In the morning, he set off, accompanied by Sergeant Pryor; Privates Shields, Windsor, Cruzatte, and Lepage; and Drouillard. (Lewis was a great admirer of “Drewyer,” calling him “this excellent man.” Whenever Lewis led a small party on a scouting mission, Drouillard was almost always the first man chosen.)
The party ascended the river along its north bank. “The whole country in fact appears to be one continued plain to the foot of the mountains or as far as the eye can reach,” Lewis wrote. The walking was difficult, partly because of the prickly pears, whose thorns readily penetrated the thin moccasins the men were wearing. These low cactus plants were so numerous “that it requires one half of the traveler’s attention to avoid them.” Further, the dry ravines were steep and numerous, so much so they caused Lewis to return to the river and travel through its bottoms. Despite the difficulties, he covered thirty-two and a half miles that day, most of it nearly straight north.
This was the most critical exploration Lewis had ever made. He was in country totally unknown except to the Blackfoot Indians, on a river he had never heard of that went he knew not where. Yet his eye for detail, for what was new, and for what was pleasing, was as sharp as always. He described the grass (short) and the distant mountains (the Bears Paw, the Highwoods, and Square Butte). He saw and wrote descriptions of two birds unknown to science, the long-billed curlew and McCown’s longspur. He camped in a shelter of riverbank willows and got thoroughly soaked from a hard, cold rain, but still concluded his June 4 journal entry, “The river bottoms form one emence garden of roses, now in full bloe.”
The following day, he made another thirty-plus miles upstream, or nearly to present-day Tiber Dam, on a course slightly north of west. He came to the conclusion, as he put it the next day, “that this branch of the Missouri had it’s direction too much to the North for our rout to the Pacific.” He made two discoveries: Richardson’s ground squirrel and the sage grouse.
He decided to make camp, and at noon the next day make an observation of the sun in order to fix the latitude of the place, in the hope that he was north of forty-nine degrees of latitude. But at noon on June 6, the sky was overcast, “and I of course disappointed in making the observation which I much wished.” His sense that he was at the northernmost point yet in the journey was correct, but he was not as far north as he hoped. Tiber Dam is about forty miles short of the forty-ninth parallel.
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.”
It rained all night, “and as I expected we had a most disagreable and wrestless night.” At dawn “we left our watery beads” and proceeded downstream, but only with the greatest danger, because the wet clay was “precisely like walking over frozan grownd which is thawed to small debth and slips equally as bad.”III In passing along the face of a bluff, Lewis slipped at a narrow walkway of some thirty yards in length across a bluff, made by the buffalo. He nearly went straight down a craggy precipice of ninety feet. He saved himself with his espontoon and just barely managed to reach a place where he could stand “with tolerable safety.”
Before he could catch his breath, he heard Private Windsor call out, “God, God, Captain, what shall I do?”
Lewis turned and saw Windsor lying prostrate on his belly, with his right hand, arm, and leg over the precipice Lewis had just passed, holding on as best he could with his left arm and foot.
Windsor’s fear was all but overwhelming him. His dangerous situation frightened Lewis considerably, “for I expected every instant to see him loose his strength and slip off.” But, although alarmed, and still shaky from his own hairbreadth escape, Lewis managed to speak calmly.
He assured Windsor he was in no danger, then told him to take the knife out of his belt with his right hand and dig a hole with it in the face of the bluff to receive his right foot.
Windsor did as instructed, and with his foot in the hole was able to raise himself to his knees. Lewis told him to take off his moccasins (the wet leather was more slippery than bare feet) and crawl forward on his hands and knees, taking care to hold the knife in one hand and his rifle in the other. “This he happily effected and escaped.”
Their adrenaline used up, Lewis and Windsor joined the party to proceed. The plains were too slippery and too much intersected with ravines, so “we therefore continued our rout down the river sometimes in the mud and water of the bottom lands, at others in the river to our breasts and when the water became so deep that we could not wade we cut footsteps in the face of the steep bluffs with our knives and proceeded.” They shot six deer, and after making camp at dark ate their first food of the day.
“I now laid myself down on some willow boughs to a comfortable nights rest, and felt indeed as if I was fully repaid for the toil and pain of the day, so much will a good shelter, a dry bed, and comfortable supper revive the sperits of the waryed, wet and hungry traveler.”
His spirits may have been revived, but his worries remained. “The whole of my party to a man . . . were fully peswaided that this river was the Missouri.” Lewis, however, was so certain it was not the Missouri that he named it Maria’s River, after his cousin Maria Wood. “It is true that the hue of the waters of this turbulent and troubled stream but illy comport with the pure celestial virtues and amiable qualifications of that lovely fair one,” he admitted, “but on the other hand it is a noble river . . . which passes through a rich fertile and one of the most beautifully picteresque countries that I ever beheld.”
