The Spanish presence was there too, as were black slaves. This was a mixing of three nationalities from the two Old World continents with the citizens of the nations from the New World. It made for a cosmopolitan city, of about five thousand residents, the most cosmopolitan of any in America west of the Eastern Seaboard port cities.
Irving found it charming, but his eyes didn’t see what would be the first thing to strike a modern visitor—horse manure everywhere one walked. Because he was so accustomed to them, Irving also failed to note the muddy (or dusty) streets and the smoke-filled rooms.
The American Irving was struck by the extreme distance between the elite and the common citizenry. The Spanish and French merchants lived lives that could only be called princely. They had huge tracts of land and had enjoyed trading monopolies, lived in elegant homes with superb libraries, excellent wines, extravagantly fashionable clothes, the latest wallpaper from New York, New Orleans, or Europe, the finest in furniture and such comforts as man-made lakes, cool cellars, and a fireplace in almost every room. One observer swore “there was a fiddle in every house.”
What Irving called “the happy Gallic turn for gayety and amusement” was most in evidence during the carnival season that preceded Mardi Gras. There was an abundance of cotillions, reels, minuets, with balls every night. The ladies wore silk gloves and stockings, bracelets and earrings. One astonished American declared, “I never saw anywhere greater elegance of dress than I have at a ball in St. Louis.” Secretary Bates admired the “inimitable grace” with which the ladies danced, but, being an American and a sour one at that, he added that their dancing was “too much in the style of actresses.”2 Shocking to American eyes were the “kings” and “queens” who presided over the balls and public ceremonies of the carnival season.
The great majority of the population, meanwhile, were illiterate, owned little or nothing, and lived in shacks. The men were mainly boatmen. They were the essential industry of St. Louis. It was their muscle power that made it possible for the merchants to move goods up the Missouri River, to the source of the furs. They were always in debt to their bosses, who treated them almost as badly as Virginia planters treated their black slaves.
Their loyalty was to one another. In 1807, while on an expedition organized by private traders, George Drouillard received orders from his employer, Manuel Lisa, to find the deserter Antoine Bissonnette and bring him back dead or alive. Drouillard brought him back dead. When the party returned to St. Louis, Drouillard was put on trial for murder. The jury found that Bissonnette’s desertion was a threat to the entire party and discharged Drouillard.3
Now the Americans were coming into this Old World society, bringing with them a new energy. Secretary Bates noted the contrast between the two styles: “While the English Americans are hard at labor and sweat under the burning rays of a meridian sun, [the French and Spanish elite] will be seated in their homes or under some cooling shade, amusing themselves with their pipes and tobacco, drinking coffee.” He further noted that “the Old Inhabitants” were “rigid economists.”4
The American threat to this way of life was very great. The Americans were questioning the validity of land titles acquired under the informal land cessions of the Spanish and French regimes, and of the monopolies granted for the lead mines and the Indian trade. There were not enough courts or judges to make decisions, and not enough soldiers to enforce them. The Americans brought with them a spirit of partisanship that added immeasurably to the difficulties of governing. Worse, some of them at least were Burrites, plotting to break Louisiana away from the United States.
Secretary and Acting Governor Bates was ill-suited to handle the responsibilities of governing, and he knew it. From the time of his arrival in the spring of 1807, he wrote Lewis about the quarreling that marked public affairs and urged him to hurry to St. Louis to set things in order. “I take a pleasure in expressing the opinion,” he wrote on April 5, 1807, “that you have a fair opportunity of establishing a lasting reputation in Louisiana, by composing the unhappy divisions of her Inhabitants.”5
Lewis’s predecessor, General Wilkinson, had granted trading licenses with abandon (to his own profit), to foreigners as well as U.S. citizens. There was intense fighting over land titles. Bates was trying to straighten things out, but felt overwhelmed. He told his brother, “The difficulties with which I have to contend in this country are numberless and almost insurmountable.”
