More Than Cowboys

by Tim Slessor

  Lewis would also have learned that in 1792, Robert Gray, the first American to sail around the world, had discovered the mouth of a huge river (the Columbia) and deduced, from its size, that its headwaters must be far inland. Lastly, Lewis would have known that French fur men had, for several years past, been trading far up the Missouri. So the conclusion was obvious: a journey to the Missouri’s headwaters (wherever they were) should place an expedition, via a modest portage or two, within reach of the headwaters of Robert Gray’s Columbia. From there, surely, one would be able to float downstream to the Pacific. After that, it could not be far to China and the Indies. Helpfully, Jefferson suggested that if, on arrival at the far Pacific shore, the expedition found itself short of funds it should contact the American consul in Mauritius.

  Even if the President had rather foreshortened ideas about global geography, his 2,000-word brief to his protégé was detailed and exact. “Your mission is to explore the most direct and practical water communication across this continent... make yourself acquainted with the names of nations... their language, traditions, monuments... their laws and customs... their diseases and remedies... the animals... the remains of any which may be extinct [Jefferson collected bones]... your observations are to be taken with great pain and accuracy... several copies... one to be written on the paper of the birch as less liable to damp... name a person who shall succeed you on your decease.”

  Captain Lewis must have been glad when, eventually, he could say farewell to his demanding patron. He took the traditional route west: to Pittsburgh, then down the Ohio River and out onto the Mississippi. Presently, he was joined by an old friend whom he had asked to come as co-leader of the expedition: Captain George Clark.

  By Christmas, 1803, they had established a base camp on the east bank of the Mississippi, just opposite St. Louis and near the mouth of the Missouri. They would have based themselves in St. Louis itself, but its French governor had not yet heard that his domain had just been bought by the United States. He thought the sale was so improbable that he would not take Lewis’ word for it.

  The winter was passed in gathering stores and recruiting. Eventually, there were nearly 40 men in the party: soldiers, Kentucky hunters, French-speaking voyageurs with up-river experience, and Clark’s black servant, York. They would travel in the keel-boat which had brought Lewis down from Pittsburgh. She was nearly 60 feet long, had a small cabin aft, and was equipped with a large square sail and 22 oars; they also had a couple of large open canoes.

  With 10 tons of stores aboard, they pushed off on 14 May 1804. “Proceeded under a jentle brease up the Missourie.” As the “brease” does not seem to have lasted, progress depended on their sweat - rowing, poling or, where possible, towing from the bank. They were plagued by “numerous and bad ticks and mosquiturs”.

  After 10 weeks they had come only 500 miles. They tied up for a couple of days to “invite the Otteaus and Panies (Pawnees) to come and talk with us at our Camp”. At the meeting, presents were offered, and several chiefs were informed that as result of a recent “Change of Government”, they and their people were now subjects of the Great Father in Washington. The locals had no idea what all this meant but they willingly accepted the presents. And, because it seemed the obvious thing to do, Lewis called this meeting place Council Bluffs.

  The site of that meeting is a few miles further upriver from today’s city of Council Bluffs. But no matter. You can stand in the main street of Council Bluffs and look across “the wide Missouri” to Omaha’s airport from where the jets go screaming off to San Francisco, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Chicago, New York... Incredibly, only 70 years after the expedition paused here, an iron railroad bridge would span the great river. You could then (with three changes) travel right across the continent, from New York to San Francisco Bay, from “sea to shining sea”, 2,800 miles, 10 days and $200. I mention this detail because, coming less than a lifetime after Lewis and Clark passed this way, it seems an excellent illustration of the speed with which the vast interior of the continent was tamed.

  Incidentally, the locals call the river the “Mizzurah” - no final “ee”.

  Going on, the expedition was encouraged to find that the river bent away toward the north-west; they optimistically reckoned that they were now paddling in the right direction - toward the Pacific. They also knew that they were now entering the country of the unpredictable Sioux.

  As they feared, the Sioux were full of “rascally intentions”. Nevertheless, they thought it prudent to spend a few days with them. After all, it was just possible that the expedition might have to come back this way. There were peace pipes to be smoked, presents to be exchanged, and plate-size medallions to be hung round the necks of selected chiefs. In this last matter, Lewis and Clark were continuing a custom that the French had started more than 100 years earlier: first, to identify a few apparent leaders who seemed more amenable than the rest; then to present them with a badge of office. In this way they become the “official” chiefs through which the government could deal in any later negotiations. The system had worked well enough among the eastern tribes, where a hierarchical structure was more developed. But these tribes out on the plains did not work like that, and, down the following century, the system would cause endless aggravation to Washington’s would-be treaty-makers. For a start, the more tractable chiefs were often not the ones most respected by the tribe. Second, an agreement made with one group of chiefs was seldom regarded as binding by their rivals.

