But the holidays were only brief interludes. Hunters went out daily as the weather permitted. The captains carefully questioned Indians and traders about the tribes, their customs, where they might be found, and especially about the topographical features of the country ahead of them.
As the only people with medical knowledge, the two officers also kept busy treating their men and the Indians who came to them for help. It was not simply ointments and tonics. “I bleed the man with the Plurisy to day & Swet him,” Clark noted one day. “Capt. Lewis took off the Toes of one foot of the Boy who got frost bit Some time ago.”
Lewis also was called to help in a case he knew nothing about. On February 11, the younger of Toussaint Charbonneau’s wives, sixteen-year-old Sacagawea, was in labor with her first child. Lewis’s brief medical training had not prepared him for this. When a trader mentioned that a rattlesnake’s rattle never failed in such cases, Lewis found one among his specimens and gave it to him. Crumbling it into a cup of water, the trader gave it to Sacagawea - and shortly afterward, she gave birth to a healthy boy.
Sacagawea’s name was roughly translated as “bird woman.” Clark called her “Janey,” and her son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, was given the nickname “Pompy,” or “Little Pomp.” In the Shoshone language, “pomp” meant “first-born.”
The captain was fond of the child and his “little dancing boy” antics. Clark saw the presence of Sacagawea and her child as an indication of peace, signaling the expedition’s “friendly intentions, as no woman ever accompanies a war party of Indians in this quarter.”
On April 7, 1805, the expedition left its camp in the two pirogues and six canoes. Enlistments from the return party replaced Floyd and the two court-martialed men, and Charbonneau and his family had been added. The expedition numbered thirty-three, including Sacagawea’s two-month-old baby.
That day, the return party departed in the keelboat, carrying nine boxes of scientific specimens for President Jefferson, including a live prairie dog and four magpies. More valuable, however, were the reports and the detailed map the two captains had labored all winter to compile.
The specimens included eight plants and eight animals that were previously unknown in the east. Plants were dried and pressed; dead animals were measured, weighed, skinned, and dissected – their hides, horns, and skeletons preserved. Lewis was meticulous in describing all that he saw – assisted by several books on botany and natural science. He was also something of an artist, including in his journals detailed sketches of “curiosities,” from the curved beak of a California condor to the veined leaf of a vine maple.
The boxes packed for the president held sixty-seven samples of soil and minerals, and sixty plants in all. An inventory recorded by Lewis listed:
First box, skins of the male and female antelope, with their skeletons . . .
Horns and ears of the black tail, or mule deer . . .
Skeletons of the small, or burrowing wolf of the prairies, the skin having been lost by accident.
Second box, four buffalo robes and an ear of Mandan corn.
Third box, skins of the male and female antelope, with their skeletons.
Fourth box, specimens of earths, salts and minerals; specimens of plants . . . one tin box containing insects.
In a large trunk: one buffalo robe painted by a Mandan man representing a battle which was fought eight years [ago], by the Sioux and [Arikaras] against the Mandans and [Minnetarees].
One cage, containing four living magpies. One cage, containing a living burrowing squirrel of the prairies. One cage, containing one living hen of the praries.
One large pair of elk’s horns, connected by the frontal bone.
Lewis included in the shipment a letter to Jefferson in which he noted a change in the Corps of Discovery that had embarked on its mission the previous spring. “At this moment,” Lewis wrote, “every individual of the party are in good health and excellent sperits; zealously attached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed; not a whisper of discontent or murmur is to be heard among them; but all in unison act with the most perfect harmony. With such men I have every thing to hope, and but little to fear.”
While Clark took their fleet to the first camp, Lewis enjoyed a stroll on the bank and later wrote in his journal: “We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessells contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves, however . . . enterta[in]ing as I do, the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which had formed a da[r]ling project of mine for the last ten years, I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life.”
On April 9, Clark noted that flowers were blooming and that mosquitoes were out and troublesome. The mosquitoes were a common complaint in the explorers’ journals. Some were as big as houseflies, the men contended; they were “so numerous,” Lewis wrote, “that we frequently get them in our throats as we breathe.” Lewis had had the foresight to supply the expedition with mosquito netting, which offered protection at night, and during the day, the men covered themselves with bear grease as a repellant. The insects were just as bothersome to the non-human members of the party – swarming around two horses and Seaman.
Day followed day uneventfully. Then, on April 13, a sudden squall struck the white pirogue. The boat heeled over, and Charbonneau, at the helm, panicked and turned it broadside to the wind, almost capsizing it. Charbonneau could not swim; Lewis called him “perhaps the most timid waterman in the world.” On Lewis’s orders, Drouillard took the helm. Charbonneau’s actions not only jeopardized records, medicine, and trade goods, but also the lives of several men, Sacagawea, and her baby. It would not be the last time Charbonneau’s ineptness would cause trouble.
On April 26, the expedition reached the wide mouth of the Yellowstone River, and Captain Lewis and Private Joseph Field – who with his brother, Reuben, was part of the core “nine young men from Virginia” - spent the day exploring the area. Field encountered a big-horn sheep on the riverbank and brought back horns. They saw bald eagles, too, nesting in the cottonwood trees, and shot one. Sergeant John Ordway plucked the feathers from the dead eagle, and fashioned a quill to write in his journal. There were so many beaver that the smacking of their tails on the water kept Captain Clark up at night.