“I have great cause to lament your absence,” Bates wrote Lewis. But he also warned the governor, “contrary to my first expectation you must expect to have some enemies.” He further warned, “We have among us a set of men turbulent and ungovernable in their dispositions, which I believe may be accounted for, from that spirit of enterprize and adventure which brought them first into the country.”6
Through to the end of 1807, Bates’s anxiety for Lewis to arrive grew. By 1808, he was almost in a frenzy. In January, he wrote Lewis, “No one feels the want of your superintending presence so much as I do.” In early February, he wrote again to say he was “eagerly expecting your arrival every day.” Later that month, he was hoping to see Lewis “every hour.” By the 26th, it was “every moment.”7
Bates was an experienced bureaucrat. In 1801, he had hoped for the appointment Meriwether Lewis had received, to be Jefferson’s private secretary.8 He had been postmaster and later receiver of public monies and land commissioner in Detroit. He had held these positions as a Federalist, but in 1804, wanting higher office, he switched parties and had his brother use his influence with a Republican member of Congress to help him obtain an appointment as associate judge of Michigan Territory.
“As for my Politics,” he said in support of his candidacy and in direct opposition to the facts, “you all know that I am staunch.” He got the job, and was a good-enough Republican to receive, in 1807, the appointment to be the secretary of Louisiana Territory.9
If even so adroit and experienced a bureaucrat as Bates found governing Louisiana nearly impossible, obviously the inexperienced Governor Lewis was entering dangerous territory. Nevertheless, as he finally broke away from Virginia and headed west, Lewis was bursting with optimism, plans, and energy. The lethargy that had plagued him since the preceding July was gone. He was eager to start his new life.
•
Lewis arrived in St. Louis on March 8, 1808. He was in independent command—if not as independent as on the expedition, still generally on his own. The government could not get detailed instructions to or set policy for a governor who was a week’s travel from the nearest post office, in Vincennes, Indiana. It was another week to the next post office, in Louisville. Under the most favorable of circumstances and in the best weather, mail to or from Washington took nearly a month; in wintertime, in the severest weather, there was no communication at all with the outside world. It took three months to ascend the Mississippi from New Orleans. So Lewis was more or less on his own, with no practical experience in politics or government, in a capital teeming with plots and ambitious and unscrupulous men, with no set of written laws in the English language, and insufficient judges and courts. This was a challenge of a new kind.
He immediately threw himself into his activities, private as well as public. He began speculating in land and in the fur trade. Simultaneously, he searched for suitable lodgings. He was appalled at the rents being charged. He wrote Clark, who was on his honeymoon in Virginia, that one place he looked at cost five hundred dollars per year. “Such rent I never had calculated on giveing.” He settled on one for $250 per year.
The home he selected, on the corner of South Main and Spruce Streets, was quite grand—as it had to be, since Lewis and Clark had agreed that they would share quarters and Clark was expected shortly, accompanied by his wife and two nieces. In a letter of May 29, 1808, Lewis described the house to Clark with the enthusiasm of a real estate agent.
There was a good cellar, four rooms on the first floor, rooms upstairs for slaves, a piazza running across the
east and south fronts, a detached kitchen with two fireplaces and an oven, and a garden, a stable, and a new smokehouse. Unfortunately, there was only one facility, and that “a small indifferent out house formerly used for smoking meat.”
Lewis planned to live with his friend, but was realistic: “Should we find on experiment that we have not sufficient room in the house, I can obtain an Office elsewhere in the neighborhood and still consider myself your messmate.” Not surprisingly, after a few months of “experiment,” the two men agreed, most likely at the insistence of Julia Clark, that the house wasn’t big enough.
Lewis got an office on Main Street and quarters with Pierre Chouteau, but ate with the Clarks.10 He had no wife, but he acquired what amounted to an adopted son. He brought René Jessaume’s thirteen-year-old boy, Toussaint, under an indenture to St. Louis to raise and educate him.11 (Eventually, Sacagawea’s son, Jean Baptiste, and daughter, Lizette, became boarders in Clark’s home and were tutored there.)
