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His leadership had been outstanding. He and Clark had taken thirty-odd unruly soldiers and molded them into the Corps of Discovery, an elite platoon of tough, hardy, resourceful, well-disciplined men.
Everyone who has ever paddled a canoe on the Missouri, or the Columbia, does so in the wake of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
The Sioux and the Blackfeet, the strongest and most warlike tribes in Upper Louisiana, were enemies of the United States. Nevertheless, Lewis had some policies to recommend to the president that he hoped would force the Sioux, Blackfeet, and all other Plains tribes to recognize American sovereignty.
It was Lewis’s unhappy task to tell the president that his hope for an all-water route linking the Atlantic and Pacific was gone.
The immediate need, he told Jefferson, was to deal with “the unfriendly dispositions” of the Sioux, Blackfeet, and other tribes along the Missouri.
to the United States (a little politics here: “Whilst they tolerate a spirit of enquiry, may never forget, that united they stand—but divided they fall,” an obvious reference to Aaron Burr’s ongoing conspiracies),
The captains held a public auction, in which they sold off the public items that had survived their voyage. These included the rifles, powder horns, shot pouches, kettles, and axes. They brought $408.62.23 This was a dreadful disgrace. The artifacts should have been preserved as public treasures rather than sold for a pittance. But apparently the captains had always intended to sell them at the value of their immediate utility rather than preserve them for museums.
Lewis had the journals with him, and Clark’s map covering the western two-thirds of the continent. Surely they discussed publication. As Donald Jackson reminds us, “Literally, the world had been waiting for their return.”
his plan: drive the British out of Upper Louisiana and use the U.S. Army to promote and protect the fur traders of St. Louis while holding back the squatters. It clearly favored the established elite in St. Louis over the onrushing Americans looking for land.
Lewis began pacing in his room. This went on for several hours. Mrs. Grinder, who was frightened and could not sleep, heard him talking aloud, “like a lawyer.” Lewis got out his pistols. He loaded them and at some time during the early hours of October 11 shot himself in the head. The ball only grazed his skull. He fell heavily to the floor. Mrs. Grinder heard him exclaim, “O Lord!” Lewis rose, took up his other pistol, and shot himself in his breast. The ball entered and passed downward through his body, to emerge low down on his backbone. He survived the second shot,
Lewis uncovered his side and showed them the second wound. He said, “I am no coward; but I am so strong, [it is] so hard to die.” He said he had tried to kill himself to deprive his enemies of the pleasure and honor of doing it.
In 1904, on the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the expedition, Reuben Gold Thwaites of the Wisconsin State Historical Society published (Dodd, Meade) the complete journals, in eight volumes, including never-before-seen journals from two of the enlisted men. His editorial work was outstanding. Often reprinted, “Thwaites,” as the work is known among Lewis and Clark fans, is an American classic.
I am as one with Private Windsor, who, when about to slip off the bluff over the Marias River, barely managing to hold on, badly frightened, called out, “God, God, Captain, what shall I do?” I too would instinctively trust Lewis to know what to do.
Certainly he would be anyone’s first choice for a companion on an extended camping trip. Imagine sitting around the campfire while he talked about what he had seen that day.
He could drive himself to the point of exhaustion, then take an hour to write about the events of the day, and another to make his celestial observations.
From crossing the Lolo Trail to running the rapids of the Columbia, he never ordered the men to do what he wouldn’t do.
He knew exactly when to take a break, when to issue a gill, when to push for more, when to encourage, when to inspire, when to tell a joke, when to be tough.
