“My dears! In the coming days, I am going on an exploratory expedition far to the west with Captain Lewis and his assistant Clark. We have received orders from President Jefferson to explore the interior of America, sail up the Missouri River and continue until we reach the far shores of the Western Ocean. The President promised us that if we discovered anything of importance during the expedition and returned alive, we would be richly rewarded by the United States.”
With these words, one of the fifty-two members of Lewis and Clark’s expedition announced to their hosts that they were leaving on their journey. The expedition was sent in May 1804 on its way to the unexplored Indian territories far to the west of what is now the USA by the third US President, Thomas Jefferson, the man who twenty-seven years earlier had written the American Declaration of Independence.
The members of the expedition, including Lewis and Clark, who led it, had high expectations. They were going into one of the last great wildernesses where the white man’s foot had rarely set foot. That in itself fired the imagination. Many of the members – who included not only experienced soldiers, scouts, hunters and river boatmen, but also those tasked with recording the unknown animal and plant life they encountered along the way – believed that far to the west dwelt long-headed mammoths with large tusks and other prehistoric animals they had only heard of.
The journey west was an unpredictable adventure, feverishly prepared for and feared at the same time. After all, the wilderness of the eastern United States, which they knew much better, had already swallowed up many of their friends, relatives and acquaintances. They also knew that the territories they were going to were inhabited by many Indian tribes, very different from each other, who had never seen a white man before. Among them, the Teton Sioux, also known as the Lakota, were renowned for their warrior spirit.
A 16-year-old Indian girl, Sakagaeva, the daughter of a Shoshone chief, later joined the expedition with her husband. As a young girl, she was abducted from her home wigwam by warriors from a neighbouring tribe and sold as a slave. She was traded between different tribes for a long time until she finally ended up in the hands of Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-born Canadian trader and corsair, who married her.
Preparations
The United States had much less land at independence in 1776 than it has today. This was also the case in 1800, when more than two-thirds of the territory in the interior and west of the continent was still owned by the French and, above all, the Spanish crown, although the vast wilderness had always been inhabited, hunted and farmed by Native American tribes, who were only later joined by white settlers.
Following a secret agreement between Spain and France, the part of the territory known collectively as the Louisiana Territory passed relatively seamlessly under Napoleon’s French administration in 1800, although it remained formally Spanish. In November 1803, the Spanish also formally ceded the territory to Napoleon, who sold it to the United States later that year for 68 million francs, in accordance with an agreement with the then US President Jefferson. This purchase more than doubled the size of the United States overnight. The purchase of the Louisiana Territory, which later became the fifteen American states, was the largest territorial expansion of the United States in its history.
Since the Spanish had previously refused to allow the Americans to settle in their territories, Jefferson concluded soon after the purchase that new territories had to be explored, while at the same time finding river routes suitable for trade and ensuring that the Indian chiefs recognised that the mountains, prairies, bison herds, forests and rivers along which they had lived for millennia were now the property of the whites.
Jefferson entrusted the more than risky task of leading an exploratory expedition to the west to a twenty-nine-year-old centurion and his advisor, Meriwether Lewis. Lewis was not only a good soldier and commander. He had spent his childhood in the wilderness and was well acquainted with the customs of the Iroquois Indians, having met them often. As well as being an excellent hunter, he was also interested in botany, zoology and astronomy. As a child, he often collected medicinal herbs and fruits with his mother, and this knowledge came in very handy on the expedition. His father died of pneumonia when Meriwether was a young boy. Jefferson was convinced that Lewis was the right man to lead the expedition, so he sent him for further training, where he learned, among other things, how to use a sextant and other navigational instruments.
When Lewis started to assemble his team, he first thought of one of his officers, with whom he had served in the army. This was thirty-three-year-old William Clark, whom he had appointed as his first assistant and second-in-command before he had selected the rest of the members. William Clark, who had also been around Indians since childhood, had a reputation for being a reliable officer, a man who could draw maps, and a master of river travel in boats. Lewis invited him to join the expedition by letter, saying, among other things, that there was no man in the world with whom he would rather undertake such a dangerous, but also exciting and honourable journey. Clark accepted his invitation and replied that he could count on him.