The party camped close to the junction of the two great rivers, near the site of two future forts – Fort Union and Fort Buford – on what would later be the border of North Dakota and Montana. To add to the pleasure, the captains handed out a liquor ration to each man. “This soon produced the fiddle, and they spent the evening with much hilarity, singing & dancing, and seemed as perfectly to forget their past toils, as they appeared regardless of those to come,” Lewis noted in his diary.
Shortly after, they crossed into Montana, and three days later met their first grizzly bears - two at once. Lewis and another man fired. One wounded animal fled; the other chased Lewis but was so badly hurt that the captain was able to reload and kill the animal. “In the hands of skillfull riflemen they are by no means as formidable or dangerous as they have been represented,” he boasted. He would later learn how lucky they had been.
A cold snap in early May froze the water on the oars. Clark noted “a verry extraodernarey climate, to behold the trees Green & flowers spred on the plain, & Snow an inch deep.” They were now in territory no European had ever seen, and they were wary of hostile natives. Although they constantly passed deserted Indian hunting camps, they encountered no one.
On May 5, Clark and Drouillard killed a grizzly bear. “It was a most tremendious looking anamal,” wrote Lewis, measuring more than eight and a half feet from the tip of its nose to its hind feet. He called it “a monster.” Clark estimated that it weighed 500 pounds, but Lewis guessed it must be at least 600. Clark and Drouillard fired ten shots before
it fell dead.
The same day, Charbonneau nearly ruined the expedition a second time. Again he was at the helm of the white pirogue, under sail, when a storm struck. Just as he had before, he turned it the wrong way as it heeled over. As Lewis described it: “Such was their confusion and consternation at this moment, that they suffered the perogue to lye on her side for half a minute before they took the sail in. The perogue then wrighted but had filled within an inch of the gunwals; Charbono still crying to his god for mercy, had not yet recollected the rudder, nor could the repeated orders of the Bowsman, Cruzat, bring him to his recollection untill he threatend to shoot him instantly if he did not take hold of the rudder and do his duty.”
Two men grabbed kettles and bailed enough water to keep the boat afloat until they could row it ashore. Lewis wrote about the incident passionately, for the pirogue contained “almost every article indispensibly necessary to further the views, or insure the success of the enterpize in which we are now launched to the distance of 2200 miles.” He noted, however, that while Sacagawea’s spouse had been frozen with fear, she had “caught and preserved most of the light articles which were washed overboard.”
From the back of the boat, Sacagawea hauled in the cargo as it floated past. Over the next two days, the party unpacked, dried and repacked the soaked supplies, but some medicine, gunpowder, and seeds were unrecoverable. In a later journal entry, Lewis seemed to have forgiven Charbonneau, writing that he was not totally at fault for the mishap; “the waves [were] so high that a pirogue could scarcely live in any situation.”
On May 8, the expedition’s boats entered a tributary of the Missouri that Lewis named Milk River, “for its peculiar whiteness, being about the colour of a cup of tea with the admixture of a tablespoonful of milk.” The appearance was the result of fine-grained clay and silt sediments, eroded from the rich basin, which were suspended in the water. Lewis was forced to get more creative in naming the myriad of new landmarks they came upon. He had exhausted the names of the men in the Corps – affixing them to creeks and streams and bends. Even Sacagawea – the Soshone interpreter, whom Lewis liked much less than Clark – got her own river, about five miles above where the Musselshell River converged with the Missouri. Lewis would name another stream Seaman’s Creek, after his beloved dog; much later in the nineteenth century, it would be renamed Monture Creek, after Hudson’s Bay Company interpreter and trader George Monteur.
Now names were conjured based on striking attributes – a stream bed “as wide as the Missouri . . . or half a mile wide, and not containing a single drop of water” was called Big Dry Creek – or from the imagination – Roloje Creek, Clark wrote, was “a name given me last night in my sleep.” Other names were the product of frustration. A large creek the party passed on May 20, Lewis wrote, “we [c]all Blowing Fly Creek, from the emence quantities of those insects which geather on our meat in Such numbers that we are obledged to brush them off what we eate.”
By May 17, the men had to tow the pirogues. “We employed the toe line the greater part of the day; the banks were firm and shore boald [bare] which favoured the uce of the cord.” The landscape was growing steeper, and on May 26, Lewis climbed a hill and “beheld the Rocky Mountains for the first time.” He felt a surge of elation at seeing the distant snow-covered peaks glistening in the sun, both at “finding myself so near the head of the heretofore conceived boundless Missouri” and reflecting “on the difficulties which this snowey barrier would most probably throw in my way to the Pacific, and the sufferings and hardships of myself and party in thim.”
