There he told Drouillard to run and call the Field brothers back: they had enough horses. Drouillard tried, but they were too far away to hear. Lewis and Drouillard went to work saddling the horses. The Field brothers returned with four of the party’s original horses. Lewis cast his eye over the herd and selected four Indian horses and three of his original bunch.
As the men arranged saddles and the placement of the baggage on the packhorses, Lewis started burning the articles the Indians had left behind. Onto the fire went four shields, two bows, two quivers of arrows, sundry other articles. Only the musket the warriors had abandoned and the flag Lewis had given an Indian the previous evening escaped the fire; those he took with him.
Enraged at the Indian treachery, he left the medal he had given out at last night’s campfire hanging around the neck of the dead Indian, “that they might be informed who we were.” But, excited as he was, Lewis wasn’t about to take a scalp, though he did cut off the amulets from the shields before throwing the shields on the fire, and put them in his pack as a war souvenir.
•
An after-action analysis of Lewis’s first-ever Indian fight indicates that he and his men made many mistakes. The first and most important was Joseph Field’s. It was inexcusable for the sentinel ever to lay down his rifle, immeasurably more so when in the presence of young Indians. One would have thought that, after two years in the wilderness, Lewis would have had that pounded into the head of every enlisted man.
Lewis’s failure to give orders that he and the other sleeping men should be woken at first light was a grave error. It was his clear duty and responsibility to be up, alert, and in full command at this most dangerous moment in the day.
Once awake, he made a number of snap judgments, some of them showing restraint and good sense, others demonstrating his sometimes impetuous nature. His first order was exactly right—get the rifles back. However dangerous it might be to chase an Indian carrying a rifle, those rifles were indispensable.
His second order, forbidding the Field brothers and Drouillard to kill a retreating Indian who had laid down the stolen rifle, was also exactly right. Next to getting the rifles back and not losing the horses, avoiding bloodshed was clearly Lewis’s first responsibility—and of course it was his commander-in-chief’s direct order. (At this time in the fight, Lewis did not yet know that Private Field had stabbed an Indian to death.)
When the Blackfeet started running off the horses, they were again attempting to steal what was indispensable to life on the Plains. It is not so clear this time, however, that Lewis’s immediate order to chase the Indians and get those horses back was necessary. There were forty horses in the bottom, milling about in little groups. The thieves were never going to get them together into a herd and drive it off; while they were gathering horses, Lewis could have had his men doing the same. He later admitted that the Indian horse he took “carried me very well in short much better than my own would have done and leaves me with but little reason to complain of the robery.” But at the time, he didn’t feel that way at all.
He held the campsite, which contained all the equipment from both parties. The Indians were in full retreat. Lewis might have decided, Let’s get some horses for ourselves, and let the Blackfeet go and get out of here.
Instead, he ordered pursuit. The Field brothers took off after the main party, which had crossed the river; Lewis was fortunate that the young men, with their adrenaline pumping, didn’t kill one or two more warriors.
His decision to leave the campsite himself to pursue two Indians leading away one of his horses and three or four of theirs was questionable. He left his command post and exposed himself to harm for what was not indispensable. But his blood was up—three hundred yards is a long way to sprint when wearing tight leather leggings and carrying a rifle—over the thieving Indians.
Whether he had to shoot the warrior or not is unclear. Lewis’s narrative of this fight is one of his best pieces of writing, with lots of drama and detail. One detail we don’t get, however: what was the Indian doing just before Lewis shot him? Lewis does not say. If he was taking aim at Lewis, obviously Lewis had to fire. But if his musket wasn’t at his shoulder, Lewis should not have fired.
Another missing detail: sometime before he fired his rifle, Lewis fired his pistol, but he does not say when. It seems most likely that he fired at the backs of the Indians as they were driving the horses toward the bluff.
Another blunder: leaving the medal “that they might be informed who we were” was an act of taunting and boasting that put into serious jeopardy the entire American-empire scheme Lewis was concocting. To turn the most powerful tribe on the upper Missouri into enemies of the United States was Lewis’s biggest mistake.
