•
Lewis said he would be in Washington shortly and would then provide Jefferson with additional details about his plan; he explained that until Jefferson had seen the map he could not understand what Lewis had in mind in dealing with the Indians, and there was but one copy of Clark’s map, which “I am unwilling to wrisk by the Mail.” He would come as soon as he could wrap up his business in St. Louis, but would go to Charlottesville before proceeding to Washington, because “I am very anxious to learn the state of my friends in Albemarle particularly whether my mother is yet living.”
•
Before closing, Lewis added a paragraph that began with a splendid tribute to his dearest friend and closest companion, followed by a typically generous gesture: “With rispect to the exertions and services rendereed by that esteemable man Capt. William Clark in the course of [our] late voyage I cannot say too much; if sir any credit be due for the success of the arduous enterprise in which we have been mutually engaged, he is equally with myself entitled to your consideration and that of our common country.”
That put it directly before the president: whatever rank Clark carried on the War Department rolls, Lewis wanted him treated as captain and co-commander. This was what he had promised, what Clark had earned. To Lewis, any other action was unthinkable.
The declaration was politically necessary and wise on Lewis’s part. No matter what he said, on the army rolls Clark was a lieutenant, Lewis the captain. Worse, among the politicians (and the people, come to that), Clark was much less known than Lewis. Lewis counted on Jefferson to make the paragraph public (he did), and hoped that it would squash any inclination on the part of Congress to give less to Clark than to himself.6
In his last paragraph, Lewis asked Jefferson’s pardon for “this haisty communication.” He explained he had no time to write more, for he had already detained the post for a day. Still, he was sorry to “have been so laconic.”
He signed, thought a moment, then added a postscript that showed what a good officer and fine man he was: “The whole of the party who accompanyed me from the Mandans have returned in good health, which is not, I assure you, to me one of the least pleasing considerations of the Voyage.”7
In sum, Lewis’s first communication with Jefferson in a year and a half answered the president’s most pressing questions while holding out hope for an American empire stretching from sea to sea. Although written in haste, with critical material missing, it was a model of how to write a report that disposes of the bad news first, then draws attention to the good.
•
In addition to his praise of Clark, Lewis took care to provide each enlisted man with a handwritten testimonial. For instance, he praised Sergeant Gass’s “ample support . . . manly firmness . . . the fortitude with which he bore the fatigues and painful sufferings,” and said he had Lewis’s “highest confidence.” Gass was entitled to “the consideration and respect of his fellow citizens.”8 In a later recommendation to Secretary Dearborn, Lewis said he hoped that each and every man would “meet a just reward in an ample remuneration on the part of our Government.”9
A good company commander looks after his men.
•
Lewis and Clark knew that news in the United States traveled fastest via the newspapers, which copied articles from one another. The nearest newspaper was in Frankfort, Kentucky. The captains knew that letters to their family members would be published and then copied, and that George Rogers Clark would get his letter more than two weeks earlier than Lewis’s family in Virginia. But Clark felt Lewis was a better writer than he. No problem for these two: Lewis drafted the letter for Clark, who copied it, signed it, and sent it off to Kentucky.IV The captains had George Drouillard take the report and letters across the Mississippi to the post on the Illinois side.
Donald Jackson comments that “the initial fame of the expedition rests largely upon this communication, which spread throughout the country as rapidly as the means of the day would allow.” The Frankfort Western World ran it on October 11; the Pittsburgh Gazette had it on October 28; the Washington National Intelligencer put it into its November 3 edition; soon thereafter, it had been reprinted scores of times.10
The letter covered many of the points made in the report to Jefferson, but added considerable details on some of the difficulties and risks involved. Here Lewis may have had a pecuniary motive—for himself, for Clark, and for their men. He knew the politicians and their constituents. He knew how an adventure story filled with tremendous mountains and terrible portages and turbulent rapids and near-starvation and various Indian encounters would stir their hearts. And he knew it was Congress that would be responsible for the size of the reward he, Clark, and the men would receive from a grateful nation. He didn’t exaggerate the dangers the expedition had faced, but he didn’t downplay them either (he scarcely mentioned them to Jefferson).
