York continued to argue that he should be set free. Clark lamented to his brother, “I did wish to do well by him [York], but as he has got Such a notion about freedom and his emence Services [on the expedition], that I do not expect he will be of much Service to me again.”
Clark fretted over the situation. He discussed it with Lewis. In a late-1808 letter to his brother, Clark wrote, “I do not cear for Yorks being in this Country. I have got a little displeased with him and intended to have punished him but Govr. Lewis has insisted on my only hireing him out in Kentucky which perhaps will be best.” Clark hoped that York would learn a lesson from “a Severe Master” and thus “give over that wife of his” to return to St. Louis.
York was not the only slave causing Clark problems. He wrote Jonathan that he was often “much vexed & perplexed with my few negrows,” so much so that he had been forced to chastise them and was considering selling all but four, not only to relieve the frustration of dealing with them but to obtain badly needed money. Still, he was troubled by his temptation to sell his slaves. “I wish I was near enough to Council with you a little on this Subject will you write a fiew lines about this inclination of mine to turn negrows into goods & cash.”
In May 1809, York returned to St. Louis. “York brought my horse,” Clark wrote, “he is here but of very little Service to me, insolent and sukly, I gave him a Severe trouncing the other Day and he has much mended.”34
No commentary is necessary. Much of the evil of slavery is encapsuled in this little story—not least Jefferson’s realism about the effect of slavery on the morals and manners of the slaveholder. York had helped pole Clark’s keelboat, paddled his canoe, hunted for his meat, made his fire, had shown he was prepared to sacrifice his life to save Clark’s, crossed the continent and returned with his childhood companion, only to be beaten because he was insolent and sulky and denied not only his freedom but his wife and, we may suppose, children.
That Lewis’s attitude was somewhat softer is obvious, but it is highly unlikely that he ever told Clark to grant York his freedom. Lewis could no more escape the lord-and-master attitude toward black slaves than Clark could—or, come to that, than Jefferson could (Jefferson also sold slaves and separated families). No wonder Jefferson could write, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”35
•
In the late fall of 1808, war with Great Britain appeared imminent. To prepare for it, President Jefferson asked the nation to raise a hundred thousand men. Louisiana’s quota was a mere 377. Lewis used the pages of the Missouri Gazette to appeal to the patriotism of the young men of his territory, mainly relying on the Anglophobia of the French and American inhabitants to get a response. He urged the young men to join in “defending our liberties and our country from the unhallowed grasp of the modern barbarians of Europe, who insatiate with the horrid bucheries of the eastern world, are now bending their course towards our peaceful and happy shore. . . . With them power begets right and justice is laughed to scorn. . . . They are destitute of magnanimity and virtue.”
Lewis asked that volunteers sign up for twelve months’ service and “thus prove themselves worthy of their fathers of ’76 whose bequest, purchased with their blood, are those rights we now enjoy and so justly prize; let us then defend and preserve them, regardless of what it may cost, that they may pass unimpaired to the generation who are to succeed us.”36
The response, sad to relate, hardly matched Lewis’s eloquence. Only a few dozen Americans, and no Frenchmen, rallied to the call to arms.
Still, Lewis’s first nine months in St. Louis had been busy and relatively successful. He had avoided, although only barely, an Indian war. He had established some law and order on the frontier. He was putting his own men into office. He was building roads and making other improvements. The St. Louis Missouri River Fur Company was a going concern.
But there was much he had not done, most especially on the two matters that most concerned Jefferson: Big White was still in town. And there the journals sat. Lewis apparently never even opened them.
* * *
I. This went back some time. In 1801, Lewis’s friend Tarleton Bates had complained to his brother Frederick that “Meriwether Lewis is silent though he promised to write weekly,” and in 1807, Amos Stoddard complained that although he had written Lewis “several friendly epistles” he had not received any reply. (Jackson, Letters, vol. II, p. 445.)
II. A French unit of land measure; an arpent was the equivalent of about .85 acre.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
St. Louis
January–August 1809
Great joy in camp. Julia Clark has had a baby. William Clark names him Meriwether Lewis Clark. Clark gives a set of Shakespeare to the teen-age mother.
Great excitement in St. Louis. The St. Louis Missouri River Fur Company is preparing to ascend the river. There are job opportunities for voyagers, for men willing to join the militia, for Indians looking for employment and a chance to get some revenge on the Arikaras and Sioux. For Lewis there is much planning and packing to supervise. It is reminiscent of the winter of 1803–4, when the city had been all hustle and bustle helping Lewis and Clark get ready for their expedition.
Especially for Lewis, who was almost as busy as in 1804. The terms of the contract he signed with the Missouri River Fur Company and the orders he gave the commander, Pierre Chouteau, show how active and productive he was in the winter and spring of 1809, how much he drew on what he had learned about going up the Missouri, how much attention he paid to detail, how imaginative he was, how much thought he put into the task, and how ruthless he could be.