Lewis made no analysis of his actions. He was content to describe them, with his characteristic honesty. He wasn’t in the habit of justifying his decisions, although he usually explained his reasons for them.
In this case, the only thing he felt needed explaining was why he didn’t have his shot pouch with him when he fired. He was very defensive about this, almost as if he felt it was the only thing he had done wrong and he wanted to make sure everyone understood it couldn’t have been helped (because he had no time to return to camp after recovering his rifle before he started chasing the Indians driving off the horses).
•
One Indian boy killed, another with a presumably fatal wound. Four whites in the middle of a land with hundreds of Blackfoot warriors who would seek revenge the instant they heard the news. It was imperative that Lewis get himself and his men out of there. Immediately.
Off they rode, up the bluff to “a beatiful level plain,” and on toward the mouth of the Marias. Lewis knew he had to get there as soon as possible “in the hope of meeting with the canoes and party at that place,” because he had no doubt the Blackfoot party would ride at top speed to the nearest band to report. He anticipated that, on hearing the news, a large party of warriors would immediately set out to kill any white men they could find. He feared there was a band of Blackfeet between him and the Marias, a band already headed toward the mouth of the river. If they discovered Sergeant Ordway’s canoe party coming down from the falls, the soldiers would not be alert to their danger and might well be overwhelmed.
The party retreated at a trot, covering about eight miles per hour. Fortunately, recent rains had left “little reservors” scattered about, the prickly pears were few, and there were not many rocks and stones.
They rode through the morning and midday, not stopping until 3:00 p.m., when they “suffered our horses to graze . . . [and] took some refreshment.” They had covered sixty-three miles.
After an hour-and-a-half break, they mounted up and rode off, to cover seventeen more miles by dark. Then they killed a buffalo and ate, mounted up again and set off, this time at a walk.
It was a night to remember. The tension was high, so too the concentration. The setting was magical. The plains were as flat as a bowling green. There were thunderclouds and lightning “on every quarter but that from which the moon gave us light.” Throughout the night, “we continued to pass immence herds of buffaloe.”
At 2:00 a.m. on July 28, Lewis finally ordered a halt. The day had begun for the party at first light, about 3:30 a.m., on July 27. The captain and his men had had an Indian fight to start the day, followed by a hundred-mile ride. “We now turned out our horses,” Lewis concluded his journal description of the day, “and laid ourselves down to rest in the plain very much fatiegued as may be readily conceived.”
Inexcusably and inexplicably, he did not post a sentinel. Lewis slept soundly, but only briefly. He woke at first light, to find he was so stiff he could scarcely stand. He woke the men and told them to saddle up so they could get going. They too complained of stiffness, and asked for more rest. “I encouraged them by telling them that our own lives as well as those of our friends and fellow travellers depended on our exertions at this moment.”
That worked. They c
ame alert, and the march was resumed. As they rode, Lewis exhorted. “I now told them that . . . we must wrisk our lives on this occasion. . . . I told them that it was my determination that if we were attacked in the plains . . . that the bridles of the horses should be tied together and we would stand and defend them, or sell our lives as dear as we could.”
That proved unnecessary. At twelve miles they came to the Missouri, rode down it another eight miles, and “heared the report of several rifles very distinctly. . . . we quickly repared to this joyfull sound and on arriving at the bank of the river had the unspeakable satisfaction to see our canoes coming down.”
Lewis’s party joined Sergeant Ordway’s. The combined force consisted of sixteen men. There were heartfelt greetings, but brief: Lewis explained the need for haste. The men quickly took the baggage from the horses and put it in the canoes, turned the horses loose, and set off.
