The next day, Lewis decided to strike out ahead of the main body, so he could get to the place where the river came out of the mountains and make celestial observations. He brought along Drouillard and two privates. They walked through the morning; at noon, Lewis measured the sun’s altitude and deduced his latitude as N. 46 degrees, 46’ 50.2”—thirty-five miles too far north.
In the afternoon, he reached a spot where the mountains were crowding in on the river and made camp. He climbed to the summit of a rock he called “the tower . . . and from it there is a most pleasing view of the country we are now about to leave. from it I saw this evening immence herds of buffaloe in the plains below.” He selected and killed a fat elk for supper.
As he began the ascent into the mountains, he encountered “a great abundance of red yellow perple & black currants, and service berries now ripe and in great perfection . . . vastly preferable to those of our gardens.”
He was aware of passing from one ecological zone into another. On July 17, he noted that the broadleaf eastern cottonwood was giving way to the narrowleaf western cottonwood. The mosquitoes were troublesome. Just as he was ready to lie down, Lewis realized with a sharp pang that he had left his “bier,” his mosquito netting, with the canoes. “Of course [I] suffered considerably,” he wrote in his journal, “and promised in my wrath that I never will be guilty of a similar peice of negligence while on this voyage.”
During the third week in July, Lewis had two new rivers to name. Previously he and Clark had used the names of the men, of Sacagawea, of relatives, or of unusual features or incidents. Now that they were past the Great Falls, they changed their references. It was as if they suddenly recalled that they had some political responsibility here, that no politician can ever be flattered too much or too brazenly, and that nothing quite matches having a river named for you.
Lewis named the first river coming in from the left Smith’s River, for Robert Smith, Jefferson’s secretary of the navy. Lewis described it as “a beautifull river. . . . the stream meanders through a most lovely valley. . . .” The first river coming in from the right he named Dearborn’s, for Henry Dearborn, the secretary of war. He called it a “handsome bold and clear stream.”I
That morning, July 18, he noted “a large herd of the Bighorned anamals on the immencely high and nearly perpendicular clift opposite to us; on the fase of this clift they walked about and bounded from rock to rock with apparent unconcern where it appared to me that no quadruped could have stood, and from which had they made one false step they must have been precipitated at least a 500 feet.”
Lewis’s anxiety to meet the Shoshones increased. He talked with Clark; they agreed that one or the other of them would take a small party and proceed by land upriver, to get well ahead of the canoes, in order to find some Shoshones. Their idea was that the daily firing of the rifles by the hunters would frighten away the Shoshones, who would assume their enemy the Blackfeet were around. Of course the land party would also have to fire weapons to sustain itself—but not so many of them.
Clark led the party. It left at dawn on July 19. Lewis led the canoes up the river. It was hard going, whether using the cord, the setting poles, or the paddles. Whenever the mountains broke back to give a view, there was to their right the disheartening sight of lofty summits all covered with snow, standing between the expedition and its goal. Meanwhile, Lewis noted unhappily, “we are almost suffocated in this confined vally with heat.”
A. E. Mathews, Gates of the Mountains (1867). (Montana Historical Society)
That evening, “we entered much the most remarkable clifts that we have yet seen. these clifts rise from the waters edge on either side perpendicularly to the hight of 1200 feet. every object here wears a dark and gloomy aspect. the towering and projecting rocks in many places seem ready to tumble on us. . . . for the distance of 53/4 miles [the river is] deep from side to side nor is there in the 1st 3 miles of this distance a spot . . . on which a man could rest the soal of his foot. . . . it was late in the evening before I entered this place . . . obliged to continue my rout untill sometime after dark before I found a place sufficiently large to encamp my small party; at length such an one occurred on the lard. side. . . . from the singular appearance of this place I called it the gates of the rocky mountains.”
In the morning, as the flotilla paddled its way out of the canyon, the mountains receded and a beautiful intermountain valley presented itself. But about 10:00 a.m., a distressing, worry-making sight appeared in the sky: a column of smoke, coming out of a creek drainage some seven miles west, big enough to have been deliberately set. It had to have been done by Indians, all but certainly Shoshone, and almost surely because a single Indian or a small party had heard the discharge of a rifle and set fire to the grass to warn the rest of the tribe to retreat into the interior of the mountains.
That was about as bad as anything that could happen, but there was nothing to do but press on. The following day, the flotilla entered “a beautifull and extensive plain country of about 10 or 12 miles wide which extended upwards further than the eye could reach this valley is bounded by two nearly parallel ranges of high mountains which have their summits partially covered with snow.”
•
Lewis was within a couple of hours’ march from one of the great gold deposits, at Last Chance Gulch, in present Helena, Montana. But he wasn’t looking for gold. His lack of interest in it was one of the things that distinguished his exploration from that of his Spanish predecessors (another was his lack of interest in converting Indians to Christianity). Interested in plants and animals, especially fur-bearing animals, he paid little attention to potential mineral deposits, especially after leaving the Mandans. He had noted lead deposits on the lower Missouri, but when he entered the Rockies he hardly ever commented on rocks or minerals.
