Newman pled, “Not Guilty!”
Evidence was presented; Newman made his defense.
Whatever Newman said, his peers rejected. The ten men on the court “are unanimously of opinion that the prisonar John Newman is guilty of every part of the charge exhibited against him.”
The sentence was seventy-five lashes on the bare back and “to be discarded from the perminent party engaged for North Western discovery.” Not dismissed, not discharged, but discarded.
The captains approved the sentence and set noon the next day for the lashing. They further ordered that Newman join the Frenchmen in the canoes as a laboring hand.
On October 14, the keelboat set out early. At noon, it came to on the starboard side in order to carry out Newman’s lashing. The Arikara chief with the boat watched the preparations. He was “allarmed verry much.” When the whipping actually began, the chief “Cried aloud.”
Clark explained the cause of the punishment. The chief, he recorded, “also thought exampls were necessary, & that he himself had made them by Death, but his nation never whiped even their Children.”
•
By October 24, the expedition was well north of present Bismarck and approaching the Mandan villages. The captains knew from their research in St. Louis and from Mr. Gravelines that the Mandans (and their neighbors and allies the Hidatsas) were the center of the Northern Plains trade, attracting Indians from vast distances. At trading time, in the late summer, the river villages were crowded with Crows, Assiniboines, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Arapahoes, along with whites from the North West Company, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and St. Louis businessmen.
Nowhere else could one see at a single glance the diversity and colorful life style of the Indians of the Plains. There were Spanish horses and mules to buy and sell, fancy Cheyenne leather clothing, English trade guns, baskets of produce, meat products, furs of all kinds, musical instruments, blankets, dressed buffalo hides, painted buffalo hides. During the fair, there was dancing until well into the night, and much visiting back and forth, and competition between the boys. It was a grand time in the five villages.
George Catlin, Distant View of Mandan Village (1832). (National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C./Art Resource, N.Y.)
George Catlin, Black Moccasin (1832). This Minitari chief was more than one hundred years old when Catlin portrayed him. This is one of the few drawings made from life of an Indian who knew Lewis and Clark. (National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C./Art Resource, N.Y.)
There were two Mandan villages. The lower one, on the west bank, was led by Big White and his second chief, Little Raven. Farther upriver, on the east bank, was the second village, led by Black Cat, with Raven Man Chief as his second-in-command. On the Knife River, coming in from the west, there were three Hidatsa villages. One of these, forty lodges strong, was led by Black Moccasin. Another, with over 130 earth lodges, had 450 warriors who were led by Le Borgne, or One Eye, a military chieftain of great reputation. The Mandans hunted buffalo on horseback, but they did not ride out on war parties ranging to the Rocky Mountains, whereas the Hidatsas rode the whole way to the snow-covered peaks to make raids and capture horses and slaves.5
As it moved north, the expedition began seeing Mandan villages, but they were abandoned, because the tribe had been decimated by smallpox. As the expedition passed the mouth of the Heart River, center of the old Mandan homeland, the men saw a Mandan sun-dance post standing forlorn on the prairie, a silent witness to the past. In the earth lodges, the Americans found scattered bones of men and animals.
On the 24th, the captains met their first live Mandans, Chief Big White and a twenty-five-man hunting party. With Gravelines at his side, Lewis introduced Big White to the Arikara chief with “great Cordiallity & Sermony.” They smoked a pipe. Lewis, Gravelines, and the Arikara chief accompanied Big White to his village. Peace between the Arikaras and the Mandans seemed possible. The captains were off to a good start with the Indians who would be their neighbors for the winter.
But even with all the good indications about relations with the Mandans, the captains were cautious. On October 26, the expedition was in camp just below the first Mandan village. Indians were all about them. Clark wrote, “Many men women & Children flocked down to See us.” The captains discussed the situation and “Deturmined that both would not leave the boat at the Same time untill we Knew the Deposition of the Nativs.” Lewis walked to the village with Big White and Gravelines, while Clark stayed on the boat and saw to security. There were over four thousand Indians in the five villages, about thirteen hundred of them warriors. Should they so choose, they could quite obviously overwhelm the Corps of Discovery. They would not so choose so long as the expedition could make it clear that the Indians would suffer grievously if they attacked, both in lives lost and future trade relations destroyed.
