Lewis named the southeast fork “Gallitin’s river,” in honor of Albert Gallatin, secretary of the treasury; the middle fork he called “Maddison’s river,” in honor of James Madison, secretary of state; the southwest fork, the one he intended to follow, he called “Jefferson’s River in honor [of] that illustrious personage Thomas Jefferson President of the United States. . . .”II
At 3:00 p.m., Captain Clark came into camp. He was extremely sick, completely exhausted. He told Lewis he had been sick all night, with a high fever, frequent chills, and constant pains in his muscles. Nevertheless, in the morning, he had made a forced march of about eight miles up the middle fork but, finding no Indian sign, decided to return to Three Forks. He said he was “somewhat bilious and had not had a passage for several days.”
Lewis convinced Clark that a dozen of Rush’s pills would be sovereign in this case; he said it always worked. Clark agreed to take five. Lewis also convinced Clark to bathe his feet in warm water. Despite the treatment, Clark closed his short journal entry for the day, “I continue to be verry unwell fever verry high.”
Lewis closed his journal that night with a worry. “We begin to feel considerable anxiety with rispect to the Snake Indians,” he wrote. “If we do not find them . . . I fear the successfull issue of our voyage will be very doubtfull or at all events much more difficult in it’s acomplishment.” He believed the expedition would soon reach “the bosom of this wild and mountanous country,” and realized that meant game would grow scarce, perhaps even nonexistent. Meanwhile, the expedition would be “without any information with rispect to the country not knowing how far these mountains continue, or wher to direct our course to pass them to advantage or intersept a navigable branch of the Columbia.”
Without Shoshone horses, without Shoshone information, the expedition might as well turn around and go home, or so Lewis feared, although he was prepared to press on as long as it was possible. He consoled himself with the thought that the Jefferson River had to head with the tributaries of the Columbia. As to the lack of game, he figured that “if any Indians can subsist in the form of a nation in these mountains with the means they have of acquiring food we can also subsist.”
•
The expedition spent two days at the Three Forks, the men making clothing or hunting, Lewis making celestial observations, Clark recuperating. Always the booster and developer, Lewis proposed the establishment of a fort at Three Forks, at the far-western limit of Louisiana, where the rivers and creeks teemed with beaver. That it was almost three thousand miles up the Missouri from St. Louis and the nearest civilization bothered him not a bit—there was plenty of timber, and “the grass is luxouriant and would afford a fine swarth of hay.”
Sacagawea informed him that the expedition’s camp was precisely on the spot where the Shoshones had been camped five years ago when a raiding party of Hidatsas discovered them. The Shoshones had retreated three miles upriver and hidden in a wood. But the Hidatsas had found and routed them, killing four men, four women, and a number of boys, and making prisoners of four boys and all the remaining women, including Sacagawea.
“I cannot discover that she shews any immotion of sorrow in recollecting this event,” Lewis concluded his journal entry relating Sacagawea’s story, “or of joy in being again restored to her native country; if she has enough to eat and a few trinkets to wear I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere.”
One wonders if Lewis was comparing Sacagawea with the young black female slaves he had known, or with white women of his own class. One wonders too how the man who could be so observant about so many things, including the feelings and point of view of his men, could be so unobservant about Sacagawea’s situation. A slave, one of only two in the party, she was also the only Indian, the only mother, the only woman, the only teen-aged person. Small wonder she kept such a tight grip on her emotions.
Captain Clark had improved, somewhat. Though his fever was gone, he was “still very languid and complains of a general soarness in all his limbs.” Lewis prescribed Peruvian bark (for the tonic effect of its quinine).
