commented that he thought Lewis’s voyage helped him ward off depression. There is nothing like daily decision-making to get the brain functioning and the body moving. From personal experience, Jefferson knew what he was talking about.
But writing was another matter. Lewis couldn’t summon the energy to be reflective.
Of course, he had some real problems, of which the most distasteful was having to inform Jefferson that there was no all-water route or anything remotely like it across the continent, a fact reinforced by those terrible falls on the Columbia. Did the prospect of having to cross the Bitterroots again weigh on his mind?
His worries were many. He feared that the expedition would not be able to rely on its rifles for subsistence until it got back to the Great Plains and the buffalo herds. He feared that the dwindling supply of trade goods was insufficient to purchase provisions in the quantity needed. Despite having reached the ocean, the expedition would not be a success unless and until the captains got their journals back to civilization.
Was the triumph of reaching the ocean only a reminder of how much remained to be done, and how little he had to do it with? Did he doubt that it could be done?
It cannot be that he was simply too tired. He had too often demonstrated an ability to forget his aching muscles and his nearly overwhelming need to sleep in order to describe the day’s activities and discoveries. It cannot be that he felt he had nothing to say beyond what Clark had written, for he often went on side explorations and saw what Clark did not. It cannot be that he regarded his journal as unimportant: he took too good care of it at all times for that to be the case.
Yet he was a professional soldier ignoring direct orders from his commander-in-chief. There must be an explanation—but we can only guess.
My guess is that he was a manic-depressive. The disorder ran in his family. If this is true, then it was his special triumph that he seldom let his emotional state take over, and then only momentarily. Whether he was high or low, his emotional state played no role in daily decision-making for two and a half years.
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Whatever Lewis’s emotional state, it was strongly affected by his drinking habits.
It had been a long time since Meriwether Lewis had had a drink. And the certainty was that it would be a long time before he had another.
He had been a hard-drinking youth. In St. Louis during the winter of 1803–4, he attended a good many balls and private parties, where it seems likely he indulged in pretty heavy drinking. It went with the territory; frontier officers and traders drank a lot of whiskey.
For the first year of the expedition, Lewis had limited himself to the same ration of whiskey the men received, hardly enough to sustain a serious alcoholic, but enough to keep a habit, perhaps even a need, alive. On July 5, 1805, he had been forced to quit cold turkey. No one can say what, if any, effect Lewis’s abstinence had on his mood.
Whatever the reason, the scene that so moved Clark, who gave us such a memorable phrase as he let his emotions burst forth, was not described by Lewis.
It is through Lewis’s eyes and words that we see the White Cliffs, the Great Falls before the dams, the Gates of the Mountains, Three Forks, the Shoshones. Wonderful portraits, all. Vivid. Immediate. Detailed. They set the standard.
But we don’t have his description of what he saw and how he felt in this moment of triumph.
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Clark had been a bit premature: what he had seen was the Columbian estuary, not the ocean. Actually, they were too close to the ocean for their own good anyway. For the next week and more, they were pinned down by the tide, the waves, the wind, at Point Ellice. They were unable to go forward, to retreat, to climb out of their campsite because of the overhanging rocks and hills, to do anything except endure pure misery. It rained for eleven days. At high tide, gigantic waterborne trees of cedar, fir, and spruce, some of them almost two hundred feet long and up to seven feet in diameter, crashed into the camp. Fires were hard to start, difficult to maintain.
The captains and men of the expedition looked more like survivors from a shipwreck praying for rescue than the triumphant members of the Corps of Discovery. For a while, spirits remained high: “For Several days past,” Clark wrote on the 9th, “not withstanding the disagreeable time of the Party, they are all Chearfull.”
But it didn’t last. Never one to suffer silently, Clark wrote on November 12, “It would be distressing to a feeling person to See our Situation at this time all wet and cold with our bedding &c. also wet, in a Cove Scercely large enough to Contain us . . . canoes at the mercy of the waves & driftwood . . . robes & leather Clothes are rotten.”
November 22: “The wind increased to a Storm . . . blew with violence throwing the water of the river with emence waves out of its banks almost over whelming us in water, O! how horriable is the day.”
November 27: “The wind blew with Such violence that I expected every moment to See trees taken up by the roots, Some were . . . ! O how Tremendious is the day.”
Since May 1804, the expedition had stopped only for winter or because the captains decided to take a couple of days’ rest. They hated being immobilized by a force they could not fight. They had to be rescued by Clatsop Indians, the Chinookan people living on the south bank of the estuary, who were able to cross the estuary easily in their coastal canoes, in conditions that absolutely defeated every effort the Americans made to get out of their bad spot.IV The Clatsops saved them by selling roots and fish.
On November 13, the desperate captains sent Privates Colter, Willard, and Shannon in the Indian canoe, which rode the swells better, to explore the shoreline beyond Point Ellice to see if a better campsite could be found. The next day, Colter returned, by land, to report that there was a sandy beach in the bay beyond the point, and a way inland from it, and game in the area. The captains agreed that Lewis would lead an advance party to the site while Clark arranged to move the entire camp as soon as the weather permitted.
The following afternoon, Lewis took advantage of a head-on wind to have five men take himself, Drouillard, and three privates around the point. The paddlers put Lewis and his party ashore on the beach and returned to the main camp, their canoe nearly swamped by the following waves breaking over it.
&
nbsp; Finally, the impatient Lewis could do some exploring at the mouth of the river. He had a specific and immediate goal: he wanted to see if there really were some white men living on the coast. If so, and he could find their trading post, he figured to be able to use Jefferson’s letter of credit to provide the expedition with ample trading goods for the return trip, and start a copy of the journals to Washington via a visiting sea captain. And of course he wanted to see the ocean.
When he set out in the morning, he found Privates Shannon and Willard in a precarious position. After separating from Colter, they had gone hunting and exploring. They had spent the night with five Chinooks, members of the tribe living on the north bank. While they slept, the Indians stole their rifles. In the morning, discovering the theft, they informed the Indians with crude but emphatic signs that a larger party of white men was about to join them and would surely shoot the thieves.
At that moment, Lewis and his small party appeared on the scene. His presence, and perhaps some threatening motions, convinced the thieves to repent. They handed back the rifles.
Lewis sent Shannon back to the sandy beach, which he correctly surmised Clark would have reached by now. The chastised Indians went with Shannon, virtual prisoners. When Clark heard Shannon’s story, he exploded. “I told those Indians . . . they Should not Come near us, and if any one of their nation Stold anything from us, I would have him Shot, which they understoot verry well . . . and if any of their womin or bad boys took any thing to return it imediately and Chastise them for it.”
Lewis, meanwhile, continued his exploration, rounding Cape Disappointment and going up the coastline for several miles. No trading post, no ship. He kept no journal. But he did carve his name into a tree at the extremity of Cape Disappointment with a certain sense of pride—enough, anyway, to tell Captain Clark later that he had recorded his presence.
Undaunted Courage Page 44