They went down the river to the mouth of the Marias, where they opened the caches from the previous summer. Some skins and furs were badly damaged, but the gunpowder, corn, flour, pork, and salt were in fairly good order. Back into the canoes—the white pirogue and five small canoes—and downstream as fast as possible. At fifteen miles, Lewis reckoned that they had left the Blackfeet safely behind and made camp—prudently, on the south bank, across the river from any Blackfeet. That night, there was a thunderstorm that lasted for hours. Lewis had no shelter of any kind; he just lay in the water all night.
Lewis’s exploration of the Marias was over. All in all, it had been a big mistake from the start. Many things went wrong, and nothing had been accomplished.
* * *
I. The term probably means “enemies,” not a specific tribe (Moulton, ed., Journals, vol. 7, p. 90).
II. The trail is plainly evident today, including travois marks from the thousands of Nez Percé who used it. It can be reached by driving up Alice Creek Road, off Montana Highway 200 some ten miles East of Lincoln, Montana. The pass is called Lewis and Clark Pass (6,284 feet)—somewhat misnamed, since Clark never saw it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The Last Leg
July 29–September 22, 1806
The job now was to reunite with Clark and his party and head on to the Mandan villages. In the morning, Lewis got an early start. “The currant being strong and the men anxious to get on they plyed their oars faithfully and we went at the rate of about seven miles an hour.”
Progress continued to be good over the next five days. Game was so plentiful that at one stop the men killed twenty-nine deer. Lewis gave instructions to cook enough meat in the evening to last through the next day, so that no stops need be made for a noon meal; “by this means we forward our journey at least 12 or 15 miles Pr. day.”
By August 7, they had reached the mouth of the Yellowstone. Clark wasn’t there, but signs of an encampment indicated he had been a week earlier. Lewis found a piece of paper stuck on a pole; it had his name in the handwriting of Captain Clark. Only a fragment could be read, but from it Lewis learned that at this site game was scarce and mosquitoes were plentiful, so Clark had gone on and would be waiting for Lewis downstream.
“I instantly reimbarked,” Lewis wrote, “and decended the river in the hope of reaching Capt. C’s camp before night.” He was so anxious to reunite that he wouldn’t take the day or so necessary to fix the longitude of the junction, as he had promised to do the previous year, when clouds had made observations impossible.
He didn’t catch Clark anyway. Clark had moved on. In the morning, Lewis followed. He didn’t catch up that day, or the next.
On the morning of August 11, seeing some elk on a thick willow bar, he put in and set out with Private Cruzatte to replenish the meat supply. After Lewis killed one and Cruzatte wounded one, they reloaded and plunged into the willow to pursue more elk.
Lewis saw an elk some yards ahead. He raised his rifle to his shoulder, took aim, and was about to pull the trigger when he was hit in the buttocks by a rifle bullet. This severe blow spun him around.
The bullet had hit him an inch below his hip joint on his left side and passed through his buttocks to come out on the right side, leaving a three-inch gash the width of the ball. No bone had been hit. The spent ball lodged in Lewis’s leather breeches.
Cruzatte was nearsighted in his only good eye, and Lewis was wearing brown leather, so his first thought was that Cruzatte had mistaken him for an elk.
“Damn you,” Lewis shouted. “You have shot me.”
There was no answer. Lewis called to Cruzatte several times, still with no response. The shot had come from less than forty yards away; if Cruzatte couldn’t hear him, it must not have been Cruzatte who shot him. It must have been an Indian. In the thick willow, it was impossible to know if it was just one warrior or a war party.
Lewis called to Cruzatte to retreat, then retreated himself. He ran the first hundred paces, until his wound forced him to slow down. When he got in sight of the canoes, he called the men to their arms, “to which they flew in an instant.” Lewis informed them of what had happened, told them he intended to return and give battle and save Cruzatte, and ordered them to follow him.
They did. But after a hundred yards, their captain collapsed. His wounds had become so painful and his thigh was so stiff he could not press on. He told the men to continue without him; if they encountered a superior force they should retreat, keeping up a fire.
Lewis struggled back to the canoes. He laid his pistol on one side of him, his rifle on the other, and his air gun close at hand. He was “determined to sell my life as deerly as possible.”
