contents - lewis and clark · august 2004 we proceeded on! 1 contents letters: neglected classics;...

1!August 2004 We Proceeded On

ContentsLetters: Neglected classics; Charbonneau; fire paths; river source 2

President’s Message: A productive year in the cause of L&C 4

Bicentennial Council: Nurturing our ties to nature 5

Trail Notes: Staying adaptable, working together 6

Peripatetic Billy 8Years before he explored the West, youngWilliam Clark was a man on the moveBy Landon Y. Jones

René Jusseaume on the Upper Missouri 16Branded by many as a rascal and cheat, this “culturalprimitive” served ably as the captains’ Mandan interpreterBy Richard K. Stenberg

The Doctrine of Discovery 24Lewis and Clark based much of their Indiandiplomacy on this principle of international lawBy Robert J. Miller

Reviews 30William Clark and the Shaping of the West; Across the Divide.Plus: L&C from the air, L&C art, L&C encyclopedia, audiodispatches. In Brief: abridged journals, L&C on the Great Plains,trail geology in North Dakota, guides to Missouri and Columbia

Dispatches: “Undaunted Stewardship” helps preserve trail sites 40

Judges’ Choice: Prize-winning Lewis and Clark essay 41

Passages: Map-maker Martin Plamondon II 42

L&C Roundup 43Karen Rickert joins staff; Catlin exhibit; new Corps IIsuperintendent; L&C in other publications; crossword key

From the Library: Barnes family donates rare books 44

On the coverVisitors at Fort Clatsop, John F. Clymer’s painting of coastal Indians calling onthe Corps of Discovery at its quarters on the Pacific to trade, depicts what wasmore or less a daily scene during that dreary winter of 1805-06. Lewis andClark’s presence in the Pacific Northwest would bear on later U.S. claims to theregion. For more on the captains as agents of empire, see Robert J. Miller’s “TheDoctrine of Discovery,” beginning on page 24. The reconstructed Fort Clatsopwill be on the list of tour sites at the Foundation’s annual meeting next August5-10 in Portland, Oregon. Courtesy Doris Clymer and The Clymer Museum ofArt, Ellensburg, Washington.

Upper Missouri, p. 19

George Rogers Clark, p. 9

Indian diplomacy, p. 25

2 !We Proceeded On August 2004

Letters

“Neglected classics” not completely neglectedAugust 2004 • Volume 30, Number 3

We Proceeded On is the official publication ofthe Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation,Inc. Its name derives from a phrase that appearsrepeatedly in the collective journals of theexpedition. ¶ 2004

E. G. Chuinard, M.D., Founder

ISSN 02275-6706

EditorJ. I. Merritt51 N. Main StreetPennington, NJ [email protected]

Volunteer ProofreadersH. Carl CampJerry Garrett

Printed by PRISM Color Corporation,Moorestown, New Jersey

EDITORIAL BOARD

Gary E. Moulton, LeaderLincoln, Nebraska

Robert C. CarrikerSpokane, Washington

Robert K. Doerk, Jr.Fort Benton, Montana

Glen LindemanPullman, Washington

Membership InformationMembership in the Lewis and Clark TrailHeritage Foundation, Inc. is open to the public.Information and applications are available bywriting Membership Coordinator, Lewis andClark Trail Heritage Foundation, P.O. Box3434, Great Falls, MT 59403.

We Proceeded On, the quarterly magazine ofthe Foundation, is mailed to current membersin February, May, August, and November.Articles appearing in this journal are abstractedand indexed in HISTORICAL ABSTRACTS andAMERICA: HISTORY AND LIFE.

Annual Membership Categories:Student $30Individual/Library/Nonprofit $40Family/International/Business $55Heritage Club $75Explorer Club $150Jefferson Club $250Discovery Club $500Expedition Club $1,000Leadership Club $2,500

The Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, Inc.is a tax-exempt nonprofit corporation. Individualmembership dues are not tax deductible. The portionof premium dues over $40 is tax deductible.

I appreciated Landon Jones’s fair and per-ceptive review of my book, Interpretersfor Lewis and Clark: The Story ofSacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau.

I read with interest Professor AlbertFurtwangler’s article “Neglected Clas-sics” (WPO, May 2004). I am not sure,however, how “neglected” are the Rob-ert Lawson-Peebles and Larzer Ziff vol-umes he cites. I consulted both for an ar-ticle I wrote entitled “A New Vision ofAmerica: Lewis and Clark and the Emer-gence of the American Imagination,”which appeared in the Summer 2001 issueof Great Plains Quarterly. I made particu-lar use of Lawson-Peebles’s Landscape andWritten Expression in RevolutionaryAmerica, citing it on six occasions, includ-ing an endnote that also mentionsFurtwangler’s essay “Captain Lewis in aCrossfire of Wit: John Quincy Adams v.Joel Barlow” (anthologized in Voyages ofDiscovery, edited by James Ronda) .

The thesis of my article is that the re-turn of Lewis and Clark had a direct im-pact on the emergence of an Americanimagination, particularly in turning itaway from a compulsive obsession withEuropean cultural models and toward thedevelopment of an indigenous culture.This hypothesis is somewhat similar toFurtwangler’s assertion (mentioned onpage 30 of his WPO article) that “Lewis’sjournals hold the seed of a powerful newimage. It is not merely a stark contrast toOld World categories, but the beginningof a new American pattern.”

In any event, I fully concur withFurtwangler’s enthusiasm for these finevolumes by Lawson-Peebles and Ziff andhope others will consult them. By theway, while it is always difficult to recallthe sequence of research that leads oneto a particular volume, if memory servesme correctly, it was Gary Moulton whocalled the Lawson-Peebles work to myattention when I was in the early stagesof my research. There simply seems tobe no end to the magnitude of Gary’scontributions to L&C research.

JAMES R. HENDRIX, JR.Atlanta, Ga.

It is not correct, however, that Clark’supbraiding of Charbonneau for strikingSacagawea is “left unmentioned alto-gether.” On pages 13 and 14, it is reportedthat at a camp at Rattlesnake Cliffs, onthe Missouri headwaters, Clark wrote inhis journal, “I checked my interpreter forstriking his woman at their Dinner.” Thatone sentence has become the basis fordepictions of Charbonneau as a habitualwife beater.

W. DALE NELSON

Laramie, Wy.

I enjoyed Robert R. Hunt’s article “FirePaths on the Lewis & Clark Trail” (WPO,May 2004). One use of fire by Indians hedoesn’t mention was to cover a tacticalretreat. The Corps of Discovery wit-nessed an example of this on July 20, 1805,when it was in the Helena Valley. Therewere Indians (probably Shoshones, per-haps Nez Perces) camped in the valleythat day, and they set fire to the grass andfled after observing either the main riverparty, headed by Lewis, or an advanceparty led by Clark which was travelingon foot. Probably they mistook the ex-plorers for a party of enemy Blackfeet.Both captains saw the fire and estimatedthe distance to it from their respectivepositions—Lewis was near today’s BlackSandy Campground and Clark was in theSpokane Hills, at the southeast edge ofthe valley. Using a map and a compassand swinging a couple of arcs based onthese known positions and distances, youfind that the arcs intersect at the west endof present-day Lake Helena, formedwhen Hauser Dam was built on the Mis-souri. The waters of Lake Helena backup into the drainage of Big Prickly PearCreek, which drains the valley. The Indi-ans were camped along the lower reachesof the creek. (Clark observed “a Smokerise to our right up the Valley of the lastCreek.” He named it Pryor’s Creek, af-ter one of the corps’ sergeants, but thename was later changed to Big PricklyPear Creek.)

Clark first sighted the Helena Valleythe day before. On July 19, his partypassed over the highlands of present-day

“What if” in the Helena Valley

Charbonneau as “wife beater”


The Lewis and Clark TrailHeritage Foundation, Inc.

P.O.B. 3434, Great Falls, MT 59403406-454-1234 / 1-888-701-3434

Fax: 406-771-9237www.lewisandclark.org

The mission of the LCTHF is tostimulate public appreciation of the

Lewis and Clark Expedition’scontributions to America’s heritage and

to support education, research,development, and preservation of the

Lewis and Clark experience.

OfficersPresident

Ron LaycockBenson, Minn.

President-ElectGordon Julich

Blue Springs, Mo.

Vice-President Patti Thomsen Hartland, Wis.

SecretaryJane Schmoyer-Weber

Great Falls, Mont.

TreasurerCharles H. “Chuck” Holland, Jr.

Meza, Ariz.

Immediate Past PresidentLarry Epstein

Cut Bank, Mont.

Executive DirectorCarol A. Bronson

Directors at largeCharles Cook, Billings, Mont. • Tom Davis,Ft. Washington, Penn. • James Gramentine,

Meguon, Wis. • Sue Hottois, Clarkston,Wash. • Jon Stealey, Findlay, Ohio • HalStearns, Wayne, Neb. • Dark Rain Thom,

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Portland, Ore.

Active Past PresidentsDavid Borlaug, Washburn, N.D. • Robert K.

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Greensboro, N.C. • Jane Henley,Charlottesville, Va. • Barbara J. Kubik,Vancouver, Wash. • H. John Montague,

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Mesa, Ariz. • Stuart E. Knapp,Bozeman, Mont.

Incorporated in 1969 under Missouri General Not-For-Profit Corporation Act. IRS Exemption

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Danas Bar and camped on the river nearLakeside. From the highlands he ob-served “a butifull Vallie of great extent.”The Indians camped along Big PricklyPear Creek went undetected, but what ifClark had seen them (or more likely,smoke from their campfires) and thenmade peaceful contact? The Indianswould doubtless have told him about the“Road to the Buffalo.” The Shoshone,Nez Perce, and Salish Indians all used thiswell-worn path, which runs up the ClarkFork and Blackfoot River and down theDearborn River, to travel between theirhomelands west of the Continental Di-vide to the game-rich plains east of theDivide. The Mandan Indians, in fact, hadtold the captains about the Road to theBuffalo the previous winter, and Lewis’sparty would follow it on the return jour-ney, in 1806. It is many miles—and weeksof travel—shorter than the long, difficultroute the corps took to reach Travelers’Rest. If the captains could have success-fully negotiated with the Indians forhorses, I believe they would have back-tracked to the Dearborn River and takenthe Road to the Buffalo west across theDivide. This could have put them at Trav-elers’ Rest by mid-August. From therethey could have crossed the Bitterrootsbefore the snows of September.

RICHARD E. ALBERTS

Helena, Mont.

Regarding the article by Donald Nell andAnthony Demetriades, “The UtmostReaches of the Missouri,” in the Novem-ber 2002 WPO and the letters in responseto it by James R. Wolf in the issues ofFebruary 2003 and February 2004: I con-ducted a solo hike along Hell RoaringCreek from Red Rock Pass Road to thesource of the Missouri on August 7, 2001,and reached coordinates substantially

similar to those recorded by Wolf.To guide me to the spot I used U.S.

Geological Survey topographic maps(7.5-minute quadrangles). The Missouri’ssource is located on the “Sawtooth Pk.,Idaho-Montana” quadrangle, most re-cently updated in 1964 (pictured, above).This same map is available electronicallyon the Geographical Information System(G.I.S.) database. The coordinates plot-ted by computer for the source’s locationare 44o 33’ 2.10” N, 111o 28’ 17.88” W.Accuracy of the computer-generated co-ordinates is +/- 0.1”. These coordinatesagree closely with Wolf’s coordinates, by0.08” and 1.3” respectively. The com-puter gives the source’s elevation as ap-proximately 8,840 above mean sea level.