•
With the report and letters home written and on their way, it was time to begin the celebration. The captains had been invited to take rooms at the home of Jean-Pierre Chouteau. They did so, and paid visits to other members of the Chouteau family and additional important personages in the town. Apparently they stayed out late; Clark opened his September 24 entry, “I sleped but little last night.”
That day, the captains dined with the Chouteaus. They arranged to store their baggage in a room they rented from William Christy, a former neighbor of Clark’s in Kentucky and now a tavern keeper in St. Louis. They went to a tailor and got fitted for some clothes. They “payed Some visits of form, to the gentlemen of St. Louis.”
Wherever they went, they were all but overwhelmed with questions. First of all, the St. Louis merchants wanted to know about the beaver and the Indians and the distances, but they—like all the other men in town—were keenly aware of the dangers of the unknown wilderness and were adventurers themselves. So they also wanted to know about the close calls, the high mountains, and any anecdotes the captains could tell. The enlisted men, one can assume, were being similarly bombarded with questions from the less exalted citizens of St. Louis.
When Lewis and Clark returned, “their accounts of that wild region, with those of their companions, first excited a spirit of trafficking adventure among the young men of the west,” recalled Thomas James, a Missourian who shortly went up the river himself. And a local chronicle recorded, “The daring adventure became the theme of universal conversation in the town.”11
Arlen Large has captured the essence of oral reporting and its influence: “This kind of unrecorded talk—campfire bull sessions, barroom yarns, refined after dinner conversation over cognac and cigars . . . sparked the initial exploitation of the expedition’s findings. The first follow-up wave of fur-business exploration that spread across the west was due more to post-expedition gossip and gab than any written documents.”12
The early newspaper accounts based on letters sent east by private citizens of St. Louis make the point. A letter printed in Kentucky and picked up across the nation read, “One of the hands, an intelligent man, tells me that Indians are as numerous on [the] Columbia as the whites are in any part of the U States,” but they were unarmed and “are represented as being very peaceable. The weather was very mild on the Pacific.” Another spoke of “horses without number” among the Indians, but said the Indians were entirely without iron tools—a sentence sure to start the heads of young entrepreneurs spinning, especially since all accounts spoke of “the whole country furnishing valuable furs.”13
The captains and their men didn’t have to stretch in telling their tales of grizzlies and Blackfeet and other dangers to impress their audience. But if they didn’t boast, they clearly were not excessively modest. Aside from their justified pride in what they had accomplished, they wanted to tell the American people—and through them their representatives in Congress—how difficult it had been. That they were successful, at least in St. Louis, is evident in the remark of the resident federal surveyor Silas Bent. “All parties,??
? he noted, “have joined here in expressing their high sence of the great merit of these Gentlemen.”14
The first formal celebration took place on the afternoon and evening of September 25, when the leading men of the town sponsored a dinner and ball at Christy’s Inn. It was a long evening. Lewis and Clark joined in a total of seventeen toasts. The first (at their suggestion?) was to Thomas Jefferson, “The friend of science, the polar star of discovery, the philosopher and the patriot.” There followed toasts to the members of Jefferson’s administration, to the expedition, to the enlisted men (“may they be rewarded,” a most welcome touch), to the United States (a little politics here: “Whilst they tolerate a spirit of enquiry, may never forget, that united they stand—but divided they fall,” an obvious reference to Aaron Burr’s ongoing conspiracies), to Louisiana, to the memory of Columbus, to the Constitution, to the memory of George Washington, to peace, to commerce, and so on.
