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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

He had the men build two rafts to descend the river, but the craft proved too small for the task (one man almost lost his rifle), so “we again swung our packs” and set out over the plains. It was cold, rainy, miserable. The party made twenty-five miles that afternoon. Lewis closed his journal entry, “It continues to rain and we have no shelter, an uncomfortable nights rest is the natural consequence.”

The next morning, June 9, Lewis attempted to convince the men of the expedition that the south fork was the Missouri, without success. To a man they were “firm in the beleif that the N. Fork was the Missouri and that which we ought to take.” Private Cruzatte, “who had been an old Missouri navigator and who from his integrity knowledge and skill as a waterman had acquired the confidence of every individual of the party declared it as his opinion that the N. fork was the true genuine Missouri and could be no other.” Despite Cruzatte’s certainty, the captains would not change their minds, and so informed the men. In a magnificent tribute to the captains’ leadership qualities, “they 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.” Lewis and Clark were not taking a vote, but, “finding them so determined in this beleif, and wishing that if we were in an error to be able to detect it and rectify it as soon as possible it was agreed between Capt. C. and myself that one of us should set out with a small party by land up the South fork and continue our rout up it untill we found the falls or reached the snowy Mountains . . . which should . . . determine this question prety accurately.”

Lewis told him that the portage was going to be at least sixteen miles long, a staggering piece of information.

At dusk, the two scouts came in “and made a very unfavourable report. They informed us that the creek just above us and two deep ravenes still higher up cut the plain between the river and mountain in such a manner, that in their opinions a portage for the canoes on this side was impracticable.”

Lewis sent the men out hunting. He wanted to lay by as large a store of dried meat as possible, so that when the portage began he wouldn’t have to detach men to hunt. That evening, Clark came into camp to report that the portage route was seventeen and three-quarters miles long.

Along the way, Lewis discovered and described one of the best-loved birds of the Great Plains, the western meadowlark.

There were vast herds of buffalo in the neighborhood; Clark estimated he could see ten thousand in one view. The bulls kept Seaman up all night, barking at them. Grizzlies were also numerous, and, unlike the buffalo, they were dangerous; Lewis forbade any man to go alone on any errand that required passing through brush, and ordered all hands to sleep with their rifles close at hand. The bears came close around camp at night, Lewis wrote on June 28, “but have never yet ventured to attack us and our dog gives us timely notice of their visits, he keeps constantly padroling all night.”

“We have never once hinted to any one of the party that we had such a scheme in contemplation,” Lewis wrote. The passage illuminates the relationship between the captains and their men. In the first place, it indicates that at some times—around the campfire? while the men were eating?—the captains were able to talk without being overheard. It also speaks to the relative absence of rumors among the men. All soldiers love rumor—and this platoon-sized unit was coming upon rivers no one had ever heard of, finding five falls where they had been told to expect one, so it might be expected to do a lot of speculation on the captains’ intentions. But it didn’t, a tribute to the captains’ leadership and discipline and the mark of how totally the men trusted them.

The men of the expedition were linked together by uncommon experiences and by the certain knowledge that they were making history, the realization that they were in the middle of what would without question be the most exciting and important time of their lives, and the obvious fact that they were in all this together, that every man—and the Indian woman—was dependent on all the others, and they on him or her. Together, under the leadership of the captains, they had become a family.

By July 3, as the boat neared completion, Lewis’s doubts were assailing him. He nearly convinced himself that none of his experiments in finding a substitute for pitch was going to work. No matter what he tried, he could not produce tar. Without tar, “I fear the whole operation of my boat will be useless.” There was something else: “I fear I have committed another blunder also in sewing the skins with a nedle which has sharp edges these have cut the skin and as it drys I discover that the throng does not fill the holes as I expected.”

That evening, the first Americans ever to enter Montana, the first ever to see the Yellowstone, the Milk, the Marias, and the Great Falls, the first Americans ever to kill a grizzly, celebrated their nation’s twenty-ninth birthday.

July 9 was launch day. Lewis had brought the frame of the Experiment all the way from Harpers Ferry. The frame had taken up space that could have been given to whiskey or trade goods or cornmeal or tools. Lewis had spent nearly two weeks getting her ready to launch, and had held up the entire expedition the past four or five days for the final preparations. He was counting on the boat to carry the bulky items to the Shoshone country at the source of the Missouri. He had a lot at stake. Yet he began his journal entry describing the day with an account of the blackbirds that crowded the White Bear Islands. Only then did he record, “We launched the boat, she lay like a perfect cork on the water. five men would carry her with the greatest ease.” Lewis directed the men to put the oars in place and load her up. He had others get the canoes ready to shove off. He was exultant.

