The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West

by Andrew R. Graybill

  The handover that day was the culmination of momentous events on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1801, as first consul, Napoleon had dispatched an enormous military expedition to quell a slave uprising on the island of Saint-Domingue, a French outpost in the Caribbean (now the independent nation of Haiti). Yet after two years of brutal fighting and the loss of 24,000 troops, including his own brother-in-law, who like so many other Frenchmen had succumbed to yellow fever, Napoleon tired of the effort altogether and uttered famously in January 1803, “Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies.”2

  Thomas Jefferson, then in his first term as U.S. president, was only too pleased to assist Napoleon in liquidating his overseas possessions. As it happened, in 1801 American emissaries had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate the French sale of New Orleans, long coveted for its strategic position near the mouth of the Mississippi River and its easy access to the Gulf of Mexico. Jefferson’s officials were thus delighted when in April 1803 Napoleon offered far more, a huge domain stretching deep into the continent’s interior, containing all or parts of fifteen future U.S. states. And the asking price of $15 million was a veritable bargain, working out to about three cents per acre.

  If the Louisiana Purchase was the greatest achievement of Jefferson’s presidency, it was also its most controversial, given the dubious constitutional authority permitting such a transaction. Jefferson forged ahead, however, spurred by his aspiration to make the United States an “empire of liberty,” a dream that hinged upon the acquisition of sufficient space to guarantee that it remained an agrarian nation populated by yeoman farmers, whom Jefferson considered “the chosen people of God.” With the Louisiana Purchase, the president believed he had acquired enough land for hundreds of generations of American settlers and, at the same time, dealt a crucial blow to European imperial ambitions in North America.3

  As reflected by the sobs—many of them not even muffled—that Lassaut heard on that bright December morning in New Orleans, not everyone shared Jefferson’s enthusiasm for the American acquisition. And yet while the French were despondent, members of a much larger group—the native peoples of the territory—remained uninformed, though presumably most of them would have looked upon the transfer with scorn or amusement rather than concern. After all, it was one thing to claim land but quite another to possess it, as countless Europeans had discovered during their imperial misadventures in North America. The Indians would have their own say about these matters.

  In time the new owners of the Louisiana Territory came to understand that few groups were more stubbornly resistant to American expansion than the Blackfeet, who lived at the opposite extreme of the Mississippi-Missouri river system, some 3,700 miles upstream from New Orleans. By the early nineteenth century, they—and not the French or the Americans—were in full control of the northwestern Plains, jealously guarding against the incursions of all outsiders, native, white, or otherwise.

  Nevertheless, even as the tricolore came down in the Place d’Armes in the waning days of 1803, plans were already underway in Washington, D.C., to explore and eventually absorb this infinite wilderness, which, in Jefferson’s eyes, held the promise of perpetual renewal for the nascent United States. In short order, Americans would make their way across the continent and enter the orbit of the Blackfeet, first as a mere trickle and later as a flood. This encounter between two disparate peoples, by turns violent and cooperative, would shape the history of the West and the larger nation that claimed it.

  AT THE TIME of the Louisiana Purchase, St. Louis was a modest but ambitious village of about one thousand residents. Established in 1764 by a New Orleans trader named Pierre Laclède Liguest, the site on the west bank of the Mississippi had much to recommend it, including its position on a high bluff and especially its nearness to the confluence of the Missouri River, just ten miles upstream. Though attracting a diverse group of travelers and traders from its earliest days, the settlement retained its French character well into the nineteenth century, in language, religion, and especially architecture, marked by the white lime application disguising the “meanness” of its many buildings fashioned from mud or stone.4 For all of its Old World attributes, however, St. Louis took on singular importance for the young American republic when it served as the “gateway to the West” for Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery, which shoved off from its environs on 14 May 1804, bound for the Pacific Ocean.