On May 29, a buffalo charged through camp in the middle of the night and nearly put an end to the expedition. Ignoring the sentry’s attempts to scare it away, the animal charged the captains’ tent, which was surrounded by rows of sleeping men. Seaman saved the day, however, by barking furiously. The buffalo swerved, missing a row of sleeping men by inches and “leaving us . . . all in an uproar with our guns in o[u]r hands, enquiring of each other the ca[u]se of the alarm,” Lewis wrote.
That day, they passed a 120-foot cliff over which Indians had stampeded a buffalo herd. At the bottom of the precipice by the river’s edge, the wolves were devouring the hundred or more rotting carcasses. Lewis noted in his journal that tribes on the Missouri regularly destroyed buffalo herds by decoying them to a precipice and then stampeding them over the side. It was an easy way of getting plenty of buffalo meat - except for the decoy. Disguised in a buffalo hide, this man ran in front of a herd until he reached the cliff and then, if he was lucky, jumped aside. Lewis named a nearby stream Slaughter River.
On May 31, the men spent much of the day in the water towing the boats. They were passing through an area of constant riffles and rocky bars, and the river bluffs were too close and too slippery to allow them a foothold. There was one consolation, however; the cliffs had been worn by erosion “into a thousand grotesque figures, which with the help of a little immagination . . . are made to represent eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings, having their parapets well stocked with statuary [and] collumns of various sculpture,” Lewis marveled.
Two days later, they arrived at an unexpected forking of the river into two large streams. Most of the men were certain the northern branch was the right one because it was brown and muddy like the Missouri, but the captains believed that the south fork, flowing clear over a bed of stones, was the correct one, since it had obviously come from the mountains. No one changed their mind after Lewis led a party up the north branch, and Clark led another up the south fork for two or three days. Lewis named the north fork the Marias River, after his cousin, whose “celestial virtues and amiable qualifications” he admired. When the captains returned, they remained confident that the south fork was the continuation of the Missouri. Lewis wrote: “[The men] said very cheerfully that they were ready to follow us any wher we thought proper to direct but that they still thought that the other was the river and that they were affraid that the South fork would soon termineate in the mountains and leave us at a great distance from the Columbia.”
Although this was in no way a challenge to their leadership, the captains humored the men: Lewis would take one party and push ahead until he reached the waterfalls that the Indians at Fort Mandan said they would find on the Missouri River.
To lighten the load and provide more hands to work the oars and tow-lines, Lewis and Clark decided to leave the red pirogue and the spare supplies at the fork of the rivers. Cruzatte organized the making of a cache. First, he removed a circle of sod about twenty inches in diameter. The men then dug a hole straight down about a foot, and gradually widened it to make a kettle-shaped area six or seven feet deep. They floored the hole with three or four inches of dry sticks covered with grass and piled the goods in, taking care to keep them away from the earth walls.
In two of these caches, the men stored excess food, salt, scientific specimens, blacksmith tools, part of the powder and lead, and other extra baggage. They hauled the red pirogue to a small island in the Marias River and lashed it to trees to prevent it from being swept away by floods. Although the captains hoped that some of the party would be able to sail from the Columbia and go back around the world, they prepared for a return trip that would follow their outgoing route.
On June 11, Lewis and four men set off on foot, leaving Clark and the rest of the party to follow the endless bends of the Missouri by boat. On their third day out, Lewis and his party heard the distant roar of falling water and saw a column of rising spray that looked like smoke. The waterfall was a majestic sight, some 300 yards wide, by Lewis’s first estimate, and eighty feet high (it was actually ninety or more).
They realized that they were on the right river; the natives at Fort Mandan had told them they would find a series of large waterfalls on the river that led to the mountains. The Great Falls of the Missouri was the highest of a series of falls and rapids extending over a ten-mile stretch of the river. Lewis celebrated “the grandest sight I ever beheld” and wrote in his
journal: “My fare is really sumptuous this evening; buffaloe’s humps, tongues and marrowbones, fine trout parched meal pepper and salt, and a good appetite; the last is not considered the least of the luxuries.”
The next morning, Lewis sent Joseph Field to carry the good news back to Clark, who was struggling. He had “two men with the Tooth ake 2 with Turners [boils], & one man with a Tumor & a slight fever.” Sacagawea, who had complained of sickness at the Marias River fork, was critically ill. Once Clark’s party reached the falls, Lewis took over and administered doses of quinine and opium. Water from a nearby sulphur spring helped; Sacagawea began to recover and was soon demanding all the broiled buffalo “and rich soope of the same meat” that Lewis would give her.
Because the cascades and rapids of the Great Falls meant eighteen miles of portaging over rough ground covered with cactus, the captains ordered their men to go through their baggage and winnow out everything that could be spared. They made another cache at the foot of the portage and hid the white pirogue in the willows, cutting its mast to make axles for a pair of rough four-wheeled trucks to haul the canoes. The men eventually found a large cottonwood tree which they felled to cut rounds for wheels; Lewis doubted there was another one that size within twenty miles.
The portage was heartbreaking work. Although the men had double-soled their moccasins against the prickly-pear cactus, many of the spines still penetrated, and the uneven earth hurt their feet. They had to grab rocks and clumps of grass to help pull the trucks up the slopes and were so close to exhaustion when they stopped that they would fall asleep in a moment.
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