Many of their acquaintances were convinced that no one would return from such a risky expedition into the heart of the Western Territories, where the warrior Sui and 170 other tribes lived, and Lewis and Clark thought it impossible and even too big a risk for them. But they also thought that they would be richly rewarded if they managed to reach the Western Ocean and return from its shores, and that their names would be written in golden letters in the history of the American continent.
During the preparations, they started to select other members. They decided that there should be 50 members in the group. In addition to the five officers, they selected thirty soldiers and twelve experienced boatmen, joined by one experienced Canadian Scout. Clark decided to take his tall, broad-shouldered, black slave York, who had been by his side since he was nine years old, with him on the expedition.
Lewis and Clark received final instructions from President Jefferson before the expedition set sail in early May 1804. Their first task was to find a river route through which East-West trade could take place. In addition, Jefferson instructed them to contact as many Indian tribes and their chiefs as possible and, in return for peace and recognition of white rule, to give them some metal peace medals that the third American President had specially designed for their expedition.
Up the Missouri
Lewis and Clark’s expedition set out in early May 1804 from the settlement of St. Louis, near where the Missouri empties into the Mississippi. They sailed up the Missouri in large wooden boats, which had stashed supplies for months in the hold. They waded through the shallows by men pulling the loaded boats with ropes. During the day they would sail, row and tow, and in the evening they would camp by the riverbank, build a fire, cook dinner and fall asleep exhausted.
Lewis, who was a somewhat withdrawn man, often left the campsite with his dog before dawn or dusk to explore the surrounding forests and vegetation. He kept a diary of his botanical and other observations. Sometimes he got into serious trouble on his hikes, and a few times he was rescued by his faithful dog, and even more times by his men. The first time he got into trouble was barely two days after setting out, when he slipped on a steep bank and slipped a few dozen metres down, and then, just above the abyss of a high cliff that threatened to swallow him up, he caught himself at the last moment by a branch of a bush. He barely managed to climb back over the sharp rocks to the edge.
The Missouri is an unpredictable river, and Lewis and Clark’s men felt this first-hand at the start of their journey. They were heading upriver, fully laden, when one of the boats unexpectedly hit a fallen log and broke its rudder. Mosquitoes and other river insects were a persistent night-time nuisance, so that the men often woke up in the morning puffy from their bites. On several occasions they were caught in storms with strong winds, forcing them to seek shelter from the lightning and thunder on small sand islands that the river had formed in the middle of its channel. The further they got from St Louis, the more often they spent the night on these islands. They knew that there were no Indians, no bears or other beasts, and therefore no danger when darkness fell.
With each day they left behind, they seemed to travel deeper into the heart of darkness. The initial enthusiasm and desire for great adventure began to give way to quieter and more anxious feelings, and with them, caution. So they travelled only a few more river miles in a day, not knowing that they still had more than two thousand miles to go to the source of the Missouri in the Rocky Mountains.
Lewis was a more reflective and sometimes withdrawn man, while Clark was considered to be the more sensible and clear-headed of the men. This is probably why he increasingly took command of the expedition, and why he was also diligent in plotting their route on his maps.
When the expedition entered what is now the state of Nebraska, it also went deep into the territories of Indian tribes. A few hunters and scouts had gone there before, but no major expedition had ever gone there. As they camped, they encountered their first small Indian tribe, whose members seemed peaceful. They exchanged a few small gifts: Lewis offered them smoked meat and the Indians gave him sweet melons in return.
After three months on the voyage, the first member of the expedition, Floyd, died of appendicitis. “Before he died, he told me he was leaving,” Clark wrote in his diary. “We buried him with full military honours.” One of the smaller rivers they camped by after burying him on a nearby hill was named after him.
After four months of travel, the expedition reached the edge of the Great Prairie east of the Rocky Mountains, where herds of bison and other game grazed, in late August 1804. The local Indians subsisted on hunting them. “We are continuing our journey into the heart of these plains,” Clark wrote in his diary. “Never in my life have I seen such vastness stretching as far as the eye can see. I don’t believe there is anything like it anywhere else in the world.” Lewis, too, encountered many new species in these prairies, including the wild prairie dog. The huge herds of bison that accompanied them were simply unthinkable, especially when the bison began to migrate with the arrival of autumn.
