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“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.”
“in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.”
“The authority of the Cheif [is] nothing more than mere admonition supported by the influence which the propiety of his own examplery conduct may have acquired him in the minds of the individuals who compose the band, the title of cheif is not hereditary, nor can I learn that there is any cerimony of instalment, or other epoh in the life of a Cheif from which his title as such can be dated, in fact every man is a chief, but all have not an equal influence on the minds of the other members of the community, and he who happens to enjoy the greatest
In two sentences, the Hidatsa brave had exposed the hopelessness of the American policy of inducing the Missouri River and Rocky Mountain Indians to become trappers and traders. They would have to be conquered and cowed before they could be made to abandon war. Jefferson’s dream of establishing through persuasion and trade a peaceable kingdom among the western Indians was as much an illusion as his dream of an all-water route to the Pacific.
First Sacagawea, now Watkuweis. 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.
shout went up. In his field notes, William Clark scribbled his immortal line, “Ocian in view! O! the joy.”
Each.12 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 • Lewis was the advance agent of Jefferson’s Indian policy.
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
“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.’
Instead of shock therapy, the captains decided on heat therapy. They built a sweat lodge for the chief and put him in, fortified with thirty drops of laudanum for relaxation. It worked. The chief regained the use of his hands and arms, and soon his leg and toes. “He seems highly delighted with his recovery,” Lewis wrote on May 30. “I begin to entertain strong hope of his restoration by these sweats.”
Lewis had just made a serious political mistake. He had told these youngsters that he had organized their traditional enemies—the Nez Percé, the Shoshones, others—into an American-led alliance. Worse, he had indicated that the Americans intended to supply these enemies with rifles. The Blackfoot monopoly on firearms, based on their exclusive access to British suppliers, would be broken. As James Ronda puts it, “the clash of empires had come to the Blackfeet.” After more than twenty years of being the bully boys of the high-plains country, they were being challenged, as were their British
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Many toasts were drunk—to the Constitution, to Lewis and Clark, and so on. Barlow offered one: “To victory over the wilderness, which is more interesting than that over man.”
confessed he was surprised to discover that Colonel Hancock “is also a Fed. I took him to be a good plain republican. At all events I will hope to introduce some substtantial sincere republicanism into some branch of the family about January.”22
It seems that Lewis’s high-mindedness caused him to curse himself every morning, and possibly to swear off drinking, only to go back to another ball, or for another walk with Dickerson, that night.
“The first principle of governing the Indians,” Lewis wrote, “is to govern the whites,” which was impossible to do without such establishments.
“While the English Americans are hard at labor and sweat under the burning rays of a meridian sun, [the French and Spanish elite] will be seated in their homes or under some cooling shade, amusing themselves with their pipes and tobacco, drinking coffee.”
people; I have taken the last measures for peace, which have been merely laughed at by them as the repetition of an old song.”
No wonder Jefferson could write, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
“Be assured Sir, that my Country can never make ‘A Burr’ of me—She may reduce me to Poverty; but she can never sever my Attachment from her.”
“Jefferson’s vision extended farther and comprehended more than that of anybody else in public life, and, thinking of himself as working for posterity, he was more concerned that things should be well started than that they be quickly finished. . . . In few things that he did as President was he more in
