Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West

by Stephen E. Ambrose

In Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote: “The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it. . . . If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his children is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”17

Slavery was critical to tobacco planters because their agricultural practices were so wasteful and labor-intensive. Slavery prospered in the American South in the decades after the revolution because of technological progress. By the time Jefferson became president, the steam engines of James Watt had been applied in England to spinning, weaving, and printing cotton, which led to an immense demand for that staple. Simultaneously, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin had made it practical to separate short upland cotton from its seeds. Slaves and land were necessary to grow cotton; the land was available in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi; the slaves were available from the excess on the Virginia plantations. These were the central economic facts in the life of the Virginia gentry, whose principal export soon became slaves.

In any event, he passed over the teen-age Lewis and chose instead a French botanist, André Michaux, who got started in June 1793. But he had scarcely reached Kentucky when Jefferson discovered that Michaux was a secret agent of the French Republic, whose chief aim was not to explore or collect natural-history specimens but to raise an army of American militia to attack the Spanish possessions beyond the Mississippi. At Jefferson’s insistence, the French government recalled Michaux.

Jefferson’s attitude toward Indians was the exact opposite of his attitude toward Negroes. He thought of Indians as noble savages who could be civilized and brought into the body politic as full citizens. In 1785, he wrote, “I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman.”

He was one of the principal authors of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, as revolutionary a document as his Declaration of Independence. The Ordinance provided for the admission into the Union of from three to five states from the territory east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio, when the territories had a large enough population. These states would be fully equal to the original thirteen. Thanks to Thomas Jefferson, the United States would be an empire without colonies, an empire of equals.

Jefferson was greatly alarmed. As he put it in one of his more famous passages, “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market.”

“In all your intercourse with the natives,” Jefferson went on, “treat them in the most friendly & conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit.” Lewis should “satisfy them of your journey’s innocence,” but simultaneously tell them of the size and strength of the United States. He should temper that implied threat by assuring the tribes of our wish to be “neighborly” and of our peaceful intentions: Americans only wished to trade with them. Lewis should invite a few chiefs to come to Washington for a visit, and arrange for some Indian children to come to the United States and be “brought up with us, & taught such arts as may be useful to them.”

July 4, 1803, the nation’s twenty-seventh birthday, was a great day for Meriwether Lewis. He completed his preparations and was ready to depart in the morning. He got his letter of credit in its final form from President Jefferson. And the National Intelligencer of Washington reported in that day’s issue that Napoleon had sold Louisiana to the United States.

Napoleon was delighted, and rightly so. He had title to Louisiana, but no power to enforce it. The Americans were sure to overrun it long before he could get an army there—if he ever could. “Sixty million francs for an occupation that will not perhaps last a day!” he exulted. He knew what he was giving up and what the United States was getting—and the benefit to France, beyond the money: “The sale assures forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a rival who, sooner or later, will humble her pride.”17

“Starting with the idea that the purchase was confined to the western waters of the Mississippi Valley, Jefferson’s conception had gradually expanded until [by 1808] it included West Florida, Texas, and the Oregon Country, a view which was to be the basis of a large part of American diplomacy for nearly half a century.”22

“As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road untill I am conpelled to beleive differently.”

one-fifth the course to run to get to sea level as the Missouri-Mississippi, and if they started out within a short hike of

Lewis told Cameahwait that he forgave the warriors their suspicion: “I knew they were not acquainted with whitemen . . . that among whitemen it was considered disgracefull to lye or entrap an enimy by falsehood.” After that stretcher, Lewis threatened that, if the Shoshones did not help with the portage, no white man would come to bring them arms and ammunition. Then he challenged their manhood, saying, “I still hope that there were some among them that were not affraid to die.” The challenge “touched on the right string; to doubt the bravery of a savage is at once to put him on his metal.”

He intended to win their loyalty through a combination of bribes and threats, the traditional American Indian policy. “We shall endeavor to impress them strongly not only with our justice & liberality,” he wrote, “but with our power.”1

St. Louis businessman and friend of Lewis Pierre Chouteau accompanied the Osages as interpreter and general manager of the tour. Chouteau had his eye on the main chance; he met with Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, who sized him up thus: “He seems well disposed, but what he wants is power and money.” He asked for a monopoly on the Indian trade west of the Mississippi. “I told him this was inadmissable, and his last demand was the exclusive trade with the Osages. . . . As he may be either useful or dangerous I gave no flat denial. . . .”2 Thus did the intense competition between frontier businessmen for the Indian trade continue under new management. The Chouteau family, along with Manuel Lisa, Joseph Robidoux, and others were adept at currying favor with corrupt Spanish bureaucrats for precious trading licenses with the western tribes. And no wonder: it was the most immediate and by far the most profitable source of wealth in the trans-Mississippi West.