That was a lot of toasting for men who had drunk nothing but water for fifteen months, and at that point the captains retired. After they left, there was a final toast, to “Captains Lewis and Clark—Their perilous services endear them to every American heart.”15
•
The following day, the captains got back to their writing. Lewis started a letter, intended for publication, that eventually took him four days and thirty-two hundred words to complete. It combined reporting with boosterism. “I consider this Track across the Continent as presenting immense advantages to the Fur Trade,” he wrote.
More immediately, Lewis’s letter was his most direct bid for an adequate reward from Congress. He had not thought about money for twenty-eight months, but back in St. Louis, that center of get-rich-quick schemes, his friends among the merchants talked of little else, and money became a subject very much on his mind. To become a player in the various schemes, he needed investment capital. His quickest access to it was a generous reward from grateful politicians.
So, although he did not exaggerate, he made certain people knew that he, Clark, and the men had risked their lives for their country. He described in detail the precarious situation the expedition was in at Cameahwait’s village. From there, he wrote, “we attempted with success those unknown formidable snow clad Mountains on the bare word of a Savage [Old Toby], while 99/100th of his Countrymen assured us that a passage was impracticable.” In crossing the mountains, “we suffered everything Cold, Hunger & Fatigue could impart, or the Keenest Anxiety excited for the fate of [the] Expedition in which our whole Souls were embarked.” Arriving among the Nez Percé, “I suffered a severe Indisposition for 10 or 12 days, sick feeble & emaciated.” Descending the Columbia, the men “narrowly escaped with their Lives.”
After a description of Fort Clatsop and the return journey over the Lolo Trail, Lewis went into a long account of his side trip to explore the Marias River. He made certain his readers were aware of his purpose, writing that it was of “the highest national importance” to establish the northernmost tributary of the Missouri. “I determined to execute it at every hazard,” even though “I was well apprised that the Country thro’ which it became necessary for me to pass was inhabited by several large & roving Bands of the Black Foot Indians, who trade at the British Settlements on the Saskoohawan.” There followed a stirring account of his encounter with the Blackfeet at Two Medicine River.16
Lewis’s storytelling was more tantalizing than fulfilling. People wanted to know more. That Lewis was thinking about the value of those journals to himself, as well as to the nation, is hinted at in a comment by an unknown St. Louis resident, written on September 23: “Their journal will no doubt be not only importantly interesting to us all, but a fortune for the worthy and laudable adventurers.”17
The wording indicates that Lewis expected to get rich from the publication of the journals. Where did he get the idea that they were his—and Clark’s—private property? The government had paid for the expedition; Lewis and Clark were on active duty when they wrote their journals; it might have been expected that the maps and journals would be regarded as belonging to the government (indeed, Jefferson later commented, “They are the property of the government, the fruits of the expedition undertaken at such expense of money”), to be published by the government with no royalties to the authors.
Apparently, however, Lewis had discussed this point with Jefferson before he left Washington, and Jefferson had said that Lewis would have the right to publish with a commercial firm and keep the profit. This supposition is based on the contemporary remark about the fortune that would come to the captains from their journals, and Jefferson’s statement, ten years later, that “We were willing to give to Lewis and Clarke whatever pecuniary benefits might be derived from the publication, and therefore left the papers in their hands, taking for granted that their interests would produce a speedy publication, which would be better if done under their direction.”18
Lewis and Clark were not the only ones who kept a journal. All of the sergeants did, as ordered by the captains, and a few of the privates as well. Lewis regarded those journals as subject to his control, making them something considerably short of private property. Private Robert Frazier approached him soon after the arrival in St. Louis, asking permission to publish his journal. Lewis readily gave it, provided Frazier submitted the prospectus for his approval. Frazier did. The prospectus promised a four-hundred-page book that would contain “an accurate description of the Missouri . . . of the Columbia . . . of the face of the Country in general . . . of the several Tribes of Indians . . . of the vegetable, animal and mineral productions discovered,” as well as the latitudes and longitudes of the “most remarkable places.” Potential subscribers were assured the book would be “Published by Permission of Captn. Meriwether Lewis.”19
Lewis read the draft and was appalled. He insisted that the publisher would have to “expunge the promise which had been made, that the work should contain certain information in relation to the natural history of the country,” because Frazier was “entirely unacquainted with celestial observations, mineralogy, botany, or zoology, and therefore cannot possibly give any accurate information on those subjects, nor on that of geography.”
