But the next morning, April 22, local Chinookans stole a saddle and robe. Lewis’s blood rose past a danger point. He swore he would either get the stolen goods back or “birn their houses. they have vexed me in such a manner by such repeated acts of villany that I am quite disposed to treat them with every severyty, their defenseless state pleads forgivness so far as rispects their lives.” He ordered a thorough search of the village and marched there himself, resolved to burn the place down if he didn’t get the saddle and robe back.
That was the closest Lewis came to applying the principle of collective guilt. Fortunately, the men found the stolen goods hidden in a corner of one of the houses before Lewis reached the village.
He had been wonderfully lucky. Had those goods not been recovered, he might have given the order to put the houses to the torch. The resulting conflagration would have been a gross overreaction, unpardonably unjust, and a permanent blot on his honor. It would have turned every Chinookan village on the lower Columbia against the Americans and thus made impossible the fulfillment of the plan Lewis was developing for a transcontinental, American-run trading empire. He had a lot at stake, but he had been ready to allow his anger to override his judgment.
To modern eyes, this looks suspiciously like racism, just as Lewis’s resolve to burn down the village raises images of the U.S. Army in the Indian wars and in Vietnam. But if one means by racism a blind prejudice toward native Americans, based on false but fully believed stereotypes, Lewis was no racist. When he talked about Indian “nations” he meant the word just as he applied it to European peoples. He was keenly aware of differences between tribes, a subject he wrote about at length and with insight. He liked some Indians, admired others extravagantly, pitied some, despised a few.
His response to native Americans was based on what he saw and was completely different from his response to African Americans. With regard to blacks, he made no distinctions between them, made no study of them, had no thought that they could be of benefit to America in any capacity other than slave labor.
But, despite his cold-blooded words and resolutions, and his hatred of the Chinooks, what stands out about his journey up the lower Columbia in the spring of 1806 is that he got through it without ever once ordering a man to put a torch to an Indian home, and no man ever fired a rifle at a native.
He had, however, four times lost his temper and twice threatened to kill. His behavior was erratic and threatening to the future of the expedition. There would be other tribes to encounter, other forms of provocation. Lewis would be tested on his self-control, not his strongest character trait.
•
On April 24, the expedition marched overland. “Most of the party complain of the soarness of their feet and legs this evening,” Lewis recorded. “My left ankle gives me much pain.” A cold-water footbath helped. By the 27th, the party reached the country of Chief Yellept and the Wallawallas, relatives of the Nez Percé. The chief rode up with six men and was delighted to see the white men, as they were to see him. Yellept was chief of a village of some fifteen lodges, with perhaps 150 men, and many horses. It was currently set up about twelve miles below the junction of the Columbia and the Snake, on the north bank.
The captains had promised Yellept the previous October that they would stay a day or two with him on the return journey. He now invited the captains to bring the expedition to his village, where he promised food and horses.
A three-day visit ensued. Yellept set an example for his people by personally bringing wood and fish to the white men. On the second morning, he presented Clark with “a very eligant white horse,” an act of generosity that lost some of its luster when Yellept indicated he would like a kettle in return. No kettle, the captains said. Then whatever they thought proper, Yellept replied. Clark gave him his sword, plus a hundred balls and powder. Yellept was satisfied.
What Yellept did genuinely give away was information. For the first time since they had left the Shoshones, the captains had an interpretive route that allowed them to go beyond the sign language. There was a captive Shoshone woman with the Wallawallas who could speak to Sacagawea, who could pass it on to Charbonneau, who could communicate with Drouillard or Labiche, who, finally, could speak to the captains in English. “We conversed with them for several hours,” Lewis wrote, “and fully satisfyed all their enquiries with rispect to ourselves and the objects of our pursuit.” In return, Yellept told Lewis of a shortcut to the western end of the Lolo Trail.