He was alone for about twenty minutes, in a state of anxiety and suspense. Finally the party returned, with Cruzatte, who absolutely denied having shot the captain and swore he had never heard Lewis call to him.
“I do not beleive that the fellow did it intentionally,” Lewis wrote, but neither did he believe Cruzatte’s denials. He had the bullet in his hand; it was a .54 caliber, from a U.S. Army Model 1803, not a weapon any Indian was likely to have. He conjectured that, after shooting his captain in the ass, Cruzatte decided to deny everything. (Sergeants Ordway and Gass, who were with the party when it met Cruzatte, wrote in their journals that, as far as they could tell, Cruzatte was entirely ignorant of having shot Lewis.)
Sergeant Gass helped Lewis get out of his clothes. Lewis dressed his wounds himself as best he could, introducing rolls of lint into the holes on each side of his buttocks (so that the wound would stay open and new tissue could grow from the inside out).1
The party proceeded downriver, Lewis lying on his stomach in the pirogue. At 4:00 p.m., they passed Clark’s campsite of the previous night; there one of the men found and brought to Lewis a note Clark had left on a post.
Bad news. Clark wrote that the reason Lewis had found only a fragment of the letter at the Yellowstone was that Sergeant Pryor and his small party had passed that place after Clark left and before Lewis arrived, and Pryor had torn off part of the note. Pryor and his three men were traveling in bull boats, which they had made after losing all their horses to Indian thieves.
Losing the horses wasn’t so bad, especially since Pryor had been resourceful enough to build bull boats and rejoin Clark, but it was a serious blow in that Pryor had not been able to deliver to Mr. Heney of the North West Company the letter asking his help in getting some Sioux chiefs to come to Washington. Heney had been Lewis’s only hope for pacifying the Sioux and making them a part of the American system.
Lewis’s entire Indian policy was coming apart. He had hostile Blackfeet behind him and hostile Sioux in front of him; between them, they could block the entire middle section of the Missouri River to traders.
Along with the bad news, Lewis’s wounds grew so painful that when the party made camp he found he could not bear to be moved. He had a poultice of Peruvian bark applied to the wounds, and spent the night stretched out on his belly on board the pirogue. He had a high fever and a restless night.
In the morning, he
was stiff and sore, but the fever had receded, probably thanks to the Peruvian bark, a standard remedy for fevers with the captains. The pain remained.
The party set out. At 8:00 a.m., it encountered two white men coming upriver. They were Joseph Dickson of Illinois and Forrest Hancock of Boone’s Settlement in Missouri, fur trappers out on their own. They had started in August 1804, spent the winter in Iowa, been robbed by Indians who also wounded Hancock, but were nevertheless proceeding upriver to get to the Yellowstone and trap beaver.
•
In other words, the Lewis and Clark Expedition had been only three months ahead of private trappers in exploring the Louisiana Purchase. Dickson and Hancock were the cutting edge of what might be called the fur rush. It could be taken for granted that there would be many others coming close behind them. However much Jefferson might want to reserve Upper Louisiana for displaced Indians from east of the Mississippi, no power on earth, and certainly no laws written in Washington, could stop the American frontiersmen. They were lured up the Missouri River by a spirit of adventure, by a cockiness and bravado that were not entirely without foundation, by a love of the wilderness, and by greed. Powerful motives in young men, the kind that can’t be denied.
Lewis was eager to help establish an American presence in Upper Louisiana. He gave Dickson and Hancock information on what lay ahead of them, provided them with some sketch maps, and told them where they could find beaver in abundance. He also gave them a file and some lead and powder.
•
The party set out again. At 1:00 p.m., it overtook Captain Clark and his party. The joy of reunion was a bit dampened by Lewis’s condition. Informed that his friend had been wounded, Clark dashed to his pirogue. He was much alarmed to see Lewis lying on his belly, but Lewis raised his head to assure him that the wound was slight and would be healed in three or four weeks. “This information relieved me very much,” Clark wrote.
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