Lewis and Clark (8 page)

The rest of the Indians fled, leaving half their horses and nearly all their weapons behind. Lewis picked out four of the best Indian horses to replace his own, bringing his party’s total to seven. While the men saddled up, the captain burned the Indians’ bows and arrows and shields on the campfire. This was the only time expedition members killed any Indians, and Lewis was convinced that the survivors would bring a large Indian band after them, bent on revenge. Since the Indians knew he intended to meet the rest of his party at the junction of the Marias River and the Missouri, Lewis feared that hostile natives might massacre the other members of the expedition before he could get there to warn them.

Taking the Indians’ buffalo meat, the four began pushing their horses “as hard as they would bear” toward the Missouri. By dark, they were eighty miles from the scene of the attack, but after resting briefly, they traveled by moonlight and covered another twenty miles before they lay down to sleep about 2:00 a.m. Their ride left them so saddle-sore that they could hardly stand the next day, but Lewis insisted they continue on.

As they neared the Missouri, they heard the sound of gunfire. Sergeant Ordway’s ten-man party had made the journey down the Missouri without incident and had been joined at the Great Falls by the six men Lewis had left there. With horses to do the heavy hauling, the sixteen men had portaged canoes and luggage around the Great Falls much more easily than the entire expedition had done on the way upstream. Once the portage was over, Ordway and most of his men took the white pirogue and five canoes downstream, while Gass and Willard set out overland with the horses. As luck would have it, they arrived at the rendezvous only a few hours after the canoe party encountered Lewis.

They opened the caches at the mouth of the Marias River and discovered their contents in fair condition, although the red pirogue had decayed too much to be repaired. Freeing the horses, Lewis and his men set out down the Missouri in the rain, eager to leave the danger behind and rejoin their comrades at the mouth of the Yellowstone.

On August 7, they arrived at the Yellowstone River, expecting to meet Clark’s party, but the only sign of the captain was a note saying that the party had moved downriver because hunting was poor, and the mosquitoes were bad.

Four days later, still behind Clark, Lewis and Cruzatte went ashore, where Lewis killed an elk. But the captain himself was injured during the hunt. “We reloaded our guns and took different routs through the thick willows in pursuit of the Elk,” Lewis wrote. “I was in the act of firing on the Elk a second time when a ball struck my left thye about an inch below my hip joint, missing the bone it passed through the left thye and cut the thickness of the bullet across the hinder part of the right thye; the stroke was very severe.”

“Damn you, you have shot me,” Lewis cried out, guessing that Cruzatte had mistaken him for an elk in the dense brush, since the captain wore elk skins and the waterman was blind in one eye and nearsighted in the other. But when Cruzatte did not answer, the alarming thought occurred that an Indian had shot him. Shouting to Cruzatte to go back to the boats, Lewis retreated as fast as his painful wound would permit, calling to the men to arm themselves. His pain so intense that he could not lead the men back to rescue Cruzatte, he directed them to go on, stumbled back to the boats, and with his pistol, rifle, and air gun, prepared “to sell my life as deerly as possible.”

It did not come to that. In twenty minutes, the men returned with Cruzatte, having seen no sign of Indians. And although the waterman denied hearing Lewis call to him, it was plain to all that he had shot his captain by mistake and was too embarrassed to admit it.

Fortunately for Lewis, the bullet missed bone and artery, but the captain was in excruciating pain.

The following day, two fur traders from Illinois told them Clark had passed by only the day before. Lewis and his men hurried on expectantly.

After the two parties separated at Traveler’s Rest on July 3, Clark and twenty men, Sacagawea, the baby, and fifty horses started up the Bitterroot River. But instead of taking the previous year’s route across Lemhi Pass, they found an easier and more direct trail farther north and crossed the Continental Divide at what was later named Gibbon’s Pass.

On July 8, they reached the forks of the Jefferson, where they had sunk their canoes and cached supplies the previous August. The cache contained tobacco, and the men, who had been without any for at least six months, Clark wrote, “become so impatient to be chewing it that they scercely gave themselves time to take their saddles off . . . before they were off to the deposit.” The tobacco and the rest of the cached goods were safe, and although one canoe had a hole in it, it was reparable.

