Lewis’s biggest mistake had been the decision to split the expedition into five parts and make the Marias exploration. Otherwise, in his most important role, that of military commander, he had done a superlative job.
Jefferson had charged him with numerous nonmilitary goals. He had carried them out faithfully. He was certain he had accomplished the number-one objective of the expedition, to find the most direct and convenient route across the continent. He had brought back a treasure of scientific information. His discoveries in the fields of zoology, botany, ethnology, and geography were beyond any value.III He introduced new approaches to exploration and established a model for future expeditions by systematically recording abundant data on what he had seen, from weather to rocks to people.
On the more personal side, he had seen wonderful things. He had traveled through a hunter’s paradise beyond anything any American had ever before known. He had crossed mountains that were greater than had ever before been seen by any American, save the handful who had visited the Alps. He had seen falls and cataracts and raging rivers, thunderstorms all but beyond belief, trees of a size never before conceived of, Indian tribes uncorrupted by contact with white men, canyons and cliffs and other scenes of visionary enchantment.
A brave new world.
And he had been first. Everyone who has ever paddled a canoe on the Missouri, or the Columbia, does so in the wake of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Everyone who crosses the Lolo Trail walks in their footsteps.
Furthermore, the journals of Lewis and Clark provided the introduction to and serve as the model for all subsequent writing on the American West.
•
For all Lewis’s accomplishments, however, there were some big disappointments, and as St. Louis came into view, he had reason for worry. His Indian diplomacy had so far been a failure. The Sioux and the Blackfeet, the strongest and most warlike tribes in Upper Louisiana, were enemies of the United States. Nevertheless, Lewis had some policies to recommend to the president that he hoped would force the Sioux, Blackfeet, and all other Plains tribes to recognize American sovereignty.
He was enthusiastic about the prospects for an American commercial empire stretching from St. Louis to the Pacific, and he had some specific schemes in mind to make it happen. God knew there were plenty of beaver out there. His task now was to get the journals published, to spread the word about the wonders of the Upper Louisiana and the Oregon country, and about the abundance of beaver, and to make his discoveries known to the scientific world.
The sad news he had to tell could not be helped: it was simple geographical fact. There was no all-water route, or anything close to it, and the Missouri River drainage did not extend beyond forty-nine degrees north latitude.
Lewis realized that Jefferson would want the news as soon as possible. So, as his canoe put in at St. Louis, it was the president who was on his mind. The men had fired a salute to the town when they saw all one thousand residents on the bank, waiting for them. The citizens gave them three cheers and a hearty welcome. A resident reported, “They really have the appearance of Robinson Crusoes—dressed entirely in buckskins.”2
As Lewis scrambled out of his canoe, his first question was, When does the post leave?
It had just left, was the answer. Lewis quickly wrote a note to the postmaster at Cahokia, Illinois Territory, and sent it on by messenger: hold the post until the next day. He took a room at the home of Pierre Chouteau and began to write the president.
* * *
I. For sure he didn’t wash them in water that had been boiled first: it was just plain Missouri River water. Lewis was lucky his wounds did not become infected.
II. Clark offered to take her son, Jean Baptiste (called “Pomp” by Clark and the men, and described by Clark as “a butifull promising Child”) to St. Louis and bring him up as if he were his own boy; she said maybe next summer, after he has been weaned. In a letter of August 20, 1806, to Charbonneau, Clark paid tribute to Sacagawea, referring to her as “Your woman who accompanied you that long dangerous and fatigueing rout to the Pacific Ocian and back diserved a greater reward for her attention and services on that rout than we had in our power to give her.” (Jackson, Letters, vol. I, p. 315.)
III. He had discovered and described 178 new plants, more than two-thirds of them from west of the Continental Divide, and 122 species and subspecies of animals (Cutright, Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists, pp. 423, 447).
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Reporting to the President
September 23–December 31,1806
On September 23, 1806, Meriwether Lewis completed the first part of the work that had been his “darling project,” and on which he had concentrated with single-minded intensity for the past four years. The second part of this great work, reporting on the results of his exploration to the president—and beyond him, to the people of America and of the world—would require a similar level of dedication. What he knew, and what he and Clark had recorded in their journals, papers, and maps, was invaluable—but of no value at all unless it was disseminated.
Lewis had gotten started on the process of making what he had learned available to the president and the public back at Fort Mandan, in the winter of 1804–5, with his reports to Jefferson on his discoveries during the first leg of his voyage. The president had ordered those reports and Clark’s map published; they were widely copied and distributed. All across America, and in Britain and Europe as well, adventuresome young men and older entrepreneurs were making plans to go west—indeed, some had already started. But the real news was still to come.
Even before finishing the voyage, Lewis got started on his task of informing the public and the scientists of what he had found. As his canoe descended the last miles to St. Louis, he began writing a first draft of his report to the president.
•
Lewis opened his report by announcing his safe arrival in St. Louis, along with “our papers and baggage.” Those words assured Jefferson that the expedition had brought back its scientific discoveries.