But where there were bison, there were Indians on the prairie. Lewis and Clark’s expedition soon encountered them. Lewis made contact with more than fifteen tribes just as he crossed the prairies. He presented their chiefs with Jefferson’s peace medals at the peace pipe they offered him, telling them that it was only a small gift and that white and white merchants would come from the east to trade with him.
The Indians they met came from different tribes. They included both Sioux and Cheyenne, as well as Indians from tribes that called themselves Crows in their own language. There were more than 170 tribes in the Great Prairie, numbering hundreds of thousands of Indians. Some subsisted by hunting or fishing, others by working the land. Some traded peacefully, others often fought among themselves. Lewis soon realised that they were quite different from each other and that he would need some skills to cope with them.
Teton Suji and wintering in a wooden fortress
The largest and one of the most warlike tribes in the prairies of the middle Missouri were the Teton Sioux. With their complete control of the river in this part of the country, it was inconceivable that trade could take place on the river without the consent of their chiefs. They demanded payment from anyone who wished to pass through their territory on the Missouri or to travel along its shores. If they were not satisfied with what was offered, it was not possible to pass through their territory, and thus westward navigation was made impossible. Moreover, the Teton Sui were not considered a peaceful tribe, but true warriors. Their chiefs were particularly proud of this.
With all this in mind, it is no wonder that Lewis and Clark’s first close encounter with the Teton Sui did not go smoothly either. When Lewis’s men looked out of their tents one morning, they found that one of their horses had disappeared during the night, that the Sui were trying to take possession of their boats, and that they had already climbed into them. The men drew their cutlasses and crossbows, but before they could use them, they saw that a large group of Sui were lurking on a nearby hill, their bows drawn. They both held their breath for a few moments, and then the first of the Indian warriors ordered the retreat.
Similar encounters with Suji occurred several more times. Lewis also met one of their chiefs, but he demanded so many gifts in exchange for passage through his territory that the expedition could not have given them even if it had wanted to. After this meeting, tensions rose several more times, but each time, when it seemed that a confrontation was imminent, one side withdrew.
In late autumn 1804, when the cold prairie nights were already forecasting winter, Lewis and Clark checked their supplies of food and other necessities, realised that they were getting low and realised that they would have to stop for a few months and spend the winter somewhere. Satisfied that their men had all survived their encounters with the Sioux and other tribes without a scratch, they decided to spend the winter in the territory of the neighbouring Mandan tribe, which was more peaceful. The Mandan were primarily bison hunters and had already encountered and traded with white traders.
Lewis and Clark’s men thus began building a small wooden fort on the banks of the Missouri before winter, naming it Fort Mandan in gratitude to their hosts. It was completed before winter. As many as 4,000 tribesmen lived at the time in the five Mandan villages near the fort, which Lewis’s men also frequented for their pretty young Indian women, more than the population of St. Louis, from which the expedition set out.
The researchers were not wrong in their prediction that the winter would be harsh and long. Their men spent five months in the wooden fort. The temperature sometimes dropped to twenty degrees below zero and it often snowed for days. The men who occasionally went hunting caught nothing and some of them got frostbite. As they began to run out of food, they had to ask their Indian hosts for it.
One day, as winter was turning into its second half, a Canadian hunter appeared in front of their fort. His name was Toussaint Charbonneau, and with him was his pregnant wife of 16 years from the neighbouring Shoshone tribe. Since Charbonneau knew a few Indian languages, and young Sakagaeva spoke them even better, Lewis and Clark offered to join them and travel west with them at the first real thaw. Charbonneau agreed and took on the role of translator, tracker and guide.
Shoshones and the crossing of the Rockies
Black Cat, one of the Mandan chiefs, told Lewis and Clark that on their way they would soon come across a mountain range that could be crossed by one of the passes he had described to them. But only if they had horses, he said. The expedition had no horses, but Lewis reckoned he could buy them from the neighbouring Shoshone tribe who lived below the mountains. He also hoped that their lost daughter Sakagaeva, who gave birth to a boy, Jean Baptiste, in February, would help him negotiate with them.
Before they set off, Lewis sent some of his men back home in boats. They took with them a detailed account of the journey they had made, as well as Clark’s river maps, the dried leaves of unknown trees and plants, and the pelts and skeletons of unknown animals they had encountered. All this had to be handed over to President Jefferson, who waited anxiously for news of the expedition’s progress. Many of his advisers believed that Lewis and Clark’s men were long dead.
