Lewis failed to note that the warriors had to be always prepared to defend the village, which required them to be constantly on the alert, with their hands free. He did point out that each man had his best war horse tied to a stake near his lodge at night.
“The man considers himself degraded if he is compelled to walk any distance,” Lewis noted. He did not add that in this they were very like Virginia gentlemen. The literal translation of Cameahwait, as best Lewis could make it out, was “One Who Never Walks.”
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“The chastity of their women is not held in high estimation,” Lewis wrote. The men would barter their wives’ services for a night or longer, if the reward was sufficient, “tho’ they are not so importunate that we should caress their women as the siouxs were and some of their women appear to be held more sacred than in any nation we have seen.” Lewis ordered his men to give the Shoshone braves “no cause of jealousy” by having sexual relationships with their women without the husbands’ knowledge and consent. To prevent such affairs altogether, he recognized, would be “impossible to effect, particularly on the part of our young men whom some months abstanence have made very polite to those tawney damsels.”
Knowing that the Shoshones had no contact with whites, Lewis wrote that “I was anxious to learn whether these people had the venerial.” His purpose was immediate—he had the health of his men in mind—but also scholarly. One of the oldest questions in medical history, still a subject of debate today, was whether syphilis originated in the Americas and spread to Europe after 1492, or was native to Europe and spread to the North American Indians by Europeans.
Through Sacagawea, Lewis made inquiries as to the presence of venereal disease among the Shoshones. He learned that it was a problem, “but I could not learn their remedy; they most usually die with it’s effects.” As far as he was concerned, “this seems a strong proof that these disorders bothe gonaroehah and Louis venerae are native disorders of America.”I
But it was not conclusive, as Lewis realized, because the Shoshones had suffered much from the smallpox, “which is known to be imported,” so they must have contracted it from other tribes that did have intercourse with white men. They might have contracted venereal disease in the same manner. Still, the Shoshones were “so much detached from all communication with the whites that I think it most probable that those disorders are original with them.”
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One part of Shoshone culture Lewis could observe and describe without having to go through a translation chain or Drouillard’s sign language was clothing and general appearance. He wrote at great length about the Shoshone shirts, leggings, robes, chemises, and other items, about their use of seashells, beads, arm bands, leather collars, porcupine quills dyed various colors, earrings, and so forth.
Lewis pronounced the tippet of the Shoshones “the most elegant peice of Indian dress I ever saw.” It was a sort of cloak made of dressed otter skin to which 100 to 250 rolls of ermine skin were attached. Cameahwait gave him one, which he prized.II Footwear could also be ornamental. “Some of the dressy young men,” Lewis noted, “orniment the tops of their mockersons with the skins of polecats [skunks] and trale the tail of that animal on the ground at their heels as they walk.”
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For all that he wrote on clothing and customs, Lewis was most interested in Shoshone economics and politics. Here his goal was specific, to integrate the tribe into the trading empire the United States was going to create in Louisiana and beyond the mountains. The first requirement was a general peace along the Missouri River and in the mountains, but of course the Shoshones needed no prodding in that direction. They were victims, not aggressors.
What the Shoshones could contribute to the overall goal was ermine, otter, and other exotic skins of the mountain animals—if they could be taught to trap, and if they could be made dependent on a steady flow of the white man’s goods. The Shoshones were so desperately poor that they had almost no economy to speak of. In the spring and summer, they lived on salmon; in the fall and winter, on buffalo.
That they could successfully hunt buffalo was thanks to their horses, the sole source of wealth among them. Having few to no rifles, without horses they would have been indifferent hunters at best. On August 23, Lewis watched a dozen young warriors pursuing mule deer from horseback. The chase covered four miles and “was really entertaining.”