It was late in the evening before the storm passed. When it did, Lewis discovered that the composition had separated from the skins and left the seams exposed. “She leaked in such manner that she would not answer.”

But, he said, “to make any further experiments in our present situation seemed to me madness.” The season was advancing; the vast buffalo herds were moving downstream, away from the Great Falls. “I therefore relinquished all further hope of my favorite boat.” He resigned himself to leaving her in a cache, but tortured himself with what-ifs.

He notes that, whereas Lewis’s journal is stuffed with loving details about every step in preparing the Experiment for her launch, Clark’s entries are brief, cold, distant, possibly indicating that he had no faith in the thing from the first. After the boat sank, Lewis wrote that he and Clark “recollected hving heard the hunters” mention some trees about eight miles upriver that would answer for canoes. Clark, however, in an 1810 interview with Nicholas Biddle, made it clear he had anticipated failure and had “previously” sent the hunters out to look for big trees. If Clark felt that the Experiment wasn’t his baby and wouldn’t work, he must have believed his friend’s obsession with the boat had cost the expedition a lot of valuable time. It may be, Large continues, that the Experiment caused a rift between the captains. If so, it was the only one.

Anyone who has ever canoed on the upper Missouri River knows what a welcome sight a grove of cottonwoods can be. They provide shade, shelter, and fuel. For Indian ponies, they provided food. For the Corps of Discovery, they provided wheels, wagons, and canoes.

When it came his turn to lead an overland search for Shoshones, Lewis followed Clark’s example and did not ask Sacagawea to accompany him. The captains shared a hubris, that they could handle Indians. They believed they needed Sacagawea’s interpreting ability only to trade for horses, not to establish contact. And they had no ability whatsoever to see the initial encounter from the Shoshones’ point of view. Four-man parties, armed better even than the Blackfeet, approaching on foot, shouting something that sounded like “stranger,” or “enemy”—did Clark really expect these Indians to come running to embrace him when they saw the American flag? In this case, it would seem that the captains allowed their self-confidence, and perhaps their male chauvinism, to override their common sense.

How, then, to cross those mountains? Cameahwait said he had never done it, but there was an old man in his band “who could probably give me some information of the country to the N.W.” He added that “he had understood from the persed nosed Indians who inhabit this river below the rocky mountains that it ran a great way toward the seting sun and finally lost itself in a great lake of water which was illy taisted.” That sentence linked the continent. For the first time, a white man had a map, however imperfect and imprecise, to connect the great rivers of the western empire. Also for the first time, a white man heard of the Nez Percés, the major tribe living west of the mountains.

Far from being downcast by such a description, Lewis was encouraged. “My rout was instantly settled in my own mind,” he wrote. “I felt perfectly satisfyed, that if the Indians could pass these mountains with their women and Children, that we could also pass them.” • This is a wonderful sentence. It shows his complete confidence in himself, Captain Clark, and the men. He is not boasting, or challenging, just being matter-of-fact about it. If they can, we can. It also shows Lewis’s (and Clark’s) ability to get more out of the men than the men ever thought they could give. Ascending the Missouri in the keelboat, the bitter cold winter at Mandan, the awful labor at the Great Falls portage, the incredible labor getting the canoes up the Jefferson—every time they had such an experience behind them, the men agreed that it had to be the worst, and that they could not possibly endure anything worse. Only to have it get worse. But well-led men working together can do far more than they ever thought they could. Especially if they are in life-threatening situations—which was exactly where Lewis intended to lead them. He dared to do so because he knew they had more in them than they thought, and he knew how to bring out the best in them.

At the site of the kill, “the seen when I arrived was such that had I not have had a pretty keen appetite myself I am confident I should not have taisted any part of the vension. . . . each [Indian] had a peice of some discription and all eating most ravenously. Some were eating the kidnies the melt [the spleen] and liver and the blood running from the corners of their mouths, others were in a similar situation with the paunch and guts. . . . one of the last [to arrive] had provided himself with about nine feet of the small guts one end of which he was chewing on while with his hands he was squezzing the contents out at the other. I really did not untill now think that human nature ever presented itself in a shape so nearly allyed to the brute creation. I viewed these poor starved divils with pity and compassion.”

Lewis had a net arranged and set to catch some trout. He brought his journal up-to-date. He concluded his August 18 journal entry with an oft-quoted passage of introspection and self-criticism. “This day I completed my thirty first year,” he began. He figured he was halfway through his life’s journey. “I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended.”