But there was a dark side to his life. It is barely hinted at in the available contemporary documents, but something was bothering him. His drinking, apparently, was heavy. He was taking “medicine” regularly, medicine laced with opium or morphine. His account book contains many references to those medicines, which he indicated he took to deal with malaria attacks. He swallowed a pill containing a gram of opium every night at bedtime to ward off such attacks, and three a night when suffering a fever. If they “do not operate” he took two more in the morning.1 He said repeatedly he needed to go back east, wanted to go back east, intended to go back east, that he would be off in a few days—but he didn’t go. He was borrowing small sums regularly from the Chouteaus, and on May 17 borrowed twenty dollars from Bates. He did not state the reason for the loans; it is possible that they were for drinking money.
His finances were in a sorry state, as shown by a November 9 entry in his account book: “Borrowed of Genl Clark this sum [forty-nine dollars] to pay Doctor Farrow for his attendance on my servant Pernia, an account which I consider exorbitant, but which my situation in life compells me to pay.”
In the orders he gave the expedition carrying Big White about how to handle the Arikaras, he was bloodthirsty to a shocking degree and displayed an alarming lack of common sense.
Meanwhile, Secretary Bates had a public scene with Governor Lewis, and the two top officials in Louisiana broke off relations.
Lewis’s behavior had become erratic.
•
On February 24, Lewis signed the contract with the St. Louis Missouri River Fur Company, in his capacity as governor of the Territory of Louisiana, on behalf of the United States of America.
The terms were explicit. The company promised to raise 125 militiamen, of whom at least forty “shall be Americans and expert Riflemen,” for the purpose of returning Big White and his party to the Mandan nation. The company was required to provide the militia with “good and suitable Fire Arms, of which Fifty at least shall be Rifles,” the numbers and quality to be approved by Lewis. All other expenses—provisions, utensils, boats, Indian presents, and so on—would be borne by the partners. Governor Lewis would sign drafts for the supplies, as an advance to be deducted from the final payment.
The company pledged to deliver Big White and party safely, to “defend them from all Warlike attacks . . . at the
risque of their lives.” When the job was done, the United States would pay the company $7,000.
Pierre Chouteau of the company would command the expedition until it reached the Mandans and returned Big White; at that point, the military functions would end and command would go over to another partner, Manuel Lisa, who would push off with the company’s men for the Yellowstone and beyond in a commercial operation. It would have a monopoly; Lewis pledged to issue no license to any trader for any part of the Missouri higher than the mouth of the Platte River.
The company “shall without any pretence of delay whatsoever embark, start, and proceed on before the Tenth day of May next, under the penalty for default” in the amount of $3,000. The United States would advance the company up to $3,500 after the expedition was fully formed and equipped. Should Lewis be absent from St. Louis, he authorized General Clark to act in his place.2
Both sides were delighted with the contract. For Lewis and for the partners, it made perfect sense to combine the military expedition with the commercial venture. After all, the army had tried in 1807 with Ensign Pryor and been turned back, with the loss of three lives, George Shannon’s leg, and seven others wounded. The army could not possibly detach a force of 125 men to do the job. As for the partners, they could not expect to get a trading group past the Arikaras without military escort. Frontier army officers and officials of the government regularly engaged in private ventures on the frontier. And, obviously, it was as much in the government’s interest as it was in the company’s that the Missouri be opened to American fur traders.
Nevertheless, the contract opened Lewis to severe criticism. He had engaged the services of a private company, paying it with government funds. Any profits made from the commercial venture would be shared by his friend William Clark and Lewis’s brother, Reuben, and, apparently, Lewis himself. But on the early-nineteenth-century frontier, these were fairly commonplace arrangements. In fact, Dearborn had set a precedent when he authorized Clark to give an exclusive trading license to private traders willing to accompany the Pryor expedition.
Lewis had an explicit authorization for such expenditures from Jefferson, but in a month Jefferson would be leaving office, and the new president, James Madison, and his secretary of war, William Eustis, were set on saving money, not taking on new obligations. They were not close to Lewis, they were much less interested in the West than Jefferson, and they did not approve of Lewis’s free and easy way of signing drafts. They agreed with a former Indian agent who wrote to President Madison to protest the contract, asking, “Is it proper for the public service that the U.S. officers as a Governor or a Super Intendant of Indian Affairs should take any share in Mercantile and private concerns?”3
•
Secretary Bates was raising the same question, and he was furious that Lewis—expected to leave for Washington shortly—had named Clark rather than himself as his agent. Further, Bates was in continual disagreement with the governor over policy matters. Lewis was interested in promoting the fur trade; Bates wanted to promote settlement. Lewis refused to issue licenses for hunters in Indian country; Bates thought it a right of Americans to hunt.
So angry was Bates that in mid-April he said publicly that he had decided to write the president a catalogue of his complaints. But before he could do so, he had an “altercation” with Lewis. He spoke to Lewis “with an extreme freedom” of the “wrongs” Lewis had done him. In an April 15 letter to his brother, Bates explained that Lewis had “aroused my indignation” and caused “a heated resentment.” What the specific issue was he didn’t say; probably it was Clark’s appointment as Lewis’s agent.