The source I reached at the head ofHell Roaring Creek was a single springin the creek channel (pictured, left). I alsonoted several smaller springs immediatelydownstream. Above the source spring Inoted medium-lush vegetation growingfrom rocks in a horseshoe-shaped open-ing on the mountainside. The rocks ob-viously had a source of water, but at thistime of year (mid-summer) the only wa-ter present flowed from the springs in thecreek channel.

I walked about an eighth of a mile far-ther upstream along a dry, narrow creekbed to a point where the dry bed stopped.This was the obvious beginning of thesnowmelt channel. The top of the Conti-nental Divide was about another eighthto a quarter of a mile beyond this point.There was no indication of any previ-ously active spring upstream of thesprings I found.

Another purpose of my visit was toverify the length of the Missouri River.According to the Montana D.N.R., thelength of the Missouri from the outlet ofLillian Lake to its junction with the Mis-sissippi is 2,615.4 miles. The G.I.S. gives4.1 miles as the length from the sourcespring to the Lake Lillian outlet. Adding

Missouri River’s source


these two figures gives 2,619.5 miles asthe length of the Missouri from its sourceto its confluence with the Mississippi.Corps of Engineers data give 2,320.8miles as the Missouri’s length from theThree Forks (where the Jefferson, Madi-son, and Gallatin rivers come together toform the Missouri proper) to its junctionwith the Mississippi. According to theG.I.S., the Mississippi itself is 2,318.3miles from its source at the outlet of LakeItasca, in Minnesota, to its mouth, at theGulf of Mexico. So the Missouri is thelongest river in the United States by name(i.e., from the Three Forks) and by dis-tance from its ultimate source.

The Missouri nominally ends whereit joins the Mississippi, even though theMississippi above this junction is thelesser of the two tributaries. If the mainstem of the Mississippi were properly re-garded as the Missouri, then the totallength of this “true Missouri” from itssource to the Gulf of Mexico would mea-sure 3,768 miles.

JOHN R. LARANDEAU

Omaha, Neb.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The writer works as ariver engineer for the U.S. Army Corpsof Engineers.

Letters (cont.)

WPO welcomes letters. We may edit themfor length, accuracy, clarity, and civility.Send them to us c/o Editor, WPO, 51 N. MainSt., Pennington, NJ 08534 (e-mail: [email protected]).

President’s Message

A productive year in the cause of Lewis & Clarks I write this, my last column

as president, I reflect back onthis past year. It has been a

good one, although busy at times. Wehave had Bicentennial Signature Eventsin Louisville; St. Louis; Hartford, Illi-nois; St. Charles, Missouri; and KansasCity, Kansas. On March 14, at a cer-emony in St. Louis, the U.S. Mint re-leased a new nickel commemoratingLewis and Clark, and followed this upon May 12 with a L&C commemora-tive silver dollar. Two days later, theU.S. Postal Service did itspart for the bicentennial byreleasing a commemora-tive 37-cent L&C stamp. Agreat year for Lewis andClark history buffs andcollectors! (To view or or-der these new issues, checkthe Web sites www.usmint.gov and www.usps.com.)

Also in May, past presidents LarryEpstein and Jane Henley and I, togetherwith Carol Bronson and Wendy Raneyof our Great Falls staff, journeyed toWashington, D.C., to participate in aneducational event for the Lewis andClark Congressional Caucus and theLearning First Alliance. Among thosein attendance were Susan Sclafani, as-sistant secretary of education, and AnnaBryant and Joan Schmidt, executive di-rector and president-elect, respectively,of the National School Boards Asso-ciation. In brief remarks, Gerard Baker,who at the time was wrapping up hisjob as superintendent of the Lewis andClark National Historic Trail, urgedthose present to “take the [Lewis andClark] story to the children. . . . Thestory is for our children and grandchil-dren and it says who we are as Ameri-can people.” As “keepers of the story,”our foundation must do just that—pre-serve the story of the Corps of Discov-ery and pass it on to future generations.Many thanks to Tom Fulton, TonyFowler, Terri Purcell, and Jane Angelisfor their help during our D.C. visit.

Other good things have happened

this past year. Our Third CenturyCommittee got off to an excellent startcollecting and prioritizing suggestions.Its members are looking for input, andif you have ideas let them know. (Con-tact Jim Gramentine at [email protected]; 414-341-9317; 9630 N. Lamp-lighter Lane, Mequon, WI 53092.) Wealso made good progress in planningour soon-to-be-launched fund-raisingdrive. Our goal is to establish an en-dowment fund that will make us finan-cially stable, insuring that we can carry

on our mission into the21st century. You’ll hearmore about this in themonths ahead.

Our great staff deservesspecial mention. Carol andthe others in the GreatFalls office do a wonderfuljob for us. Presidents and

board members come and go, and it isthe staff that provides stability and con-tinuity—we couldn’t operate at thelevel we do without them.

Our great board and committeechairs deserve a word too. They guideand direct the staff, set policies, makedecisions, and make everything work.

Last of all, I must thank my wife offorty years. Ione has taken messages,checked my calendar, made appoint-ments for me, and listened to me timeafter time, hour after hour. I couldn’thave done it without her. Thanks, Ione.

—Ron LaycockPresident, LCTHF

A

I’ve read with interest the ongoing debatein recent issues of WPO about the fate ofLewis’s iron boat. Consideration shouldbe given to the possibility that somemembers of the Corps of Discoverymight later have returned to the UpperPortage Camp to dig up the frame forpurpose of trading its valuable iron to theIndians. John Colter, George Drouillard,John Potts, and Peter Weiser all returnedto the upper Missouri as fur trappers andwould have known the burial location ofthe iron frame. Toussaint Charbonneau,whom Clark presented with the corps’blacksmithing tools, could also have re-turned to the Great Falls area with hiswife Sacagawea.

KEITH E. JONES

Racine, Wisc.

Iron boat’s fate

Portland in 2005M ark your calendars: The Foun-

dation’s 2005 annual meeting willtake place next August 5-10 in Port-land, Oregon. Activities planned in-clude visits to the reconstructed FortClatsop and other L&C sites as well aslectures, a special kids’ program, andmuch more. Look for more informa-tion in the November WPO. ■


Bicentennial Council

Nurturing the intimate relationship between humans and nature

“F or millennia, our people main-tained and were sustained by a

pristine and natural world of abun-dance. . . . The Creator provided every-thing we needed to live. In return, oursacred covenant was to respectfully useand forever protect these gifts.” Sowrote the curators of Many Voices,Many Nations, the Circle of TribalAdvisors’ exhibition commemoratingthe Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. Thissacred covenant remains intact today, aheritage of the native peoples whogreeted the Corps of Discovery twohundred years ago. It is a legacy wemust all learn to claim.

Native American tradition aboundswith stories of the intimate relationshipbetween humans and the world of na-ture. Alan Pinkham, a Nez Perce elder,told me a story that demonstrates thecommitment his people have to the ani-mals, and by extension to all of nature,with whom they share the planet. Longago, Alan related, human people andanimal people lived together and spokewith each other. The animal people hadbeen here longer, but the humans hadmore strength and power and began tokill the animals indiscriminately. Theanimal people called upon the NezPerce, threatening to stop sharing theirwisdom if the wanton slaughter did notcease. If the Nez Perce would agree tobe the animals’ advocates in this regard,“then we will speak with you again.”So it was agreed, and so it has remained.Just one of many examples is the NezPerces’ well-planned advocacy in sav-ing the gray wolf from extinction.

Roberta Conner, vice president ofthe National Lewis & Clark Bicenten-nial Council and a member of the Con-federated Tribes of the Umatilla IndianReservation, further illustrated this at-titude. Bobbie lives on the reservationin eastern Oregon, a fertile regionwhere luscious blueberries grow inabundance. She startled me one day bytalking about the sacred blueberrybushes near her home. I grew up on theUpper Peninsula of Michigan, where I

picked blueberries every summer. Butthese were from prospective blueberry-pie bushes, blueberry-muffin bushes;I’d never known a sacred blueberrybush. Bobbie smiled tolerantly.’“Thoseblueberry bushes have sustained mypeople for generations. Theygive life and have from timeimmemorial. Of coursethey are sacred.”

Closer to my ownhome in St. Louis on theMississippi River, I foundthe same intimate connec-tion. Evelyne Voelker was aComanche who lived across theriver in Illinois. Before she died, in2002, she often came across the river,frequently to visit me. She consideredthe Mississippi a sacred, powerful force,despite its polluted water and the con-struction encroaching along its banks.On a particularly harried morning,Evelyne told me in the relative calm ofmy office how she focused on the riveras a way of settling her thoughts, get-ting in better tune with the world, andbanishing any evil from her mind andher work. The river was a reminder toher of things beyond a lifetime, ofthings that endure—an emblem ofstrength and power far beyond the wis-dom of humans. Evelyne had her ownsacred covenant with this strong browngod.

It may not be possible, or even prac-tical, for all of us to adopt the world-view of the American Indian. But dis-covering this perspective and examiningit will show us that we can re-think is-sues and philosophies and even beliefs.In the Indian principle of the sacrednessof the earth and all its forms of life, thereare elements that will serve to save ourplanet, ourselves, and our descendantsfrom the dangers that loom in the care-less neglect of spiritual connection.

The land traversed by the Lewis andClark Expedition has been radically al-tered by human action. Members of theexpedition would not even recognizemost of it, so different are the flora and

fauna, the rivers, the landscape. As werelive the adventure, let us use the les-sons, in both the burdens and the trea-sures, bequeathed to us by the past andlink the expedition with our ownpresent. How did our predecessors

treat these lands? How did theirdecisions affect the land and

its inhabitants? Whatchoices were made thatenhanced and improvedthat “pristine and natural

world of abundance”?And, as we join the journey

and continue the adventure,what can we do now to keep

this sacred covenant?

Upcoming Signature EventsTwo more National Lewis and ClarkBicentennial Signature Events arescheduled for 2004:

Oceti Sakowin Experience: Remem-ber and Educating begins August 27and concludes September 26 in andaround the Oacoma/Chamberlain areaof South Dakota. Tours to varioustribes in South Dakota and a festivalof various cultural activities are amongthe activities planned. For more infor-mation, see the Alliance of Tribal Tour-ism Advocates’ Web site, www.attatribal.com. ATTA seeks to enhanceand promote tourism as a means ofeconomic development while main-taining respect for tribal traditions andlands.

Circle of Cultures: Time of Renewaland Exchange will be held October 22-31 in North Dakota. The event high-lights the cordial welcome the expedi-tion received from the Upper Miss-ouri’s earth-lodge peoples and featuresa high-tech “virtual village” of the Man-dan Indians, replica earth lodges, Na-tive American interpretations and dem-onstrations. and presentations by re-enactors and scholars. More informa-tion is available at www.circleofcultures.com.

—Robert R. ArchibaldPresident, Bicentennial Council


Trail Notes

Staying adaptable, working togetherach segment of the Lewis andClark National Historic Trail hasits own story, its own signifi-

cance, and its own issues of concern.Just as Lewis and Clark respected thevarious American Indian tribes theymet, the divergent landscapes, the na-ture of plants and animals, so must we.Members of the Foundation come to-gether as one group to commemorate,revere, and protect the story and thetrail of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,but in doing so, we must acknowledgeall the differences that make each state,reservation, community, and site alongthe trail unique.

The stories of the expedition arerooted in tradition, as are members ofthe Foundation who serve as keepersof the story and stewards of the trail.As we move forward into the third cen-tury of this great American story, wemust be flexible in how we continueour mission. We have greater resourcesand greater numbers than ever before.We can achieve our goals from one endof the trail to the other and in manyplaces off the trail.