Shortly after noon, the hunters came in with two deer and three pronghorns. To Lewis’s surprise, there was no division of the meat among the hunters. Instead, the families of the men who had made the kill took it all. “This is not customary among the nations of Indians with whom I have hitherto been acquainted,” Lewis wrote. “I asked Cameahwait the reason why the hunters did not divide the meat; he said that meat was so scarce with them that the men who killed it reserved it for themselves and their own families.”
Their implements for preparing food and eating were primitive. They had neither ax nor hatchet to cut wood; they used stone or elk horn. Their utensils consisted of earthen jars and buffalo-horn spoons. Lewis did an inventory of the metal objects possessed by Cameahwait’s people: “a few indifferent knives, a few brass kettles, some arm bands of iron and brass, a few buttons, worn as ornaments in their hair, a spear or two of a foot in length and some iron and brass arrow points which they informed me they obtained in exchange for horses from the Crow or Rocky Mountains Indians.” Any people so primitive that they were forced to trade horses for a few metal arrowheads obviously needed to get into a more extensive trading system.
What the Shoshones valued above all else, and depended on absolutely, was the bravery of their young men. Their childrearing system was designed to produce brave warriors. “They seldom correct their children,” Lewis wrote, “particularly the boys who soon became masters of their own acts. They give as a reason that it cows and breaks the Sperit of the boy to whip him, and that he never recovers his independence of mind after he is grown.”
In politics, they followed not the oldest or wisest or the best talker, but the bravest man. They had customs, but no laws or regulations. “Each individual man is his own soveriegn master,” Lewis wrote, “and acts from the dictates of his own mind.”
From this fact sprang the principle of political leadership: “The authority of the Cheif [is] nothing more than mere admonition supported by the influence which the propiety of his own examplery conduct may have acquired him in the minds of the individuals who compose the band, the title of cheif is not hereditary, nor can I learn that there is any cerimony of instalment, or other epoh in the life of a Cheif from which his title as such can be dated, in fact every man is a chief, but all have not an equal influence on the minds of the other members of the community, and he who happens to enjoy the greatest share of confidence is the principal Chief.”
Since bravery was the primary virtue, no man could become eminent among the Shoshones “who has not at some period of his life given proofs of his possessing [it].” There could be no prominence without some warlike achievement, a principle basic to the entire structure of Shoshone politics.
These observations led Lewis to an insight into the problems the Americans were going to have in integrating not just the language but all the Indians west of the Mississippi River into their trading empire. He recalled the day at Fort Mandan when he was explaining to the Hidatsa chiefs the advantages that would flow to them from a general state of peace among the nations of the Missouri. The old men agreed with him, but only because they “had already geathered their havest of larals, and having forceably felt in many instances some of those inconveniences attending a state of war.” But a young warrior put to Lewis a question that Lewis could not answer: “[He] asked me if they were in a state of peace with all their neighbours what the nation would do for Cheifs?”
The warrior went on to make a fundamental point: “The chiefs were now oald and must shortly die and the nation could not exist without chiefs.”
In two sentences, the Hi
datsa brave had exposed the hopelessness of the American policy of inducing the Missouri River and Rocky Mountain Indians to become trappers and traders. They would have to be conquered and cowed before they could be made to abandon war. Jefferson’s dream of establishing through persuasion and trade a peaceable kingdom among the western Indians was as much an illusion as his dream of an all-water route to the Pacific.
This was a great disappointment, but it could not be helped. It was characteristic of the men of the Enlightenment to face facts. Lewis’s ethnology helped establish the facts. It was therefore a great contribution to general knowledge—exactly the kind of contribution Lewis berated himself for not making in his thirty-first-birthday musings.
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I. Lues venera is Latin for “syphilis.” Gonorrhea was often confused with syphilis at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but Lewis here made a clear distinction. (Moulton, ed., Journals, vol. 5, p. 125.)