Before he left, Clark wrote in his diary: “We are about to enter territory where white feet have not yet set foot. I cannot say at this moment whether this means good fortune for us or whether something bad awaits us there. All I know is that I can’t wait for us to leave and that this is one of the happiest moments of my life.”
When they really hit the road in the spring, at the first thaw, they were no longer in their river boats, but in Indian canoes, which were more manoeuvrable and better suited for the journey up the increasingly narrow river. Taking a young Indian woman, Sakagaeva, with them also proved to be more than a good decision: she knew how to find medicinal herbs and edible plants and forest fruits. When one of the large canoes capsized, it was she who rescued an indispensable part of the cargo. She warned them about the grizzlies they had encountered and several times they barely took their heels off.
One day they reached a place where the river split into two smaller ones. At first, Lewis and Clark didn’t know which one would lead them the furthest west. But then they remembered the Mandan chief’s words to choose the one which, a little higher up, flows over a rocky barrier in five waterfalls. When they went to reconnoitre, they did indeed encounter five waterfalls, and they took their breath away with their grandeur. To avoid them, the men had to shoulder all the necessities of life and circumnavigate the waterfalls on steep slopes strewn with stones, carrying canoes along the same route. Despite all the hardship and fatigue, Clark and Lewis never had a quarrel and their men remained in good spirits and motivated.
In July 1805, after circumventing the Falls, they found themselves on Shoshone territory. To get the horses, they had to make contact with them. Sakagaeva remembered the landscape of her childhood and led them through it. But the Shoshones were nowhere to be found; it was as if they had burrowed into the earth or turned into the rocks of an increasingly vertical mountain range. Lewis gathered a few men and set out to scout for them. “If we don’t find them,” he said to Clark, “the continuation of our journey is in great doubt.” Without the horses, they simply could not have crossed the high mountains that stood in their way, especially not with all their cargo and canoes.
After just a few days, the reconnaissance team found the source of the great Missouri River, which they had been navigating for more than a year. Lewis was justifiably proud of his great discovery, but worried – he still hadn’t found the Shoshone. If he could find them and buy horses from them, he hoped that his men could cross the high snow-covered pass in a day and descend the other river, which the Mandan chief Black Cat had told him about, on the other side of the mountains into the valley.
When he had almost given up hope, one day the Shoshones appeared out of the forest on their horses. He managed to persuade their chief to accompany him and his warriors back to the main expedition, which was waiting with Clark for the return of the scout. The chief agreed.
When they arrived at the camp and young Sakagaeva began to translate Lewis’ words into the language of the Indian guests by the fire, the atmosphere was tense. But suddenly she fell silent, approached one of the Shoshone chiefs and began to shout his name. The chief was at first astonished: how did this stranger, who had come with the whites, know him? Then he stood up and fell into her arms. They were brother and sister, who had spent their childhood together in the same wigwam until Sakagawa was kidnapped by warriors from a neighbouring tribe. Negotiations with the Shoshone then continued on very friendly terms and Sakagaeva’s brother Kameui promised Lewis and Clark his horses. Once again they were very lucky. They spent the next two weeks with their husbands in a hospitable Shoshone camp.
Two weeks passed quickly, autumn was approaching and they had to continue westwards if they didn’t want to be caught by winter high in the mountains on the border between present-day Idaho and Montana. They began to climb and search for the right pass, and several times they were caught in bitter cold with snow flurries. They froze and slept in the snow. Even their Shoshone guide, provided by Sakagaeva’s brother, repeatedly missed his way in the high snow and on the steep icy slopes. All around them were only high mountains. The pass spoken of by the Mandan chief Black Cat was never found and the hope of crossing it in a single day became a joke. Finally, they ran out of food and it was virtually impossible to catch anything in the high snow. They were left with some cooking oil and soup.
After two weeks of hunger and cold, they crossed the highest peaks and started descending on the other side. Clark went with a small group of men to scout for the shortest route to the lower areas. As they descended, they came upon a green fertile valley inhabited by a tribe of Indians called the Punch-Nosed Indians for their ornaments. When the Indians spotted Clark and his men, they captured them and took them to their village to kill them.