The Foundation is developing sev-eral stewardship programs to promoteour stated mission, which concludeswith the words, “The Foundationserves as advocate, interpreter and pro-tector of the Trail.” We must recognizethat the exact same program will notwork on the Lolo Pass and in St. Louis.We must be flexible in adapting ourprogram objectives to different areaswhile preserving our overall goals.

Our new Chapter Partnership Pro-gram will allow chapters for the firsttime to establish formal relationshipswith one another and share resourcesand ideas.

Partnerships with the U.S. Bureauof Land Management and the ForestService will allow us for the first timeas a foundation to formally carry outour mission as stewards of the trail. Fordecades, chapters individually haveconducted stewardship projects. Theyhave served as interpreters, performed

cleanup projects, and monitored seg-ments of the trail. Our Trail Watch pro-gram will allow chapters to work withland-management agencies to protectand preserve the trail and be compen-sated for their efforts.

The Trail Watch program will beginalong some of the more remote andpristine stretches of the trail which arelikely to see increased visitation duringthe L&C Bicentennial. If interest andparticipation in the program are strong,it will expand to other segments of thetrail and will be modified, where neces-sary, to address the issues and concernsof various landscapes and populations.Eventually, Trail Watch could includeinterpretive programming. How theprogram grows and evolves will dependon Foundation members. You will helpset the direction of the program. We arelooking to you to tell us what concernsexist along the trail and what needs mustbe addressed.

The Foundation is also workingwith a program in Montana called Un-daunted Stewardship (see page 40). Theprogram has developed heritage-pres-ervation interpretive sites at privateranches across the state and wants topartner with the Foundation to protectand preserve those Lewis and Clarksites. Undaunted Stewardship will payan annual fee to chapters that monitorthe interpretive sites on a regular basis.This marks the first time the Founda-tion will enter into such an agreementand opens the door for similar partner-ships elsewhere along the trail.

As we move toward the third cen-tury of Lewis and Clark, the Founda-tion is strengthening its partnershipswith federal, state, and local agenciesand with private organizations. Manyagencies and organizations are lookingto the Foundation for leadership,strength, and vision.

The Foundation’s legacy is in yourhands. Let’s work together to ensure itssuccess.

—Wendy RaneyDirector, Field Operations

E

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Kentucky was going mad for land. The Continen-tal Army veterans migrating to Kentucky wav-ing their land grants were followed by succeed-

ing waves of speculators waving conflicting land claimsand attorneys waving lawsuits. The surveyors’ custom ofmarking out tracts with ephemeral features like buildingsand bushes led to overlapping, or “shingled,” land claimsand voluminous litigation.

Thanks in part to George Rogers Clark’s grants of thou-sands of acres in Indiana and Kentucky, the family wasland-rich. Just one of his claims at the mouth of the Ten-nessee River was for seventy-four thousand acres. Theproblem was that George’s many creditors were now clos-ing in. Most prominent among them was LaurentBazadone, a Spanish merchant who had arrived atVincennes when George and his men were short on sup-plies there in 1786. The general’s regiment had illegallyconfiscated Bazadone’s goods.

The following article is adapted from a new biography of the Corps of Discovery’s co-com-mander reviewed on page 30. It covers a two-and-a-half-year period in William Clark’s life be-ginning in July 1786, when he resigned his lieutenant’s commission and left the army after sevenyears’ service on the frontier to return to the family homestead of Mulberry Hill, near Louisville,Kentucky.

“Billy” Clark was 25 years old, the youngest of ten children (four girls and six boys) of Johnand Ann Rogers Clark. For much of the next seven years—until he joined his old army friendMeriwether Lewis on the expedition to the Pacific—he attended to the financial problems of hisdebt-ridden older brother, George Rogers Clark, a hero of the American Revolution who hadsecured the Ohio country for the United States.

Whether the cause was family or commerce, Clark never seemed to stay still for long. In hisfirst year after leaving the army, he traveled some three thousand miles by horseback on his brother’sbehalf. Later, on an eight-month trip of more than four thousand miles, he journeyed by river bargeto New Orleans to sell a load of tobacco. His leisurely trip home included an ocean voyage aroundFlorida and up the coast to New Castle, Delaware.—ED.

PERIPATETIC BILLYYears before he explored the West, youngWilliam Clark was a man on the move

BY LANDON Y. JONES

Bazadone’s lawsuit was just one of three major actionsagainst George. He was also being sued by a prominentKentuckian, Humphrey Marshall, over a contract to selltwo large claims of land, and by the heirs of Captain Wil-liam Shannon, a quartermaster in his old regiment. Dur-ing his 1779 campaign, George had endorsed vouchersdrawn by Shannon in order to supply his army. But thestate of Virginia later penuriously refused to pay for ei-ther the flour for Clark’s men or the general’s own salary.“I have given the United States half the territory they pos-sess,” George later wrote bitterly, “and for them to sufferme to remain in poverty, in consequence of it will not re-dound much to their honor hereafter.”1

Since George was increasingly disabled by alcohol, itfell to the entire Clark family to solve his problems. They

Excerpted from William Clark and the Shaping of the West, by Landon Y.Jones, published by Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux,LLC. Copyright © 2004 by Landon Y. Jones. All rights reserved.


divided up the task. Brother Jonathanwould lobby for redress with the Vir-ginia state assembly in Richmond, thecapital. Brother Edmund would sup-ply ready cash from his gristmill andmercantile businesses in Virginia.

The job of settling the lawsuits fellto brother William. Just over a monthafter his return from the army, Will-iam was on horseback riding throughKentucky, surveying George’s hold-ings and attempting to extinguish hisdebts in return for land. In the pro-cess, many of the properties weretransferred into William’s name; thisprotected them from George’s credi-tors and allowed the younger brotherto sell them without complication.

The Clarks were not without assets. The richest 10 per-cent of Kentuckians in 1800 owned one-third of the land,and the Clarks were firmly placed among this planter elite.Daughter Lucy was living with her husband, WilliamCroghan, in their elegant Georgian manor house, LocustGrove, just a few miles from Mulberry Hill. DaughterFanny had remarried and was now the wife of a wealthymerchant, Charles Mynn Thruston, Sr. She would soonmove to his plantation thirty miles upriver.

In addition to land, the family’sother chief investment was in humanproperty. Enslaved African-Americanswere present in only one of four blue-grass households, though their num-bers increased as the forests and cane-brakes were cleared and the regionmoved from mixed farming to a labor-intensive tobacco-based economy. OfKentucky’s total population of 73,677just before statehood in 1792, some12,430 were African-American slaves.

Like other tidewater Virginianswho settled in Kentucky, the Clarkswere convinced that slaves were essen-tial to running a successful plantation.John Clark owned about two dozen

slaves at Beargrass Creek, considerably more than the av-erage Kentuckian. Though the phrase “sold down theriver” originated in the Ohio Valley, the Clarks chose toview their chattel as fixed rather than liquid assets. Theyrarely sold slaves and almost never freed them.

William rode throughout the area during a second hardwinter, 1796-97, when temperatures fell to 18 degrees be-low zero at Cincinnati and the Ohio was frozen over fora full month. By the following summer, however, he hadmade some progress. On August 18, he wrote Edmund

George Rogers Clark

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This 19th-century photoof Mulberry Hill, theClark family’s first homein Kentucky, shows thehouse as it must havelooked to young WilliamClark in the 1790s, whenhe was living there andoverseeing the tangledfinances of his famousolder brother, GeorgeRogers Clark.

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10!We Proceeded On August 2004

that he was “doing what parts of [George’s] business Icould, which I found a verry unfinished Situation.” Wil-liam was planning to go to Vincennes to deal with theBazadone lawsuit there, “which I fear will go against[George].” He then added glumly, “After which I shallnot [have] Money of my own to attend any longer.”2

Two days after he wrote Edmund, William set out forVincennes along the old buffalo trace connecting a stringof mineral, or salt, springs. Along the way, he campedwith some Delaware Indians along the White River. AtVincennes, then a community of fifty houses along theWabash, he learned that he would need to push on tovisit the lawyer John Rice Jones in the Illinois countryopposite St. Louis. George was de-lighted with his brother’s decision. “Iam pleased for two reasons,” he toldWilliam in a letter. “First you may per-haps do some valuable business andalso see a Cuntrey that it may hereaf-ter be of an advantage to you to be ac-quainted with.”3

Clark and his companions made it toKaskaskia in five days, one of whichthey spent retrieving their runawayhorses and riding them bareback thirtymiles back to camp. On September 6,1797, Clark crossed the Mississippi andstayed as the guest of François Vallé II,the Spanish commandant in Ste.Geneviève, a village founded by theFrench in the late 1740s. He recrossedto visit Fort de Chartres, once the largest fortification inNorth America, but by the time of his visit the fort wasoccupied only by lizards and foraging deer.

Farther north was Cahokia, a small village in the so-called American Bottom, an alluvial floodplain, three toseven miles wide, that stretched for nearly a hundred milesalong the east bank of the Mississippi. With topsoils thirtyfeet deep, the region had produced huge corn crops annu-ally for a thousand years. The remnants of the ancientMississippian culture were evident in the six square milesof mounds, the biggest of which covered sixteen acres. Asmany as forty thousand people had lived there around1200 A.D., making the complex not only the largest con-centration of humans north of Mexico but also larger atthe time than London, which had a population of thirtythousand. Clark noticed “the remains of some antent city,”but there was little else to hold his attention in Cahokia, atown of “low & mean houses and much stragled.”4

Of greater interest was the village he viewed across theMississippi. It was St. Louis, officially Spanish but in-tensely French in character. A thousand residents—a headymixture of French Creoles, French Canadians, mixed-racemétis, Indians, and black slaves—mingled on three prin-cipal streets above a low limestone bluff. Clark “was De-lighted from the ferry with the Situation of this town . . .commanding a butifull view of the river.”5

He was warmly welcomed, no doubt because manyresidents still remembered George Rogers Clark’s roleassisting in the defense of the village against the Britishand Indians in 1780. He dined with the Spanish lieutenantgovernor, Zenon Trudeau, and met the Chouteaus, the

French founding family who so dominated the fur tradethat they were something like the Medici of the MiddleMississippi.

That night, William went to a ball thrown by theChouteaus, admiring, as he noted in his journal, “all thefine girls & buckish Gentlemen.”6 French dancing wasscandalous, since gentlemen put their arms around ladies’waists in public; what was more, local women often ap-plied rose-petal rouge to their cheeks and lampblack totheir eyes. William did not get back to his lodgings atCharles Gratiot’s house until dawn.

Soon Clark was heading home despite “pressinginvertations to stay.” Along the way he was delayed by“a violent hed ake” and outbreaks of “several largeinflematory sores on my legs & thighs.”7 The infectedboils—a chronic problem for Clark—were no doubt ex-acerbated by many hours on horseback. A few monthslater, after recovering from “a long and lingering fe-

Elegant Locust Grove was home to Clark’s sister Lucy and her husband, William Croghan.

