Together, the map and report surpassed both in scope and reliability anything hitherto available to the American government on the American West. By themselves, they justified the expense of the expedition. With considerable pride, Jefferson reported to the Congress on the achievements to date, and ordered the map and the statistical view to be printed and distributed as a part of his annual message.26
They were the first printed fruit of the expedition. There was an impatient audience for them. Publishers in Washington, New York, Natchez, and London printed editions in book form.27
•
In his message of transmittal of the Lewis and Clark documents to Congress, Jefferson mentioned the command structure of the expedition—the only time he did so. He reported that “Capt. Meriwether Lewis, of the 1st regiment of infantry was appointed with a party of men, to explore the river Missouri from it’s mouth to it’s source, and crossing the highlands by the shortest portage, to seek the best water communication thence to the Pacific ocean; and Lieut. ClarkeIV was appointed second in command.”28 As far as the president was concerned, it was the Lewis expedition.
•
In October 1805, Stoddard’s tour left St. Louis, including forty-five Indians from eleven tribes. They arrived in Washington in January 1806. Jefferson gave them the standard Great Father talk: “We are become as numerous as the leaves of the trees, and, tho’ we do not boast, we do not fear any nation. . . . My children, we are strong, we are numerous as the stars in the heavens, & we are all gun-men.” He followed the threat with the carrot: if they would be at peace with one another and trade with the Americans, they could be happy.
(In reply, one of the chiefs said he was glad the Americans were as numerous as the stars in the skies, and powerful as well. So much the better, in fact, for that meant the government should be strong enough to keep white squatters off Indian lands.)29
How much good these tours did for Jefferson’s Indian policy is questionable. Surely the visitors were impressed, but they had their own constituencies at home, who were not likely to embrace the program no matter what tales the returning warriors told about American power. Further, as almost always happened when trans-Mississippi Indians traveled to Washington, a number of the chiefs died from diseases picked up along the way, which created considerable resentment and mistrust back in the villages.
•
The Indian delegates brought with them grapevine news of Lewis’s progress. On January 12, 1806, Jefferson wrote William Dunbar: “We have no certain information of Capt. Lewis since he left Fort Mandan. But we have through Indians an account of his having entered on the passage over the high lands dividing the Missouri from the waters of the Pacific.”
The next day, he wrote Reuben Lewis that he had a letter from Pierre Chouteau in St. Louis informing him that two Otos had said that “Capt. Lewis & his party had reached that part of the Missouri near the mountains where the Indian tract [road] leads across (in 8 days march) to the Columbia, that he had there procured horses and had, with his whole party entered on the tract.” He did not expect to hear from Lewis again until he returned to St. Louis, but, “Knowing the anxiety of a mother in such a case, I mention this information praying you to present her my respects.”30
•
Although his original orders gave Lewis permission to return by sea if it was possible and if he thought it best, obviously Jefferson expected the expedition to return overland. Why he was so certain is unclear. In 1805, he informed various sea captains headed around the Horn and onto the mouth of the Columbia of Lewis’s possible presence there.31
Lewis and Clark hoped to find a trading vessel to replenish their supplies, but never did. Jefferson has been severely criticized, by historians Bernard De Voto and David Lavender and editor Elliott Coues among others, for failing to send a U.S. Navy vessel to pick up the explorers. The criticism ignores some fundamental factors.
In 1805, the navy was fighting a war in the Mediterranean against the Tripoli pirates. It had half its strength stationed there—six frigates, four brigs, two schooners, one sloop, two bomb vessels, and sixteen gunboats—or under orders to go there. All the remainder of the fleet was laid up for repairs and refitting. There were no vessels to send.