  ***

  Even today, in any negotiation with the Sioux (particularly with the Oglala tribe), it is important to know that one is talking to the right people. Some years ago, I wanted to film a short sequence of “Native American” dancing and music at a summer festival on Pine Ridge Reservation, the homeland of the Oglala Sioux. I negotiated a day or two in advance with members of the Tribal Council. The questioning was quite tough and I had to explain to a suspicious audience that my documentary, being made by the BBC, did not have a moneybag sponsor, nor, when it was eventually transmitted, would it carry remunerative advertising. Eventually it was agreed that for $200 we could film for an hour. Willingly, I paid. A few days later we turned up at the festival somewhere in the back-country of the reservation. Entry was refused. I explained that our presence had been agreed - and paid for. I was told that the Tribal Council was made up of busybodies who had no jurisdiction over these proceedings and that I had been negotiating with quite the wrong people. Anyway, why should I be believed? “Never”, I was informed, “trust a white man.” Who was I to argue? Anyway, another $200 would be required. Maybe I was being ripped off, but given the way the Sioux have themselves been ripped off over the last 150 years, I knew that I was in no position to complain. My experience came as no surprise to those who think they know the Sioux. “So, what’s new?” was the general reaction.

  In fact, though I did not know it at the time, I had naively run slap-bang into an enmity which had been developing between a dissident group and the Tribal Council. A few years later, this hostility was one of the causes of the second “battle” of Wounded Knee. We will come to that sad story...

  ***

  As the expedition pushed on upstream it called on several other tribes until, in early November, it reached the country of the Mandan people. The river was beginning to freeze. So they tied up their boats, built a rough fort and prepared to snug down for the winter. They had come over 1,500 miles, and this was about as far as all but a very few whites had ever penetrated.

  The Mandans were a more or less settled people who probably saw, in the expedition and its guns, some protection against their enemies, the marauding Sioux. And the expedition had callers: French-Canadian traders. One of them, Toussaint Charbonneau, had recently taken a young wife from among the Mandans; it is probable that the expedition leaders thought that, despite the fact that Sacajawea was only just 16 and pregnant, she would be useful to them. First, they
knew that Indian war-parties never traveled with their women, let alone one carrying a papoose. So there was a fair chance that any roving Indians the expedition might meet would conclude that Sacajawea’s companions did not have any hostile intentions. Second, she was not a true Mandan, but had been taken five years earlier from a tribe called the Shoshone who lived away to the west. Now, the two Captains, thinking ahead, knew that when they eventually had to leave the river they might need horses. Sacajawea would be a useful interpreter and go-between. So it may well be that Sacajawea’s husband really owed his engagement to the fact that he had a potentially useful wife. As for her pregnancy, she would have the baby at least two months before the expedition moved on; Indian mothers were quite accustomed to traveling within a very few days of giving birth.

  Of course, the piquancy of just one girl among so many men has been altogether too much for some people. The situation particularly appealed to the Victorians, who saw Sacajawea as a curvaceous, high-bosomed, wasp-waisted, dark-eyed Valkyrie with twinkling rings on her toes, a dagger in her belt, and feathers in her waist-long plaits. And, of course, Lewis or Clark or both fell in love with her. The unsentimental truth is that Sacajawea seems to have been a quiet and modest young woman who became a thoroughly useful member of the team and, yes, in time everyone became fond and caring towards her and her baby.

  By late March the ice was melting and they were ready to go. On an afternoon in early April, they watched their keel-boat with its 14-man crew drift away downstream. It carried a cargo of specimens and reports for their patron in far-away Washington. Then they loaded their own small dug-outs (built during the winter) and the two larger canoes that they had brought with them.

  For the next few weeks, they bent their heads against the stinging sleet and hail of the spring storms - they were in present-day North Dakota. Then, as the weather got warmer, there were clouds of midges and more of those “mosquiturs”. Details of all the creatures they met went down in the journals: grizzly bears, buffalo, antelope, rattlesnakes, cougar and, above all, beaver. Jefferson would be disappointed; he had hoped for mammoth elephants.

  Jefferson was also going to be disappointed in the expedition’s failure to find any of those Welsh Indians. (There were also rumors of Israelite Indians and Chinese Indians, but about these Jefferson was more skeptical.) This beguiling piece of Celtic lunacy had its origins in the legends of a Prince Madoc, who was supposed to have led his people across the Atlantic hundreds of years before. Always, according to the tales, the Welshmen had inconveniently wandered off somewhere “more west”. A few years earlier, a single-minded Celt, John Evans, got as far as the Mandan villages looking for them. True, some of the Mandans were lighter skinned than most other Indians, and, yes, they built Welsh-looking coracles. But, no, they did not know what John Evans was talking about.

  By early June they could see mountains on the western horizon. Then they came to a series of impassable cascades. These were the Great Falls of the Missouri. There was nothing for it but to drag the boats and all the stores around the rapids until they reached smooth water again. They must have been deeply frustrated. They had so hoped that, like Mackenzie away to the north 10 years before, they would have been able to make their way right across the continent with only a few short and easy portages.

  The biggest boat was too heavy; it had to be left behind. For the other boats, they made crude rollers with logs. For day after day they pulled and pushed. As soon as one load had been taken forward, they had to make the 18-mile hike back to get another. It took three weeks.