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ver,” Clark in a letter to Edmund estimated that “I haverode for Bro. George in the course of this year upwardsof 3000 miles . . . continually on the pad attempting tosave him.”8

TO NEW ORLEANS AND BEYOND

In addition to clearing George’s debts, William was help-ing manage their father’s plantation at Mulberry Hill. Theirlargest cash crop was Virginia-style bulgar tobacco, ofwhich not just the leaves but the entire stalk was harvestedand dried. Fortunately for the Clarks, the markets at NewOrleans were once again open. Threatened by war withBritain, Spain had sought to mollify the Americans byreopening their trade. In the Treaty of San Lorenzo inOctober 1795 (also known as Pinckney’s Treaty), Spaingranted Americans the right to ship their goods to NewOrleans and beyond, without paying duties, and acceptedthe 31st parallel as the northern border of West Florida,thereby abandoning their claims to the so-called YazooStrip on the Lower Mississippi. In effect, Spain was be-ginning to withdraw from a territory it realized was toolarge to protect. As its minister Manuel Godoy put it, “Youcan’t put doors on open country.”9

On March 9, 1798, William hired a crew at the Falls ofthe Ohio, loaded a flatboat with hogsheads of Clark fam-ily tobacco, and pushed off for New Orleans. In a life ofjourneys, Clark was beginning what would be his longesttrip to date. He seemed to anticipate this. As always, hecarried a notebook—but in this one he set down morethan the usual quotidian entries. In the opening pages hehad written a set of maxims, most likely gathered fromother sources. Some of them were commonplace-bookprinciples familiar to any follower of the Enlightenment:

Man cannot make principles, he can only discoverthem.

The most formidable weapon against errors of ev-ery kind is Reason.

I believe that religious duties consist in doing jus-tice, loveing mercy, and endeavoring to make ourfellow creatures happy.10

Another seemed to reflect more personally on his lackof formal schooling:

Learning does not consist in the Knowledge of Lan-guage, but in the knowledge of things to which lan-guage gives names.

The last in the list could have been his lifelong credo:

Every person of learning is finally his own teacher.

The boat floated down the river against gusty windsthat frequently forced them to tie up and wait out the gales.

March 11: “Wind rose blew & snowed all the evening.”March 14: “Wind rose & obliged us to land.”At Fort Massac, Clark bought a canoe and was joined

by four other boats to make up a flotilla. Even in thebest circumstances, the Mississippi’s currents were a for-midable challenge for small craft. When Charles Dickensentered the Mississippi on his American tour 44 yearslater, he was appalled at the sight:

An enormous ditch, sometimes two or three mileswide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour: itsstrong and frothy current choked and obstructedeverywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees:now twining themselves together in great rafts,from the interstices of which a sedgy lazy foamworks up, to float upon the water’s top; now roll-ing past like monstrous bodies, their tangled rootsshowing like matted hair; now glancing singly bylike giant leeches; and now writhing round andround in the vortex of some small whirlpool, likewounded snakes.11

Clark bought a passport at New Madrid to enter Span-ish territory, even as his boats continued to struggleagainst the gusty winds sweeping across the water. OnMarch 23 he wrote, “The wind now verry high obligedus to land—with much Difficuelty & Danger the boatesmuch Scattered.”

They passed the first, second, and third ChickasawBluffs and navigated the three-mile stretch of swirlingcurrents and rapids called the Devil’s Race-Ground. OnMarch 28, they arrived at the newly built Fort Adams,just above the high ground at the fourth bluff. Clark wrotea letter to William Croghan containing the results of thesurvey he’d made for him at the confluence of the Ohioand the Mississippi. “Capt. Lewis promes to Deliver it,”Clark wrote in his journal. “He will set out from[Chickasaw Bluffs] about the 15 or 20 of Apr.”12 (Thiscourier was not Meriwether Lewis, then an army paymas-ter in Charlottesville, but most likely another Virginian,Captain Thomas Lewis.)

Clark floated on downstream, beset by more foulweather:

March 30: “Raned hard set out early wind rose we con-tinued landed on a Sharp Point a Dangerous part of theriver. One Boat far behind and cant get in at the port . . .the bank falling in all night.”

March 31: “A violent storm all night it litioned [light-ninged] for at least 2 hours incesently as one continuedblaze.”


Disaster finally came on April 1.Another monstrous wind rose up,driving Clark’s canoe into an em-bedded stump that smashed thebow. The canoe then hit a “saw-yer”—a partially submerged treetrunk—which “nearly sunk her.”Finally a third trunk “held her fast.”In his notebook Clark wrote re-signedly, “Here I am at 12 oclockcanoo stove.”

It got worse. One of the trader’sboats, weighed down by its fullload of merchandise, was sunk bythe same sawyer Clark hit. The sur-viving flatboats were then driven upagainst the bank by the raging current, “a very dangeroussituation.” Surveying his bedraggled men, Clark wrote,“my hands fritened.” Not until the next day were theyable to dislodge the snagged boat and retrieve a few of thetrader’s goods that had washed ashore.

They proceeded on downstream, amid driving rains,violent windstorms, thick fogs, and occasional alcoholichazes. “All the hands Drunk in the contractors boat,”Clark tersely noted one day. During the journey, he drewa sequence of freehand maps of the course of the LowerMississippi that are astonishing in their accuracy anddraftsmanship.

As they neared New Orleans, Clark noticed traders’keelboats passing almost every day. Finally, on April 24,he berthed in New Orleans—presumably avoiding theplight of less careful boatmen who, caught in the power-ful current, would miss the eddy at the harbor and be sweptpast the city. Clark rented a warehouse to store his to-bacco and successfully located a buyer. With the proceedsfrom his tobacco sales, Clark paid his men and bought abarrel apiece of sugar and coffee, which he shipped backto Mulberry Hill.

After the harrowing trip downriver, Clark may havehoped for a few balmy weeks in New Orleans, the capi-tal of Louisiana and already the most exotic Europeancity in North America. Enormous poplar trees lined thelevee, where Frenchwomen strolled along a raised gravelwalk. At the heart of the city was the Place d’Armes,fronted by church and state: the St. Louis Cathedral andthe Cabildo, seat of the local government; both had beenerected in the past two years. William stayed in MadameChabot’s boardinghouse on Conti Street, whose Irishlandlady catered to English and American visitors. He

also would have observed in New Orleans a new, morebrutal type of slave society based on the emerging mar-kets for sugar and cotton. These plantation slaves workedin the fields throughout the year, generating enormousprofits for their owners.

A week after he arrived, Clark noted in his journal thatthere was “an uproar about a War with the United States& Spa[i]n France &c.” This was the result of the so-calledXYZ Affair, in Paris—a diplomatic incident that had in-flamed anti-French Federalists in the United States andspilled over into an undeclared maritime war. Hundredsof French and American armed merchant ships—priva-teers—were roaming the seas seizing ships, sailors, andplunder. President John Adams reported that three hun-dred American vessels had been seized on the high seasby French warships. On May 3, 1798, George Washing-ton had been called out of retirement to command thearmy, and a new naval department had been authorized.

In the midst of the Quasi-War with France, Clark wasmaking plans to return to the East Coast by sea. On June19, 1798, the Spanish governor of Louisiana, ManuelGayoso de Lemos, issued a passport for “GuillermoClark” to travel from New Orleans to Philadelphia onthe schooner Active. But delayed perhaps by the uproarwith France, or more likely by weather, Clark never didsail on the Active. (Thirty years later, the ship was involvedin one of the most bizarre incidents in nautical history.Anchored in the rich whaling grounds off the Maine coast,the Active suddenly began churning through the waterwith no visible means of propulsion. A whale had becomeentangled in its anchor chain and towed the vessel toMount Desert Island, where the dumbfounded crew fi-nally cut the anchor free.)

St. Louis was still Spanish when Clark first saw it in 1798. He admired its “commanding” view.

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Waiting for another ship, Clark purchased five horsesin New Orleans and took them upriver to Natchez inhopes of making some ready cash. At that time, Natchez-Under-the-Hill was the roughest vice district in NorthAmerica, a gathering place for the flotsam of boatmen,traders, gamblers, and prostitutes coming down the river.The botanist John Bradbury wrote of the town: “There isnot, perhaps, in the world a more dissipated place.”13 HereClark sold the horses at an army camp, played some bil-liards, and gave nine dollars to “a pore sick man.” Twodays later, he retreated downriver to New Orleans on apirogue.

On July 27, Clark boarded a six-gun American vessel,the Star, bound for Philadelphia. Escorting it was a two-masted brig carrying eight guns. The two ships departed,passing Spanish ships of war moving up the river, andreached La Balize, the fortified lighthouse the French hadbuilt at the entrance to the Mississippi. There they waitedfor favoring winds to take them across the sandbar at themouth of the river.

It was a time when suspicions rose quickly. A Frenchprivateer with four cannons and fifty men approachedand anchored overnight near the Star. Clark and theAmericans lay awake the entire night, “all prepared”for an attack. But when the morning came withoutevent, Clark and the Star’s owner asked permission toboard the French vessel. On it they found three Ameri-can prisoners, sea captains whose ships had been cap-tured. Would the French captain mind if Mr. Clark hadbreakfast with his countrymen? Mais non. It resultedin an extraordinary scene: at this unique confluence ofnations and international tensions, Clark sat down atpetit déjeuner with three captured American captains

on a French ship in Spanish waters.On July 7, the Star moved about a mile

downstream—an act that generated muchalarm on the Spanish galley patrolling themouth of the river. ‘We went to shore,”Clark said, “and the officer . . . informedus that he had orders to stop us. This in-formation astonish us as we knew of nocause.”

The Americans soon learned that theyhad been accused of “insulting” the com-mander of La Balize and of making“threats” to the French privateer. Twoof their party who had returned to NewOrleans to inquire about the cause forthe detention were escorted to prison

and kept there for 24 hours. That gesture evidently sat-isfied the Spanish, since a letter soon arrived from Gov-ernor Gayoso stating that the ship could continue on itsvoyage, “as the Spanesh Nation is in purfect harmonywith the US.”

The course the Star had charted would take it throughthe Straits of Florida past Cuba and up the Atlantic sea-board to Delaware Bay. A few days out, a sail appeared towindward. “We all prepared for action,” noted Clark, onlyto learn that the feared French privateer was actually aSpanish ship bound for Havana. Instead of bullets andcannonballs, they encountered storms and heavy seas inthe Gulf. Ever succinct, Clark wrote, “I am sick.” Othersails appeared and disappeared on the horizon withoutincident—and eventually the island of Cuba floatedthrough the haze on the southeast.

On September 2, they were approached by an Englishship-of-the-line, the brig HMS Hero, flying the UnionJack and armed with sixteen cannons and 150 men. A lieu-tenant climbed aboard and informed the men of the Starthat they were in the Dry Tortugas, westward of theFlorida Keys. Antipathy toward the English ran strong inthe Clark family, but in this ever-shifting world of oppor-tunistic empires, the Royal Navy was now helping to pro-tect American shipping against the French. If Clark heldany negative opinions about the nation most Americansblamed for the Indian “depredations” north of the Ohio,he did not note them in his journal.

It could have been because he was sick, tired, and hun-gry. “We are much alarmed about provisions,” he wrote,“having consumed the greater part of our stock.” So, onSeptember 4, 1798, at latitude 24 degrees 28 minutes—alocation just off the present-day resort of Islamorada in

At the Chouteau house Clark enjoyed the company of “fine girls & buckish Gentlemen.”

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the Florida Keys—Clark took matters into his own hands:he went deep-sea fishing. During a single day’s trolling inan area now famous for sport fish like bonefish and tar-pon, he caught “a no. of fish dolfin, skipjacks, gruperssnappers &c.” The “dolfin” William Clark caught in 1798is known today as mahimahi, though how it was preparedor appreciated we do not know. The accomplished hunterof deer, bear, and bison did not record his opinion.