Even had there been, Jefferson couldn’t be sure the expedition had reached the mouth of the Columbia, or would still be there when a ship showed up (indefinite at best, since it could take from one to three weeks to round the Horn, depending on the winds). Arlen Large’s conclusion seems inescapable: “Jefferson’s non-action seems justified by so many ‘what ifs.’ ”32
The president could only wait, hope, conjecture. In February 1806, he told a correspondent that he guessed Lewis “has reached the Pacific, & is now wintering on the head of the Missouri, & will be here next autumn.”33 He was right about the first point, wrong about the second. Whether he had gotten the third point right or not remained to be seen. It depended on the captains.
* * *
I. What that channel was, is a mystery. Donald Jackson suggests that an interpreter for the Oto tribe (to whom Lewis had just spoken) had come down to St. Louis with the news.
II. A good estimate: in mid-April 1811, John Jacob Astor’s trading house at Astoria on the Oregon coast was established.
III. There is an exact parallel with the Virginia planters who grew tobacco for three years and then moved west.
IV. Jefferson consistently misspelled Clark’s name.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Return to the Nez Percé
March 23–June 9, 1806
At 1 P.M. we bid a final adieu to Fort Clatsop,” Lewis wrote in his journal the night of March 23. The party had hardly proceeded a mile before it met a Chinook band of twenty or so. The chief said he had heard the expedition wanted to buy a canoe; he had brought with him an elegant one he wished to sell. But, Lewis wrote (whether with satisfaction or shame), “being already supplyed we did not puchase it.” The next day, an Indian guided them among some islands, then claimed the stolen canoe as his. Lewis offered him a dressed elk skin for it. Surrounded by thirty-two riflemen in five canoes, and without a clear title in his possession, the Indian accepted.
Maybe this “payment” assuaged Lewis’s conscience. It didn’t alter his act. The theft of the canoe showed how desperate he was.
As the party set out from Fort Clatsop, it cut a much less impressive figure than it had on April 7, 1805, as it set out from Fort Mandan. In 1805, the canoes were jammed with boxes, canisters, kettles, bales of trade goods, blankets, tobacco, whiskey, flour, salt pork, corn, dried squash and beans, writing desks, tents, scientific instruments, tools of many descriptions, knives, rifles, and more. In 1806, the party set out with canisters of powder, scientific instruments, kettles, dried fish and roots, the clothes on their backs, and rifles. They were only halfway through their journey, but they had spent 95 percent of their budget.
On the other hand, in 1805, they didn’t know what was ahead. In 1806; they did know, and they had put supplies into caches stretching from the Nez Percé country to Great Falls, so they would be able to replenish as they moved east.
Knowing the lay of the land ahead was a mixed blessing, however, for part of that land was the Bitterroots. From the moment the men left Fort Clatsop, the rigors of those mountains were on their minds. “That wretched portion of our journy,” Lewis called it in his June 2 journal entry, “the Rocky Mountain, where hungar and cold in their most rigorous forms assail the waried traveller; not any of us have yet forgotten our sufferings in those mountains in September last, and I think it probable we never shall.”
•
Going up the Columbia was hard work. The current was always strong; in rapids, the canoes had to be towed; falls had to be portaged. Food was a constant problem, as were the multitudes of curious Indians. On April 1, Lewis learned from some natives along the Columbia that there was a “great scarcity of food” on the river, that the people upstream were starving, and that the salmon run woul
dn’t begin for a month.
This news “gave us much uneasiness,” Lewis wrote. In the country above The Dalles, through the plains to the Nez Percé camps at the base of the mountains, there were no deer, pronghorns, or elk. Lewis conferred with Clark. They agreed that to wait for the salmon would keep them from getting onto and down the Missouri River before it froze. Delay would also cost their horse herd, being held by Twisted Hair, because he had told them the Nez Percé would cross the mountains at the beginning of May, and without Nez Percé help Lewis doubted the men could round up the expedition’s horses.
On April 2, the captains decided, not surprisingly, “to loose as little time as possible in geting to the Chopunnish Village.”I They would stay below The Dalles long enough for the hunters to kill and dry sufficient meat to sustain them until they reached the Nez Percé. Lewis figured that the party could live on horse meat as it crossed the Bitterroots. He explained, “we now view the horses as our only certain resource for food, nor do we look forward to it with any detestation or horrow, so soon is the mind which is occupyed with any interesting object reconciled to it’s situation.”
