Lewis also provided detailed descriptions of how things were done, ranging from Indian methods of preparing fish and roots to the making of canoes. On January 7, when Drouillard brought in a fat beaver (most welcome as food), Lewis asked him how the castor, or bait, was prepared for the traps. He used over five hundred words to describe the process as Drouillard explained it to him. You could prepare castor and place it correctly on a trap today from Lewis’s description.
Some of Lewis’s portraits were of animals he had encountered in the mountains, not native to the lower Columbia; for example, he wrote about Franklin’s grouse, which, he said, he had not seen since leaving the mountains. This was another indication that he had not written in his journal while crossing the Nez Percé trail.
Jefferson has been criticized for not sending a trained naturalist on the expedition. Donald Jackson will have none of that. “If a botanist,” he asks, “why not also a zoologist and perhaps a geologist? Later the government could send out such specialists; now the problem was to get a few men to the Pacific and back, encumbered no more than necessary by equipment, and intelligent enough to recognize and collect—but not necessarily to evaluate—the natural resources of the region.”6
Cutright goes further. “Lewis was blessed with capabilities often missing in naturalists, particularly an outstanding, inherent observational competence, an all-inclusive interest, and an objective, systematic, philosophical approach to understanding the natural world. Nothing refutes Lewis’s self-appraisal [as a botanist], and deprecating remarks of others, more eloquently than his own abundant writing. . . . In the context of the day, Lewis was an unusually capable naturalist, one with an attitude more consistent with scientists of the twentieth century than with those of his own.”7
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While Lewis described birds, plants, animals, and methods, Clark worked on his map, covering the country from Fort Mandan to Fort Clatsop. On February 11, he finished the work, an invaluable contribution to the world’s knowledge. Together with his previous map of the lower Missouri, it brought the American West together for the first time.
The map was Clark’s work, but the implications of it were a subject of intense discussion between the captains. For two months, they talked about what they had seen for themselves and learned from the Indians. The result, in the opinion of geographer John Logan Allen, was “the most important product of their winter on the Pacific.”8
“We now discover,” Lewis wrote on February 14, after three days of going over the completed map with Clark, “that we have found the most practicable and navigable passage across the Continent of North America.”
That note, almost triumphant, hid a deep disappointment. The real headline news from the Lewis and Clark Expedition was that there was no all-water route across the continent. The short portage from the Missouri to the Columbia did not exist. “This negation of the Passage to India,” Allen writes, “the feature of all images of the American Northwest since Marquette, was the greatest single transformation of geographical lore for which the journey of Lewis and Clark was responsible.”9
Lewis’s sketch of, clockwise, a trout, a vulture, a brant, and a gull, in his journal. (Courtesy American Philosophical Society)
The best route fell far short of Jefferson’s hopes. That was the answer Lewis was going to have to give to the first question Jefferson would ask when they met next year.
Beyond his personal feelings, Jefferson would have to pay a political price. With the Sioux blocking the Missouri, and with no all-water route across the continent, the Federalists would have a peg upon which to ridicule the Louisiana Purchase.
At Fort Clatsop, Lewis started practicing how he would present the news. That business about the best route made for a positive start. He went on to claim that, just as Jefferson had anticipated, the best route was up the Missouri and down the Columbia, the route the expedition had followed (except for the two shortcuts from the Missouri, at the Gates of the Mountains and at the Great Falls, which the Shoshones and Nez Percé had told the captains about; these they intended to explore on the return trip). As for crossing the Bitterroot Mountains, Lewis explained that Indian information convinced him it would not be possible to go north or south to find a better passage than the Nez Percé trail. He recorded without comment that it was a distance of 184 miles.
Not much of a best route, but the reality of geography could not be wished away. In a little-known letter dated September 29, 1806,v Lewis came a bit closer to recognizing that reality than he had in his Fort Clatsop entry. In it he wrote that he had “no hesitation to say & declar” that the expedition had been “completely successful” in discovering “the most practicable Route,” but then added the crucial qualifier, “such as Nature has permitted.”10
For the men of the Enlightenment, there was no arguing with nature. Surely Jefferson would be unhappy with the end of his dream, but still glad to know the truth. And the truth was that Jefferson would have to put out of his mind forever any comparison between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians.
Sitting on his rough-hewn stool at his rough-hewn desk at Fort Clatsop, Lewis could imagine sitting in the drawing room at the President’s House, reporting to Jefferson. He could imagine Jefferson taking in the news, nodding, accepting the fact, and already beginning to think of how to deal with the newly discovered reality.
Lewis could suppose that, after getting some details, Jefferson might well ask about the commercial possibilities. Could Americans establish a trading post at the mouth of the Columbia and take over from the British the fabulously profitable fur trade with the Orient? Lewis was working on a plan to bring that about, but it had not yet matured. He revealed one part of it, however, by noting that the abundance and cheapness of horses among the natives on both sides of the mountains “will be extremely advantageous to those who may hereafter attemt the fir trade to the East Indies by way of the Columbia river and the Pacific Ocean.”