The Star cleared the Keys shortly before the Caribbeanbecame the scene of the most intense naval action of theundeclared war. On November 20, a French ship seizedan American schooner off Guadeloupe. Two months later,the United States Navy’s firstfrigate, Constellation, turned its38 guns against the FrenchInsurgente, defeating the largervessel in an hour-long battle offthe island of Nevis.

As the Star made its waypast the Outer Banks ofNorth Carolina, Clark diag-nosed himself “sick” or “verrysick” for thirteen consecutivedays, at one point bleaklyadding, “Am so reduced canscarcely walk.” He may havebeen seasick, though the evi-dence suggests something else;Clark later said that he hadlived “in bad health” duringhis civilian years.14 The ship’smen sustained themselveswith rainwater collected insailcloths and with “SugarCoffee & limes” sent over bya passing schooner.

In late September, the Star followed a high tide and fa-vorable winds over the bar at Cape May and entered Dela-ware Bay. But its destination could no longer be Philadel-phia, which had been devastated by an epidemic of yel-low fever. Congress had adjourned and hastily departedin July, and by September 40,000 people had fled the city,Of those who remained, 3,600 died.

Instead, the Star docked at New Castle, Delaware, aharbor bustling with forty ships. Among them were thesoon-to-be-victorious Constellation and a 20-gun schoo-ner, the Delaware, commanded by the already famousCaptain Stephen Decatur. Two months earlier, the Dela-ware had seized the French schooner Croyable off the

New Jersey coast, and now the captured vessel also lay atanchor at New Castle.

Setting foot on land for the first time in nearly six weeks,Clark discovered that New Castle was thronged with refu-gees from the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. Heand a companion hired a horse and buggy to take them tothe town of Christiana, Delaware, and on to Elkton, Mary-land, and Havre de Grace, on the west bank of theSusquehanna. At 11 P.M., they caught a scheduled stage-coach for Baltimore.

In the winter and spring, coach travel in the new re-public was a problematic affair. The previous year,

Francis Baily had traveled thesame road Clark did in one ofthe typical coaches of the day,a covered buckboard withtwelve passengers crammedonto four seats, all facing for-ward. “The roads, which ingeneral were very bad, wouldin some places be impassable,so that we would be obliged toget out and walk a considerabledistance, and sometimes to“put our shoulders to thewheel,” Baily recalled.15 Hewound up walking six of thetwelve miles to Havre de Gracethrough mud, mire, and pigslop up to his ankles. Still,Baily appreciated the enforceddemocracy of the road: “Themember of congress is placedby the side of the shoemakerwho elected him; they frater-

nize together, and converse with familiarity.”16

Immediately upon his arrival in Baltimore, however, Wil-liam Clark found himself thrust into democracy run amok.A congressional election was finishing up, marked by un-usual vindictiveness. The incumbent, General Samuel Smith,a hero of the Delaware campaign during the Revolution,had opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts passed earlier thatyear—an unpopular stand in Federalist Baltimore. His op-ponent, James Winchester, vehemently castigated Smithwhile inflaming public opinion against the French.

When the polls opened on election day—Monday, Oc-tober 1, 1798—the usual politicking, which revolvedaround free whiskey, barbecues, and rallies, soon degen-erated into what Clark called “a riot,” with sailors fight-

The Mississippi River between St. Louis and Cape Girardeau.


ing in the streets and one man killed. It was “a horrid seenfor an American,” he lamented.

The next day was no calmer, but by Wednesday Clarkcould note that “the opposition not so outrageous as yes-terday.” Clark’s political sentiments were clear enough:he was a Virginian, a Jeffersonian, and a Republican. Headmired the French, feared the British, and shared the usualbackcountry suspicions of President Adams and North-easterners. When Smith was finally proclaimed the victor,Clark noted with satisfaction that the general was carriedthrough the torchlit streets for several hours on a chairsprouting laurel branches, “With Shouts Drums & Instru-ments of all kind playing after him.”

Clark spent a leisurely week in Baltimore, boarding atEvans’s Tavern, the same place newly elected Vice Presi-dent Jefferson stayed during his trips from Monticello toPhiladelphia. One night he went to the theater. Then, onOctober 9, he rose at 3 A.M. to catch the coach for theFederal City.

The new nation’s capital was a work in progress—onlyone wing of the Capitol had been built, though “the Presi-dents house was nearly finished.” Clark was delighted withWashington City, “the most elegant situation I ever saw.”But he proceeded on to Alexandria and Fredericksburg(where he saw another play), and to his brother Edmund’sfarm in Spotsylvania, Virginia.

From there he would head home to Mulberry Hill.Clark was nearing the end of an eight-month journey inthe course of which he descended the largest river systemon the continent, sailed in a tall ship through the Gulf ofMexico and up the Atlantic seaboard, and traveled bystagecoach and on horseback across the Appalachians. Hehad covered about 4,400 miles—a distance, as it happens,more than a thousand miles greater than that from St. Louisto the mouth of the Columbia River. Along the way, heencountered a potpourri of flatboatmen and Indians onthe rivers, French Creoles and Spanish officials in NewOrleans, British naval officers on the high seas, and crab-cake politicians in Baltimore.

As he traveled from Virginia to Kentucky, retracing hisfamily’s original journey across the mountains toRedstone, Pennsylvania, and down the Monongahela andOhio rivers, Clark continued to write. But while he waspenning the last paragraph on the last page in the journalchronicling his trip, his usually flowing handwriting sud-denly tightened and cramped:

Stay a few days at Col. Booths & a few <2> days atRedstone, & at Wheeling, also Chilacothe. Arriveat my father’s the 24 of Dec. at dusk —

He was unable to bring himself to complete the last sen-tence. What he could not write was that on the same dayhe returned to Mulberry Hill—Christmas Eve, 1798—his mother, Ann Rogers Clark, had died at the age ofsixty-eight.

Landon Y. (Lanny) Jones, Jr., a member of the Foundationand the board of the National Council of the Lewis and ClarkBicentennial, edited The Essential Lewis and Clark (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2000). He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, andBozeman, Montana.

NOTES

1 George Rogers Clark to Jonathan Clark, May 11, 1792. FromW. H. English, Conquest of the Country Northwest of the RiverOhio, 1778-83, in James Alton James, ed., George Rogers ClarkPapers, 2 volumes (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library,1912), pp. 417-418.2 Letter dated August 18, 1797. Lyman Copeland Draper Manu-scripts, 2-L-45, Archives Division, State Historical Society ofWisconsin, Madison.3 George Rogers Clark to William Clark, September 1, 1797.William Clark Papers, Missouri Historical Society.4 Samuel W. Thomas, “William Clark’s 1795 and 1797 Journalsand Their Significance,” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical So-ciety 25, no. 4, pt. 1 (July 1969), p. 280. Entry dated September9, 1797.5 Ibid., p. 292. September 10, 1797.6 Ibid.7 Ibid. September 12-18, 1797.8 Draper 2-l. Letter dated December 14, 1797.9 David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 290.10 William Clark’s Notebook, 1798-1801; Western HistoricalManuscripts Collection, Ellis Library, University of Missouri,Columbia. All subsequent journal entries are from this source.11 Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy(London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 171.12 Clark’s 1798 Journal, undated entry.13 John Bradbury, “Travels in the Interior of America: In theYears 1809, 1810, and 1811,” in Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., EarlyWestern Travels, 1748-1846, 32 volumes (Cleveland: Arthur H.Clark, 1904-07), Vol. 5 p. 211.14 Clark to Nicholas Biddle, August 15, 1811, in Donald Jack-son, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Re-lated Documents, 1783-1854, 2 volumes (Urbana: University ofIllinois Press, 1968), Vol. 2, p. 571.15 Francis Baily, Journey of a Tour in Unsettled Parts of NorthAmerica in 1796 & 1797; Jack D.L. Holmes, ed. (Carbondale:Southern Illinois University, 1969), p. 25.16 Ibid., p. 272.


BY RICHARD K. STENBERG

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark met thefur trader René Jusseaume in the fall of 1804at the Knife River villages, in what is now

North Dakota, and hired him as an interpreter.Jusseaume, his Indian wife, and their two children, a boyand a girl, wintered with the captains at Fort Mandan.When Lewis ministered to Sacagawea during the birthof her son, Pomp, it was Jusseaume who famously sug-gested that a potion made from the ground-up rattle of arattlesnake might ease the delivery. A year and a half later,when the Lewis and Clark stopped at Knife River on theirway home from the Pacific, Jusseaume helped the cap-tains convince the Mandan chief Sheheke to visit Wash-ington, D.C. The trader and his family also accompa-nied Sheheke to the nation’s capital.

That, in a nutshell, is Jusseaume’s story as it relates tothe Lewis and Clark Expedition and its aftermath. He isone of those characters whose contributions to the Corpsof Discovery, although mainly peripheral, still have someimportance, and are easy to overlook.

Many questions remain about him. For starters, we can’teven be sure about the spelling of his name, which in con-

temporary accounts is rendered Jusseaume, Jessaume,Jussomme, Jessomme, Gissom, Jussom, Jissom, Jessiaume,and Grousseaume. The name in its various guises cropsup frequently in documents of the early fur trade, andwhat people had to say about the man attached to it wasnot always flattering. John Evans, a Welshman who vis-ited the Mandans in 1796, accused him of attempted mur-der,1 and Alexander Henry the Younger, a North WestCompany trader who encountered Jusseaume in 1806,thought him an “old sneaking cheat” whose “character ismore despicable than the worst among the natives.”2 Not-ing that Jusseaume’s Mandan wife and children “dress andlive like the natives,” Henry observed that Jusseaume him-self, while retaining “the outward appearance of a Chris-tian,” had principles “much worse” than those of anyMandan. Henry conceded Jusseaume’s linguistic ability—he spoke Mandan “tolerably well”—but otherwise dis-missed him as a man “possessed of every superstition natu-ral to those people, nor is he different in every mean, dirtytrick they have acquired from intercourse with the set ofscoundrels who visit these parts—some to trade and oth-ers to screen themselves from justice, as the laws of their

RENÉ JUSSEAUMEON THE UPPER MISSOURI

Branded by contemporaries as a rascal and cheat,

this “cultural primitive” served ably as

Lewis and Clark’s liaison to the Mandans


own country would not fail to punish them for their nu-merous offenses.”3

Jusseaume’s fellow interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau(Sacagawea’s husband) was viewed in much the sameterms. John Luttig, a clerk at Fort Manuel in 1812-13, re-garded both Jusseaume and Charbonneau as perfidious“rascals” who deserved hanging for stirring up Indiansagainst American traders.4

Whatever Jusseaume’s failings, at least some of theseassessments may reflect a certain prejudice. Jusseaume,Charbonneau, and other so-called “squaw men” bridgeda cultural divide. Although valued for their intimateknowledge of native languages and cultures, paradoxicallythey were also scorned for what was seen as their exces-sive fraternizing with Indians.5

Jusseaume also failed to impress William Clark, at leastat their first meeting, which took place on October 27,1804. Evidently, he tried to ingratiate himself with theAmerican officer by claiming that General George RogersClark, the captain’s older brother and a hero of the Revo-lution, had employed him to spy on British troops in theOld Northwest. Clark appears to have doubted this as-

sertion, although it may well have been true. In his jour-nal entry about their meeting he described Jusseaume as“Cunin artfull an insoncear” (cunning, artful, and insin-cere). Setting aside reservations about his character, he andLewis—who doubtless shared Clark’s opinion—decidedto hire him anyway, as “we think he maybe made use fullto us … as an interpeter.”6

Nor has Jusseaume fared well with some scholars andwriters. In his 1893 edition of Nicholas Biddle’s 1814 para-phrase of the explorers’ journals, Elliott Coues refrainedfrom attacking him in the way he did Charbonneau (whomhe branded a “fool” and a “coward”), but he pointedlyconcurred with Henry’s remarks.7 In Breeds and Half-Breeds, his 1969 study of the fur trade, Gordon Speck in-cluded a short chapter on Jusseaume. Speck’s citations aresparse, but not his demeaning commentary. Jusseaume,he writes, “could seldom deliver the quality of his ser-vices which he constantly boasted.” He was a man who“skulked on the fringes of great events, a sort of historicaljackal—too ignoble to praise, too conspicuous to ignore.”In short, “about as reprehensible a character as the inter-preter-guide clan ever turned up.”8

Karl Bodmer painted this winter scene of the upperMissouri near Knife River in the 1830s. Except for FortClark, the stockaded fur-trade post at left, the scenewould have looked familiar to René Jusseaume.Sheheke’s summer village stands on a high bluff onthe west bank.Opposite: Jusseaume’s signature, one of severalknown to exist, suggesting that he could probablyread and write.