But there were no horses below The Dalles. There were dogs, which were purchased whenever possible and were a favorite food of nearly all the party.
On the 3rd, Indians descending the river in search of food paid a visit. “These poor people appeared to be almost starved,” Lewis noted. “They picked up the bones and little pieces of refuse meat which had been thrown away by the party.”
Clark was off on a side expedition, probing the Willamette River, some ten miles upstream to the site of the present-day city of Portland. Lewis supervised the preparation of the jerky for the trip over the plains. Never one to waste time, while the men kept the fires going under the strips of elk and deer, he looked for and described new plants and animals. “I took a walk today of three miles,” he wrote on April 8, “in the course of which I had an opportunity to correct an errow which I have heretofore made with rispect to the shrub I have hithertoo called the large leafed thorn.” He was referring to the salmonberry, which he had confused with the thimbleberry. He made amends for his error with a remarkably detailed description of the salmonberry,II including an attempt to classify it using the Linnaean system.
On the human side, he had Indians to deal with. They came in from the small villages up and down the river to see and steal from the white men. “These people are constantly hanging about us,” Lewis complained on April 6. “I detected one of them in steeling a peice of lead,” he wrote the next day. Back in Virginia, a plantation owner would have a slave whipped for petty theft, and perhaps Lewis felt the impulse to do just that, but these were Chinookan Indians with whom he wanted good relations. Instead of beating the thief, “I sent him from camp.” But he also inspected the rifles and held a target practice in front of a group of Indians, who shortly “departed for their village.”
The following night, April 8, the sentinel detected an old man trying to sneak into the expedition’s campsite. The soldier threatened the intruder with his rifle, and “gave the fellow a few stripes with a switch and sent him off.” As with Lewis, tempers were running high among the men; never before had they whipped an Indian.
But never before had they been so provoked. One party of warriors tried to wrest a tomahawk from Private John Colter, but they had picked the wrong man. “He retained it,” Lewis dryly recorded. Still, as the expedition worked its way upriver, whether dragging the canoes through the rapids or portaging them, the Indians were always there, ready to grab anything left unguarded for an instant. At the Cascades, on April 11, Lewis had to detail guard parties to watch the baggage, because “these are the greatest theives and scoundrels we have met with. . . . One of them had the insolence to cast stones down the bank at two of the men.” Others threatened Shields, who had to pull his knife to drive them off.
In the evening, three Indians stole Lewis’s dog, Seaman, which sent him into a rage. He called three men and snapped out orders to follow and find those theives and “if they made the least resistence or difficulty in surrendering the dog to fire on them.” The soldiers set out; when the thieves realized they were being pursued, they let Seaman go and fled. Lewis may have been ready to kill to get Seaman back, but the Indians weren’t ready to die for the dog.
Back at camp, meanwhile, an Indian stole an ax, got caught, and after a tussle gave it up and fled. Lewis told a group hanging out at the camp that “if they made any further attempts to steal our property or insulted our men we should put them to instant death.”
Lewis and his men were right up to the edge of serious violence. They had no patience left, and the temptation to use their rifles was very strong, especially since they felt surrounded. “I am convinced that no other consideration but our number at this moment protects us,” Lewis wrote.
He and the party were in so foul a mood that they could entertain the thought of a first strike: one quick volley would drive the Indians away. But that was dangerous thinking. Giving in to temper would be risking not just good relations with the natives but the expedition itself. Lewis had to keep a check on himself, without allowing the Indians to pilfer the pantry of the expedition or run off with his dog. He controlled his breathing and began talking, through the sign language, with the chief.