They would have done so if one of the old ladies in the camp hadn’t reached out to save their lives. With their noses pierced, Clark and his men were set free. They came to their village several more times in the following weeks, but were now welcomed by the Indians. Clark later wrote in his diary that the Punched Noses were the most honest people he had met on the trail.
Once the expedition was reunited, Lewis and Clark began to plan the way forward. But they needed canoes to get down the river they had come across. They cut down trees and hollowed them out into canoes, just as they had seen the Indians do. After a few days, they were launched and floated down the Clearwater River at the end of October 1805. For the first time since they set out, they sailed with the current of the river, not against it. After only a few days of travel, they reached rapids that grew faster, more dangerous and more unpredictable with every kilometre they travelled. Indians from smaller surrounding tribes gathered on the banks of the river to watch the strange white newcomers, apparently intent on drowning.
Lewis and Clark’s men continued on, not knowing what was around the next bend in the river. The rapids had subsided on the flatter terrain and the expedition was back in calm waters. In the lowlands they came across a new river, then a larger one, now called the Columbia. It was calm and wide and looked as if it might empty into the ocean.
After a year and a half of sailing, Lewis and Clark saw the shores of the Pacific Ocean in the distance on 7 November 1805, and reached its shores two weeks later. They had reached their final destination. With the invaluable help of a young Indian woman, Sakagawa, the expedition had achieved what most Americans had thought impossible until then. They were the first to cross America from east to west and stay alive. Not one of the fifty-two men, with the exception of Floyd, who died of appendicitis, lost their lives, even though they were travelling through Indian territory the whole time.
Overwintering and return
So they had reached their final destination, but a new winter was coming. They camped by the river and soon found that the elk they had been hunting and eating had retreated to the forests and foothills deeper inland in what is now Oregon. This became a major problem for the expedition, as they had long since used up all their supplies and had nothing with which to buy food from the local Indian tribes. The men began to fall ill with various diseases and their camp by the river was repeatedly battered by violent storms coming in from the sea.
Something had to be done. Lewis and Clark called together all the members of the expedition, explained their situation and proposed that they take a vote to decide how to proceed. The majority voted to move the camp a few kilometres further inland and to build a wooden fort similar to the one they had wintered in on Mandan territory. Clark’s black slave York and the indispensable seventeen-year-old Indian Sakagaeva also had the right to vote.
Just before Christmas, they finished a small fort, moved in, named it Fort Clatsop after the local Indian tribe and flew the American flag. The first of the two huts housed Lewis, Clark, his slave York and Sakagaeva and her husband and son, and the second all the other members of the expedition.
The winter was long, cold and monotonous. Lewis and Clark spent their days editing and rewriting their notes on plants and animals and redrawing maps, while others passed the time as best they knew how. Every few days they went moose hunting, but otherwise they spent most of their time in their fort, which was often in the vicinity of wolves. The men continued to suffer from respiratory illnesses and high fever, and they were determined to return home in the spring at the first major thaw. During the long winter months, their impatience grew, and they were sick to death of eating moose meat every day. And even that often ran out. After almost two years away from home, many of them were also suffering from homesickness.
In mid-March 1806, the weather warmed up and they began to prepare for departure. But they needed at least two large canoes. The Clatsop Indians refused to sell them more than one, so the men stole the other and made a hasty departure at the end of March.
For a few weeks, they rowed the same way they came, up the Columbia River. Paddling upstream was exhausting, and in places where there were waterfalls, the men had to carry large canoes on their backs. When they were camped, they were repeatedly stalked by Chinook Indians who wanted to seize their supplies, and on several occasions they would almost fight each other.
After a month’s journey, they left the canoe on the river bank and headed for the mountains on the backs of horses they had bought from the Indians. As food became scarce, they found themselves once more at the camp of the Punched Noses, where they rested until the beginning of June. Although the tribe’s chief advised Lewis and Clark against crossing the high mountain range before high summer, when the snow would melt, they nevertheless set out with their horses. The higher they climbed, the thicker the snow cover became, and the harder the horses trudged uphill. After five days of wandering, they were finally lost and had to return to the Indian camp and try again with their guide. The second time they succeeded.
On the other side of the mountains, Lewis and Clark decided to split their men into two groups, as they wanted to explore as much territory as possible on the way back. Lewis and his group set off along the Marias River, while Clark followed the Yellowstone River.