The length and difficulty of the portage over that route could be overcome with readily available horses from tribes that had no contact with the British. He gave a census of the horse holdings of the Shoshone, the Nez Percé, and other tribes, “all of whom enjoy the bennefit of that docile, generous and valuable anamal the horse.”
The British had to take their furs out the St. Lawrence and on to London before they could begin the voyage to the Indies. If only a man could figure out how to get a trading post established on the Columbia, and a way to get the furs from the Canadian and the American Great Plains to it, American businessmen would have a one-year advantage over their British rivals. Lewis continued to think about that larger problem.
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But there would be no person-to-person report to Jefferson if Lewis did not get himself and his party home. He prepared accordingly. He checked the supplies, especially the rifles and ammunition, “now our only hope for subsistence and defence in a rout of 4000 miles through a country exclusively inhabited by savages.” He found there was more than enough and congratulated himself on having come up with “that happy expedient which I devised of securing the powder by means of the lead.” The lead canisters had been through many adventures but were “little dammaged.” The powder was dry. Moccasins were being made. The rifles were all in order, thanks to John Shields’s skills.
Lewis had determined to stay at Fort Clatsop until April 1, but on March 5 he indicated he wanted to move the date forward. For one thing, like everyone else, he wanted to get out of the place. For another, the elk were farther away than ever, making life even more difficult.
By mid-March, Lewis had fixed March 20 as departure day. It came and went—the wind blew so violently the Americans dared not attempt the river in their canoes. Still, Lewis used the occasion to say goodbye to Fort Clatsop. His statement was objective and philosophical, and had just a bit of nostalgia to it: “Altho’ we have not fared sumptuously this winter at Fort Clatsop, we have lived quite as comfortably as we had any reason to expect we should; an
d have accomplished every object which induced our remaining at this place. . . .”
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In making the preparations for departure, Lewis set out to purchase a couple of native canoes to use in going up the river as far as the lowest falls. On March 14, he bargained with a Clatsop over “an indifferent canoe,” but Lewis thought the price was “more than our stock of merchandize would lisence us. I offered him my laced uniform coat but he would not exchange.”
The expedition was desperately poor, almost broke. “Two handkercheifs would not contain all the small articles of merchandize which we possess,” Lewis lamented on March 16. “The ballance of the stock consists of 6 blue robes . . . one uniform artillerists’s coat and hat, five robes made of our large flag,” and a bit of ribbon.
“On this stock,” he realized, “we have wholy to depend for the purchase of horses and such portion of our subsistence from the Indians as it will be in our powers to obtain.”
Thinking it over, he added, “A scant dependence indeed, for a tour of the distance of that before us.”
But there wouldn’t be any crossing of the mountains if the party couldn’t get to the falls of the Columbia first, and to get there Lewis needed Indian canoes. On March 17, he sent Drouillard with his prized coat to pay the price demanded by the Indian owner of the canoe he wanted. He complained in his journal that the Indians valued their canoes too highly, and noted, “I think the U’ States are indebted to me another Uniform coat, for that of which I have disposed on this occasion was but little woarn.”
His poverty and his great need for another canoe put him in a foul and desperate mood. He made a decision and came up with a rationalization to justify it: “We yet want another canoe, and as the Clatsops will not sell us one at a price which we can afford to give we will take one of them in lue of the six Elk which they stole from us in the winter.” He did not point out that the Clatsops had paid for the stolen elk, with dogs.
On March 18, the deed was done. Lewis did not record it, but Sergeant Ordway noted in his journal that four men went “over to the prarie near the coast” and took a canoe, “as we are in want of it.” When they got it back to the fort, they found that Chief Coboway was visiting, so they hid it. Lewis admitted that the deception of Coboway “set a little awkward,” but he covered his crime by giving the chief “a cirtificate of his good conduct and the friendly intercourse which he has maintained with us during our residence at this place.”
James Ronda rightly characterizes this as “a particularly sordid tale of deception and friendship betrayed . . . at worst criminal and at best a terrible lapse of judgment. . . . The essential honesty that distinguished Lewis and Clark from explorers like Hernando DeSoto and Francisco Pizarro had been tarnished.”11
Lewis felt he had no choice. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps the expedition’s poverty did preclude purchase. Surely the Clatsops would have taken a rifle and some ammunition and powder for a canoe, but giving a rifle to a native would have involved a violation of an absolute rule—just as stealing a canoe did. Lewis chose to steal.
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During Coboway’s March 18 visit, Lewis had given him (with copies to other chiefs who visited that day) a list of the names of the men in the Corps of Discovery. He posted another copy in his quarters, explaining in a preamble that “the object of this list is, that through the medium of some civilized person who may see the same, it may be made known to the informed world, that the party consisting of the persons [named], and who were sent out by the government of the U’ States in May 1804 to explore the interior of the Continent of North America, did penetrate the same . . . [to] the Pacific Ocean.” On the back of the lists Clark added a sketched map of the Missouri and Columbia.