Over the next week, Lewis, with Drouillard and small parties of men (and once Sacagawea), marched ahead of the canoes, searching for Indians. The early-August sun beat down on the hikers; on the first day of the month, Lewis described himself as “much exhausted by the heat of the day the roughness of the road and the want of water.” He nevertheless discovered and described the blue grouse and the pinyon jay. He found a profusion of berries, “now ripe and in full perfection, we feasted suptuously on our wild fruit.” He saw more beaver signs than he had ever thought possible. He named two tributaries of the Jefferson River: “[We] called the bold rapid an clear stream Wisdom and the more mild and placid one Philanthrophy, in commemoration of two of those cardinal virtues, which have so eminently marked that deservedly selibrated character [Jefferson] through life.”III
The junction of the Wisdom and the Jefferson presented a familiar problem. Which river to follow? Lewis decided on the Jefferson, not because it was bigger (it carried less water than the Wisdom) but because it was much warmer, “from which I concluded that it had it’s source at a greater distance in the mountains.” He wrote a note to Clark, recommending that he bring the canoes up the Jefferson if he got to the junction before Lewis returned from a two-day scout for Indians. He stuck the note on a pole at the fork of the river and set out with Drouillard, Charbonneau, and Sergeant Gass (who had disabled himself in an accident and was in great pain, too much so to work a canoe, though, according to Lewis, “he could march with convenience”).
Two days later, August 6, Lewis returned to the area, empty-handed with regard to the Shoshones. Now he heard “the hooping of the party to my left.” He marched toward the sound and found Clark and the canoes on the Wisdom River. They were a sorry mess. One canoe had just overset and all its baggage was wet, including the medicine box. Two other canoes had filled with water. Immediate action was necessary.
“The first object,” Lewis wrote, was to examine, dry, and arrange the stores. They made a camp on a gravel bar at the mouth of the Wisdom and spread the stuff out to dry.
That job done, the captains talked. Why was Clark going up the Wisdom? Hadn’t he seen Lewis’s note? He had not. The captains puzzled over this, then concluded that Lewis had put the note on a green pole; a passing beaver had cut it down and carried it off, together with the note. “The possibility of such an occurrence never once occurred to me when I placed it on the green pole,” Lewis confessed.
Clark had not agreed with Lewis on which river to take. He had gone up the Wisdom because he thought it went more directly in the direction the expedition wanted to go. But the Wisdom was much too narrow, willow-infested, rapid, and twisty. Clark said that he had met with Drouillard before Lewis came up, that Drouillard had informed him of the true state of the two rivers, and that he was in the process of turning around (which was what caused the canoe to upset) when Lewis arrived.
Another worry. Clark had sent Private Shannon ahead, up the Wisdom, to hunt. When Clark met Drouillard and decided to turn around, he told Drouillard to proceed upstream, catch up with Shannon, and bring him back. But toward dusk, Drouillard came in to report he could not find Shannon. Lewis ordered the trumpet sounded and had the men fire a couple of volleys, but Shannon made no appearance.
In the morning, August 7, the captains decided they had so far exhausted their supplies that they could proceed with one canoe less, so they hid and secured one in a thicket of brush. In the afternoon, they made seven miles up the Jefferson. Shannon failed to join the party. On the 8th, they made fourteen river miles, but, as Lewis noted, “altho’ we travel briskly and a considerable distance yet it takes us only a few miles on our general curse or rout,” because the river was “very crooked many short bends.” Three days previously, Lewis had noted that “the men were so much fortiegued today that they wished much that navigation was at an end that they might go by land.” Morale, and the energy level, were sinking
fast.
The Corps of Discovery was becoming a walking hospital. Captain Clark’s intestinal problems had disappeared, but he had developed a tumor on his ankle, which was much swollen and inflamed and gave him considerable pain. Sergeant Gass, Charbonneau, and four or five of the enlisted men had various indispositions. Everyone was more or less exhausted most of the time.
But that afternoon, Sacagawea again gave the men a much-needed lift. As Lewis put it, “The Indian woman recognized the point of a high plain to our right which she informed us was not very distant from the summer retreat of her nation on a river beyond the mountains which runs to the west.” She said the Shoshones called the hill the “Beaver’s Head,” from a supposed resemblance of its shape to the head of a swimming beaver. “She assures us that we shall either find her people on this river or on the river immediately west of it’s source.”