Ensign Pryor carried Lewis’s May 29 letter to Clark, with instructions to hand it over at the mouth of the Ohio, where Clark and party were expected in late June or early July. Pryor would provide a military escort up the Mississippi.
Clark was traveling with two keelboats, bringing his household furniture and heavy equipment for the Indians, including a horse-power mill and blacksmith’s tools. And, of course, his wife and his nieces. He had written Lewis that he would be arriving with “goods” and “merchandize.”
In his letter to Clark, Lewis showed what a good humor he was in, writing in a jocular vein, “I must halt here in the middle of my communications and ask you if the matrimonial dictionary affords no term more appropriate than that of goods, alise merchandize, for that dear and interesting part of the creation? It is very well Genl., I shall tell madam of your want of Gallantry; and the triumph too of detection will be more compleat when it is recollected what a musty, fusty, rusty old bachelor I am.”
Lewis went on: “I trust you do not mean merely to tantalize us by the promise you have made of bringing with you some of your Neices, I have already flattered the community of S Louis with this valuable acquisition to our female society.”12
It turned out that Clark had brought only one niece, “the beautiful and accomplished Miss Anderson,” his sister’s daughter. She caused a flutter in town. A friend wrote to Secretary Bates, “Great agitation in St. Louis among the bachelors, to prevent fatal consequences a Town meeting has been proposed for the purpose of disposing of her by lot.”13
As had been the case on the expedition, Lewis went through periods of doing little or no writing, followed by periods of extensive composition.I In the summer of 1808, he did a lot of writing—personal, chatty letters sparkling with good humor, as well as his official documents. In a long letter of July 25 to his old army friend (and fellow speculator in Kentucky lands) Major William Preston, Lewis gave a glimpse of his life and emotions.
“How wretchedly you married men arrange the subjects of which you treat,” Lewis complained in his opening (Preston had recently married Julia Hancock’s older sister). Lewis said that, just because “You have gained that which I have yet to obtain, a wife,” Preston was not excused from starting off with an entire page about land speculation and “your musty frusty trade,” and “a flimsy excuse about the want of money to enable you to come and see us &c &c before you came to the point.”
The point was that “she is off.” “She” was Letitia Breckenridge, who on June 2 had married Robert Gamble of Richmond. “So be it,” a disappointed but resigned Lewis wrote. “May God be with her and her’s, and the favored angels of heaven guard her bliss both here and hereafter, is the sincere prayer of her very sincere friend, to whom she has left the noble consolation of scratching his head and biting his nails, with ample leasure to reuminate on the chapter of accidents in matters of love and the folly of castle-building.”
Lewis was generous about the man who had won his fair lady: “Gamble is a good tempered, easy honest fellow, I have known him from a boy; both his means and his disposition well fit him for sluming away life with his fair one in the fassionable rounds of a large City.” He was also charitable about Letitia: “Such is the life she has celected and in it’s pursuit I wish she may meet all the pleasures of which it is susceptable.”
Lewis wanted his friend to come to St. Louis to participate in the boom. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “Louisiana, and particularly the district of St. Louis, at this moment offers more advantages than any other portion of the U’States . . . to the honest adventurer who can command money or negroes.” He described the economy, based on corn (shipped to New Orleans in the form of barrels of whiskey), wheat, lead, and furs. “Were I to dwell on the advantages of this country I might fill a volume.”
There would never be a better time to take the plunge: “I will wrisk my existence that you will at some future period regret having chosen any other,” Lewis wrote. “You have no time to lose. Lands are rising fast, but are yet very low.” Prices had doubled in a year. If Preston would sell his place in Kentucky, even if he got only half value for it, “and bring your money or negroes with you to this country you might purchase a princely fortune.”