Lewis felt that the chances that a copy of the journals would get from the Clatsops to a trading vessel and then on to Washington were too small to take the risk. Likewise Jefferson’s idea of sending one or two men home on a trading vessel with a copy of the journals and reports. “Our party are also too small to think of leaving any of them to return to the U’States by sea,” Lewis wrote, “particularly as we shall be necessarily divided into three or four parties on our return in order to accomplish the objects [exploration of alternative routes] we have in view.” Anyway, it was highly unlikely that a trader who had to go around the world to reach the East Coast of the United States could get there before the captains arrived. And there were no ships in the area; leaving two men to wait on the chance that one would arrive soon was not practical.
On March 22, the storm began to slack off, and the party prepared to push off in the morning. That day, Coboway paid a parting visit. Lewis gave him “our houses and funiture,” a generous gesture even if he had no other option. He wrote of Coboway, in whose canoe he was about to depart, “He has been much more kind an hospitable to us than any other indian in this neighbourhood.”
Then came the last words he wrote during his long wet winter at Fort Clatsop. Appropriately, they were botanical: “The leafing of the hucklebury riminds us of spring.” Spring in Virginia, that is, where he intended to be when the leaves started to come out in 1807.
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I. The method was to boil seawater in five large kettles until it evaporated, then scrape the sides for the salt. The requirements were a place where the salt-makers had ready access to saltwater and to wood for the fires, as well as enough game in the area to sustain them.
II. The fort has been re-created today by the National Park Service, on the site.
III. The camp today has a small marker and a replica of the kettles and fireplaces. It usually had a three-man crew and over the winter produced three or four bushels of salt.
IV. Gary Moulton points out that Lewis’s apparent cure was temporary only. Six months later, Goodrich and McNeal were exhibiting symptoms of the secondary stage of the disease. Both men died young, as did many of the expedition veterans. It is possible that Lewis’s heroic doses of mercury, dispensed so freely at the first sign of venereal disease, contributed to or even caused those early deaths—although Moulton declares it would be “unwise” to make such a conclusion. (Journals, vol. 6, p. 242.)
V. Written by Lewis in the form of a summary report, apparently given by Lewis to Mr. John Hay for copying and distribution. Hay was a businessman and minor civil official in St. Louis who had been of considerable help in packing for the expedition. Lewis liked and respected him and later recommended him for a federal post. It appears that Hay made several copies of the long document, and they got a wide distribution. For details, see Jackson, Letters, vol. I, pp. 156–57, 343.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Lewis as Ethnographer: The Clasops and the Chinooks
Important as Lewis’s biological and Clark’s geographical work at Fort Clatsop was, Lewis’s ethnological studies were even more valuable, because the plants and animals and the rivers and mountains they described in such painstaking detail are, mostly, still with us, but the coastal Indians are not. Badly depleted by two smallpox epidemics in the decades before Lewis and Clark arrived, the Clatsops and Chinooks and their relatives were decimated by an epidemic of malaria in 1825–26. The handful of survivors mingled with whites and lost much of their culture. Within a generation of the winter of 1805–6, the once-flourishing Chinookan family had almost ceased to exist. Lewis gave the world the first and by far the fullest description of this tribe.1
He did his ethnology on a daily basis, using his ears, eyes, and tongue. He made a vocabulary. He described what he saw. And he spent hours interviewing Clatsops and Chinooks about their way of life.
The conversations were difficult. The sign language of the Plains Indians was inadequate on the Pacific Coast, the Americans learned few Chinookan words, and the natives had only some bits and pieces of English. Lewis recorded on January 9, 1806, that they used such words as “musquit, powder, shot, nife, file, damned rascal, sun of a bitch &c.” That wasn’t much. There was no Chinookan Sacagawea to translate for him.
&
nbsp; Under the circumstances Lewis did his best, and although he complained about his inability to get into depth on such subjects as religion or politics, his portrait of the coastal Indians was rich and fascinating, if not complete.
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They were unlike any Indians that Americans (other than sea captains and their crews) had ever encountered. They were “a mild inoffensive people,” Lewis wrote on January 4, in his first set of observations, “but will pilfer.” They were “great higlers in trade,” a consequence of their regular contact with trading vessels. But if a buyer walked away from an Indian seller, the Indian would be back the next day with a much-reduced price. And sometimes they would sell a valuable article “for a bauble which pleases their fancy.”
Lewis did not at all approve of these practices, but he had to endure them while trying to profit from them. In his view, the cause was “an avaricious all grasping disposition” (January 6). But there were redeeming features. Also on January 6, Lewis described the Indians as “very loquacious and inquisitive; they possess good memories and have repeated to us the names [of the] captains of the vessels &c of many traders.” That was potentially useful information for the captains, who made a list of the ships and their skippers who traded regularly at the mouth of the Columbia.I
Physically Lewis found the natives “generally low in stature, proportionably small . . . and much more illy formed than the Indians of the Missouri.” They had “thick broad flat feet, thick ankles, crooked legs wide mouths thick lips nose moderately large, fleshey, wide at the extremity with large nostrils, black eyes and black coarse hair” (March 19). They bound their women’s ankles, to produce swollen legs, a mark of beauty with them. They squatted rather then sat, which helped swell the legs. They practiced head-flattening by compressing the infant’s head between two boards.