The second sentence went to the heart of the matter, as far as Jefferson was concerned: “In obedience to your orders we have penitrated the Continent of North America to the Pacific Ocean, and sufficiently explored the interior of the country to affirm with confidence that we have discovered the most practicable rout which does exist across the continent by means of the navigable branches of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers.”
In the long paragraph that followed, Lewis was as positive about what he had found as reality allowed him to be. He said the navigation of the Missouri was “safe and good,” so too the Clearwater-Snake-Columbia system, at least down to The Dalles. But the passage by land from the Missouri to the Columbia’s waters was another matter altogether.
It was Lewis’s unhappy task to tell the president that his hope for an all-water route linking the Atlantic and Pacific was gone. So, even as he pulled into St. Louis in triumph, he carried the burden of knowing that the headline news to come out of the expedition was bad. Never would he hide the truth—Jefferson was above all a man of facts—but if he felt a bit embarrassed by them, or defensive about them, if he went to great lengths to put the best possible face on what he was reporting, it was perhaps understandable.
In any case, Lewis was straightforward about the portage from the Missouri waters to the Columbia waters: it was a passage of 340 miles, 200 along a good road, the other 140 “the most formidable part of the tract . . . [over] tremendious mountains which for 60 mls. are covered with eternal snows.”
With those words, Lewis put an end to the search for the Northwest Passage.
After outlining the difficulties of the portage, he shifted to the positive. “We view this passage across the Continent,” he wrote, “as affording immence advantages to the fur trade.” He went on to describe in detail the plan for the American fur-trading empire in Upper Louisiana and Oregon that he had been working on in his mind ever since he crossed the Rocky Mountains.
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br /> It was a breathtaking proposal, continent-wide in scope. The scheme involved nothing less than gathering all the furs collected in the whole of the Northwest, from the northern reaches of the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, and transporting them to the mouth of the Columbia, whence they could be shipped to the Canton market to be exchanged for goods from the Orient.
The plan was based on the Shoshone and Nez Percé horse herds. The mountains could be passed, Lewis told Jefferson, from late June to the end of September, “and the cheep rate at which horses are to be obtained . . . reduces the expences of transportation over this portage to a mere trifle.”
The British could be cut out of the trade almost entirely, because American furs could be sent direct to the great Canton market, whereas British mercantile laws required that all furs from the British Empire must be shipped first of all to London before being sent on to their market.1 Americans could cut the distance and cost, their furs would arrive earlier and be in better condition and thus command a premium price, and British import and export duties, as well as profits for the East India Company, could be avoided.I
The route Lewis proposed was so far superior to the present one—from the Canadian west to Montreal and down the St. Lawrence and across the Atlantic to London, then on around Africa to the Orient—that Lewis thought it possible the North West Company would want to ship their furs via the Columbia.
In making this report, Lewis was attempting to create government policy. And as an adviser, he did not hesitate to reverse Jefferson’s original idea, that furs from the Pacific Coast be sent to the Missouri, then brought on down to St. Louis.
To the objection that in Lewis’s scheme the flow of goods from Canton to the mouth of the Columbia, over the mountains, down the Missouri to St. Louis, then up the Ohio and over the Appalachians, and finally down the Potomac to market, was too long and difficult for imports from the Orient, Lewis had a reply. “Many articles not bulky [or] brittle nor of a very perishable nature may be conveyed to the United States by this rout with more facility and at less expense” than by going around the Cape of Good Hope.
The exchange of furs for oriental goods could take place at a great trade fair to be held each year in July at the Nez Percé camp. And there would have to be a permanent trading establishment set up at the mouth of the Columbia.
•
Lewis obviously knew the intricacies of the fur trade, and about business practices, costs, profits, requirements. He also knew his countrymen. Thus he opened the third paragraph of his report to Jefferson with a sentence that became the most frequently quoted one he ever wrote: “The Missouri and all it’s branches from the Cheyenne upwards abound more in beaver and Common Otter, than any other streams on earth, particularly that proportion of them lying within the Rocky Mountains.”2 It was certain to set off a rush for the mountains.
Then he wrote a paragraph that reached considerably in its promises of what might be. “If the government will only aid, even in a very limited manner, the enterprize of her Citizens,” he wrote, “I am fully convinced that we shall shortly derive the benifits of a most lucrative trade from this source, and that in the course of ten or twelve years a tour across the Continent by the rout mentioned will be undertaken by individuals with as little concern as a voyage across the Atlantic is at present.”
It would take government action, at considerable expense to the public. It would take an expanded army, acting aggressively against hostile Indians on the Missouri. Neither proposition was part of Jefferson’s overall philosophical position on the role of government. Never mind. Neither was the purchase of Louisiana. Whatever his philosophical musings, Jefferson was a man of the West, just as the Republican Party was a party of the West. Whenever the Constitution was silent, Jefferson, when in power, was willing to abandon a strict construction of the document in order to promote western expansion. His vision of the United States stretched from sea to sea—and more than any other individual, he made that happen.
