The Nez Percé concluded by warning the captains it was too early even to think about crossing the mountains. The captains could think of little else. “We are anxious to procure some guides to accompany us on the different routs we mean to take from Travellers rest,” Lewis wrote.IV
•
Lewis did most of the smoking and talking with the chiefs, while Clark practiced medicine. Every morning, his patients lined up for treatment. He used eyewash, hot rubdowns, and simples for sore eyes, scrofula (tuberculosis of the lymph glands), ulcers, rheumatism, and other ailments. One case was particularly difficult. An old chief had been suffering from paralysis for three years. He was “incapable of moving a single limb,” Lewis reported, “but lies like a corps in whatever position he is placed, yet he eats heartily, digests his food perfectly, injoys his understanding, his pulse are good, and has retained his flesh almost perfectly.” Nothing Clark tried on him seemed to do any good.
Among the party, Bratton was still suffering from his bad back; Sacagawea’s son, Jean Baptiste, in addition to teething, had a high fever and a swollen neck and throat. The captains gave him some tartar and sulphur and applied a poultice of boiled onions to his neck, as hot as he could stand it.V The therapy did no good; a few days later, Lewis wrote that the boy “was very wrestless last night; it’s jaw and the back of it’s neck are much more swolen. . . . we gave it a doze of creem of tartar and applyed a fresh poltice of onions.”
Clark had better results with Bratton. At Private John Shields’s suggestion, Clark prescribed a sweat bath for Bratton. A sweat lodge was built, stones were heated up and placed inside, Bratton went in naked with a vessel of water to sprinkle on the stones to make steam, and after twenty minutes he was taken out and plunged into cold water. Then back to the sweat lodge. Within a day, Bratton was walking, free from pain for the first time in months.
Sacagawea’s boy slowly recovered, but the paralyzed chief showed no improvement. Lewis regretted that he was not back in Philadelphia, where Benjamin Franklin had experimented with electricity to treat paralytic cases. “I am confident that this [chief] would be an excellent subject for electricity,” Lewis wrote on May 27.
Instead of shock therapy, the captains decided on heat therapy. They built a sweat lodge for the chief and put him in, fortified with thirty drops of laudanum for relaxation. It worked. The chief regained the use of his hands and arms, and soon his leg and toes. “He seems highly delighted with his recovery,” Lewis wrote on May 30. “I begin to entertain strong hope of his restoration by these sweats.”
•
The medical practice was critical to maintaining a continuing food supply, but by itself insufficient: the men needed more food than Clark’s fees could provide. They had nothing in the way of trade goods, so it was down to the clothes off their backs, the buttons off their coats and pants. When the men discovered that brass buttons were “an article of which these people are tolerably fond,” the men cut off all their buttons to trade for roots.
Never ask your men to do something you won’t do yourself, is time-honored advice to company commanders. In this case, the captains cut the buttons from their dress coats a few days later, which brought in three bushels of roots. “A successful voyage,” Lewis said of the trading venture, “not much less pleasing to us than the return of a good cargo to an East India Merchant.”
On May 21, the captains took a drastic step. They decided that each man should make his own deal for roots sufficient to get him over the Bitterroots. Each man got “one awl, one Kniting pin, a half an ounce of vermillion, two nedles, a few scanes of thead and about a yard of ribbon.” Lewis called it “a slender stock indeed with which to lay in a store of provision for that dreary wilderness.” He comforted himself with the thought that they could fall back on horsemeat. The expedition’s herd was growing, thanks to Clark’s doctoring, and by the beginning of June was up to sixty-five horses.
•
The long wait with the Nez Percé gave Lewis an opportunity to do more ethnography. He described the tribes’ dress and ornaments at some length. He judged the Nez Percé to be “cheerfull but not gay.”
Their young men were fond of gambling and games. So were Lewis’s young men. In addition, Lewis had the problem of idle hands. Like most company commanders with that problem, he turned to athletics as a way to keep up morale and strength and reach out to the natives.
The result was a tournament. There was a shooting match, which Lewis won with two hits of a mark at a distance of 220 yards, something even more impressive to the Indians than his air gun. On horseback, the Nez Percé put the American soldiers to shame. Lewis was amazed at how accurate they were with the arrow, even when firing at a rolling target from the back of a galloping horse.
There were frequent horse races, among the Indians or between Indians and whites. Lewis remarked, “several of those horses would be thought fleet in the U States.” The Indians could do feats that the whites could only watch: “It is astonishing,” Lewis wrote, “to see these people ride down those steep hills which they do at full speed.”
The stallions in the expedition’s herd were so troublesome the captains offered to trade two of them for one of the Indians’ geldings. The Indians refused. The captains decided they would have to take the risk of castration and began the operation. A young man interrupted to show the whites how the Indians did it. His method was to let the wound bleed, rather than tying off the scrotum. As an experiment, the captains had him operate on two stallions in the Indian way, while Drouillard gelded two in the white way. Two weeks later, Lewis wrote, “I have no hesitation in declaring my beleif that the indian method of gelding is preferable to that practiced by ourselves.”