II. In 1807, the artist Charles B. J. Févret de Saint-Mémin painted Lewis wearing the robe. See illustration on here.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Over the Bitterroots
September 1–October 6, 1805
The party set out early on September 1, traveling cross-country over high, rugged hills, to today’s North Fork of the Salmon River (Fish Creek to Lewis and Clark), following the Shoshone guide, whom the captains called Old Toby. They were headed almost due north and climbing toward the Continental Divide (on their right, to the east) in rough, seldom-traveled mountainous country, with no Indian trail or any other sign of human presence.
They were entering mountains far more difficult to pass than any American had ever attempted. The country is so remote and rugged that nearly two full centuries later it remains basically uninhabited. The confusion of creeks and ravines cutting through the steep mountainsides has made the route the expedition used one of the most disputed of the entire journey. One expert, Harry Majors, calls the route “the single most obscure and enigmatic of the entire Lewis and Clark expedition.”1
Clark described the route: “thro’ thickets in which we were obliged to Cut a road, over rockey hill Sides where our horses were in [perpetual] danger of Slipping to Ther certain distruction & up & Down Steep hills . . . with the greatest dificuelty risque &c. we made 71/2 miles.”
As the party ascended toward the Divide, the going grew worse. On September 3, it snowed. The last thermometer broke. Clark summed up the misery of the day: “We passed over emence hils and Some of the worst roade that ever horses passed our horses frequently fell.” There was no game in the mountains, save grouse. The expedition consumed the last of its salt pork. At least they got to the Divide (whether at Lost Trail Pass or Chief Joseph Pass is disputed), which they followed for some miles, along the present Idaho-Montana border, before beginning their descent to the Bitterroot Valley, west of the Divide.
There was a hard freeze that night. On September 4, the party fell down a very steep descent to a north-flowing river that Lewis named “Clark’s River” (today’s Bitterroot River). There, at today’s Ross’s Hole, the captains encountered a band of the Salish Indians some four hundred people strong, with at least five hundred horses.
The Salish, whom the captains called Flatheads (a generic term with them, loosely used to signify all Northwest Indians, even though they did not deform their heads as Indians on the Columbia did), were friendly. The presence of Old Toby undoubtedly helped ease the way for the Americans, for the Salish were allies of the Shoshones; indeed, this band was on its way to join Cameahwait’s people at the Three Forks.
Charles M. Russell, Indians at Ross’ Hole (1912). (Montana Historical Society)
Communication was possible if cumbersome. A Shoshone boy lived with the Flatheads; he could speak with the captains through the usual translation channels.
As he habitually did with previously unknown Indians, Lewis made a vocabulary of the Salish language, taking special care in this instance because the Indians’ throaty, guttural speech led him to conjecture that they were descendants of Prince Madoc and the Welsh Indians. Like many others, Jefferson believed that this persistent myth might well be true, and had instructed Lewis to look for the tribe.
The Salish were not Welsh, but they were—in Private Joseph Whitehouse’s words—“the likelyest and honestst Savages we have ever yet Seen.”2 They were also generous. Although their stock of provisions was as low as that of the expedition, they shared their berries and roots. And they traded for horses at much better prices than the Shoshones demanded, perhaps not aware of how desperate Lewis and Clark were. The captains bought thirteen horses for “a fiew articles of merchendize,” and the Salish were kind enough to exchange seven of the run-down Shoshone ponies for what Clark called “ellegant horses.” The expedition now had approximately thirty-nine horses, three colts, and one mule—for packing, riding, or food in the last extreme.3
On the morning of September 6, the captains directed the men to lighten the loads on the Shoshone horses and pack the excess on the Salish horses. By midafternoon, that task was completed and the party set off down the Bitterroot River (north) while the Salish galloped out for Three Forks and the buffalo hunt. The expedition made ten miles and camped, with nothing to eat but two grouse and some berries. The captains were out of flour and had in the larder only a little corn and the portable soup Lewis had purchased in Philadelphia.
