Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  In select spots, however, nature and the cleverness of those humans combined to sustain larger communities. Along the Columbia River and its tributaries, the spawning salmon made the fishing peoples rich and powerful. A thousand miles to the southeast, where the Rio Grande descends from the Rocky Mountains en route to the southern desert, communities of farmers corralled the runoff from the mountains to irrigate crops of corn and beans and squash. They built small cities of stone and dried mud—nothing like the grand cities of Mexico and Peru, but notable for the American West. And on the Great Plains, enormous herds of bison, or buffalo, provided the same kind of concentrated food source that salmon did in the Northwest. The buffalo weren’t as helpful as the salmon in gathering for their own slaughter; the peoples of the Great Plains had to chase the buffalo, much as their Siberian and Beringian ancestors had chased deer and woolly mammoths to America in the first place. The moving limited the size of the Plains bands and tribes, but the resource was reliable and their existence relatively secure.

  But only relatively secure. The fat living of the favored peoples drew the attention of hungrier sorts. Competition developed for control of the hunting and fishing grounds and the corn and bean fields. Nothing like the wars of Europe and Asia—lasting years or decades and involving tens of thousands of soldiers—occurred in the American West; even the most favored tribes lacked the numbers and resources for such hostilities. But the wars of the West could be sharply violent. A tribe seeking to displace the possessor of a bountiful ground might wipe out an entire village and move in. Warring tribes carried off women and children to boost their own populations, sometimes enslaving the captives, sometimes incorporating them into the tribes.

  Successful tribes grew stronger; unsuccessful ones diminished and occasionally disappeared. Fragments of failing tribes might band together to create a new tribe, or they might apply to join a successful one. The tribes of the West lacked writing, and such records as recalled the histories of tribes were generally oral, handed down from generation to generation. But in a few places physical remains told of earlier times and peoples. The Pueblo peoples of the upper Rio Grande lived among ruins left by predecessors they called the Anasazi, who had vanished for reasons unknown. The ghosts of the Anasazi whispered among the ruins, but what they said the Pueblos couldn’t quite grasp.

  AT THE HEART OF NORTH AMERICA WAS THE GREATEST RIVER of the continent, whose tributaries drained most of what would become the United States. The Mississippi took its name from an Ojibwa phrase for “great river,” and it had three main branches. The Ohio River originated in the mountains of the East and flowed west. The Mississippi proper rose in the North and ran south. The Missouri began in the highlands of the West and flowed east. Especially in those days before convenient and cheap land travel—and long before air travel—the Mississippi held the key to the future of much of the continent.

  The victory of the United States in the Revolutionary War delivered the eastern half of the Mississippi basin to the new nation. The western half, originally claimed by France, had been transferred to Spain to keep it out of British control. Until this point the name Louisiana had applied to the whole Mississippi watershed; henceforward it meant just the western half of the region. Yet this was still a mighty realm, larger than modern Mexico.

  And now it was Spanish. Or rather, its title was Spanish: in nomenclature—Louisiane became Luisiana—and in international law. Its people were French, African and Native American. The French merchants and planters, the African and African American slaves, and the Native Americans belonging to scores of different tribes paid little attention to the change of management. Most likely a majority of the people who lived within the boundaries of Louisiana—the Mississippi in the east, the crest of the Rocky Mountains in the west, the Red River Valley of Texas in the south, the Milk River basin of Canada in the north—never knew their home had changed hands. French authority had been notional beyond New Orleans, the city near the mouth of the Mississippi, and in a few other populated spots. Spanish authority, stretched painfully thin in New Spain, was vaguer still.