When the sun broke out around 10:00 a.m., the “innumerable litle birds” that inhabited the cottonwoods along the riverbanks “sung most inchantingly; I observed among them the brown thrush, Robbin, turtle dove, linnit goald-finch, the large and small blackbird, wren and several other birds of less note.”
At 5:00 p.m., “much fatiegued,” he arrived at camp at the junction of the Missouri and Maria’s Rivers. Clark was relieved to see him come in, for he was two days later than expected. The captains conferred, studied the maps they had with them, especially the Arrowsmith 1796 map, and agreed that the south fork was the true Missouri.
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 rated Clark the better waterman and decided he should oversee the armada’s progress up the river, while Lewis undertook the land expedition. Besides, Lewis liked to hike—and it may be that he wanted to be the first white man to see the Great Falls.
The captains determined to leave the red pirogue hidden and secured on an island at the mouth of Marias River. Lewis put his brand on several trees
in the area.IV The captains also decided to leave much of the heavy baggage in a cache—Cruzatte showed them how to make one. The purpose was to lighten the load, to have a supply depot available on the return journey (a strong indication that they intended to return overland and did not expect to meet a ship at the mouth of the Columbia River), and to provide seven more paddlers for the remaining pirogue and the canoes.
They buried the blacksmith’s bellows and tools, beaver pelts, bear skins, some axes, an auger, some files, two kegs of parched corn, two kegs of pork, a keg of salt, some chisels, some tin cups, two rifles, and the beaver traps. They also buried twenty-four pounds of powder in lead kegs in two separate caches. To leave so much buried in the ground indicated either that the expedition had been grossly overloaded up to this point, or that it was setting off to conquer the Rocky Mountains and whatever lay beyond with inadequate supplies.
In choosing the south fork, the captains had made their most critical decision yet. It was not quite irrevocable, but, considering the lateness of the season, it was almost so.V Not one noncom, not one enlisted man, not Drouillard, presumably not York or Charbonneau or Sacagawea agreed with the decision. Yet such was the spirit of the Corps of Discovery that Lewis could conclude his June 9 journal entry, “In the evening Cruzatte gave us some music on the violin and the men passed the evening in dancing singing &c and were extreemly cheerfull.”
The next day was spent in preparing the caches and making the deposits. Lewis saw and wrote the first description of the white-rumped shrike. He selected Drouillard and Privates Silas Goodrich, George Gibson, and Joseph Field to accompany him on his overland search for the Great Falls. Clark would come on with the remainder of the party in the white pirogue and six canoes.
•
During the night of June 10–11, Lewis suffered an attack of dysentery. He took some “salts,” not otherwise described, for the malady. In the morning, he felt a bit better, but weak. Nevertheless, at 8:00 a.m., “I swung my pack and set forward with my little party.” He was certain that he would discover the Great Falls. Drouillard, Goodrich, Gibson, and Field were sure he would not. They had covered some nine miles when they shot four elk, which they butchered and hung beside the river, for Clark and the party to use. Lewis directed that a feast of the marrowbones be made, but before it was ready “I was taken with such violent pain in the intestens that I was unable to partake.” The pain increased, accompanied by a high fever. It got so bad Lewis could not proceed.
Having brought no medicines with him, he decided to experiment with some simples—exactly what his mother would have done and had taught him to do. He had the men gather some of the small twigs of the choke cherry, stripped them of their leaves, cut them into pieces of two inches, boiled them in water until “a strong black decoction of an astringent bitter tast was produced,” and took a pint of it at sunset. An hour later, he forced down another pint, and within a half-hour “I was entirely releived from pain and in fact every symptom of the disorder forsook me; my fever abated, a gentle perspiration was produced and I had a comfortable and refreshing nights rest.”
At sunrise, 4:30 a.m., Lewis rose feeling much revived. He took another pint of the choke-cherry decoction and set out. It was a glorious day. Despite his illness of the previous day, he made twenty-seven miles. The small party killed two bear. Lewis climbed to a height of land, from which
we had a most beatifull and picturesk view of the Rocky moiuntains which wer perfectly covered with Snow. . . . they appear to be formed of several ranges each succeeding range rising higher than the preceding one untill the most distant appear to loose their snowey tops in the clouds; this was an august spectacle and still rendered more formidable by the recollection that we had them to pass. . . .
This evening I ate very heartily and after pening the transactions of the day amused myself catching those white fish [the sauger, unknown to science; another unknown species, caught by Goodrich on this stretch of the river, was the goldeye]. . . . I caught upwards of a douzen in a few minutes.”
June 13 was an even better day. Lewis climbed to another height in the plains, where “I overlooked a most beatifull and level plain of great extent or at least 50 or sixty miles; in this there were infinitely more buffaloe than I had ever before witnessed at a view.” He struck out for the river, with the men out to each side with orders to kill some meat and join him at the river for dinner.