Why should he? In the prerailroad age, there was no way to move heavy, bulky items—no matter how valuable—from the mountains back to the seaboard. In his final instructions to Lewis, Jefferson had ordered the explorer to take note of the mineral deposits, but he meant such minerals as lead, iron, and coal, valuable adjuncts to an agricultural economy, not export items.
Donald Jackson comments that this unconcern with minerals “was a blank spot in Lewis’s thinking that he almost surely had acquired from Jefferson. The Rockies were too far away for mining, for any commerce but the fur trade, and so were not an object of study and speculation but only a wretchedly cold obstacle between men and the sea.”1 As far as Lewis and Jefferson were concerned, animals, not minerals, were the great wealth of the Rocky Mountains.
Ten days after passing Last Chance Gulch, the expedition made camp on a small creek entering today’s Beaverhead River. The captains named it Willard’s Creek, in honor of Private Alexander Willard. “Nothing remarkable happened,” Donald Jackson writes. It would be sixty years before Willard’s Creek was renamed Grasshopper Creek and the Beaverhead country teemed with gold miners.
Jackson speculates on what might have happened had the expedition brought back a handful of nuggets from Willard’s Creek: “Nomadic fur traders, blazing trails in the years immediately following Lewis and Clark, might have been joined by adventurous miners. The finding of shorter and easier trails, such as the route across South Pass in southern Wyoming, would have occurred earlier. The timetable for western settlement would surely have been advanced by a generation, and that peculiar American invention, Indian removal, would have become standard government policy much earlier in the area west of the Mississippi.”2
•
As the mountains began to close in again, toward evening on July 22, the expedition got a badly needed morale booster. The men were laboring mightily, often in the water pulling the canoes along, feet slipping (or getting cut on rocks), the river apparently having no end, the mountains crowding in, the great buffalo herds now left behind on the plains, no whiskey left, the days beginning to grow noticeably shorter. Sacagawea recognized this section of the river. She had been
here as a girl; it was the river on which the Shoshones lived in the summer. The Three Forks were at no great distance ahead. “this peice of information has cheered the sperits of the party,” Lewis duly noted.
At 4:00 p.m., the flotilla reached Clark, who had made camp on the starboard side. He had found no Indians, although he had seen signs that they were out there. He had left some presents, cloth and linen, “in order to inform the indians should they pursue his trale that we were not their enemies, but white men and their friends.”
But the thing that stood out was Clark’s physical condition, more specifically his feet. They were a raw, bleeding mass of flesh torn apart by prickly pears. “I opened the bruses & blisters of my feet which caused them to be painfull,” Clark wrote, in his own get-to-the-point fashion. He spent the day resting, waiting for Lewis to come up with the canoes.
The captains talked. They agreed that another overland expedition was necessary. Clark wanted to lead it; he wanted another chance at finding Indians and overcoming prickly pears. One day of self-enforced idleness was all he could take; he itched to be back at work.
Lewis wrote, “altho’ Capt. C. was much fatiegued his feet yet blistered and soar he insisted on pursuing his rout in the morning nor weould he consent willingly to my releiving him. . . . finding him anxious I readily consented to remain with the canoes.” Clark told the Field brothers and Private Robert Frazier to get ready to accompany him in the morning. Charbonneau asked if he could go along; Clark agreed.
This was about as close to a disagreement that the captains ever came, or at least ever wrote about, with regard to rank. In Lewis’s version, “I readily consented.” In Clark’s version, “I deturmined to proceed on in pursute of the Snake Indians.”
So insistent was Clark that he had determined, rather than Lewis’s having consented, that years later, in editing the journals for publication, Clark had “I deturmined” substituted for Lewis’s “he insisted.”
•
As a dispute, that wasn’t much, more a disagreement over the right word to describe the decision-making process than a fight over the question of who was in command. For Virginians, taught rank-consciousness from birth, sensitive to the slightest slight, concern about rank, status, and position was as much a part of life as breathing. Lewis’s journal description of this little incident is written on an unspoken, probably unconscious, assumption: that he could order Clark to stay with the canoes while he took the scouts to look for Indians. Clark disagreed: in his view, this was a case of “I deturmined” rather than “you allowed.”
There is a hint in the decision that the captains thought Clark was the better at approaching and dealing with Indians, but just a hint. The makeup of Clark’s party is puzzling. Why did Charbonneau have to ask to come along, and why didn’t Clark bring Sacagawea? The captains had brought her all this way so that she could to be the contact person with the Shoshones.
Instead, Clark was proposing to approach them with three other armed men, none of them proficient with the sign language (Drouillard was camped upriver a few miles that night; he had been hunting). The only Shoshone words Clark knew he had been taught by Sacagawea. He had asked her what was her people’s word for “white man.”