  Yet it was sufficient to rankle the Americans who depended on the Mississippi for their livelihood. In the days before canals and railroads, nearly everything grown, mined or manufactured in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys funneled down to New Orleans, where it was gathered and loaded onto ocean-going ships bound for the American East Coast, the West Indies and Europe. Whoever controlled New Orleans controlled the fate of all those American farmers, miners and manufacturers. In the negotiations at the end of the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Franklin insisted on the importance of the Mississippi to America’s future. “I would rather agree with them to buy at a great price the whole of their right on the Mississippi than sell a drop of its waters,” Franklin said, referring to the Spanish. “A neighbor might as well ask me to sell my street door.”

  Franklin and America got a partial right to the Mississippi. American territory included most of the eastern bank of the Mississippi, conferring navigation rights on that stretch of the river. But Spain kept Florida, whose panhandle then ran all the way to the Mississippi and Spanish Louisiana. Thus the Spanish controlled both banks of the river near its mouth, and hence the river itself. Franklin and other American diplomats negotiated for navigation rights on the lower river, and for the right of deposit at New Orleans—the right to use the docks and warehouses of the city without tariffs—but they were only inconsistently successful. In 1795 Spain signed a treaty with the United States securing the right of navigation and deposit to American shippers, but in 1798 the Spanish revoked the treaty and the right. Americans in the Ohio Valley hated the “dons,” as they called the Spanish; more than a few spoke of dispossessing them forcibly of Florida, Louisiana and perhaps Mexico. At the very least, the American government must restore and guarantee the free passage of the Mississippi and the right of deposit at New Orleans.

  The problem became Thomas Jefferson’s in 1801, upon the Virginian’s inauguration as president. Jefferson had been looking west for decades. He saw the country’s population expanding, and he judged that America’s territory must expand, too, lest America become as crowded and conflict-prone as Europe. Jefferson understood the dissatisfaction of the Ohioans and Kentuckians and Tennesseans; he didn’t doubt that if the American government didn’t resolve their Mississippi River concerns, they might take matters into their own aggressive hands.

  Once in the White House, Jefferson started modestly, by seeking to purchase New Orleans. This would guarantee the right of deposit and navigation. He discovered that France, under Napoleon Bonaparte, had reacquired Louisiana from Spain, by a treaty that was supposed to be secret but didn’t stay so for long. Jefferson sent envoys to Paris with authority to spend $10 million for New Orleans.

  Napoleon answered with a breathtaking counterproposal. Would the Americans care to purchase all of Louisiana? Napoleon had dreamed of re-creating France’s New World empire, but his dream had foundered in Haiti, where a slave revolt and yellow fever had exacted a frightful toll on French troops. Napoleon proposed to cut his losses and liquidate his western holdings: the Americans could have Louisiana for ready cash.

  The offer flummoxed Jefferson. The president prided himself on his strict construction of the Constitution, and the Constitution said nothing about acquiring new territory. Where the charter was silent, Jefferson had always said, government mustn’t venture. He had been willing to stretch his philosophy to accommodate the purchase of New Orleans. But the purchase of all of Louisiana? His philosophy would be in tatters.

  Yet Napoleon was offering the deal of a lifetime. The acquisition of Louisiana would double the size of the United States, ensuring a handsome patrimony for generations of American farmers. And the mercurial Napoleon might change his mind. He might resurrect his plans for a French American empire, or return Louisiana to the Spanish, strengthening New Spain and forestalling future American expansion.

  Jefferson couldn’t say no. He s
wallowed his scruples and signed an agreement promising France $15 million for Louisiana. Jefferson’s Federalist opponents in Congress, who had branded his small-government thinking naive when they were in power, had a moment’s enjoyment at Jefferson’s expense before falling into line. Not even for political benefit could they spurn the handsomest bargain their country was ever likely to see.

  2

  THE CORPS OF DISCOVERY

  WHAT, EXACTLY, THE BARGAIN CONSISTED OF REMAINED to be determined. The purchase of Louisiana created the American West as it would be understood for the next century. America’s earlier West, between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, was suddenly annexed to the East in the minds of forward-thinking Americans. To be sure, many Bostonians still considered Ohio to lie at the western edge of America, if not of the earth. Eastern provincialism would persist into the twenty-first century. But Jefferson’s bargain, viewed broadly, established a new template for American geography. The country now had two halves, an East and a West, with the Mississippi providing both the line of division and the seam tying the halves together.