Horse care, horse trading, horse racing brought the white and red men together. On the evening of May 13, “we tryed the speed of several of our horses,” in races against one another and Indians. It is an irresistible scene: the young braves, red and white, racing from point to point over that beautiful valley with the snow-topped mountains looming behind, whooping and whipping their horses, digging in their heels, while crowds of onlookers, also mounted and also a mix of red and white, cheered them on. Wherever one looked, there were horses, Appaloosas mostly, selectively bred, “active strong and well formed,” according to Lewis.
They were present in “immence numbers,” a phrase Lewis hadn’t used to describe a herd of animals since he left the buffalo country. “50, 60 or a hundred hed is not unusual for an individual to possess.”
That herd was by far the Nez Percés’ greatest asset. It also represented a potential solution to one of the major transportation problems facing the proposed American trading empire stretching from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia. The trick would be to get the Nez Percé herd over to the other side of the mountains, which in turn depended on making a peace between the Blackfeet and the Nez Percé, which was hardly likely as long as the Blackfeet had guns and the Nez Percé did not.
Still, Lewis was resolved to try. As he gazed at the magnificent herd, he began to imagine two long strings of Indian packhorses passing each other on this prairie. One was headed east, carrying spices and other fabulous goods from the Indies; the other headed west, carrying furs from the Missouri River country and trade goods from Europe. In the image, Nez Percé horses would make up for the lack of an all-water route across the continent.
It was an idea Lewis had started working on back at Fort Clatsop. His first attempts to begin creating the conditions that would make the plan workable had failed—he couldn’t get a Nez Percé delegate to go with him to meet with the Blackfeet, or a chief to come to Washington with him. But he stayed with the idea, and continued to try to think it through.
•
There were frequent footraces. Lewis was impressed by one Indian who proved to be as fleet as the expedition’s best runners, Drouillard and Reubin Field. There were games of prison base (an Indian game in which each side tries to make prisoners of those who run out of their base a
rea), and pitching quoits (a white man’s game of throwing flattened rings at a pin).3 Lewis encouraged the games, for they gave the men who were not hunters some badly needed exercise. They “have had so little to do that they are geting reather lazy and slouthfull.”
•
Mainly what they did was look at the Bitterroots to see how much snow was left. The expedition’s energy was as tight as a coiled spring, ready to vault itself over those mountains, in an agony of anticipation of being released.
Waiting for snow to melt is rather like watching grass grow. The first discernible sign of progress is greeted with the greatest joy. Thus Lewis on May 17: “I am pleased at finding the river rise so rapidly, it no doubt is attributeable to the meting snows of the mountains.”
Still they had to wait. The mountains remained: “That icy barier which seperates me from my friends and Country, from all which makes life esteemable.”
“Patience, patience,” Lewis advised himself as he concluded his journal entry and closed the elk-skin-covered volume.
Not until May 26 did he let a little optimism into his journal. “The river still rising fast and snows of the mountains visibly diminish,” he wrote.
•
Ethnography and nature studies helped him get his mind off the snow. On May 27, one of the men brought him a “black woodpecker,” which Lewis had already seen and noted but not held in his hand. He now gave it a five-hundred-word description (“the throat is of a fine crimson red,” “the belly and breast is a curious mixture of white and blood red,” “wings and tail are of a sooty black,” “top of the head black . . . with a glossey tint of green in a certain exposure,” and so on).
The bird is now named Lewis’s woodpecker. Lewis preserved the skin, which ended up at Harvard University. It is his only surviving zoological specimen.4
On June 6, “we meet with a beautifull little bird,” also described in charming detail. It was the western tanager.
Lewis also collected, described, and preserved close to fifty new plants, including camas, yellow bells, Lewis’s syringa, purple trillium, ragged robin, and mariposa lily. Paul Cutright calls this his most productive period as a botanist.5
•
Every day, the Nez Percé told the captains they would have to wait. As May turned into June, the waiting got harder. Twisted Hair had told them that the tribe would cross the mountains in May, but that was before the winter snows began. It had snowed and snowed and snowed, far beyond an average year, to such an extent that some of the Indians were warning the captains they would have to wait until July.
But on June 3, Lewis was surprised and pleased to learn that “today the Indians dispatched an express over the mountains to travellers rest.” The “express” was a teen-age boy who went seeking information from the Flatheads about “the occurrences that have taken place on the East side of the mountains” during the winter.
If the Indians could send a boy over the Lolo Trail just to pick up some gossip, Lewis “thought it probable that we could also pass.” He told the Nez Percé he was going to try, but they replied that, although their boys could make the trip, Lewis’s men could not: the creeks were too high, there was no grass, and the snow was deep over the roads, which were extremely slippery. They told Lewis to have patience. In twelve to fourteen days, he could set out.
On June 4, Lewis met with some of the chiefs. He repeated his request for guides to accompany his party to the falls of the Missouri, then up to the Blackfoot country in search of a truce. The chiefs stalled.