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EARLY CAREER IN THE FUR TRADE

The first Jusseaumes arrived in Canada at the beginningof the 18th century from Saintonge, France.9 René wasborn on August 5, 1753, in Montreal. Sometime in hisearly-to-mid-twenties he accompanied a fur trader namedPierre Calvet to Sault Ste. Marie, a strategic trading postat the junction of Lakes Superior and Huron. Like manyFrench-Canadians, Calvet was known to have sympa-thized with the American cause. Jusseaume could well haveshared Calvet’s views, which would lend credence to hisclaim that he had spied on the British for George RogersClark.10

By the early 1790s, Jusseaume had moved farther west.Documents place him on the Assiniboine River, in present-day Manitoba, where two great British-Canadian enter-prises, the North West Company and the Hudson’s BayCompany, were vying for control of the western fur trade.Since the 1780s, the rival firms had been sending tradingparties from posts on the Assiniboine to the Mandan andHidatsa villages, located two hundred miles south on theupper Missouri, in present-day North Dakota. Becausethe villages were in Louisiana Territory, at the time partof Spain’s North American empire, these incursions setoff an the international conflict between the British andSpanish.11

Jusseaume played a role in that struggle as one of thefirst independent traders among the Mandans andHidatsas, who lived in an assemblage of earth-lodge vil-lages where the Knife River joins the Missouri. These trad-ers resided with the Indians and acted as intermediariesbetween them and the North West and Hudson’s Bay com-panies, bartering goods acquired from the Canadians forhorses, buffalo robes, and pelts.12

With goods supplied by the North West Company,Jusseaume made his first visit to the Knife River villagesin the spring of 1793. He returned to the Canadian poststhe following spring to reprovision. That fall, he led a partyof Nor’westers back to the upper Missouri to spend an-other winter among the earth-lodge people.13 The smallfort they built between the Mandan and Hidatsa villagesbecame the first trading post in what is now North Da-kota.14 Some of the goods Jusseaume brought with himfrom Canada were intended for a resident trader namedMenard—sometimes called Old Menard or Manoah (hisfirst name is unknown)—a French-Canadian who hadbeen living with the Mandans since the 1770s.15

One of Jusseaume’s standing orders at his post was tohoist the British flag on Sundays. The post stood on what

was nominally Spanish soil. It isn’t known if Jusseaumedecided to fly the Union Jack on his own or at the behestof his British-Canadian sponsors. What is known is thatafter he returned to Canada in April 1795, two of his mendeserted and wound up in St. Louis, where they informedHis Spanish Majesty’s authorities of this latest affront totheir sovereignty.16

To counter British moves into upper Louisiana, theSpanish governor in St. Louis had already chartered theMissouri Company, a fur-trade enterprise whose agentsincluded a former school teacher turned adventurer namedJean Baptiste Truteau.17 In June 1794 the company hadsent Truteau with a party up the Missouri to establish atrading post among the Mandans and Hidatsas. WhenTruteau’s expedition was blocked by the Teton Sioux (thesame tribe that, 10 years later, nearly stopped Lewis andClark), it retreated downriver to spend the winter in whatis now southern South Dakota. The following spring,Truteau resumed his upriver journey and made it as far asthe Arikara villages, in northern South Dakota. Jusseaume,meanwhile, had returned to his post on the upper Mis-souri. Truteau by now had learned about the activities ofJusseaume and Menard. In his capacity as an agent of aSpanish-chartered company, he dispatched a message ask-ing them to cease trading with the Indians.18

Truteau remained at the Arikara village, and Jusseaumeand Menard ignored his request. But the Missouri Com-pany wasn’t done with what it regarded as their illegalventures.

MACKAY AND EVANS

The authorities in St. Louis next turned to James Mackay,a Scotsman who had become a Spanish subject. An expe-rienced trader who had worked for both the North Westand Hudson’s Bay companies and had first visited theMandans and Hidatsas in 1787, Mackay was employed bythe Missouri Company as principal explorer and directorof its affairs in Indian country. 19 Mackay was aided byJohn Evans, a Welshman who had come to North Americain search of the legendary Welsh Indians, thought by someto be living on the upper Missouri. Mackay and Evans leda party up the river in August 1795. They spent the win-ter near present-day Homer, Nebraska, where they builta fort and named it for the Spanish King, Charles IV.20

The following year, Mackay explored the prairies west ofFort Charles while Evans proceeded on to Knife River.He reached the villages on September 26, 1796, distrib-uted gifts, delivered a speech extolling the benefits of trad-ing with the Spanish, took possession of Jusseaume’s


Post—which he renamed Fort Mackay—and raised theflag of Spain.21

Jusseaume had temporarily returned to Canada andwasn’t around to witness the seizure of his post. He hadleft a supply of furs there, and after learning of Evans’sactions he was eager to get them back. So too were hisNorth West Company underwriters, who had lost moneyfunding his enterprise and viewed the furs as collateral.Jusseaume and two of the company’s factors, CuthbertGrant and John Macdonell, all wrote letters to Evans re-questing that the furs be returned. Jusseaume was alsoconcerned about his Mandan wife and children, who wereliving at the post, and asked Evans to look after them. 22

The record doesn’t say if the furs were returned, andwe can assume they were not. We do know, however, thatJusseaume was back at the villages the following March.He brought with him merchandise supplied by the NorthWest Company for distribution among the Mandans andHidatsas in an effort to lure them from the Spanish. Ac-cording to Evans, Jusseaume also schemed to have himmurdered. In his journal he wrote that the Frenchman“advised the Indians to enter into my house under theMask of Friendship, then to kill me and my men and pil-lage my property.” Instead, some of them told Evans ofthe plan, and the plot was foiled. A few days later,Jusseaume himself entered Evans’s house, “and seizing themoment that my Back was turned to him, tried to dis-

charge a Pistol at my head loaded with Deer Shot.” Evans’sinterpreter saw what was happening and raised an alarm.Several Mandans dragged Jusseaume from the house and“would have killed him,” wrote Evans, had the Welsh-man not intervened. Jusseaume departed for Canada soonafterward, “disgusted on the ill success of the Executionof his Black Designs.”23

Evans (who determined there was no connection, afterall, between the Welsh and the Mandans or Hidatsas), leftFort Mackay for St. Louis in May 1797, ending foreverSpain’s brief presence on the upper Missouri. He andMackay reached St. Louis in July. Both had produced de-tailed maps of their travels which would later help Lewisand Clark in their own explorations. Evans died in 1799,but his six map segments of the Missouri from Fort Charlesto Knife River wound up in the captains’ hands—prob-ably a gift from Mackay, who advised Lewis during hisfrequent visits to St. Louis during the winter of 1803-04,when the Corps of Discovery was camped nearby at RiverDubois.24

Jusseaume returned to Knife River at the end of 1797,this time in the company of David Thompson, an em-ployee of the Northwest Company and one of the furtrade’s greatest explorers. He and another free tradernamed Hugh McCraken guided Thompson on a wintertrek from the Assiniboine. Thompson estimated that ingood weather they could have made the 218-mile journey

Bodmer’s painting depicts ameeting at Fort Clark in 1833between the Hidatsas andthe artist’s patron, PrinceMaximilian. The man in themiddle may be theinterpreter ToussaintCharbonneau, whose dressand general appearancewas probably similar toJusseaume’s.JO

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in 10 days, but delayed by blizzards, it took them 33. Aman of restless intellect, Thompson brought along giftsto woo the Mandans and Hidatsas, but he was there mainlyto learn all he could about their cultures. Jusseaume, whoaccording to Thompson “fluently spoke the MandaneLanguage,” introduced him to the principal Mandan chiefs,including Sheheke, who would later befriend Lewis andClark. Thompson asked endless questions, and his narra-tive of their 10-day visit is packed with details about tribalhistory, customs, ceremonies, and other ethnographic mat-ters, yet he complained that “the information I obtainedfell far short of what I had expected.” He concluded thateither Jusseaume and McCraken“did not understand my questions,or the Natives had no answers togive.”26

The record for Jusseaume isscanty for the years 1798-1803. Hisname appears in some minor com-mercial transactions at the Assini-boine posts. Although it can’t bedocumented, he presumably spentmost of this period with theMandans.27

ENTER LEWIS AND CLARK

Jusseaume met the Corps of Dis-covery upon its arrival at KnifeRiver on October 27, 1804. Thecaptains realized that his knowl-edge of the Mandan language andCharbonneau’s fluency in Hidatsawould be essential to the corps’day-to-day dealings with their In-dian hosts.28 Both interpreters and their families moved inwith the explorers. Jusseaume took up residence in campon November 4 and settled into Fort Mandan after itscompletion later that month. Although Lewis and Clarkmention Jusseaume only sporadically in the journals, wecan assume that he was by their side during the captains’frequent exchanges with the Mandans as they bartered forcorn, observed and recorded their religious ceremonies,and inquired about intertribal politics and the country tothe west.29 He seems to have gotten along with the visi-tors well enough, although Sergeant John Ordway cryp-tically records an incident of “Gealousy” betweenJusseaume and the corps’ chief hunter and sign-languageinterpreter, George Drouillard.30

On February 11, 1805, Jusseaume was present during

Sacagawea’s long and difficult labor. He told Lewis thaton similar occasions “he had freequently administered asmall portion of the rattle of the rattle-snake, which heassured me had never failed to produce the desired effect,that of hastening the birth of the child.” Lewis happenedto have a rattle (one assumes in his collection of natural-history specimens), and he gave it to Jusseaume. The in-terpreter snapped off two rings and broke them into pieces,added water, and gave the potion to Sacagawea. “Whetherthis medicine was truly the cause or not I shall not under-take to determine,” wrote Lewis, “but I was informed thatshe had not taken it more than ten minutes before she

brought forth.”31

Lewis pointedly added, “per-haps this remedy may be worthyof future experiments, but I con-fess that I want faith as to it’s effi-cacy.” A snake’s rattle is made ofkeratin, the same substance as fin-gernails, and passes through thebody undigested, so whatever me-dicinal substances it might containare not absorbed.32 But nativehealers believed that rattlesnakescould both cause and cure afflic-tions, and one should not discountthe concoction’s placebo effect onSacagawea.33

The Corps of Discovery said itsgoodbyes to the Mandans andHidatsas on April 7 and headed upthe Missouri in a flotilla of dugoutcanoes and pirogues, bound for theRocky Mountains and the Pacific

Ocean. The party included Charbonneau and Sacagawea.The captains, who were hopeful of meeting Sacagawea’speople, the Shoshones, and trading with them for thehorses needed to cross the mountains, realized that sheand her husband would be essential links in the transla-tion chain from Shoshone to English. There would be nomore need for Jusseaume’s services as an interpreter untilthe following summer, and he remained behind.