Lewis’s objections to the prospectus were well taken. They were also self-serving, in that they were intended to suppress competition for his own book. They further show that Lewis regarded his scientific discoveries as the most valuable part of his journal. (In the event, Frazier’s publishers ignored Lewis, but they never brought out the book, and Frazier’s journal has never been found—a sad loss to history.)20
•
The Frazier prospectus put added pressure on Lewis to get to Washington as soon as possible, to receive the adulation of his countrymen and his compensation, and to find a publisher—and, he hoped, get an advance. But duty kept him in St. Louis. It took him a month to settle fiscal affairs connected with the expedition. He spent much of his time obtaining hard currency for the enlisted men who wanted an advance on the pay due them; the sums were as large as $400 (for Private John Potts).
The task threw him into the inner circle of money men in St. Louis. Currency was scarce on the frontier; Lewis had to call on sixteen merchants to obtain cash advances ranging from $300 to $19.50. In return, he gave drafts drawn on the War Department.21 There were supplies to purchase, clothes and provisions for himself, Clark, Big White, and the rest of the party that would soon head off for Washington. He paid with drafts. He easily fell into a habit of paying for whatever he needed or wanted with drafts; why not, since he had an unlimited checking account with the U.S. government?
The riches of Louisiana available for immediate exploitation consisted almost entirely of furs and land; speculation in both was the all-but-consuming activity among St. Louis businessmen. Lewis’s men quickly got into the action. He had promised them when they volunteered for the expedition that they would receive “a compensation in Lands equal to that granted to a Soldier of the Revolutionary Army.” That unwritten promise, backed
by Lewis’s word, was considered as good as a land warrant in hand. Private Joseph Whitehouse sold his anticipated warrant to Drouillard for $280, who also bought Private John Collins’s. Six months later, Drouillard sold his own warrant and the two he had purchased for $1,300, a handsome profit. The purchasers took a beating; they sold the warrants a year later for $1,100.22
The captains held a public auction, in which they sold off the public items that had survived their voyage. These included the rifles, powder horns, shot pouches, kettles, and axes. They brought $408.62.23
This was a dreadful disgrace. The artifacts should have been preserved as public treasures rather than sold for a pittance. But apparently the captains had always intended to sell them at the value of their immediate utility rather than preserve them for museums.
As he dealt with these and other matters, Lewis was in constant contact with the St. Louis businessmen. Although there are no contemporary documents revealing what they talked about, it was almost surely land and furs. The merchants certainly bombarded Lewis with questions. Since he was thinking about getting into the fur trade himself, and in any case wanted to get going on his American fur-trade-empire plan, he must have answered in great detail on such subjects as the right size for a party setting off for the Yellowstone country, what trade items were most desired by the Indians on the upper Missouri River, what equipment was needed, and most of all where and in what quantity the beaver were. Manuel Lisa, according to his biographer Richard Oglesby, was “galvanized” by the stories he heard from Lewis and Clark in October 1806. He began raising money for a two-keelboat expedition up the Missouri in the spring.24 Lewis may have been in on the subscription.
•
On October 24, Lewis’s letter of September 23 arrived in Washington. Jefferson immediately replied. He said he had received it “with unspeakable joy,” and allowed himself to express a bit of the terrible anxiety he had felt for his young friend and for the expedition that he had fathered: “The unknown scenes in which you were engaged, & the length of time without hearing of you had begun to be felt awfully.” He said he was sending the letter to Charlottesville, where he expected Lewis to arrive shortly, and added that his “only object is to assure you of what you already know, my constant affection for you & the joy with which all your friends here will recieve you.”