That evening, Yellept’s relatives and neighbors the Yakimas came in at his invitation to see the white men and have a party. There were about one hundred men and a few women. Together with the Wallawallas, they surrounded the white men and waited patiently to see them dance. Cruzatte brought out the fiddle and for an hour the men danced, to the delight of the Indians. Then the Indians, some 550 men, women, and children, “sung and danced at the same time. most of them stood in the same place and merely jumped up to the time of their music,” but the bravest men went into the center of the circle “and danced in a circular manner sidewise.” To the Indians’ gratification, some of the white men joined in the dance. This was much different from evenings on the lower Columbia.
On the morning of April 29, two inferior chiefs presented each of the captains with a horse. The gift was welcome, but the return present was expensive. Lewis wrote, “we gave them sundry articles and among others one of my case pistols and several hundred rounds of ammunition.” That pistol was a highest-quality, custom-made weapon, a so-called dueling pistol, kept in a case with accessories, and it was Lewis’s personal property, not government issue.1
The following day, “we took leave of these friendly honest people the Wollahwollahs and departed at 11 A.M.” The shortcut Yellept told them about took them across the base of the northern bend of the Snake, saving some eighty miles. Thanks to the Wallawallas, the party had twenty-three horses, “most of them excellent young horses, but much the greater portion of them have soar backs. These indians are cruell horse-masters; they ride hard, and their saddles are so ill constructed. . . . reguardless of this they ride them when the backs of those poor annimals are in a horrid condition.”
The second night out, three teen-age Wallawalla boys rode into camp. They were returning a steel trap that “had been neglegently left behind.” Lewis called this “an act of integrity rarely witnessed among indians” (without adding that it was also rare among whites), but he praised the Wallawallas for returning knives “carelessly lossed by the men.”
Lewis paid a final tribute to the Wallawallas: “I think we can justly affirm to the honor of these people that they are the most hospitable, honest, and sincere people that we have met with in our voyage.”
•
The march the next two days was god-awful. The weather was miserable: rain, hail, and snow with high winds. At dinner on May 3, the captains divided the last of the dried meat and the balance of the dogs. “We made but a scant supper and had not anything for tomorrow.”
Their luck held. The next day, the party encountered a band of roving Nez Percé, led by Chief Tetoharsky, the man who had helped Twisted Hair as a guide the previous autumn. He offered to take them to Twisted Hair’s village and sold them some roots and fuel. They set off together in the morning. When they reached a village, they tried to purchase provisions, without much success. But they discovered that Captain Clark had quite a reputation with these natives as a doctor.
It seemed that the previous fall Clark had washed and then rubbed some liniment on an old Indian man’s sore knee and thigh, accompanying the doctoring with what Clark called “much seremony.” The man had not walked for months, but recovered with Clark’s therapy. Since then, Lewis wrote, this band “has never ceased to extol the virtues of our medecines.” Together with the effectiveness of the eye-water, the Nez Percé had “an exalted opinion of our medicine. my friend Capt. C. is their favorite phisician and has already received many applications.”
The captains could pay for th
eir keep by establishing a hospital. Lewis was a bit disturbed at thus fooling the Indians. He doubted there was much that could be done for most of the complaints, and he was embarrassed to be practicing psychosomatic medicine. He rationalized his way to a justification: “In our present situation I think it pardonable to continue this deseption for they will not give us any provision without compensation. . . . we take care to give them no article which can possibly oinjure them.”
In fact, Clark did much good for the Nez Percé. The Indians kept coming because they were benefiting from his therapy; there was no need for Lewis to feel embarrassment. The Indians paid for the therapy with roots and dogs.
The dogs were another source of potential embarrassment. The Nez Percé ate horsemeat only to ward off starvation, and never ate dog. On May 3, Lewis related a dog-meat anecdote in a piece of concise storytelling: “While at dinner an indian fellow verry impertinently threw a poor half starved puppy nearly into my plait by way of derision for our eating dogs and laughed very heartily at his own impertinence; I was so provoked at his insolence that I caught the puppy and threw it with great violence at him and struk him in the breast and face, siezed my tomahawk and shewed him by signs if he repeated his insolence I would tommahawk him, the fellow withdrew apparently much mortifyed and I continued my repast on dog without further molestation.”