  Once back on the river, they paddled, poled and towed themselves as fast as they could manage. Soon, the river (they called it the Jefferson) became a mountain torrent; the canoes could go no further. Now it was urgent that they found the Shoshone - Sacajawea’s people - and traded for horses. Lewis and three others went ahead to try to make contact.

  “After refreshing ourselves”, wrote Lewis on the third day of his trek, “we proceeded on the top of the dividing ridge from which I discovered immense ranges of high mountains still to the west of us with their tops partially covered with snow.” Lewis must have been devastated: he could see that there was now no possibility of a convenient portage to take them across to some river that would lead them easily down to the Pacific.

  Sacajawea in another romantic reconstruction

  ***

  I was sitting in the departure lounge at Salt Lake City waiting for a flight north to the town of Great Falls, to make preliminary arrangements for a film about the wheat harvest. On my knees was a large road atlas and it was turned to the double-spread of Montana; I was trying to work out how close the flight-path would go to the Lewis-and-Clark country at the head of the Missouri. Maybe the man waiting in the next seat thought I was trying to find some small town. Anyway, he said that he was from Montana and asked if he could help. Well, maybe he could. He doubted that we would fly quite that far west; we would miss those particular mountains by about 100 miles. But he was a western history “buff” himself and, being an executive with Western Airlines, he would ask the pilot when we got aboard. Then, while we were about it, how was “jolly old London”, and why not fly Club Class with him, courtesy of the airline? Thank you very much.

  An hour later the aircraft seemed to bank slightly. My friend explained that there was no question of the pilot diverting by more than the smallest fraction from the airline’s normal routing, but he might, for a few seconds, drop the port wing slightly so that “we can get a better view”. It was one of those blue, mountain days when one can see for 100 miles or more. Somewhere ahead was Three Forks, and away off to the west, sliding under the wing, were the very foothills up which Lewis had struggled on Monday, 12 August 1805. On the farthest horizon, partially covered with snow, were what I reckoned to be the Salmon River Mountains, probably what Lewis could see from the crest of his windy ridge.

  At 28,000 feet and close to 500 m.p.h. I did not learn much except an even greater wonder at the nerve of those first explorers; and that the Rockies stretched away forever, range after range. It was enough. I would not have missed it.

  A few minutes later we were over the wheat country of the plains. Then we passed the broken water of the Missouri and landed at Great Falls. From my map I could see that the runway was just across the river from the place where the expedition put its boats back on the river after that 18-mile portage. I remember that, on leaving the aircraft, I was allowed to put my head round the door to the cockpit to thank the pilot for what might have been a slight divergence from his normal flight-path. “Well, we dodged over a little-bitty to the west”, and I’m sure he gave a wink, “’cause we figured on some clear-air turbulence to the east - and we always aim to give you folks a real smooth ride.”

  “It was great. Thank you very much.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  ***

  As Lewis and his companions went on, they began to realize that the valleys and the streams had a westerly thrust to them. In geography and in history, they had crossed the continental divide. More prosaically, they were running out of food. Then, just when they were about to turn back, they came on four women. Two of them ran away. But an old woman and a young girl were too frightened or too slow to run. The white men tried to reassure them by sign language, and by giving them some beads and a small mirror. Suddenly, with a rushing of hooves, the explorers found themselves facing 60 or more warriors. Lewis put his gun on the ground and walked forward. The Indians sat their horses and watched; some fingered their bows. This was the most critical moment of the expedition so far. Then the old lady shouted; she seemed to be calling out that these strange pale beings had given her some presents. She ran across to show the beads. The Indians rode slowly forward. Perhaps the chief leaned down from his horse and touched Lewis to see what kind of man this was. It was enough.

  “The men advanced and embraced me very affectionately in the
ir way, which is by putting their left arm over your right shoulder, clasping your back, while they apply their left cheek to yours and frequently vociferate ah-hi-e, ah-hi-e, that is ‘I am much pleased, I am much rejoiced!’ We were all caressed and besmeared with their grease and paint till I was heartily tired of the national hug.” Given his luck, Lewis seems unreasonably grumpy.

  They spent the night in the Shoshone camp where they were received with much dancing and mutual smoking of ceremonial pipes. But it took two more frustrating days of sign language before the Indians could be persuaded to go back to meet the rest of the expedition. When they reached the pre-arranged rendezvous with the main party, there was no one there. The Indians became very edgy, fearful of some treachery. Lewis was on tenterhooks lest they took off for some hiding place where he would never find them or their horses again.

  Now comes the moment so beloved by all tellers of the expedition’s story, whether they are romantics or dry old realists. The Indians pointed to three distant figures coming up the river; Lewis recognized them as Clark, Charbonneau and Sacajawea. Slowly the three figures came on, unaware that they were being watched. Then Sacajawea must have seen them; she knew immediately that they were her own people and, scrambling forward, she embraced the chief. Lewis reports rather flatly that “Captain Clark arrived with the Interpreter Charbono and the Indian woman who proved to be the sister of the Chief; the meeting of these people was really affecting”.