“I had proceded on this course about two miles . . . whin my ears were saluted with the agreeable sound of a fall of water and advancing a little further I saw the spray arrise above the plain like a collumn of smoke. . . . [It] soon began to make a roaring too tremendious to be mistaken for any cause short of the great falls of the Missouri.” He arrived at the river about noon and hurried down the two-hundred-foot bluff to a point on top of some rocks on an island, opposite the center of the falls, “to gaze on this sublimely grand specticle . . . the grandest sight I ever beheld.”
A. E. Mathews, Great Falls of the Missouri (1867). (Montana Historical Society)
He all but tripped over himself in attempting to describe the falls. After seven hundred words, he was “so much disgusted” with his “imperfect” description that he almost tore up the pages, “but then reflected that I could not perhaps succeed better than pening the first impressions of the mind.” He wanted to “give to the enlightened world some just idea of this truly magnifficent and sublimely grand object, which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of civilized man,” a nice indication of just how seriously he took his role of being the first white man to see such sights and the resulting responsibility to describe them to “the enlighted world.” He regretted that he did not have the “pencil of Salvator Rosa or the pen of Thompson.” (Rosa was a seventeenth-century Italian landscape painter; James Thomson was an eighteenth-century Scottish poet.)
He did not neglect to describe his own feelings—the sight filled him with “pleasure and astonishment”—but he did not indicate that the sight gave him the satisfaction of having been right about the true Missouri River. Still, he must have felt it, not only as vindication of his thought process but even more because he now knew for certain that Clark and the expedition were coming the right way.
Drouillard and the privates met him on his island camp with plenty of prime buffalo meat. Goodrich caught some trout, unknown to science, described by Lewis, delicious to eat—they were cutthroats.
Sitting at his camp at the foot of the falls, Lewis concluded his entry for June 13: “My fare is really sumptuous this evening; buffaloe’s humps, tongues and marrowbones, fine trout parched meal pepper and salt, and a good appetite; the last is not considered the least of the luxuries.” A fine ending to a memorable day.
In the morning, Lewis sent Private Field with a letter to Clark, telling him of the discovery of the falls. He set the remainder of his party to work drying meat, then took his gun and espontoon and went for a walk. He thought he would go a few miles upstream to see where the rapids terminated. It couldn’t be far—the Hidatsas had said the portage took half a day.
For the first five miles, however, it was one continuous rapid. Lewis came around a bend and to his surprise saw a second falls, this one of some nineteen feet, or about half as high as the first falls. He named this one Crooked Falls. He pushed on. “Hearing a tremendious roaring above me I continued my rout . . . and was again presented by one of the most beatifull objects in nature, a cascade of about fifty feet perpendicular streching at right angles across the river . . . a quarter-mile. . . . I now thought that if a skillfull painter had been asked to make a beautifull cascade that he would most probably have presented the precise immage of this one.”
Inevitably, he compared this one with yesterday’s discovery. “At length I determined between these two great rivals for glory that this was pleasingly beautifull, while the other was sublimely grand.”
Then there was another fall, of fourteen feet, then another of twenty-six feet. Altogether
, five separate falls made up the Great Falls of the Missouri. The Hidatsas had never mentioned more than one. It suddenly looked like a much longer and more difficult portage than Lewis had anticipated.
Finally, there was an end to the twelve-mile stretch of falls and rapids. Lewis arrived at a point where the Missouri “lies a smoth even and unruffled sheet of water of nearly a mile in width bearing on it’s watry bosome vast flocks of geese which feed at pleasure in the delightfull pasture on either border.”
He was quite beside himself with joy. He wrote of “feasting my eyes on this ravishing prospect and resting myself a few minutes.” Then he decided to proceed as far as the river he had seen entering the Missouri from the northwest, a river the Hidatsas had mentioned and which they called Medicine River.
His walk took him past the biggest buffalo herd he ever saw—and therefore quite likely the biggest buffalo herd any white man ever saw. He thought he would kill a buffalo, then pick up the meat he needed for his dinner on his way back to camp from Medicine River. He shot a fat buffalo through the lungs, and watched as the blood spurted from its mouth and nostrils. Distracted by the sight, he forgot to reload his rifle.
At that moment, he became the hunted. Behind him, a grizzly had crept to within twenty steps of Lewis. Seeing the bear, Lewis brought up his rifle, but instantly realized she wasn’t loaded, and further realized that he had not nearly enough time to reload before the bear—now briskly advancing—reached him.
Instinctively, he searched the terrain. Not a tree within three hundred yards. The riverbank was not more than three feet above the level of the water. In short, no place to hide in order to gain enough time to reload.
He started to walk faster. The bear pitched at him, “open mouthed and full speed, I ran about 80 yards and found he gained on me fast.”