SHEHEKE’S ODYSSEY

The homeward-bound explorers were back at the villagesin August 1806. The captains hoped to persuade Mandanand Hidatsa leaders to accompany them to St. Louis andthen to Washington, D.C., to meet Jefferson. Clark in-vited several to join them on the downstream journey, but

The fivevillages

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1797, no longerexisted when

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they declined out of fear of a possible encounter with thehostile Teton (Lakota) Sioux, a tribe that had tried to blockthe expedition’s upriver passage two years before.34 Whena Mandan named Little Crow first agreed to go and thenabruptly changed his mind, an exasperated Clark turnedto Jusseaume for help; if you can recruit one of the otherMandan chiefs, he said, we’ll hire you as interpreter andtake you along.35 In short order, Jusseaume enlistedSheheke, who said he would go so long as his family ac-companied him. Jusseaume accepted with the same con-dition. Wrote Clark, “we wer obliged to agree.”36

Joined now by Sheheke, his wife and son, andJusseaume and his wife, son, anddaughter, the explorers continueddownriver to St. Louis. The pas-sage was without incident exceptfor some tense moments betweenthe party and an armed band ofTeton Sioux who tried unsuccess-fully to lure the boats ashore.Jusseaume and his Mandan wifeknew some Lakota, apparently,and were helpful as translatorsduring the exchange, which ap-pears to have degenerated into ashouting match.37

The Corps of Discovery reachedSt. Louis on September 23. Thismust have been Jusseaume’s firstvisit to the bustling river town theexplorers had departed 28 monthsbefore. He and his family spent sixweeks there before leaving in earlyNovember on the 1,600-mile over-land journey to Washington viaLouisville, Frankfort, Charlottesville, and Richmond.38 Theparty arrived in Washington on December 28 and two dayslater had an audience with Jefferson in the White House.Sheheke and company spent two weeks in the capital be-fore going on to Philadelphia and perhaps New York, andwere back in St. Louis in March 1807.39

Sheheke, Jusseaume, and their families had now beenaway for eight months and were surely eager to get home.A detachment of soldiers commanded by EnsignNathaniel Pryor (a former sergeant in the Corps of Dis-covery) was assigned to return Sheheke to his people.Attached to Pryor’s unit were 32 engagés led by the St.Louis fur trader Auguste Chouteau. More soldiers andengagés came along to accompany a delegation of Teton

Sioux returning to their homeland. Once the Sioux hadbeen safely deposited, their escort returned to St. Louiswhile the remaining party proceeded upriver in twoboats, but it was turned back by the Arikaras in a bloodyaltercation on September 9 that left four men dead andsix wounded, including Jusseaume, who was shot in thethigh and shoulder.40

Pryor’s party retreated to St. Louis, where Jusseaumeslowly recovered. In December, he wrote directly to Tho-mas Jefferson requesting a pension, claiming the woundshad left him unable to work. His letter went on to urgethe president to take steps to punish the Arikaras. “Some

savages,” he declared, “will notsupport the flag of the UnitedStates unless it is supported by suf-ficient force” (translation from theoriginal French).41 He also askedthe government to return him andhis family to the Mandans. Jeffer-son did not respond to the letter,nor was a pension awarded.42 OnMay 17, 1809, however, anotherexpedition left St. Louis withSheheke, Jusseaume, and theirfamilies. It reached the Knife Rivervillages on September 24. Threeyears and one month after leaving,they were home at last.

JUSSEAUME’S LAST YEARS

While waiting in St. Louis for theexpedition’s departure, Jusseaumeindentured his 13-year-old son,Toussaint, to Lewis to provide forthe boy’s education.43 Toussaint’s

name appears in the record again eight years later, on Au-gust 24, 1817, when he married at Cahokia, a settlementopposite St. Louis on the Illinois side of the Mississippi.44

Jusseaume’s daughter, Josette Therese, married three yearslater in nearby Florissant, Missouri, indicating that shereturned to St. Louis at some point following her family’srepatriation.45

As for Jusseaume père, he shows up as a minor charac-ter in the journal kept by the English botanist JohnBradbury when he ventured up the Missouri in 1811.Jusseaume served as interpreter when Bradbury inter-viewed Sheheke, and with the Canadian’s help he was al-lowed to witness several Mandan ceremonies.46 By thistime, Jusseaume was working for the St. Louis fur trader

This portrait of Sheheke was painted by Charles B.J.F.de Saint-Mémin in early 1807, during the Mandanchief and René Jusseaume’s visit to Philadelphia.

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Manuel Lisa and spending most of his time at Fort Manuel,near today’s border between North and South Dakota.He and Charbonneau are mentioned in passing severaltimes in the journal of John Luttig, the fort’s factor. Luttig’sjournal ends in March 1813, and its entries for Jusseaumeare the last records we have of him. Gary Moulton, theeditor of the Lewis and Clark journals, mentions in a foot-note that Jusseaume was still alive at the time of PrinceMaximilian of Wied-Neuwied’s visit to the Mandans in1833-34.47 An abridged version of Maximilian’s journals(the only version available in English) contains a singlereference to Jusseaume, but it is in the past tense, leadingone to speculate that he was dead by this time.48

* * *René Jusseaume reflects the vices and virtues of a fron-

tier type. The historian Henry Nash Smith refers to suchmen as “cultural primitives.” In his classic work, VirginLand: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Smith de-scribes cultural primitives as men “who had fled from therestraints of civilization” to marry Indians and adopt theircostume, speech, and outlook on life.49 Jusseaume fits thedescription well enough, but that is an observation, not ajudgment. The record shows that he was practical, durable,adaptable, and almost certainly a better interpreter than hasbeen assumed. He was neither hero nor villain, but a prod-uct of the early fur trade of the upper Missouri.

Foundation member Richard Stenberg is an assistant profes-sor of history at Williston State College, in Williston, NorthDakota, a seasonal ranger at Fort Union Trading Post Na-tional Historic Site, and secretary of the Missouri-YellowstoneConfluence Chapter of the LCTHF.

NOTES

1 Abraham P. Nasatir, ed., Before Lewis and Clark: DocumentsIllustrating the History of the Missouri, 1785-1818, Vol. 1 (Lin-coln: University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books, 1990), p. 497.2 Elliot Coues, ed., New Light on the Early History of the GreaterNorthwest: The Manuscript Journals of Alexander Henry andDavid Thompson (Minneapolis: Ross & Haines, Inc. Reprint,1965), Vol. 1, p. 401.3 Ibid., p. 333.4 John C. Luttig, Journal of a Fur-Trading Expedition on theUpper Missouri 1812-1813 (New York: Argosy-Antiquarian,Ltd., 1964), p. 84. Luttig’s journal states, “Charbonneau andJessaume keep us in constant uproar with their Histories andwish to make fear among the engages, the two rascals ought tobe hung for their perfidy, they do more harm than good to theAmerican Government, stir up the Indians and pretend to befriends of the white People at the same time but we find them tobe our Ennemies.”5 For more on cultural bias toward men like Jusseaume, seeRita Cleary, “Charbonneau Reconsidered,” We Proceeded On,

February 2000, pp. 18-23.6 Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Ex-pedition, 13 volumes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1983-2001), Vol. 3, p. 203. Clark’s exact words are “Cunin artfullan insoncear—he tels me he was once emplyd. by my brother inthe Illinois & of his description I conceve as a Spye upon theBritish of Michillinacknac & St Joseph.” Michilimackinac (Clarkgot the spelling almost right) was a strategic post on the Straitsof Mackinac, between Lakes Michigan and Huron. St. Josephwas a post on the St. Joseph River in present-day southern Michi-gan. (Moulton, Vol. 3, p. 206n).7 Elliott Coues, ed., The History of the Lewis and Clark Expe-dition by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, 3 volumes (NewYork: Dover Publications, Inc., 1965; reprint of 1893 edition),Vol. 3, pp. 1178n and 1185n.8 Gordon Speck, Breeds and Half-Breeds (New York: ClarksonN. Potter, 1969), pp. 3, 76, and 77.9 For this and other facts about Jusseaume’s early life I am in-debted to Tim McLaughlin, a fur-trade historian and reenactorfrom Minot, North Dakota. He has an extended interest inJusseaume and has tracked down many of his descendants inCanada and the United States.10 McLaughlin research. See also Douglas Dunham, “The FrenchElement in the American Fur Trade, 1760-1818” (Ph.D. disser-tation, University of Michigan, 1950), p. 134. Documentaryproof that Jesseaume was in the Old Northwest after the Revo-lution is found in a promissory note he left to a certain J. Fevrier,dated Prairie du Chien, October 10, 1790, now preserved in theP. Chouteau Maffit Collection, Missouri Historical Society, St.Louis.11 Spain had acquired Louisiana from France in 1763. In 1801 itwould revert to France, which two years later would sell it tothe United States.12 Marcel Giraud, The Métis in the Canadian West (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 1986 English edition), Vol. 1, p.268. (Translated by George Woodcock.)13 Abraham P. Nasatir, “Anglo-Spanish Rivalry on the UpperMissouri,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. XVI (De-cember 1929), p. 380. On this first visit to the Mandans andHidatsas he was outfitted by Cuthbert Grant, a factor with theNorth West Company. On the second visit he was supplied byJohn Macdonnell, another Nor’wester. The party arrived at thevillages on October 17, 1794, after an 11-day journey. See W.Raymond Wood and Thomas D. Thiessen, eds., Early Fur Tradeon the Northern Plains: Canadian Traders among the Mandanand Hidatsa Indians, 1738-1818 (Norman: University of Okla-homa Press, 1985), p. 46. Daniel J. Provo, Fort Esperance in 1793-1795: A North West Company Provisioning Post (Lincoln, Neb.:J&L Reprint Co., Reprints in Anthropology, 1984), pp. 104-105 and 111.14 Elwyn B. Robinson, History of North Dakota (Lincoln: Uni-versity of Nebraska Press, 1966), p. 35.15 Moulton, Vol. 3, p. 198n.16 Abraham P. Nasatir, ed., Before Lewis and Clark: DocumentsIllustrating the History of the Missouri, 1785-1818, Vol. 1, (Lin-coln: University of Nebraska Press, Bison Books reprint, 1990),pp. 330-335. See also W. Raymond Wood, Prologue to Lewis &Clark: The Mackay and Evans Expedition (Norman: Univer-sity of Oklahoma Press, 2003), p. 45.17 The Missouri Company was formally chartered as the Com-