So close. The men wanted to hide the canoes, put the baggage on their backs, and march to the dividing ridge. But if the captains let them do that, they would have to leave the greater part of the baggage as well as the canoes, and in Lewis’s view, “we have a stock already sufficiently small for the length of the voyage before us.” They had to have horses.
“As it is now all important with us to meet with those people [the Shoshones] as soon as possible,” Lewis wrote, the captains decided to send out an overland party that would stay out until it located the Indians. Clark wanted to lead it, but “the rageing fury of a tumer on my anckle musle” made it impossible for him to walk.
Lewis’s determination was absolute. His intention was “to proceed tomorrow with a small party to the source of the principal stream of this river and pass the mountains to the Columbia; and down that river untill I found the Indians; in short it is my resolusion to find them or some others, who have horses if it should cause me a trip of one month.”
In the morning, before breakfast, Lewis did some “wrightings, which I conceived from the nature of my instructions necessary lest any accedent should befall me on the long and reather hazardous rout I was now about to take.” What those writings consisted of, no one knows. It sounds as if they were written instructions to Clark in the event he did not return. Did he tell Clark to press on, whatever happened to him? Or to fall back to St. Louis and try again the next year, with a bigger party?
This was the first time he had done such a thing. Clearly he felt he had arrived at the critical moment and that he was in a do-or-die situation. He was a man whose mind never stopped working, and during his long walks on the plains or in the mountains he had plenty of time to think—even though his eyes were constantly picking up flora and fauna, geographical features, the distance to this or that spot, and registering them in his mind so he could write about them in his journal.
That was the naturalist/explorer in him, and his interest never flagged. But he was also an army officer operating under orders to go to the Pacific and return and report. And he was a company commander, responsible for the lives of thirty men. So what was the military-officer/explorer thinking?
In that capacity, Lewis was a worrier who took care to put his concerns down on paper. The question “Where is Shannon?” led to conjecture. Lewis’s thought was that he must have shot an elk or two and was waiting beside the Wisdom for the expedition to come to him. Which river to take? Can we possibly make it without horses? Always he worried about the state of the men’s health, and wondered how much more of this they could take.
As to what he thought lay ahead, on August 10 he wrote, “I do not beleive that the world can furnish an example of a river runing to the extent which the Missouri and Jefferson’s rivers do through such a mountainous country and at the same time so navigable as they are.” His men were already questioning that word “navigable,” but his optimism remained: “If the Columbia furnishes us such another example, a communication across the continent by water will be practicable and safe.” This had to be the triumph of faith in Jefferson, at the expense of what he was seeing with his own eyes, the men at their uttermost limits and still so far to go.
His realism returned to him: “this [a short portage and an easy float to the Pacific] I can scarcely hope from a knowledge of its having in its comparitively short course to the ocean the same number of feet to decend which the Missouri and Mississippi have from this point to the Gulph of Mexico.”
His mind covered the continent. If the Columbia had only one-fifth the course to run to get to sea level as the Missouri-Mississippi, and if they started out within a short hike of each other, then the Columbia was going to have lots more falls and rapids than anything they had so far encountered.
But his fixed rule was always to assume the road ahead was good, until proved otherwise.
Only a tiny number of people have ever had the experience of not knowing what they would see when they got to the top of the mountain or turned into the river or sailed around the tip of a continent. Lewis expected that, when he got up the mountain to the Divide, he would see something resembling the country he was traveling through—long, sweeping valleys dropping down to the broader valley of the Jefferson—only in this case the stream would be running to the south branch of the Columbia. Whatever he saw, he was either going to find horses on this trip, and get over the mountains and onto the Columbia, or die in the attempt.
Aside from his own calculation about the nature of the Columbia, he seldom wrote about what he expected to see. He did write about what the Hidatsas told him. Their information was awfully sketchy beyond Three Forks, and nonexistent on the western side of the Divide. Lewis’s theoretical expectation, learned from Jefferson, was that the Rockies were a single chain of mountains, like the Appalachians. But, given that the Rockies were so much higher than anything east of the Mississippi, he really didn’t know what he would see.