Lewis knew that the Marias River was inhabited by the Indians of the larger Blackfoot tribe. They were considered warlike among the other tribes, and word of their bloodthirstiness spread far and wide. In late July, eight of their warriors spotted Lewis and his men and made contact with them. They seemed peaceful enough for Lewis to agree to spend one night in the same camp. However, as he did not fully trust them, he instructed his men to keep watch over the tents at night.
His caution was not without merit: in the middle of the night, two of the Indians tried to steal some of their rifles, but the guard caught them and killed them both in the ensuing firefight. To avoid reprisals, Lewis ordered his men to hitch up their horses and immediately move east. They rode steadily all day and into the next night, stopping only after they had ridden nearly two hundred kilometres.
Clark and his party entered Crow territory at this time along the Yellowstone River. When his men awoke one morning, they found that half of their horses had disappeared during the night. Although they had not encountered a single one of their warriors on the journey, the men knew that it was the Crow Indians who had taken their horses.
Lewis and Clark agreed that their groups would meet and reunite in early August at the point where the Missouri splits into the two rivers along which they were travelling with their groups. Clark’s group was the first to arrive at the agreed place. One day, as one of Clark’s men was leaving the camp, he noticed movement in the forest. Convinced it was a moose, he grabbed his rifle, aimed and fired. He heard a human scream, ran to where his elk should have been, and saw his captain, Lewis, on the ground in a pool of blood. He had wounded him in the thigh. It was not an innocent wound, but it was not a fatal one either.
From the day they were reunited and set off down the Missouri, the men have walked every day a large part of the way that still separates them from home. They found a Mandan Indian camp and spent enough time there for Lewis’s wound to begin to heal and he was able to travel again. They obtained new canoes from the Mandans and intended to cross into Sioux territory as quickly as possible.
But in Missouri, it was virtually impossible to avoid the Teton Sioux or sneak past them without being spotted. One day, as Lewis and Clark’s men were rowing to help the Missouri, which itself was carrying them eastward, more than a hundred of their warriors suddenly appeared on the shore. They shouted in a great roar, making it clear to the whites that they were in a mood to fight. But they managed to evade them again, as they quickly swept forward down the middle of the river.
For the last two weeks of the journey, the men travelled 130 kilometres a day, each day getting closer to St Louis, where they left two years ago. The closer they got to home, the more hunters and traders they met, explaining in amazement that everyone back home had long been convinced that they were all dead.
On the morning of the twenty-third of September 1806, Lewis and Clark and their loyal companions set sail for the Mississippi, disembarking from their canoes on the shores of St. Louis at noon the same day. They had been on the voyage for two years, four months and ten days. A crowd of townspeople greeted them with cheers, rifle salutes and hugs of happiness.
Epilog
Meriwether Lewis, who was already a member of a Masonic Lodge before the expedition, became Governor of the Louisiana Territory after the expedition. He also received some land as a reward. He tried to promote the fur trade and mediated several disputes between Indian tribes and the whites who were beginning to settle the area. But politics did not go his way, and he soon became embroiled in disputes with both his rivals in St Louis and Washington, ran into debt and lost most of his fortune. In September 1809, he went to Washington to make one last attempt to explain and clarify the accusations that had been heaped on him. He stopped at one of the settlements along the way and took a room in a local cottage.
Shortly before dawn the next day, the housekeeper heard gunshots and when her assistant entered the room where Lewis was staying, he found him on the floor, shot by several bullets. Shortly after sunrise, Meriwether Lewis died. Although his somewhat mysterious death was later ruled a suicide, speculation has persisted to this day as to whether it might not have been murder, especially since he was wounded several times.
William Clark has met a kinder fate. A few months after the expedition, President Jefferson appointed him General of the US militia in the Louisiana Territory and his envoy for Indian affairs. A short time later, he too became a member of the Masonic Lodge of St. Louis. In the following years, he took part in several wars with the Indians, was appointed Governor of the Territory of Missouri three times in succession, and held several other important military, political and diplomatic posts. Throughout his service in the West, he tried to remain fair both to the native Indians and to his fellow countrymen who were immigrating to the western United States. He died of natural causes in St. Louis at the age of 69.