  The expedition consisted of approximately three dozen men packed into a keelboat and two pirogues (modest, flat-bottomed craft agile in shallow waters), led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. While the two commanders acted as equals, it was the younger Lewis who was officially in charge. Born in 1774 in Albemarle County, Virginia, the mercurial Lewis had spent most of his life as a soldier, in the process gaining valuable experience with frontier conditions and native peoples. He was thus an obvious choice for Thomas Jefferson, who knew him well, having appointed him as his private secretary in 1801 shortly after assuming the presidency. Lewis in turn tapped another Virginian, the redheaded William Clark, whom he had met in the military.5

  If small in size, the Corps of Discovery was invested with enormous responsibility: namely, to chart the lands Jefferson had bought from Napoleon while binding them to the United States, safe from any imperial designs entertained by the Spanish (to the south) or the British (to the north). To that end, Lewis and Clark sought to make contact with the many indigenous peoples of the region, hoping to win their loyalty on behalf of the fledgling nation to the east. With such diplomacy in mind, the expedition lugged along a variety of gift items: clothes and blankets, guns and ammunition, liquor and tobacco, and, most memorable of all, Indian peace medals specially produced by the U.S. Mint.

  Given the importance of establishing amicable relations with the native peoples of the trans-Missouri West, it is not surprising that encounters with Indians receive extensive treatment in the detailed journals kept by Lewis and Clark and stand out as some of the most enduring episodes of the journey. Take, for instance, the five months the expedition spent among the Mandans in present-day North Dakota during the hyperborean winter of 1804–05. Beyond spreading word of U.S. sovereignty and promoting peace among rival tribes of the area, the corps enlisted there the French-Canadian interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau and his young Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, who became one of the most famous Indians in American history.6

  Yet for all the indigenous peoples they contacted during their epic voyage, there was one tribe the Corps of Discovery worked strenuously to avoid: the Siksikau, as they called themselves, a term meaning “black foot” or “black feet,” which probably referred to their moccasins, because they were either painted black or discolored by the prairie fires that frequently swept the Plains. Though divided into three groups who remained politically distinct—the Siksikas proper (or Blackfoot), the Kainahs (or Bloods), also known as the “many chiefs,” and the Piegans (or Pikunis), meaning “scabby robes”—all members of the Blackfoot Confederacy spoke one language, shared common customs, and faced off against the same adversaries. Together, they controlled a vast swath of territory east of the Rocky Mountains, stretching south from the Saskatchewan River in Canada all the way to the Teton Range, in what is now northwestern Wyoming. And they were reflexively hostile to interlopers, whom they perceived as a threat to both their horse herds and their access to buffalo.7

  The expedition avoided the Blackfeet on the outbound portion of its trip across present-day Montana during the summer of 1805. The Americans were not so fortunate the next year when they traversed the same area on the way home, for Lewis had an accidental run-in with a small group of Piegans just south of the forty-ninth parallel, which now marks the U.S.–Canada border. That meeting sparked the only episode of lethal native-white violence during the entire twenty-eight-month odyssey of the Corps of Discovery, but its impact set an ominous tone for U.S.-Blackfeet relations for decades to come.

  IN THE SMALL CAMP on the banks of the Two Medicine River, 26 July 1806 dawned
cloudy. Captain Meriwether Lewis had hoped to use his sextant that morning to fix the longitude, but overcast skies and intermittent rain made such work impossible. Instead, he and his small group moved on from “Camp Disappointment,” as Lewis ruefully named the site. As they traveled in a southeasterly course down the valley of the Two Medicine, the mood of Lewis brightened a bit as he took note of a species of cottonwood tree he had never before glimpsed on the Missouri River or its tributaries. But he did not pause for long; Lewis was homeward bound, and he was eager to return to the welcoming confines of St. Louis before summer turned into fall, no mean feat given that the city—and thus the finish line for the Corps of Discovery—lay 2,300 miles downriver.