For the next three days, the descent of the wide and beautiful Bitterroot Valley was relatively easy. The expedition made twenty-two miles on the 7th, twenty-three on the 8th, and twenty-one on the 9th. But as they marched, the captains and their men kept looking to their left (west) at the snow-covered Bitterroot Mountains, described by Sergeant Patrick Gass as “the most terrible mountains I ever beheld.”4 The barrier would have to be crossed; how, they could hardly imagine.
The Bitterroot was wide enough to be floated in canoes, but the captains never thought of stopping to make the craft and becoming waterborne again. When they asked Old Toby about its course, he could only inform them that it continued to flow north as far as he knew it and he did not know whether it joined the Columbia River or not (it did, but far to the north). In any case, the absence of salmon on the river told the captains that there had to be a great falls downstream.
Making further geographical inquiries of Old Toby, Lewis learned that a few miles downstream (just west of today’s Missoula, Montana) the Bitterroot was joined by another river (today’s Clark Fork) that flowed from the Continental Divide through an extensive valley. If a party went up the Clark Fork to its source, it could cross the Divide over a low pass and would then descend down a gentle road to the Missouri River near the Gates of the Rocky Mountains. According to Old Toby, “a man might pass to the missouri from hence by that rout in four days.”
Four days! It had taken the expedition fifty-three days to travel from the Gates of the Rocky Mountains to its present location. Whatever emotions Lewis felt when he learned that the party might have saved seven weeks he kept to himself.I
The party camped the night of September 9 at the junction of a stream coming in from the west (today’s Lolo Creek, some ten miles south-southwest of Missoula). Old Toby informed Lewis that at this place the party would leave the Bitterroot River and head almost straight west, up Lolo Creek, and then over the mountains. The ordeal that every man had dreaded every time he looked left was about to begin. Lewis wrote of “those unknown formidable snow clad Mountains,” which the party was about to attempt “on the bare word of a Savage [Old Toby], while “99/100th of his Countrymen assured us that a passage was impracticable.”5
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“The weather appearing settled and fair,” Lewis wrote, “I determined to halt the next day rest our horses and take some scelestial Observations.” He called the campground “Travellers rest.”
On the morning of September 10, Lewis sent out all the hunters. They returned with four deer, a beaver, and three grouse. Even more welcome, if possible, Private John
Colter brought in three Indians from a tribe that lived across the mountains. The captains called them Flatheads, but they were almost surely Nez Percé. They were in pursuit of a band of Shoshones that had stolen twenty-one horses—proof that the mountains could be crossed. One of the three agreed to remain with the Americans “to introduce us to his relations whom he informed us were numerous and resided in the plain below the mountains on the columbia river, from whence he said the water was good and capable of being navigated to the sea.” He also told Lewis that “some of his relation were at the sea last fall and saw an old whiteman who resided there by himself.” The best news of all, Lewis recorded, was that the Indian said “it would require five sleeps wich is six days travel, to reach his relations.”
Six days’ travel wasn’t so bad. Perhaps those mountains were not so formidable as they appeared.
Further inquiry revealed that the river that flowed into the Bitterroot a few miles north (today’s Clark Fork) received a smaller stream (today’s Blackfoot) some little distance to the east (near the site of today’s Missoula), and that it was this stream the Nez Percé followed to get to a low pass over the Continental Divide, bringing them to the buffalo country in the vicinity of either the Dearborn or the Medicine (today’s Sun) River.
That news confirmed that there were two mountain crossings required to get to the Missouri drainage from the Nez Percé country west of the Bitterroot Mountains. And it told the captains that there were at least two better routes across the Continental Divide than the one they had taken—one via today’s Clark Fork to today’s MacDonald Pass (6,320 feet) down to today’s Helena, a second via the Blackfoot River to today’s Lewis and Clark Pass (elevation 6,000 feet exactly) down to the Great Falls, and a possible third, via Gibbons Pass (6,941 feet), down the Wisdom River to the Jefferson River.