It took two days to get the canoes ready, but once they were afloat, the trip downriver was a fast one. They arrived at the Three Forks in only three days. At that point, Sergeant Ordway and nine men paddled five canoes and most of the baggage downriver to meet Lewis’s men and portage around the rapids while Clark, with ten men, Sacagawea, and the baby set out overland toward the Yellowstone River.

This was familiar country to Sacagawea. The Shoshones regularly hunted in the area, and she had been there many times when she was a child. Without hesitation, she directed Clark along a fork of the Gallatin River, then over a pass later named Bozeman Pass in a dividing ridge. “The indian woman, who has been of great service to me as a pilot through this country, recommends a gap in the mountains more south, which I shall cross,” Clark noted. On the other side, they followed a small stream downhill, and some ten miles farther on, the stream joined the deep and broad Yellowstone River.

The only hardship on the fifty-mile journey was suffered by their horses, whose hoofs were worn to the quick by the stony ground. Clark solved this problem by having “Mockersons made of green [untanned] Buffalow Skin and put on their feet which seams to releve them very much.”

They followed the river downstream for four days, seeking timber large enough to make canoes. The two largest cottonwoods they found would make canoes about twenty-eight feet long and barely two feet wide - a tight squeeze for Clark’s party and its baggage. But Clark had no other choice and hoped to give his dugouts extra strength by lashing two together. Work began on July 20. That night, roving Indians stole twenty-four of their fifty horses.

By July 23, the canoes were completed. Most of the party embarked the next morning. Sergeant Pryor, Shannon, and Windsor took the remaining horses overland to the Mandan villages to barter for trading goods that might persuade the Sioux chiefs to visit Washington - the captains were still hoping to end the Sioux threat to existing and potential river traffic on the Missouri.

With the current behind it, the double canoe covered the miles swiftly, and before evening, the party overtook Pryor. The sergeant was having troubles. Whenever they came near a herd of buffalo, the horses, trained by the Indians to hunt, would break loose and surround the animals. Pryor needed a man to ride ahead and scare away the buffalo before the horses came up. Hugh Hall, who could not swim, volunteered for the job, and the two groups went their separate ways.

On July 25, Clark’s canoe party stopped to examine a rock tower rising 200 feet above the flat plains. Clark, who enjoyed leaving his name on trees as a record of his visit, seized the opportunity to carve “Wm. Clark July 25 1806” on the rock face, already decorated with Indian drawings. He christened the tower “Pomp” after Sacagawea’s baby. To this day, it is known as Pompey’s Pillar, and Clark’s signature can still be seen. Clark also named a nearby creek Baptiste, after the boy’s real name.

Two days later, the Rocky Mountains, which had been continuously in view since May 1, finally vanished in the distance behind them. Clark noted the tremendous quantity of buffalo, which were then in mating season and bellowed incessantly. Elk herds rested near the river, barely twenty paces away, and they saw several beavers, which would soon bring many trappers in search of pelts.

By the time they reached the junction of the Yellowstone and the Missouri on August 3, the mosquitoes were so thick that the men could neither hunt nor work. At night, with only their worn blankets for protection, the men could scarcely endure the pain. The next afternoon, after leaving a note for Lewis, they went downriver a few miles to camp on a sand bar, but even there got no relief. The baby’s face was puffed and swollen from the stings, and sleep was almost impossible. They continued slowly down the river, blessing every gust of wind that kept the mosquitoes off.

On August 8, they were surprised to see Sergeant Pryor and his three men floating down the river toward them in two bullboats - round, basin-shaped craft like those used by the Mandans. With them came the sad news that the Indians had stolen the rest of the horses. Left afoot on the plains, the men had hiked to the river at Pompey’s Pillar and made their odd craft by killing a couple of buffalo and stretching their hides over frameworks of saplings.

Three days later, the party met Joseph Dickson and Forest Hancock, the two fur trappers Lewis would see the following day, and learned that the peace the captains had arranged between the Mandans and Hidatsa Minnetarees and the Arikaras had not lasted long, and the two sides were at war once more.