  Lewis was on his own that day, save for his three companions: George Drouillard, a half-French, half-Shawnee interpreter widely regarded as the best hunter on the expedition; and the brothers Joseph and Reuben Field, dependable Virginians who had been among the earliest enlistees in the Corps of Discovery. Three weeks earlier, Lewis and his co-captain, William Clark, had divided their command in order to explore uncharted areas they had passed through the year before. Clark took his group south to investigate the Yellowstone River, while Lewis and nine men headed in the opposite direction to scout the headwaters of the Marias.

  Since then, Lewis had suffered one frustration after another, including the loss of several horses to Indian thieves. In order to make better time, he sent six of his men downriver and led Drouillard and the Field brothers northwest. But more irritations awaited him: the failed astronomical readings and especially his discovery that the Marias, which he had named for his cousin Maria Wood, did not extend as far north as he had hoped. This meant less territory that he could claim on Jefferson’s behalf as part of the Louisiana Purchase.

  Later on that summer afternoon, Lewis’s displeasure gave way to apprehension. Cresting a small hill, he spotted a herd of thirty ponies about a mile away, tended by eight Indians. Worried that flight might signal weakness and perhaps spur the natives to attack, Lewis instead rode out to meet them. At first, he took the Indians to be Hidatsas, perhaps because three days earlier Drouillard had discovered a recently abandoned Indian camp that Lewis supposed to have belonged to members of that tribe. In fact, the Indians Lewis had stumbled upon were Piegans. His fear ebbed a bit when the Indians drew close, for he noticed that they were not adult men but rather boys in their early teens. As it happened, the Piegans were probably just as surprised by this chance encounter, although they may have regarded it as some sort of supernatural test on their road to becoming warriors.

  As he had done on other such occasions, Lewis offered gifts to the Indians, including an American flag, a handkerchief, and a peace medal. Communicating in the sign language common on the Plains, he invited the Piegans to camp with them that night. Together, the group rode down a steep bluff and found a good spot close to the river. Lewis and Drouillard accepted the Piegans’ invitation to share one of their teepees, while the Field brothers bedded down just outside near the fire. With Drouillard’s help, Lewis conversed with the Indians late into the evening, and he shared his pipe and tobacco with them. In the course of their discussion, Lewis learned that the Indians traded with the British Hudson’s Bay Company at a post on the Saskatchewan, where they had acquired guns, ammunition, and liquor in exchange for animal skins. In turn, Lewis explained that he had come to establish relations with all the Indians of the region, and to facilitate peace among them. Despite their apparent friendliness, Lewis remained uneasy about the presence of the natives, and so took the first watch. At around eleven-thirty, with the Indians fast asleep, he retired.

  Lewis awoke the next morning to a commotion that confirmed his worst premonitions. At dawn one of the Piegans attempted to steal the rifles of the Field brothers, who darted off after the thief. When they caught up with the boy, who was known as Side Hill Calf, Reuben stabbed him in the heart with a knife; the injured youth lurched forward a few steps before falling dead. Thwarted in their bid to capture the Americans’ firearms, the Piegans then turned their attention to the white men’s horses. Lewis grabbed his rifle and pursued two of the Indians; when one of them turned to attack, Lewis shot the boy in the stomach. Though fatally wounded, the young man raised himself onto one elbow and snapped off a bullet, narrowly missing Lewis’s head. Having seen two of their number killed, the six remaining Indians rode away. For their part, the Americans quickly struck the campsite and gathered up their own belongings as well as those of the Indians, although Lewis “left the medal about the neck of the dead man [Side Hill Calf] that they might be informed who we were.”8

  The surviving Piegans carried word of the clash back to their friends and relatives, who were camped in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The Indians hastily assembled a war party that chased the Americans, but to no avail, given that Lewis enjoyed a head start of more than a day. In teepees throughout Blackfeet country that fall and winter, the skirmish was no doubt a central topic of conversation, and in time the story of the Two Medicine fight became a part of tribal lore, carrying the unmistakable lesson that white men were brutal and duplicitous.9

  Surely the tale was heard by Coth-co-co-na sometime in the early 1830s, as it was by most Blackfeet children born during the early nineteenth century. By that time, however, the relationship between the white race and the red had undergone a total metamorphosis.