That Lewis envisioned himself as a part of this vast enterprise he made clear over the next two years by his actions. Having discovered the American West, he wanted to be in on the first wave of Americans to exploit it. He knew that he would achieve worldwide fame after the president received his report; now he wanted riches. And there was no faster way to make a big profit on a small investment in the first decade of the nineteenth century than the fur trade to the Orient.
On his first day back in St. Louis, Captain Lewis got started on a career as both a lobbyist and publicist for, and a participant in, the development of the empire. He polished his report for the president and wrote another long letter for the newspapers. In both he called for “the earliest attention of our government.” The immediate need, he told Jefferson, was to deal with “the unfriendly dispositions” of the Sioux, Blackfeet, and other tribes along the Missouri.
•
In the next section, Lewis apologized to Jefferson for not sending a report to him from the falls of the Missouri, as he had promised. He knew Jefferson had been terribly worried about him and the expedition—indeed, he knew that most Americans had given up on them—so he really did owe an explanation. He said he and Clark had “conceived it inexpedient to reduce the party” by sending back two soldiers with a report, “lest by doing so we should lessen the ardor of those who remained and thus hazard the fate of the expedition. [We decided that it was] better to let the government as well as our friends for a moment feel some anxiety for our fate than to wrisk so much.” The subsequent difficulties the expedition encountered in crossing the Rockies, descending to the Pacific, and returning to St. Louis “proved the justice of our dicision, for we have more than once owed our lives and the fate of the expedition to our number which consisted of 31 men.”
He next gave an inventory of the furs he was bringing back, along with the “pretty extensive collection of plants” and nine new Indian vocabularies. In addition, he had Big White with him, and the Mandan chief was “in good health and sperits, and very anxioius to proceede.” Lewis knew his man. He gave no more details, no elaboration, counting on Jefferson to be greatly excited by the unadorned paragraph.
But this was a big mistake. He would have been wiser to write two or three pages on his discoveries. As it was, the early accounts available to readers said little or nothing about the first American scientific survey on a continental scale. As far as contemporaries could tell, the only contributions to knowledge made by the expedition were in the field of geography.
Lewis knew the value of what he had found, but he apparently felt it would be better to await the publication of his discoveries in book form (he was already planning to publish in three volumes, with the third containing the scientific material). He knew he needed help; before giving any publicity to the scientific studies, he wanted to get to Philadelphia, where he could turn over his raw materials to professionals, who in turn would prepare them for publication.
He was certain to get a warm welcome in Philadelphia, where there were so many leading scholars who had helped him prepare for the expedition and would be eager to hear his account of how this pill or that sextant had worked out. Also, Jefferson had arranged for Lewis’s election to the American Philosophical Society, an incredibly prestigious honor.II Jefferson, full of pride in Lewis, described him as “a valuable member of our fraternity, [just returned] from a journey of uncommon length & peril.” The president promised that Lewis would soon join the members to give them an account “of the geography & natural history of our country, from the Missisippi to the Pacific.”3
That had to have been the most welcome announcement of a lecture ever received by the Philadelphia scientists. They were about to have two-thirds of a continent, previously almost unknown, revealed to them. They would get the first account of the discoveries and have entirely new paths of research to follow. These were scholars who had spent their lives discovering and describing the country, men who lived by facts who had been forced to rely on conjectur
e in delineating the mountains and rivers of the West. There was so much to learn about, examine, study, draw. Not since Columbus and Cook had there been so much that was new.
Given the time it would take to make the journals available to the public, however, Lewis’s decision to postpone publishing his discoveries ran the risk of exposing the expedition to ridicule as little more than an adventure. And, indeed, that was done. Federalists, John Quincy Adams among them, expressed their scorn. Adams was not ready to accept the president’s word for it that important discoveries had been made. “Mr. Jefferson tells large stories,” he wrote in his diary on one occasion after dinner in the President’s House. On another, he recorded that Jefferson had told him that once, for six weeks in Paris, the temperature never went above the zero mark Fahrenheit; Adams commented, “He knows better than all this; but he loves to excite wonder.”4
Ridiculing the expedition became a tradition with the Federalists and their progeny. Nine decades later, Adams’s grandson Henry Adams wrote a classic history of the Jefferson administration in which he scarcely found room for the expedition. He characterized it as “creditable to American energy and enterprise,” but dismissed it as adding “little to the stock of science or wealth. . . . The crossing of the continent was a great feat, but was nothing more.” The real news from the period 1804–6, Adams wrote, wasn’t Lewis struggling against the current but Robert Fulton beginning to construct the hull of his new steamboat.III, 5
East versus West, technology versus human endeavor, partisanship versus patriotism. These are permanent themes in American politics. Lewis had been private secretary to the president, a Washington insider. He should have protected Jefferson, and his expedition, by providing information that could build anticipation and justify the costs.
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