At 1:00 p.m. on August 12, Clark’s party was overtaken by Lewis’s boats. Finding Lewis in the pirogue, they were alarmed to discover that he had been injured. Clark dressed his wound and confirmed that, though painful, it was not dangerous. Lewis, who had kept up his journal while immobilized, made one last entry and thankfully abandoned his duties to Clark. While they were camping and exchanging news, Dickson and Hancock caught up with them; the trappers wanted to revisit the Mandans.

It took only two more days to reach the Minnetaree and Mandan villages, where the explorers received a joyful reception. Clark pleaded with some of the chiefs to accompany the party to Washington, but the Indians resisted, insisting that they would never make it through the Sioux alive. At last, however, Clark convinced a Mandan chief named Sheheke, or Big White, to make the trip.

Clark scolded the Minnetaree and Mandan chiefs for breaking the peace with the Arikara. They agreed to try again and asked him to tell the Arikaras that they could come and visit without fear.

Private John Colter now came to the captains and asked to be discharged from the service. Dickson and Hancock had invited him to join their trapping venture up the Missouri, and Colter, who had seen the big sky and the wide land, had no desire to return to civilization. The captains agreed to discharge him, provided that no one else wanted the same privilege. No one did. “We gave Jo Colter Some Small articles which we did not want and some powder & lead. the party also gave him several articles which will be usefull to him on his expedition,” wrote Clark.

Charbonneau was also paid off, since there would be no further interpreting duties for him or for Sacagawea. Clark, who had grown quite fond of little Pomp, offered to take Charbonneau’s son, “a butifull promising child who is 19 months old to which they both himself & wife wer willing provided the child had been weened. they observed that in one year the boy would be sufficiently old to leave his mother & he would then take him to me if I would be so freindly as to raise the child for him in such a manner as I thought proper, to which I agreed &c.”

On August 17, they started on their way again, and four days later, arrived at the first Arikara village. After renewing friendships, Clark brought up the matter of the broken peace agreement, and the Arikaras met with Big White, the Mandan chief, and agreed to peace again.

As August drew to an end, Clark noted that “my worthy friend Capt. Lewis is recovering fast,” although he later tried to walk too soon and had a brief relapse. On August 30, a number of Teton Sioux hailed them from shore, but Clark lectured them on their bad conduct two years before and refused to have anything to do with them. On September 4, they stopped to visit Floyd’s grave and found that Indians had buried a chief’s son with Floyd to share his journey to another world. Distressed, they reburied their comrade more securely.

But news from home was perhaps just as valuable to these men, who had been disconnected from family and civilization for so many months. They learned happily that their great benefactor, Thomas Jefferson, had won re-election. While they had been gone, the United States had waged, and won, a war against Tripoli – one of four Barbary States in North Africa – over the piracy of American merchant ships. There were more disturbing developments: Two Indians, they learned, had been found guilty of murder in St. Louis and hanged, and two prominent American politicians, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, had fought a duel that left Hamilton dead.

The party was most disturbed to hear that it had been given up as lost or dead by most of the people back east. One trader, noted John Ordway, “informed us that the people in general” in the United States “were concerned about us, as they had heard we were all killed. Then again, they heard that the Spanyards had us in the mines [of Mexico].” After a similar conversation, Clark was encouraged that while the expedition had been “almost forgotten” by most, “the President of the U. States had yet hopes of us.”

In fact, Jefferson had already sent two more parties to explore other parts of the Louisiana Territory. Zebulon Pike, an American brigadier general, led an expedition south and west into Colorado, where it was stalled and thrown off track by a mountain later named Pike’s Peak. Another expedition – led by astronomer Thomas Freeman and botanist Peter Custis – had started up the Red River near Natchez, Mississippi, in April. Both parties were eventually intercepted by Spanish troops.

As the Lewis and Clark Expedition raced downstream, with the current behind them, Clark noted their mileage in his journal, and the word “only” began to appear even before figures of sixty or seventy miles a day.

On September 20, the party raised a happy shout at seeing cows on the bank. Shortly afterward, they spotted La Charrette, the last settlement they had seen on their way upriver and now the first on their return. They stopped overnight as the guests of two young traders.