  IN THEIR OWN ACCOUNT of that portentous 1806 meeting with the Corps of Discovery, Piegans of today, more than two centuries later, describe it as a collision of “two worlds at Two Medicine.” There is much truth in that telling, for it captures the yawning gulf between the natives and the newcomers. By another metric, however, the Blackfeet and the Americans were in fact quite similar: both belonged to dynamic, expansive societies that at the start of the nineteenth century were brimming with ambition and confidence. Little wonder, then, that their early interactions generated such friction.

  Beginning around 1800 the fledgling United States began a transformation that remade it as a nascent industrial power, and frontier absorption served as a catalyst for these developments.10 For more than a century Americans had pushed outward from their beachheads on the Atlantic coast in search of fertile territory, but that process slowed considerably at the end of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) when the British retarded colonial migration beyond the crest of the Appalachian Mountains, hoping that the careful management of intending settlers would curb whites’ encroachment on Indian lands. Some colonists ignored these prohibitions altogether, including Daniel Boone, who famously led a group of pioneers through the Cumberland Gap and into the new backcountry of present-day Kentucky in March 1775, one month before the American Revolution erupted at Lexington and Concord.11

  In the wake of the British defeat, citizens of the new republic clamored for their government to reverse the English policy and throw open the Ohio Valley, where land grants had been promised to veterans in lieu of payment for their military service during the revolution. Bowing to these pressures, Congress in 1784 tasked one of its members, the thirty-one-year-old Thomas Jefferson, with the responsibility of developing a plan for the survey and settlement of the region. The brilliant Virginian proposed a grid system of adjacent townships, which would ensure orderly and egalitarian distribution of the public lands; three years later, Congress ratified these guidelines as the Northwest Ordinance. This legislation provided the framework for integrating territory acquired from the region’s native peoples through war or diplomacy, a process that gained particular momentum in the aftermath of the U.S. victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, which secured most of contemporary southern Ohio for the Americans.

  Thus unleashed, whites poured across the Ohio River into the Northwest Territory (present-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and part of what is now Minnesota). Between 1790 and 1820 the population of this “first American West” mushroomed from ten thousand residents to more than two million, equal to one-fifth of the na
tion’s population. It was this migration, of course, that motivated Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana, given his concerns about sufficient farmland for future generations.

  To be sure, the Indians of the region were not about to surrender their patrimony to the invaders, and they found a strange bedfellow in Great Britain. Though defeated by the Americans in 1783, the British retained some of their trading establishments and military posts in the Ohio Valley, from which they now provisioned native insurgents. The Northwest was thus roiled intermittently by Indian-white violence for much of the next two decades, helping to precipitate the War of 1812, between England and the United States.12 The American conquest of the territory was achieved only in October 1813 at the Battle of the Thames in Canada, when General William Henry Harrison—described by one biographer as “Mr. Jefferson’s Hammer”—crushed a British force and its Indian allies, commanded by the famed Shawnee military leader Tecumseh. Harrison rode his reputation as an Indian fighter all the way to the White House in 1840, though “Tippecanoe” died just one month into his term.13

  It would be hard to overstate the importance of the incorporation of the Northwest to the growth of the United States during the early republic. The Ohio River was a pivotal east–west waterway, stretching from western Pennsylvania to the border between Illinois and Missouri, where it met the Mississippi River. Farmers in the trans-Appalachian West now had a perfect route for sending their harvests of corn and wheat downriver to New Orleans. But Americans were not content to settle for the natural routes of passage offered by mere geography; they therefore embarked on what some historians have called a “transportation revolution,” which saw the frenzied construction of roads and railways as well as the advent of the steamboat, which facilitated upriver travel.14