  Only a comparative handful of Americans—traders working out of St. Louis, mostly—had penetrated much beyond the Mississippi into the new West. Otherwise Louisiana was terra incognita to nearly all but the Indians who called it home. Jefferson set about filling in the blank space on the map between the great river and the crest of the Rocky Mountains. In doing so he diverged still further from the small-government philosophy that had carried him to office, and established an enduring principle of Western history. Development of the trans-Mississippi West would be a top-down affair driven by the federal government. East of the Mississippi, individuals and states had taken the lead in promoting settlement and development. State claims to territories east of the Mississippi antedated the creation of the federal government, which subsequently gave its blessing to the creation of new states but otherwise kept to the rear. West of the river there were no states or state claims; all the land was federal land. The Louisiana Purchase provided Jefferson a tabula rasa on which to write the federal will. As he did so, and as subsequent presidents and Congresses followed suit, they dramatically expanded federal powers. The American West owed its existence—as an American West—to the federal government. And the federal government owed much of the legitimacy and authority it assumed during the nineteenth century to the American West.

  As a first step toward promoting Western development—beyond the huge step of the Louisiana Purchase itself—Jefferson persuaded Congress to support expeditions of scientific and geographic discovery into the West. The precedent Jefferson established here, of putting the federal government in the business of sponsoring scientific research and exploration, would far transcend the West and long outlast the nineteenth century; at the two-thirds mark of the twentieth century it would transport Americans to the moon. Congress gave Jefferson money for four expeditions. One would ascend the Red River, another the Ouachita, a third the Arkansas and the last the Missouri. The Missouri was the largest of the tributaries to the Mississippi, and it deserved the biggest expedition.

  The Missouri expedition would have an additional purpose. From the headwaters of the Missouri its members would cross the mountains to the Columbia River and trace that stream to the Pacific. The region the Columbia traversed, called Oregon after an old name for the river, wasn’t part of Louisiana. The United States had no legal title to it. But an American merchant captain, Robert Gray, in 1792 had been the first non-Indian to recognize and enter the mouth of the river, which he named for his ship, the Columbia Rediviva. Gray’s feat gave the United States at least as solid a claim to Oregon as those put forward by Britain and Spain, the pushiest rivals, and Jefferson intended to improve the American claim by an exploration of the Columbia from headwaters to mouth. Already the greatest expansionist in American history—a distinction he would never lose—the mild-mannered Virginian audaciously thrust his young republic into the game of empires.

  For agent he chose a man he knew well. Meriwether Lewis was the son of two of Jefferson’s neighbors in Albemarle County, Virginia. His father had died when Meriwether was a boy, and his mother and stepfather took him to Georgia, where he learned the ways of the woods and streams. He returned to Virginia to be educated and eventually joined the Virginia militia. He transferred to the U.S. army, ascending to the rank of captain. Jefferson tapped him for a presidential aide, and he came to live in the White House. He and the president shared a passion for science and natural history; Jefferson saw in Lewis a younger, more active version of himself. As important as Jefferson was to the history of the American West, he never personally ventured farther west than western Virginia. Lewis would go where Jefferson did not.

  To aid Lewis, Jefferson selected William Clark, a much younger brother of Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark and himself a soldier. The choice was potentially problematic in that Lewis had served under Clark in the army; to minimize the awkwardness, Lewis treated Clark as co-commander, though Jefferson still accounted Lewis the leader and Congress insisted on paying Clark at a lower rate.