Jefferson went on, in a passage that is almost poetry: “It is so long since our forefathers came from beyond the great water, that we have lost the memory of it, and seem to have grown out of this land, as you have done. . . . We are all now of one family, born in the same land, & bound to live as brothers; & the strangers from beyond the great water are gone from among us. The great Spirit has given you strength, and has given us strength; not that we might hurt one another, but to do each other all the good in our power.” He concluded, “No wrong will ever be done you by our nation.”3

Jefferson didn’t mind the expense of courting the Indians. As he later explained to Congress, good relations with the tribes on the Missouri were “indispensable to the policy of governing those Indians by commerce rather than by arms,” and the cost of the former was much less than the cost of the latter.13

The policy Lewis was establishing represented, in Jefferson’s thinking, only a first phase. Jefferson knew that such a system of commerce could not last long. For one thing, the beaver east of the Rocky Mountains were not a renewable resource; the whole history of the fur trade in North America was one of overtrapping the beaver and moving west.III For another, immigration and emigration—the most important factors in shaping the United States—precluded leaving Louisiana to its current inhabitants. Americans, whether U.S. citizens or recent immigrants, would push west. No power on earth could stop them, certainly not the feeble U.S. Army or the distant government.

Jefferson proposed to deal with that problem in three ways. As he put it in February 1803 in a directive to Governor William Henry Harrison of Indiana Territory, he first proposed to remove the white population of Upper Louisiana across to the east side of the river (giving them equal or larger holdings) and forbid emigrants access to Upper Louisiana. Second, he hoped to civilize at least some of the Indians living east of the Mississippi. Third, those Indians who remained uncivilized could be sent west of the river, into what would be a vast reservation. Jefferson told Harrison his hope was that the Indians would “incorporate with us as citizens of the United States,” or, failing this, “remove beyond the Mississippi.”14 From the government’s perspective, that made perfect sense. The frontier would move forward at a regular pace, but only after the Indians had been civilized or removed. Pioneers would have to purchase regular deeds and titles to the land they farmed, rather than just squatting on it. Frontier clashes between red and white men would be reduced if not eliminated. There would be law and order, bureaucratic regularity, taxes collected, and a reduced need for the U.S. Army. But it was all a pipe

Hypocrisy ran through his Indian policy, as it did through the policies of his predecessors and successors. Join us or get out of the way, the Americans said to the Indians, but in fact the Indians could do neither. By pushing them ever west, the Americans made it impossible for the Indians to become civilized as they meant the term, and it turned out there was almost no place where the Indians would be out of the way of the onrushing pioneers. Jefferson said he believed the Indian was almost as capable as the European, and although not ready for assimilation soon would be (in contrast, blacks would never be ready). In this he differed from other presidents, yet only in theory, not in action. In fact, he stole all the land he could from Indians east of the Mississippi while preparing those west of the river for the same fate, after the beaver were trapped out. How could the greatest champion of human rights in American history do such a thing? Jefferson (and his contemporaries) would not have regarded the question as valid. In their view, Indian ideas about land ownership were a lot of foolishness. As one historian observed, “A band of Sauks, say, rode twice a year through a tract as big as a couple of eastern states and claimed it as their own.”16 That same land could support thousands of farms, tens of thousands of settlers.

‘The Indians can be kept in order only by commerce or war,’ Jefferson said. ‘The former is the cheapest.’ ”18

In October 1805, Stoddard’s tour left St. Louis, including forty-five Indians from eleven tribes. They arrived in Washington in January 1806. Jefferson gave them the standard Great Father talk: “We are become as numerous as the leaves of the trees, and, tho’ we do not boast, we do not fear any nation. . . . My children, we are strong, we are numerous as the stars in the heavens, & we are all gun-men.” He followed the threat with the carrot: if they would be at peace with one another and trade with the Americans, they could be happy. (In reply, one of the chiefs said he was glad the Americans were as numerous as the stars in the skies, and powerful as well. So much the better, in fact, for that meant the government should be strong enough to keep white squatters off Indian lands.)

“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.

Three days later, Jefferson again wrote Lewis. He had just heard of Lewis’s statement in early July that three Iowas were to be hanged for murder. He hoped it would not be done, “as we know we cannot punish any murder which shall be committed by us on them even if the murderer can be taken. Our juries have never yet convicted the murderer of an Indian.” If a hanging was necessary, he instructed Lewis to limit it to one man, the “most guilty & worst character,” because only one white man had been killed. (Lewis kept the Indians in jail, from which they escaped in the summer of 1809.)

Lewis avoided specifics: “I deem it improper to trammil your operations by detailed and Positive Commands as to the plan of procedure.” But he had suggestions. The first was to employ up to 300 Indians from the nations living below the Arikaras: “You will Promise them, as a reward for their Services, the plunder which they may acquire from the Aricares.” He further advised Chouteau to recruit 100 white hunters and trappers, bringing his total up to 250 whites and 300 Indians. In other words, should the Arikaras prove still to be hostile, Lewis was declaring all-out war on them. He was explicit on the point; he wanted Chouteau to have “a force sufficient Not Onely to bid defiance to the Aricares, but to exterpate that abandoned Nation if necessary.” This went far beyond Jefferson’s recommendation that if the Arikaras tried to stop Big White they should be “punished.” It went far beyond burning their property or killing their horses. It called for nothing short of genocide. If the Arikaras proved to be peaceable, Chouteau should demand of them “the unconditional surrender” of the warriors who had killed any member of Ensign Pryor’s party. Should the Arikaras claim they could not say who had fired the fatal bullets, Chouteau should require them to deliver up three warriors (three white men had been killed), chosen from among those “most active in stimulating” the hostilities. “These murderers when Delivered will be shot in the presence of the nation,” and the Arikaras require...