Fortunately, the Mandans understood all this and were friendly. Lewis received a warm welcome in Big White’s village and was able to extend an invitation to the chiefs of all five villages to come to the expedition’s camp for a council. Meanwhile, a trader from the second Mandan village, named René Jessaume, paid a visit to Clark. Jessaume had been living with the Mandans for fifteen years and participated fully in their ceremonial and social life. He had married a Mandan woman and was raising a family in the village. He claimed he had been a spy for General George Rogers Clark during the revolution, but apparently William Clark did not believe him; in any case, he wrote of Jessaume, “Well to give my ideas as to the impression this man makes on me is a Cunin artfull an insoncear.” But he was also useful, as interpreter and source of information, so Clark hired him on.
Relations with the Mandans continued to be excellent. The Indians were delighted that the expedition would spend the next five months as their neighbor.
On October 28, Black Cat, Lewis, Clark, and Jessaume walked up the river for some distance, looking for a place to build a fort for the winter—the Americans needed good trees and lots of them, and plenty of game. The country they examined that day would not answer.
On October 29, the first formal council was held. Lewis gave his basic Indian speech. To Clark’s dismay, “the old Chief was restless before the Speech was half ended.” Another chief “rebuked him for his uneasiness at Such a time.” When Lewis finished, Clark introduced the Arikara chief, who smoked with the Mandans. Various promises were made, but Clark complained that the talk was “not much to the purpose,” because “those nations know nothing of reagular Councils, and know not how to proceed in them, they are restless &c.” Lewis was so busy with the Indians that he forgot to wind his chronometer, but he did find time to take a meridian altitude of the sun with his sextant, for latitude.
On the morning of the last day of October, Black Cat invited Clark to his lodge to “here what he had to Say.” Since the captains regarded Black Cat as the first chief of all the Mandans, Clark readily went. Black Cat told Clark that it would fill his heart with joy if there could be a peace between the Arikaras and the Mandans, because if there were Mandan men could hunt without fear “and our womin Can work in the fields without looking every moment for the enimey.”
Then came a rebuke: “When the Indians heard of your Coming up they all Came in from hunting to See, they expected Great presents. They were disapointed, and Some Dessatisfied.” As for Black Cat, however, he was “not so much So but his Village was.” Still, he would go to meet his Great Father in Washington in the spring.
Lewis, meanwhile, played host to Hugh McCracken, a British trader with the North West Company, who had just made a nine-day, 150-mile overland trip from the Assiniboine River post of the company.
McCracken was a regular in the village, as were other traders from the North West Company and its rival, the Hudson’s Bay Company. The British in Canada were the primary suppliers of manufactured goods to the Mandans. This was a situation Lewis intended to change. His policy, Jefferson’s policy, was to isolate the Sioux, open the river from St. Louis to the Man
dans, and establish an American trading monopoly at this great emporium of the Northern Great Plains. But Lewis knew that he needed to be patient. Although he had the legal authority to throw the British traders out of Upper Louisiana, he didn’t have the physical force to do so, not when the Indians outnumbered his party by fifty warriors to every soldier. He wouldn’t have kicked the British traders out anyway, because they were providing a critically necessary service to the Indians that the Americans were not yet ready to replace.