  The president made clear what he wanted from Lewis. “The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, and such principal stream of it as by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean—whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river—may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce,” he said. Getting more specific, Jefferson continued, “Beginning at the mouth of the Missouri, you will take observations of latitude and longitude at all remarkable points on the river, and especially at the mouth of rivers, at rapids, at islands, and other places and objects distinguished by such natural marks and characters of a durable kind as that they may with certainty be recognized hereafter.” Lewis and his corps should learn everything they could about the peoples of the West: “The names of the nations and their numbers; the extent and limits of their possessions; their relations with other tribes of nations; their language, traditions, monuments; their ordinary occupations in agriculture, fishing, hunting, war, arts and the implements for these; their food, clothing, and domestic accommodations; the diseases prevalent among them and the remedies they use; moral and physical circumstances which distinguish them from the tribes we know; peculiarities in their laws, customs and dispositions; and articles of commerce they may need or furnish and to what extent.”

  Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. These portraits were painted after the explorers became famous.

  Jefferson admonished Lewis to be diplomatic toward the Indians. “Treat them in the most friendly and conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit,” he said. “Allay all jealousies as to the object of your journey, satisfy them of its innocence.” The Americans came as explorers, not as colonizers; there should be no reason for the Indians to be hostile. Yet if they were, Lewis must be prepared. He should not shrink in the face of challenge. But neither should he endanger his men and the mission unduly. “We value too much the lives of citizens to offer them to probable destruction.” If proceeding became too dangerous, the expedition should turn back.

  Jefferson instructed Lewis that he should convey to the Indians that though the Americans came in peace, they also came of right. Louisiana was America’s by right of purchase, while Oregon would be America’s by right of first discovery. Jefferson supplied Lewis with several dozen silver medals showing the president in profile on the front and two hands clasped in friendship on the back. Lewis was to distribute these medals to the chiefs of the tribes he met, explaining that the United States was the sovereign of the West and the president the “great father.”

  Jefferson hoped for the best for Lewis but told him to prepare for the worst. “To provide, on the accident of your death, against anarchy, dispersion, and the consequent danger to your party, and total failure of the enterprise, you are hereby authorized, by any instrument signed and written in your own hand, to name the
person among them who shall succeed to the command on your decease,” Jefferson wrote.

  THE THREE DOZEN MEN OF THE CORPS OF DISCOVERY, AS THE Lewis and Clark expedition was formally styled, left St. Louis in May 1804. The going at first was slow; the expedition’s three boats—a large keelboat and two flat-bottomed pirogues—battled the current of the Missouri for six hundred miles to the mouth of the Platte. Sometimes the wind favored their course and they raised sails to catch it; the rest of the time they paddled, rowed, pulled and pushed against the muddy flow. Lewis often walked the banks collecting specimens; with the boats averaging less than a mile per hour, he didn’t worry about being left behind.

  Yet he did worry about not seeing any Indians. An important purpose of the expedition was to cultivate the native peoples, but the native peoples kept their distance, and Lewis didn’t know why. He saw evidence of Indian encampments and, hoping to make contact, sent scouts to track the Indians down and invite them to the corps’ camp. But he got no response. Only at sunset on August 2, near the mouth of the Platte, did a delegation of Otoes and Missouris arrive. “Captain Lewis and myself met those Indians and informed them we were glad to see them, and would speak to them tomorrow,” Clark wrote in the expedition journal. “Sent them some roasted meat, pork flour and meal. In return they sent us water melons. Every man on his guard and ready for anything.”

  Lewis and Clark inferred that these were chiefs of some sort but not the principal ones. “Made up a small present for those people in proportion to their consequence,” Clark wrote. The Indians accepted the gift in a friendly manner. Speeches were exchanged, through an interpreter. Lewis closed the parley with more gifts and a display of weaponry. “We gave them a canister of powder and a bottle of whiskey and delivered a few presents to the whole, after giving them a breech cloth, some paint, gartering and a medal to those we made chiefs, after Captain Lewis’s shooting the air gun”—a novel rifle of Austrian design—“which astonished those natives.”