Lewis checked the men’s packs and was pleased to “find that our whole party have an ample store of bread and roots for our voyage.” All around the campsite, the men were “much engaged in preparing their saddles arranging their loads provisions &c for our departure.”
The captains planned to move camp eastward, from the banks of the Clearwater to higher ground at the western terminus of the Lolo Trail, on the southern end of Weippe Prairie, where they had first met the Nez Percé the preceding September. There they would make camp and begin the final preparations for the assault on the mountains.
On June 8, two days before the move, there was a sort of farewell party at the campsite they had occupied on the banks of the Clearwater for nearly a month. The afternoon featured horse- and footracing and game-playing. In the evening, Cruzatte brought out the fiddle and dancing began.
But as the festivities went on, an Indian told the captains that the snow was still deep and they would not be able to cross until the beginning of July. He warned that if they tried it sooner the horses would be at least three days without food.
“This information is disagreable,” Lewis admitted. “It causes some doubt as to the time at which it will be most proper for us to set out.” But not enough doubt to deter the captains. Lewis explained, “as we have no time to loose we will wrisk the chanches and set out as early as the indians generally think it practicable or the middle of this month.”
By midday, June 9, everything was in readiness for the move to Weippe Prairie. The mood was exuberant. “Our party seem much elated with the idea of moving on towards their friends and country,” Lewis happily noted. “They all seem allirt in their movements today.” Notwithstanding the thoughts of what lay ahead, they were “amusing themselves very merrily today in runing footraces pitching quites, prison basse &c.”
The expedition was about to resume its march.
* * *
I. Chopunnish was the captains’ name for the Nez Percé.
II. A sample: “Of the stamens the filaments are subulate, inserted into the recepticle, unequal and bent inwards concealing the pistillum.” His description covers most of a printed page.
III. Clark later commented that those Indians who had had no contact with whites until the expedition arrived were much more hospitable than those who had, such as the Chinooks (Moulton, ed., Journals, vol. 7, p. 241).
IV. This was his first mention of a decision he and Clark had made sometime earlier, probably at Fort Clatsop.
V. It has been suggested that the boy had mumps, or perhaps it was tonsillitis. Dr. Chuinard thinks it was an external abscess on the neck. (Only One Man Died, pp. 370–75.)
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Lob Trail
June 10–July 2, 1806
On the morning of June 10, just before the expedition set off for Weippe Prairie, Cut Nose sent word that two of his young men would overtake the party in a day or so, guide it through the mountains, then lead Lewis to the falls of the Missouri. Welcome news, the best possible. The party moved out in high spirits.
Each man—and presumably Sacagawea—was mounted and leading a packhorse. In addition, there were several spare horses. “We therefore feel ourselves perfectly equiped for the mountains,” Lewis wrote. He established camp at the quawmash flats. “Quawmash” was camas, the root that had stood off starvation for the men in September and then damn near killed them. Stomachs had adjusted; the men could eat it now without violent consequences. The plant was so central to the lives of the Nez Percé that Lewis wrote a fifteen-hundred-word description of camas and the Indian methods of preparing it for food. His concluding sentence was: “This root is pallateable but disagrees with me in every shape I have ever used it.”
He enjoyed its appearance: “The quawmash is now in blume and from the colour of its bloom at a short distance it resembles lakes of fine clear water, so complete is this deseption that on first sight I could have swoarn it was water.”
By June 13, the pressure on the captains—from both within and without—to get going was all but irresistible. But Cut Nose’s young men had not shown up. Lewis gave them one more day. Meanwhile, he sent two hunters ahead, to a prairie eight miles east, to lay in a stock of meat.
The Indians did not show that day, or the next, and Lewis gave up on the guides. On the evening of June 14, he ordered the horses hobbled, in anticipation of an early start.
“From hence to traveller’s rest,” Lewis wrote that night, “we sha
ll make a forsed march.”
•
With the decision to go without guides, Lewis had allowed impatience to cloud his judgment. He was taking chances and violating Jefferson’s orders to be always prudent so that he could carry out his number-one objective, to get to the Pacific and back with a report on the main features of the country. And for what was he taking such a risk? To get home a little earlier?
If the expedition could get to Traveler’s Rest by early August, and if it then took the Nez Percé route to the buffalo country, it would be at Great Falls by the middle of August. There it could dig up its caches and then speed downstream, with two good traveling months to get to St. Louis.
But Lewis felt a pressing need to get going. Besides just giving in to impatience, he had some genuine objectives in mind, primarily further exploring. He and Clark had agreed to divide at Traveler’s Rest. Clark would go to the Jefferson River and on to Three Forks, where he would cross to the Yellowstone Valley and proceed down the Yellowstone to the Missouri, mapping and describing new country every step of the way.
Lewis would follow the Nez Percé buffalo route to Great Falls, then conduct an exploration of the Marias River to its sources. He hoped that those sources would be well north of forty-nine degrees. That would be good news to bring to the president.
To make these side explorations, the captains needed to get over the mountains by the beginning of July. That was why Lewis felt time pressing. But, although the expeditions to the Marias and the Yellowstone were interesting and important, they were not significant enough to merit risking everything.
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