Among other things, the passage is a reminder of how young Lewis was to be carrying so heavy a burden of command. Physically tired and emotionally exhausted after the tension of the past few days, he was in what is still today one of the most remote places on the continent, with only eighteen enlisted men, Drouillard, and four Indians as companions. He had reached the source of the Missouri River, but he still had those tremendous mountains to cross and was dependent on the whims of Cameahwait and his people to make that crossing.

The Shoshones were so desperately poor that they had almost no economy to speak of. In the spring and summer, they lived on salmon; in the fall and winter, on buffalo. That they could successfully hunt buffalo was thanks to their horses, the sole source of wealth among them. Having few to no rifles, without horses they would have been indifferent hunters at best. On August 23, Lewis watched a dozen young warriors pursuing mule deer from horseback. The chase covered four miles and “was really entertaining.” Shortly after noon, the hunters came in with two deer and three pronghorns. To Lewis’s surprise, there was no division of the meat among the hunters. Instead, the families of the men who had made the kill took it all. “This is not customary among the nations of Indians with whom I have hitherto been acquainted,” Lewis wrote. “I asked Cameahwait the reason why the hunters did not divide the meat; he said that meat was so scarce with them that the men who killed it reserved it for themselves and their own families.”

In politics, they followed not the oldest or wisest or the best talker, but the bravest man. They had customs, but no laws or regulations. “Each individual man is his own soveriegn master,” Lewis wrote, “and acts from the dictates of his own mind.”

Since bravery was the primary virtue, no man could become eminent among the Shoshones “who has not at some period of his life given proofs of his possessing [it].” There could be no prominence without some warlike achievement, a principle basic to the entire structure of Shoshone politics. These observations led Lewis to an insight into the problems the Americans were going to have in integrating not just the language but all the Indians west of the Mississippi River into their trading empire.

Herein lies one of the great stories of American history, even though it is a tale of what didn’t happen rather than what did. It would have been the work of a few moments only for the Nez Percé to kill the white men and take for themselves all the expedition’s goods. Had the Indians done so, they would have come into possession of by far the biggest arsenal not just west of the Rocky Mountains but west of the Mississippi River, along with priceless kettles, axes, hatchets, beads, and other trade items in quantities greater than any of them would ever see in their lifetimes.

The expedition owed more to Indian women than either captain ever acknowledged. And the United States owed more to the Nez Percé for their restraint than it ever acknowledged. When, in 1877, the army, carrying out government policy, drove Chief Joseph and the Nez Percé from their Idaho home, there were in the band old men and women who had as children been in Twisted Hair’s village.

The local Indians were proving troublesome because of their proclivity for petty theft: any object laid aside for a moment vanished. The captains’ greatest concern became not the Indians’ arrows but “the protection of our Stores from thieft.”

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.

Anyway, no matter how much compassion Jefferson felt toward the Indians, however badly he wanted law and order and bureaucratic regularity on the frontier, on this question the people, not the government, ruled. Americans had but one Indian policy—get out of the way or get killed—and it was nonnegotiable. The only thing that separated Jefferson from the settlers was that he wanted to buy the Indians out rather than drive them out. But that too was more rhetoric than reality.

The Nez Percé had seen the white soldiers hungry and fed them; seen them cold and provided fuel; seen them without horses and put them on mounts; seen them confused and provided good advice; seen them make fools of themselves trying to cross mountains ten feet deep in snow and not snickered; seen them lost and guided them. They had ridden together, eaten together, slept together, played together, and crossed the Lolo Trail together. Although they could communicate only with the sign language, they had an abundance of shared experiences that drew them together. They had managed to cross communication and cultural barriers to become genuine friends.

As the Indians set off to the north, Lewis and his men headed east. They passed through present-day Missoula, up today’s Broadway Street across the river from the University of Montana. At five miles, they came to today’s Blackfoot River, called River of the Road to Buffalo by the Nez Percé, coming in from the east, and headed up it, through a heavily timbered country of high and rocky mountains. The next day, they made thirty-one miles.