Generally, relations with the Nez Percé were excellent. On May 7, an Indian rode in with two canisters of powder. His dog had dug them up at the cache the expedition had made in October. The captains rewarded his honesty with a piece of fire-making steel.
•
That day, the Bitterroot Mountains came into view. They “were perfectly covered with snow.” The Nez Percé gave the captains unfortunate news: the winter snows had been heavy, the snow was yet deep in the mountains, so no passage was possible until early June, at best. “To men confined to a diet of horsebeef and roots,” Lewis wrote, “and who are as anxious as we are to return to the fat plains of the Missouri and thence to our native homes,” this was “unwelcom inteligence.”
The party hated to be stopped. Every day, other than those in winter camp, the men tried to make some progress. Furthermore, beyond those mountains there was tobacco, tools, kettles. On the Missouri Plains there were the calves, providing unlimited quantities of tender veal, supplemented by buffalo hump and buffalo tongue, with sausage made by Charbonneau. The captains and their men had been thinking about the upcoming feast for weeks. Now they learned that they would have to stay where they were for three weeks, possibly longer, with nothing to eat but dried fish and roots and, when they were lucky, lean elk and deer, or horsemeat, or dog.
Morale sank. On the morning of May 8, some of the men ordered out to hunt instead lay about the camp, “without our permission or knoledge.” The captains found it necessary to “chid them severely for their indolence and inattention.”
•
That day, the Americans chanced on Chief Cut Nose with a party of six. Cut Nose had been off on a raid the previous fall, but Lewis had heard of him and knew he was regarded as a greater chief than Twisted Hair. The Indians and white men rode on together, and soon encountered Twisted Hair with a half-dozen warriors.
It was Twisted Hair who had agreed to keep the Americans’ horses through the winter—he had been promised two guns and ammunition as his reward—and guided the expedition as far down the Snake-Columbia as The Dalles. The captains were naturally delighted to see him. But he greeted the white men very coolly. Lewis found this “as unexpected as it was unaccountable.”
Twisted Hair turned to Cut Nose and began shouting and making angry gestures.
Cut Nose answered in kind. This continued for some twenty minutes.
The captains had no idea what was going on, but clearly they had to break it up. They needed the friendship of both chiefs if they were to get through the next three weeks, and they needed their horses if they were to have any chance of getting over the mountains. They informed the chiefs that the expedition was proceeding.
The Indians fell in behind, keeping a distance from each other. When the expedition made camp, “the two chiefs with their little bands formed seperate camps at a short distance, they all appeared to be in an ill humour.”
The captains called for a council. They relied on a Shoshone boy with Cut Nose to interpret for them, but he “refused to speak, he aledged it was a quarrel between two Cheifs and that he had no business with it.” For the next hour, the captains could make no sense out of the “violet quarrel.” They were in an agony of suspense, anxious to reunite with their horses and to keep the Nez Percé as friends.
The captains pleaded with the Shoshone boy, but “he remained obstenately silent.” The chiefs departed for their respective camps, still angry with each other. An hour later, Drouillard returned from hunting. The captains invited Twisted Hair for a smoke. He accepted, and through Drouillard explained that when he had returned from The Dalles the previous fall he had collected the expedition’s horses and taken charge of them. Cut Nose then returned from his war party and, according to Twisted Hair, asserted his primacy among the Nez Percé. He said Twisted Hair shouldn’t have accepted the responsibility, that it was he, Cut Nose, who should be in charge. Twisted Hair said he got so sick of hearing this stuff that he paid no further attention to the horses, who consequently scattered. But most of them were around, many of them with Chief Broken Arm, who lived upriver and was “a Cheif of great emenence.”