“Tab-ba-bone,” she replied.
Actually, the Shoshones had no word for “white man,” never having seen one. Scholars have guessed that tab-ba-bone might have meant “stranger,” or “enemy.”3
Certainly bringing along a recently ill young woman with a papoose on her back would have slowed the party, but, then, how fast was Clark going to go, with his feet in tatters? Anyway, proceeding slowly would have been preferable to blundering ahead hoping to bump into some Indians yet having no way to communicate with them.
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.
•
Clark set out the next morning, July 23, in search of Indians. Lewis headed upriver. Conditions were awful. “Our trio of pests still invade and obstruct us on all occasions, these are the Musquetoes eye knats and prickley pears.” It was hot. Progress was measured in yards, even feet. “The men complain of being much fortiegued, their labour is excessively great.” So moved was Lewis by their effort—and so eager was he to get on—that “I occasionally encourage them by assisting in the labour of navigating the canoes, and have learned to push a tolerable good pole in their fraize.”
He still had time for observation. Signs of beaver were noted, and otter. Cranes, geese, red-breasted mergansers, and curlews brought comment. He saw “a great number of snakes,” killed one, examined its teeth to see if they were hollow and thus would carry poison, “and fund them innosent.”
What excited wonder also caused worry. “The mountains they still continue high and seem to rise in some places like an amphatheater one rang above another as they receede from the river untill the most distant and lofty have their tops clad with snow.” They loomed out there, every time Lewis looked to his right, waiting for him.
Another frustration—the river was now flowing from a southeasterly direction, so progress was taking the expedition in exactly the wrong direction.
Another worry—although Sacagawea insisted that there were no falls or obstructions in the river above, Lewis confessed, “I can scarcely form an idea of a river runing to great extent through such a rough mountainous country without having it’s stream intersepted by some difficult and dangerous rappids or falls.”
Another pest—needle grass, an invention of the devil, consisting of barbed seeds which “penetrate our mockersons and leather legings and give us great pain untill they are removed. my poor dog suffers with them excessively, he is constantly binting and scratching himself as if in a rack of pain.”
Another day on the river. Making about eighteen miles per day. Endless. Exhausting.
July 27: “We set out at an early hour and proceeded on but slowly the current still so rapid that the men are in a continual state of their utmost exertion to get on, and they begin to weaken fast from this continual state of violent exertion.” They had reached the breaking point.
Then fortune smiled. Just around the turn, at 9:00 a.m., Lewis in the lead canoe came to a junction with a river from the southeast. A quarter-mile or so upstream, two rivers came together, a southwest fork and a middle fork, making the Three Forks. As Lewis described it, “The country opens suddonly to extensive and beatifull plains and meadows which appear to be surrounded in every direction with distant and lofty mountains.”
He came to shore on the larboard side. Telling the men to rest, he set out to climb a nearby high limestone cliff. At the top, “I commanded a most perfect view of the neighbouring country.” Looking up the southeast fork, he saw “smoth extensive green meadow of fine grass. . . . a distant range of lofty mountains rose their snow-clad tops above the irregular and broken mountains which lie adjacent to this beautifull spot.”
From the cliff Lewis stood on, the view today is still spectacular. There are modern intrusions—Interstate Highway 90, Montana Highway 287, and a few secondary roads run through it, and the little town of Three Forks is a few miles away—but the overall scene is as it was. There is a tremendous bowl, containing the linked valleys of the two rivers coming out of today’s Yellowstone Park to the south and east, and the valley of the river to the southw
est, coming down from the Madisons. The rivers are crowded with fish and waterfowl; the banks are crowded with deer. The mountains surround the bowl in a nearly complete circle of up to a hundred miles in diameter and are just as Lewis saw them, lofty and snow-covered.
A. E. Mathews, Three Forks (1867). (Montana Historical Society)
After writing a description of the Three Forks area, Lewis returned to the canoes, ate breakfast, and led the flotilla upstream. At the junction of the middle and the southwest forks, he found a note Clark had written and stuck on a pole; it said he would rejoin Lewis here unless he fell in with some fresh sign of Indians, in which case he intended to follow the Indians and would count on Lewis to ascend the southwest (or right-hand) fork.
Lewis immediately agreed with Clark’s judgment that the right-hand was the fork to take. He set up camp and made plans to stay awhile, because “beleiving this to be an essential point in the geography of this western part of the Continent I determined to remain at all events untill I obtained the necessary data for fixing it’s latitude Longitude &c.” And it wouldn’t hurt to give the men a chance to rest.
Lewis set out to explore. Comparing the middle fork with the southwest fork, he could see no difference in character or size. “Therefore to call either of these streams the Missouri would be giving it a preference wich it’s size dose not warrant as it is not larger than the other. They are each 90 yds wide.”