After Drouillard rode off, the horses swam across the river, the bull boats were paddled over, and camp was set up on the site they had occupied during the great portage of 1805. The cache was opened; high water during the spring runoff had gotten into it; Lewis’s plant specimens were all lost, but fortunately the papers and maps were okay. The loss of the specimens was a terrible blow. They had been collected painstakingly, labeled, carefully dried (requiring daily attention) and preserved. Paul Russell Cutright writes, “Such losses were more than minor catastrophes, resulting as they did in the defeat of prime scientific objectives and the complete vitiation of weeks and months of dedicated effort and inquiry.”1 •

The enchantment of the place did not prevent Lewis from worrying. His expressed desire to meet the Blackfeet had given way to fear. When he was planning this exploration, he had hoped to have with him some leading Nez Percé men, so that he could make a peace between the Nez Percé and the Blackfeet. That motive was now gone. Further, he had planned to explore with a party of seven; now he was down to four. Finally, what the Nez Percé said about the Blackfeet—“they are a vicious lawless and reather an abandoned set of wretches”—had its effect on Lewis. His conclusion: “I wish to avoid an interview with them if possible,” because he had no doubt that “finding us weak should they happen to be numerous [the Blackfeet] wil most probably attempt to rob us of our arms and baggage.” He vowed to “take every possible precaution to avoid them if possible.”

This was the pickle Lewis’s leadership had brought them to. Four men alone (and one of them separated from the rest) in the heart of Blackfoot country had run into a roving band of young Indian braves. Two parties of armed young men, each suspicious of the other, were attempting to occupy the same space at the same time. That always meant trouble. The red war party outnumbered the white war party by at least two to one, and possibly much more. The natives figured to have reinforcements close at hand; the whites had no reinforcements within two hundred miles. It was Lewis’s fault. He was the one who had dreamed up this exploration, the one who had decided to make it with a party of four only, the one who had delayed two full days at Camp Disappointment even though he knew that every additional hour in Blackfoot country raised the risks of an unwelcome encounter and that Clark would soon be waiting for him at the Yellowstone, and even though he wanted to get back to St. Louis as soon as possible.

Lewis asked about the trading patterns of the Blackfeet. The boys informed him that they rode six days’ easy march to reach a British post on the North Saskatchewan River, and that from the traders there “they obtain arms amunition sperituous liquor blankets &c in exchange for wolves and some beaver skins.” This was unwelcome news. It reinforced Jefferson’s worst fears: that agents of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the North West Company were firmly entrenched on the Northern Plains, and were rapidly extending their monopoly.

the Lewis and Clark Expedition had been only three months ahead of private trappers in exploring the Louisiana Purchase. Dickson and Hancock were the cutting edge of what might be called the fur rush. It could be taken for granted that there would be many others coming close behind them. However much Jefferson might want to reserve Upper Louisiana for displaced Indians from east of the Mississippi, no power on earth, and certainly no laws written in Washington, could stop the American frontiersmen. They were lured up the Missouri River by a spirit of adventure, by a cockiness and bravado that were not entirely without foundation, by a love of the wilderness, and by greed. Powerful motives in young men, the kind that can’t be denied.

The news from the chiefs was all bad. The Arikaras and the Mandans had been fighting. The Hidatsas had sent a war party into the Rockies and killed some Shoshones—possibly from Cameahwait’s band. The Sioux had raided the Mandans. And the Mandans were divided by internal quarrels. This was dreadful. The American peace policy had failed within days of the departure of Lewis and Clark. The whole middle and upper Missouri River was at war. It was as if Lewis and Clark had never come, never made promises, never extracted pledges to be good. Making matters worse, the chiefs turned down Clark’s invitation to come to Washington.

On August 17, just before departing, Clark settled with Charbonneau. He received $500.33 1/3 for his horse, his tepee, and his services. Sacagawea got nothing.II The Charbonneaus stayed with the Mandans.

For all Lewis’s accomplishments, however, there were some big disappointments, and as St. Louis came into view, he had reason for worry. His Indian diplomacy had so far been a failure. 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.

laconic.”

indolent

odious,

Lewis asked that volunteers sign up for twelve months’ service and “thus prove themselves worthy of their fathers of ’76 whose bequest, purchased with their blood, are those rights we now enjoy and so justly prize; let us then defend and preserve them, regardless of what it may cost, that they may pass unimpaired to the generation who are to succeed us.”

pacific;

Fiat

impetuous,

“Of courage undaunted, possessing a firmness & perseverance of purpose which nothing but impossibilities could divert from it’s direction, careful as a father of those committed to his charge, yet steady in the maintenance of order & discipline, intimate with the Indian character, customs & principles, habituated to the hunting life, guarded by exact observation of the vegetables & animals of his own country, against losing time in the description of objects already possessed, honest, disinterested, liberal, of sound understanding and a fidelity to truth so scrupulous that whatever he should report would be as certain as if seen by ourselves, with all these qualifications as if selected and implanted by nature in one body, for this express purpose, I could have no hesitation in confiding the enterprize to him.”