The captains invited Cut Nose to join the campfire. He came and “told us in the presents of the Twisted hair that he the twisted hair was a bad old man that he woar two faces.” Cut Nose charged that Twisted Hair had never taken care of the horses but had allowed his young men to ride them and misuse them, and that was the reason Cut Nose and Broken Arm had forbidden him to retain responsibility for the animals.
The captains said they would proceed to Broken Arm’s camp in the morning, and see how many horses and saddles they could collect. This was satisfactory to Twisted Hair and Cut Nose, who had calmed down considerably after being allowed to tell their sides of the story.
The next day, everyone moved to Broken Arm’s lodge, which was some 150 feet long, built of sticks, mats, and grass. There the expedition recovered twenty-one horses, about half the saddles, and some ammunition that had been cached. Lewis paid Twisted Hair one gun, a hundred balls, and two pounds of powder for his services, and said the other promised gun would be delivered when the balance of the horses were brought in. The gun he gave Twisted Hair was an old, beat-up British trading musket, for which he had paid a Chinook two elk skins.
When the captains explained their supply situation, and asked if the Indians would exchange a good but lean horse of theirs for a fat young horse, with a view to slaughter the colt for food, Broken Arm said he was “revolted at the aydea of an exchange.” His people had a great abundance of colts, however, and the white men could have as many as they wanted. He soon produced two fat colts and demanded nothing in return. Lewis commented that this was “the only act which deserves the appellation of hospitallity which we have witnessed in this quarter.”III
•
Over the next couple of days, various other chiefs joined Cut Nose and Twisted Hair at Broken Arm’s lodge. All together, the Nez Percé were some four thousand strong, living in their separate bands, and had by far the largest horse herd on the continent. These chiefs had a constituency that demanded attention.
The captains seized their opportunity and held a conference of all the leading men of the Nez Percé. Lewis made a speech. It took nearly half a day for him to get his main points across, because the interpretation had to pass through French, Hidatsa, and Shoshone to get to Nez Percé.
The main points were: peace and harmony among the natives on each side of the Rocky Mountains; the strength and power of the United States; the trading posts that were coming. The captains did not refer to the Nez Percé as their children, or to Jefferson as the Indians’ new father,
but, as James Ronda writes, “thoughts of sovereignty were not far from the Americans’ minds.”2
Beyond the American claim to lands west of the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark had other goals. One was to persuade the Nez Percé to send some guides and diplomats with the expedition to the Blackfoot country. The captains said they would make a peace between the two tribes, so that the Nez Percé could come live on the buffalo side of the Continental Divide and, not incidentally, bring all those horses with them. The captains also wanted one, two, or three chiefs to accompany them back to Washington, to meet the president.
The chiefs “appeared highly pleased” with the presentation, but said that they would have to consult among themselves before replying.
After the conference, the captains held a magic show, displaying the latest in European and American technology, including a magnet, a spy glass, a compass, a watch, and “sundry other articles equally novel and incomprehensible to them.” Lewis shot his air gun. The Nez Percé were astonished and impressed. The chiefs then withdrew for their consultation.
The next morning, May 12, the chiefs informed the captains that they had “resolved to pusue our advise.” To get the power of the people behind the decision, Broken Arm held a sort of plebiscite. He made up a dish of pounded roots and soup, then gave a speech. He announced the decision to do as the Americans wished, then asked all those who were ready to abide by that decision to come forward and eat; those who opposed would show their sentiments by not eating. “There was not a dissenting voice on this great national question,” Lewis wrote, “but all swallowed their objections if any they had, very cheerfully with their mush.”
It turned out, however, that what the Nez Percé nation had agreed to do was far short of what the captains had asked. The chiefs said the people were willing to move east of the mountains, but only after the United States Army had a fort on the Missouri, where they could trade for arms and ammunition to defend themselves. As for a delegate to the Blackfeet, they rather thought not. And as for a delegate to the president, perhaps, maybe, sometime, later.