•
With regard to the Indians he was seeking, he neglected to think through his situation. He just blundered ahead on the unshakable and unacknowledged assumption that he was such an expert in handling Indians that when he met a Shoshone he would know instinctively what to do.
If he ever interviewed Sacagawea about her people, he didn’t consider it important enough to put into his journal. If he ever asked her what the country beyond the Divide was like, he didn’t write about it. Clark’s asking her how to say “white man” in Shoshone was the full extent of the captains’ interrogation of the most valuable intelligence source they had available to them. That Lewis did not bring her along on the most important mission of his life is inexplicable. She had made long marches before, and could again.
Also inexplicable was the failure of the captains to talk with each other, and to bring Drouillard and Charbonneau in on the discussion, about what to do when contact was made with a Shoshone. Furthermore, Lewis held no conference with Drouillard and Privates John Shields and Hugh McNeal, the men he had selected to go on the mission with him, to tell them what to do when an Indian was spotted—how to behave, what signs to use, what to say.
Lewis had good reason to believe the Shoshones would welcome the expedition. The tribe desperately needed contact with white traders, so that the braves could arm themselves and fight the Blackfeet, Hidatsas, and other enemies on more equal terms. Of course, Lewis wasn’t bringing the hard-pressed Shoshones any guns—only the promise that if the Shoshones cooperated, American traders would come to their country. Short-term, Lewis needed the Shoshones far more than they needed him; long-term, their fate was tied up with the success of the expedition. But how to get them to recognize this would be a problem. So would getting past the initial moment of contact without anybody’s firing or running away.
These problems required a plan and a strategy, but the captains never developed either one.
•
At breakfast on the morning of August 9, a good omen for Lewis’s mission: Shannon came in, with three deer skins and an adventure story that had a happy ending.
“Immediately after breakfast,” Lewis wrote that night, “I sl
ung my pack and set out.”
The first day, he covered sixteen miles. The second day, it was thirty miles, ending up in “one of the handsomest coves I ever saw, of about 16 or 18 miles in diameter.”IV He had followed an old Indian road, but it gave out on him. On the morning of the 11th, he met with his party and gave out the closest thing to a plan he could come up with. They would spread out across the valley, headed west, looking for the Indian road. Drouillard would go out to the right, Shields to the left; McNeal would stay with Lewis. If Drouillard or Shields should find the road, he would notify Lewis by placing a hat on the muzzle of his rifle and holding it aloft.
They marched abreast for five miles. No sign of a road. Suddenly Lewis squinted, looked again, took out his telescope, and saw for sure “an Indian on horse back about two miles distant coming down the plain toward us.” His dress was Shoshone. “His arms were a bow and quiver of arrows, and was mounted on an eligant horse without a saddle.”
“I was overjoyed at the sight of this stranger,” Lewis wrote, “and had no doubt of obtaining a friendly introduction to his nation provided I could get near enough to him to convince him of our being whitemen.”
Lewis hiked on at his usual pace. The Indian horseman came on. But when they were about a mile apart, the Indian stopped. So did Lewis. Lewis pulled his blanket from his pack, threw it into the air, and spread it on the ground, which he understood to be a signal of friendship. Unfortunately, “this signal had not the desired effect, he still kept his position.” He was glancing from side to side. It seemed to Lewis that he was viewing Drouillard and Shields “with an air of suspicion.”
Of course he was. The Indian was, probably, a teen-ager out on a scout, curious about these strangers but cautious, brought up to fear all strangers. Coming at him were four armed men. How could he not be suspicious? Especially since the Shoshones had just suffered a serious loss of people and horses from a Blackfoot raid.4
Lewis wanted to make Drouillard and Shields halt, but they were out of shouting range “and I feared to make any signal to them least it should increase the suspicion in the mind of the Indian of our having some unfriendly design upon him.”