McCracken was setting off on his return journey the next day, November 1, so Lewis seized the opportunity to establish contact with the British merchants in Canada and explain the new situation to them. While Clark talked to Black Cat, Lewis wrote a letter to McCracken’s boss. He started off with a bit of a fib: “We have been sent by the government for the purpose of exploring the river Missouri, and the western parts of the continent, with a view to the promotion of general science.” He added that his party had no intention of disrupting the trade relationship that existed, as long as the British acknowledged American sovereignty. Then, as a man who was about to go into a five-month winter camp surrounded by Indians and only Captain Clark to talk to as an equal, Lewis put in a heartfelt line: “As individuals, we feel everey disposition to cultivate the friendship of all well-disposed persons.” More specifically, he said he would be grateful in the extreme for any “hints in relation to the geography of the country, its productions, etc. which you might conceive of utility to mankind.” In short, he invited British traders to come on down for a visit.6
The British took him up on it. A number of them paid a call, including François-Antoine Larocque and Charles MacKenzie. Each man left a journal record of his visit. Larocque was twenty years old. Born in Quebec, he was educated in the United States. He wrote that he “was very politely received by Captains Lewis and Clarke and passed the night with them. Just as I arrived, they were dispatching a man for me, having heard that I intended giving flags and medals which they forbid me from giving in the name of the United States. . . . As I had neither flags nor medals, I ran no risk of disobeying those orders, of which I assured them.”
Lewis told Larocque that “the object of our voyage is purely scientific and literary, and in no way concerns trade.”
Lewis liked the young Canadian and “pressed me to remain a couple of days” for company. Larocque did. His compass was not working; the glass was broken and the needle would not point due north. He reported, “Capt. Lewis fixed my compass very well, which took him a whole day.”
Larocque was out for adventure and recognized opportunity when he saw it. From his first meeting with the captains, he begged to be allowed to accompany them to the Pacific and back. But the captains were not about to give a clerk in the North West Company a free look at the commercial possibilities in the region and said no.7
MacKenzie’s journal entries provide a sharp image of the American captains and the British traders lounging around a table in the captains’ quarters, talking about a wide range of subjects. MacKenzie wrote, “Mr. Larocque and I having nothing very particular claiming attention, we lived contentedly and became intimate with the gentlemen of the American expedition, who on all occasions seemed happy to see us, and always treated us with civility and kindness.”
But some subjects brought out Lewis’s Anglophobia. MacKenzie wrote: “It is true, Captain Lewis could not make himself agreeable to us. He could speak fluently and learnedly on all subjects, but his inveterate disposition against the British stained, at least in our eyes, all his eloquence.”8
•
The captains’ quarters were in Fort Mandan, which was located on the north bank of the Missouri, some seven miles below the mouth of the Knife and directly opposite the lower Mandan village.III Work on it had begun on November 3. Private Joseph Whitehouse recorded in his journal that “all the men at Camp Ocepied their time dilligenently in Building their huts and got them Made comfertable to live in.”9 That same day, Lewis paid off in cash the Frenchmen who had paddled the pirogues upriver. Some of them built a pirogue and returned to St. Louis before the river froze; others stayed to spend the winter with the Indians and return in the spring with Corporal Warfington and the keelboat. Jessaume and his squaw moved into camp, providing instant translation capacity.
The fort consisted of two rows of huts, set at an angle, with a palisade on the river side, a gate and a sentry post, plus the swivel gun mounted. The outer walls were eighteen feet high. In the event of an Indian attack, it would answer, at least for a while. Larocque observed, “The fort is made so strong as to be almost cannon-ball proof.”10
From the beginning of the work, Indians crossed the river to observe, mingle, and trade with the soldiers. Other visitors also came. On November 4, Clark recorded that “a french man by Name Chabonah . . . visit us, he wished to hire & informed us his 2 Squars were Snake Indians.”
His name was Toussaint Charbonneau. A French Canadian, about forty-five years old, he had once worked for the North West Company but was now living among the Hidatsas as an independent trader. His squaws, or “wives,” were Shoshones, or Snakes, from a band that lived in the Rocky Mountains at the headwaters of the Missouri. They were teen-agers who had been captured by a Hidatsa raiding party four years earlier at the place where three rivers came together to form the Missouri, called the Three Forks. Charbonneau had won them in a bet with the warriors who had captured them.