“We now understand each other much better,” Bates wrote. “We differ in every thing; but we will be honest and frank in our intercourse.”4
Bates was an unlikable character, that type of bureaucrat who cannot for the life of him see any other person’s point of view. In a letter to his brother, he confessed that he found this “a strange world.” He explained, “My habits are pacific; yet I have had acrimonious differences with almost every person with whom I have been associated in public business.” He admitted that this disturbed him and had caused him to examine his actions, but, “before God, I cannot acknowledge that I have been blamable in any one instance.”5
His jealousy of Lewis was obvious. He told his brother that Lewis “has been spoiled by the elegant praises” of scientists and poets, “and over whelmed by so many flattering caresses of the high & mighty, that, like an overgrown baby, he begins to think that everybody about the House must regulate their conduct by his caprices.”6
It was commonly said in St. Louis that Bates wanted Lewis’s job. In his April 15 letter, Bates charged that Lewis had lost public confidence. “I lament the unpopularity of the Governor,” he claimed, but “he has brought it on himself by harsh and mistaken measures. He is inflexible in error, and the irresistable Fiat of the People, has, I am fearful, already sealed his condemnation.
“Burn this letter.”7
•
Through the late winter and into the spring of 1809, the Missouri River Fur Company recruited men and gathered supplies. Word came downriver that the Sioux had joined the Arikaras and were determined to stop all boats headed upstream. Lewis looked over the supply of presents for the Indians and decided it was insufficient, so on March 7 he signed a draft payable to Pierre Chouteau for $1,500 for additional presents; on May 13 he signed another, for $500, and two days later yet another, in the amount of $450, mainly for 500 pounds of gunpowder and 1,250 pounds of lead.8
Meanwhile, he worked on a set of orders for Chouteau. He declared that Chouteau’s “principal object” was to return Big White and his family. Paraphrasing what Jefferson had told him, Lewis wrote, “I consider the honour and Good faith of our Government pledged For the success of this enterprize.”
Lewis avoided specifics: “I deem it improper to trammil your operations by detailed and Positive Commands as to the plan of procedure.” But he had suggestions. The first was to employ up to 300 Indians from the nations living below the Arikaras: “You will Promise them, as a reward for their Services, the plunder which they may acquire from the Aricares.” He further advised Chouteau to recruit 100 white hunters and trappers, bringing his total up to 250 whites and 300 Indians.
In other words, should the Arikaras prove still to be hostile, Lewis was declaring all-out war on them. He was explicit on the point; he wanted Chouteau to have “a force sufficient Not Onely to bid defiance to the Aricares, but to exterpate that abandoned Nation if necessary.”
This went far beyond Jefferson’s recommendation that if the Arikaras tried to stop Big White they should be “punished.” It went far beyond burning their property or killing their horses. It called for nothing short of genocide.
If the Arikaras proved to be peaceable, Chouteau should demand of them “the unconditional surrender” of the warriors who had killed any member of Ensign Pryor’s party. Should the Arikaras claim they could not say who had fired the fatal bullets, Chouteau should require them to deliver up three warriors (three white men had been killed), chosen from among those “most active in stimulating” the hostilities.
“These murderers when Delivered will be shot in the presence of the nation,” and the Arikaras required to give their horses to Chouteau’s Indian allies.
If the Arikaras refused to deliver up their warriors, “You will take such measures as you may think best calculated to surprise and cut them off.” If Chouteau took any prisoners, “you will either give them to the mandane or minnitare nations.”
If the expedition got into an inconclusive fight and passed the Arikaras without destroying them, Chouteau should make an alliance with the Mandans and supply them with the necessary firepower to crush the Arikaras.
Lewis also said that Chouteau would be meeting “with sundry american Citizens” whose licenses to trade on the Missouri had expired. If they had acted in good faith, Chouteau should renew their licenses; had their conduct been
improper, he should arrest them and return them to St. Louis by force. As for the competition from the north, “No British agent, Clerk, or engagé can under any Pretence whatever be Permitted to trade or hunt within this territory, the limits of which, are to be conceived to extend to all that Country watered by the Missoury.”
Lewis signed off, “I sincerely wish you a Pleasant voyage and a safe Return to your Family and Friends.”9
In mid-May, the expedition was under way. All together there were thirteen keelboats and barges, the largest flotilla sent up the river to date.
•
Through June and into July, rumors floated around St. Louis about Bates. He had made it known that he intended to denounce Lewis to the president and was said to be “at the head of a Party whose object it would be to procure his dismissal.” So widespread was the talk that Lewis called on Bates to demand an explanation.
“You are greatly mistaken,” Bates told him. In a letter of July 14 to his brother, Bates related that “As a Citizen, I told him I entertained opinions very different from his, on the subject of civil government, and that those opinions had, on various occasions been expressed with emphasis; but that they had been unmixed with personal malice or hostility.”