The chief responded to Lewis’s charges about Indian behavior by laying all the trouble at the feet of two bad men in his nation. They alone had been responsible for “these seenes of outradge of which we complained.” The village as a whole wished for peace and good relations. So did Lewis, who concluded his account, “I hope that the friendly interposition of this chief may prevent our being compelled to use some violence with these people; our men seem well disposed to kill a few of them.”
Of course, some young warriors in the Indian village were equally well disposed to kill a few of the whites. Knowing that, and determined to prevent it, Lewis recorded, “We keep ourselves perefectly on our guard.”
•
The captains decided that, once they got onto the open plain country above The Dalles, they would go overland to the mountains. To do that, they needed as many horses as they could purchase. Clark went ahead beyond The Dalles to set up an advance camp and begin buying horses. Lewis stayed behind to oversee the portage of the baggage. After the first day of haggling, Clark sent a runner to tell Lewis the Indians would not sell at the price being offered. Lewis sent back a note telling Clark to double the price. He wanted at least five horses, and wanted them badly, for he wanted to get out of there, to shake these Indians from his heels. In addition, the longer the expedition stayed in the area, the more chances the Indians would have “to execute any hostile desighn should they meditate any against us.”
The Indians knew a seller’s market when they saw one. They kept saying no to whatever Clark offered, which in truth wasn’t much. What made it so maddening was that the natives beyond The Dalles, as Lewis complained on April 17, “have a great abundance of horses but will not dispose of them.” On April 18 and 19, Lewis broke down and paid the price of two large kettles for four horses. Never before had he been willing to part with a kettle. The expedition was reduced to four small kettles to do its cooking, one per mess.
The night of the 19th, Lewis directed the horses be hobbled and allowed to graze, with orders that the man who was responsible for each horse stay with him and watch him. But Private Willard “was negligent in his attention to his horse and suffered it to ramble off.” Lewis’s temper again flared, this time at one of his men. “This in addition to the other difficulties under which I laboured was truly provoking,” he explained in his journal. “I repremanded [Willard] more severely for this peice of negligence than had been usual with me.”
As Lewis and the men with him made their way up the Columbia, the Indians continued to torment them. Tomahawks and knives disappeared during the night. On April 20, Lewis had once again to warn the local inhabitants “that if I caught them attempting to perloin any
article from us I would beat them severely.” That remonstrance had to be repeated at every village.
When the party got above The Dalles, Lewis decided to abandon the canoes—getting them past Celilo Falls appeared to be impossible—join Clark at his upriver camp, obtain as many packhorses as possible, and march to the mountains.
That decision made, on April 21 Lewis had all the spare poles and paddles placed on the canoes. Then he set fire to the pile. He was determined to make certain that “not a particle should be left for the benefit of the indians.”
While the fire burned, Lewis caught an Indian stealing an iron socket that had been tossed aside from one of the poles. His pent-up fury burst forth. He caught the man, cursed him, beat him severely, and then “made the men kick him out of camp.”
His blood was hot. He informed the Indians standing around that “I would shoot the first of them that attempted to steal an article from us. That we were not affraid to fight them, that I had it in my power at that moment to kill them all and set fire to their houses. . . .”
The release that came with the physical satisfaction of beating the thief and the psychological pleasure of shouting threats at the young hang-abouts who were gawking at him, drained some of Lewis’s emotion. He breathed deeply and got control of his temper.
He told the Indians “it was not my wish to treat them with severity provided they would let my property alone.” He could easily take some horses, he said, the horses of the men who had stolen knives and tomahawks, but since he did not know who the thieves were he would “reather loose the property altogether than take the hose of an inosent person.” The Indians “hung their heads and said nothing.”
That afternoon, Lewis set off, with nine horses carrying baggage and one being ridden by Private William Bratton, who had a severe back condition and could not walk. Lewis was in a better mood—he always was happiest when proceeding—and looking forward to getting out of the Chinookan country and back in the land of the Nez Percé, where he expected that the natives “will treat us with much more hospitality than those we are now with.”
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