The captains eagerly accepted Charbonneau’s offer to sign on as interpreter, not so much for his own sake as because his wives could speak the language of a mountain tribe. The wives could talk to Charbonneau in Hidatsa; he could then talk in French to Drouillard, who could pass it on to the captains in English. From their difficulties with the Sioux, the captains knew how hard it was to communicate with the Indians without a translator. So on the spot they signed up Charbonneau and one of his wives “to go on with us.” He chose Sacagawea, who was about fifteen years old and six months pregnant.
MacKenzie got to know Charbonneau and was not much impressed. He noted that translation was more an art form than scientific at Fort Mandan. “Sacagawea spoke a little Hidatsa,” he wrote, “in which she had to converse with her husband, who was a Canadian and did not understand English. A mulatto [Jessaume], who spoke bad French and worse English, served as interpreter to the Captains, so that a single word to be understood by the party required to pass from the natives to the woman, from the woman to the husband, from the husband to the mulatto, from the mulatto to the captains.”
That might not have been so bad, except that Charbonneau and Jessaume argued about the meaning of every French word they used.11
Another visitor was Big White, the enormously fat, light-skinned Mandan chief.IV On November 12, Clark recorded that “Big White Came Down, he packd about 100 W. of fine meet on his Squar for us,” meaning his wife carried the hundred-pound load. Clark gave her some trinkets and a small ax for her labor.
On November 20, warriors from Black Cat’s village came to inform the captains that the American peace policy was in danger. Two Arikara delegates who had gone to the Sioux with a peace offer had been roughed up, had their horses taken from them, and been generally made to realize how angry the Sioux were that the Arikaras had arranged through Clark and Lewis for a peace with the Mandans.
There were other meddlers, including the Mandans, who had filled the ears of the Hidatsas with lies. The Mandans had an obvious interest in keeping the Hidatsas away from Fort Mandan and thus having a monopoly on trade with the expedition, so they told the Hidatsas that the Americans had joined with the Sioux and intended to make war on the Hidatsas. They offered as proof such facts as Jessaume’s moving into the fort, the strength of the fort, the constant presence of a sentry, and other military preparations.
Lewis realized how dangerous it was for the Americans to have the Hidatsas believing such things, so he reacted immediately. He set out on horseback for the Hidatsa villages, accompanied by Jessaume and Charbon
neau as translators, to make the rounds of the principal men and assure them of the falsity of the Mandan stories.
But he was rebuffed. Later that day, he saw MacKenzie. “He observed to me,” MacKenzie wrote, “that he was not very graciously received. ‘I sent ahead,’ said he, ‘to inform Horned Weasel [the Hidatsa chief] that I intended to take up my quarters at his lodge, he returned for an answer that “he was not at home.” This conduct surprised me, it being common only among your English Lords, not to be “at home” when they did not wish to see strangers, but as I had felt no inclination of entering any house after being told the landlord would not be “at home”, I looked out for another lodging, which I readily found.’ ”12
•
In the morning, Lewis and his men returned to Fort Mandan, accompanied by two lesser Hidatsa chiefs. From them, Lewis extracted a promise not to wage war on the Shoshones and Blackfeet, who resided north of the Shoshones, on the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains. The promise was worthless; a day or two later, the leader of the Wolves, a society of young Hidatsa warriors, took a party of fifty on a raid into Blackfoot territory.
So it had always been and apparently would be. The terms “peace” and “war” as understood by the Americans had no meaning to the Indians. Hostilities could break out at any time, for no apparent cause other than the restlessness of the young warriors, spurred by their desire for honor and glory, which could only be won on raids, which always brought on revenge raids, in a regular cycle. The captains were hopelessly naïve on this point. Lewis was sure he had created a peace in the face of overwhelming evidence that his words were carried away by the wind. He told Larocque of his confidence in his “very grand plan,” but Larocque had doubts, and rightly so.13