Lewis backed his boosting with his own money. “I have purchased seven thousand four hundred and 40 ArpentsII for five thousand five hundred and thirty dollars,” all of it in the St. Louis neighborhood and blessed with springs and sites for mills, and excellent soil and ample rain.
As for the Indians, Lewis admitted that they had been “exceedingly troublesome during the last winter and spring,” but insisted that “I have succeeded in managing those on the Mississippi.” He added, however, that “the Osage and others on the Missouri are yet in a threatening position.” Still, he was confident that the steps he was about to take would soon “reduce them to order.”14
•
Lewis had indeed been extremely active on the Indian front, although to what extent the policies he had put into motion would bring the various nations to order remained to be seen. He had sent a veteran Indian agent, Nicholas Boilvin, accompanied by a military escort of twenty-seven men, to bring in two Indians of the Sauks and Foxes accused of murder.15 And he had initiated drastic measures against one band of the Osage tribe, called the Great Osages.
He explained his actions in a July 1 letter to Secretary Dearborn, his first report as territorial governor to the administration. The Great Osages had “cast off all allegiance to the United States,” he wrote, and no longer acknowledged the authority of their former leader, White Hair. According to White Hair and other information Lewis had received, the Great Osage had taken some prisoners, stolen some horses, killed some cattle. They had plundered frontier inhabitants of their clothes and furniture and burned their homes.
If the Great Osages wanted war, Lewis was ready. He held several councils with the Shawnees, Delawares, Kickapoos, Iowas, and others, telling them “that they were at liberty to wage war against” the Great Osages. He began preparations in St. Louis, because “War appears to me inevitable with these people; I have taken the last measures for peace, which have been merely laughed at by them as the repetition of an old song.”
The problem was that the Great Osages felt themselves independent of the government, because they had a Spanish trader among them. Lewis had therefore suspended all trading licenses (which caused an uproar among the traders in St. Louis) “until a sufficient force” could be sent to establish permanent trading posts. He provided General Clark with an escort of eighty men to go up the Missouri to establish a fortification and trading post on the Osage River. This amounted to an expedition against the Great Osages.
Lewis needed more men, and asked for an authorization to pay recruits for the militia. He needed supplies, and asked Dearborn to send him 500 muskets, 300 rifles, 120 swords, 60 pairs of pistols, and a ton of gunpowder. That should take care of the Spanish-influenced southern flank.
The danger on the northern front, on the Missouri beyond
the Mandans, came from the British. Lewis gave orders that they should be kept out of U.S. territory, but of course he had no power to enforce them. Indeed, he wasn’t sure the War Department would approve.16
Dearborn had about lost all his patience with the young hero. From his point of view, Lewis was doing everything wrong. The United States was on the verge of war with Britain; the War Department was woefully unprepared; here was Lewis opening up another front, demanding weapons and men, marching regular troops off to deal with some minor Indian problems that sounded like a squabble between the Little Osages and the Great Osages, fed by wild stories from White Hair and some traders.
Lewis had said not one word about returning Big White to his people, even though the commander-in-chief had ordered him to make this his top priority. And he had taken unauthorized actions without properly reporting—the first Dearborn had heard about Boilvin’s expedition to bring back the murderers (in itself a very questionable piece of Indian policy) had come from an army officer reporting the requisition for men and supplies.
In a July 2 letter that crossed Lewis’s letter to him, Dearborn set a policy: “Except in cases of the most pressing emergency detachments of the troops should not be made” until approved by the president. The secretary closed with a complaint: “No communication except some Drafts for Money, has, for many Months, been received from the Executive of Louisiana.”17 That was a stinging rebuke, and no doubt surprising to Lewis when he received it, so long had he been accustomed to making decisions without having to seek any approval beyond talking it over with Clark.
•
A worse rebuke quickly followed. On July 17, Jefferson wrote to Lewis. He opened with a complaint: “Since I parted with you in Albemarle in Sept. last I have never had a line from you.” He said he would have written earlier but for his conviction “that something from you must be on it’s way to us.”