pany of Explorers of the Upper Missouri. Truteau’s name issometimes spelled Trudeau.18 H.T. Beauregard, ed., “Journal of Jean Baptiste TrudeauAmong the Arikara Indians in 1795,” Missouri Historical Col-lections, Vol. 4, 1912, pp. 36-37. See also Trudeau’s Journal,”South Dakota Historical Collections, Vol. VII, pp. 403-474.19 Wood, Prologue to Lewis & Clark, pp. 35-36.20 Moulton, Vol. 1, p. 6.21 Drawn in part from Nasatir’s “Anglo-Spanish Rivalry.” Seealso W. Raymond Wood, “John Thomas Evans: An OverlookedPrecursor to Lewis and Clark,” North Dakota History: Journalof the Northern Plains, Vol. 68, No. 2 (2001), pp. 27-37.22 Nasatir, Before Lewis & Clark, Vol. II, pp. 460-461 (Grant toEvans, October 8, 1796), 474-475 (Jusseaume to Evans, Novem-ber 5), and 478-479 (Macdonell to Evans, November 23).Macdonell’s name is also spelled MacDonell and McDonnell.23 Ibid., pp. 496-497.24 Moulton, Vol. 1, pp. 6-7.25 Wood and Thiessen, pp. 99, 108, and 110.26 J.B. Tyrrell, ed., David Thompson’s Travels in Western NorthAmerica, 1784-1812 (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1916;1968 reprint by Greenwood Press), pp. 209-287. Thompson (p.226) says that Jusseaume and McCraken were “illiterate,” but aletter Jusseaume wrote to Thomas Jefferson belies this. Severalexamples of Jusseaume’s signature also exist (Luttig, p. 79; Speck,p. 75). See also W. Raymond Wood, “David Thompson at theMandan-Hidatsa Villages, 1797-98: The Original Journals,”Ethnohistory, Vol. 24 (Fall 1977), pp. 329-342.27 Wood and Thiessen, p. 65; see also Table 1 in the back of thebook, “Documented Round Trips by Canadian Traders betweenthe Mandan-Hidatsa Villages and the Assiniboine River, 1738-1818.”28 We can also assume that Jusseaume must have known someHidatsa and Charbonneau some Mandan. At least one writerstates that Jusseaume also knew some English, but his sourcefor this isn’t clear. See David Lavender, The Way to the WesternSea: Lewis and Clark Across the Continent (New York: AnchorBooks/Bantam Doubleday, reprint of Harper & Row edition,1988), p. 158.29 James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark among the Indians (Lin-coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), p. 117. In June 1806,Charles McKenzie, a clerk with the North West Company, metJusseaume at the Mandan villages and described his participa-tion in Mandan ceremonies. See Wood and Thiessen, pp. 276,278, and 280.30 Moulton, Vol. 9, p. 99.31 Ibid., Vol. 3, p. 204.32 David J. Peck, Or Perish in the Attempt: Wilderness Medicinein the Lewis & Clark Expedition (Helena, Mont: FarcountryPress, 2002), p. 134.33 Laurence M. Klauber, Rattlesnakes: Their Habits, Life Histo-ries, and Influence on Mankind (Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1982), pp. 295-296.34 William Foley and Charles Rice, “The Return of the MandanChief,” Montana, The Magazine of Western History, Vol. 24,No. 3 (July 1979), p. 2; Moulton, Vol. 8, pp. 298-301.35 Foley and Rice, p. 4.36 Moulton, Vol. 8, pp. 304-305. Entry for August 16, 1806.37 Ibid., pp. 329-331 (Clark), and Vol. 9, p. 356 (Ordway). En-

tries for August 30, 1806. Clark (p. 330) says that one man in hisparty “could Speak a fiew words of Seioux,” and Ronda (p. 250)infers that he is talking about Jusseaume. Ordway is more spe-cific about the interpreter’s wife, “Mrs. Jessom,” who “couldunderstand Some words” shouted by the Tetons. Some of theexchange was conducted in sign language.38 For an overview of their time in the eastern United States, seethe chapter on Big White in Katherine C. Turner, Red Men Call-ing on the Great White Father (Norman: University of Okla-homa Press, 1951), pp. 28-44. Also Tracy Potter, Sheheke: Man-dan Indian Diplomat (Helena, Mont.: Farcountry Press/FortMandan Press, 2003), pp. 120-136. Besides Sheheke, Jusseaume,and their families, the party included a delegation of Osage In-dians escorted by the St. Louis fur trader Pierre Chouteau.39 Potter, pp. 136-137.40 Jackson, Vol. 2, p. 436. A detailed account of Pryor’s fightwith the Arikaras and reasons for the tribe’s hostility is beyondthe scope of this article. For additional information, see, for ex-ample, Foley and Rice; and Potter, pp. 137-146. Pryor’s officialreport of the incident is found in Jackson, Vol. 1, pp. 432-437.For other contemporary accounts, see Donald Jackson, “Jour-ney to the Mandans, 1809: The Lost Narrative of Dr. Thomas,”Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, Vol. 10, No. 3 (April1964), pp. 179-192; and Thomas James, Three Years among theIndians and Mexicans (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1962), reprintof 1846 edition.41 “Letter to President Jefferson from Rene Jesseaume,” Mis-souri Historical Society Collections, Vol. 4 (1913), pp. 234-236.The original of the letter, dated December 3, 1807, is in the Jef-ferson Collection, Missouri Historical Society.42 Responses to letters of inquiry to the Jefferson Library atMonticello and to the National Archives for Federal Pension orBounty Land warrant applications.43 Moulton, Vol. 3, p. 205, note 1; Instrument of Indenture be-tween Jusseaume and Meriwether Lewis entered into May 13,1809; Lewis Collection, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.44 Luttig, p. 79.45 Ibid. She married on January 31, 1820. The contract forSheheke’s return to Knife River, signed on February 24, 1809,calls for suitable accommodations for Jusseaume, his wife, andtheir “Child.” The singular suggests that Josette accompaniedthem on the homeward journey. Jackson, Vol. 2, p. 447.46 John Bradbury, Travels in the Interior of America in the Years,1809, 1810, and 1811 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,Bison Books 1986; reprint of the 1904 Arthur H. Clark edition,edited by Reuben G. Thwaites), pp. 156-160.47 Moulton, Vol. 3, p. 205n.48 A project is currently underway to translate Maximilian’s jour-nal in its entirety. If he was still alive, Jusseaume would havecertainly merited mention in the detailed journal kept byFrançois Chardon at Fort Clark, a post (named after WilliamClark) located near the junction of the Missouri and Knife riv-ers in the 1831. See Annie H. Abel, ed., Chardon’s Journal atFort Clark, 1834-1839 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,Bison Books reprint, 1997).49 Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Sym-bol and Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 1957, reprint editionwith a new preface, 1970), p. 81.


On August 3, 1804, two and a half months afterdeparting Camp River Dubois for the Pacific,the Lewis and Clark Expedition met with a

delegation of Oto and Missouri Indians on the west bankof the Missouri River upstream of present-day Omaha,Nebraska. The gathering was the explorers’ first tribalcouncil, and it set the pattern for the many that followed.Conducted under an awning made from the keelboat’smainsail, it included a military review, the presenting ofgifts, and the reading of a speech by Meriwether Lewisthat ran to more than two thousand words. Lewis spokeof the Louisiana Purchase and the resulting change in po-litical authority over the tribes living along the Missouri.In the paternalistic language common to such diplomaticceremonies, he addressed the delegates as “children.” Heexplained that they now had a new “father,” the “greatChief of the Seventeen great nations” of the United States,and that their old fathers, the French and Spanish, hadsailed away, never to return. As a representative of thenew government, he declared six of the tribal leaders chiefsand bestowed upon them flags and peace medals. By ac-cepting these gifts from their new father, Lewis declared,“you also accept therewith his hand of friendship”—and,by implication, American sovereignty over the Territoryof Louisiana.1

The historian Bernard DeVoto argued that the dispatchof the Lewis and Clark Expedition was “an act of impe-rial policy” and that the creation of an American empirestretching to the shores of the Pacific would profoundlyaffect the tribes of the Louisiana Territory and the PacificNorthwest.2 But however great the expedition’s impacton the tribes, the tribes’ impact on the expedition was noless important. Establishing commercial relations with thetribes and acquiring knowledge about them were principalobjectives of the expedition as outlined by Thomas Jeffer-son, and once underway, the expedition could not have suc-ceeded without their help. In formal occasions like theirmeeting with the Otos and Missouris, Meriwether Lewis andWilliam Clark laid out the case for American authority overthe tribes. Their argument was based implicitly on the Doc-trine of Discovery, a European legal principle that wouldlater help legitimize the subordination of Indian rights.

TRIBES KEY TO EXPEDITION’S SUCCESS

From the time Lewis and Jefferson began planning theexpedition, they realized its success would depend on theassistance of Native Americans, but the full extent of thatdependency did not become apparent until the winter of1804-05, which the explorers would not have survivedwithout the abundant supplies of corn provided by the

BY ROBERT J. MILLER

In spreading the word of American sovereignty to the tribes

of the Louisiana Territory, Lewis and Clark relied on

a principle of international law long used by colonial powers

to subjugate indigenous peoples

THE DOCTRINE OF

DISCOVERY


Mandans.3 The following winter, at Fort Clatsop, theywere dependent on food from the Clatsops and Chinooks.4

Crucial assistance of one sort or another came from othertribes as well. During the explorers’ winter at Fort Man-dan, the Hidatsas furnished valuable information regard-ing the route to the headwaters of the Missouri, and Saca-gawea played a critical role as a translator when the expe-dition made contact with the tribe of her birth, the Shos-hones, on the Continental Divide. The Shoshones and theSalish Indians sold them the horses they needed for cross-ing the Bitterroot Mountains, which a Shoshone guide(Old Toby) led them across. Members of the Nez Percetribe fed them when they stumbled, on the verge of star-vation, out of the Bitterroots.5 Two Nez Perce chiefs thenled them down the Clearwater, Snake, and Columbia riv-ers, introducing them to tribes along the way, while an-other chief cared for their horses until they could retrievethem the following spring. Tribes along the Columbiasupplied them with salmon and roots, and it was their oldfriends the Nez Perces who got them back across the Bit-terroots on the return trip.6

The objectives of the expedition, and the part playedby tribes in meeting those objectives, can be summarizedunder the headings of geography, commerce, science, andsovereignty.

GEOGRAPHY AND COMMERCE

In sending Lewis on his mission, Jefferson hoped he wouldfind a practical water route to the Pacific—the famed butelusive Northwest Passage. This, arguably, was Jeffer-son’s first objective for the expedition. He assumed (in-correctly) that the Missouri and Columbia rivers werenavigable to their sources and that their headwaters wereclose enough to be easily portaged. Jefferson alluded tothis objective in his message to Congress requesting fundsfor the expedition, and he was explicit about it in hisinstructions to Lewis.7

This quest for a Northwest Passage depended on geo-graphic information provided by the tribes (particularlythe Hidatsas, who informed the captains about the Fallsof the Missouri and other features of the upper river, andthe Shoshones, who gave a detailed account of the coun-try west of the Continental Divide).8 It also underlayJefferson’s second objective—establishing an American furtrade with China, which depended on good relations withthe tribes of the upper Missouri. Jefferson envisioned astring of wilderness posts built by the U.S. government.Indians would come to these posts to trade their furs,which would then be transported by river to an Ameri-can port at the mouth of the Columbia for shipment to

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Lewis and Clark’smission includedinforming tribes in theLouisiana Territory theywere now subject to anew political authority,the United States. Thispainting by Charles M.Russell shows WilliamClark and other membersof the Corps of Discoverymeeting the Mandans.(Details such as teepees— the Mandans lived inearth lodges — andYork’s colonial-eraclothes are inaccurate.)


the Far East. Securing tribal friendship and cooperationwas key to the venture’s success.9

Trade is a two-way street, of course, and Jefferson real-ized that Indians living west of the Mississippi representeda huge potential market for American goods. As he madeclear to Congress and Lewis, the United States was posi-tioned to greatly expand its commercial dealings withtribes.10 Government posts built for the sole purpose ofIndian trade had been present on the frontier since Con-gress, at the behest of George Washington, first autho-rized them in 1795, and Jefferson’s desire to create a simi-lar network in the new territory was a natural extensionof this policy.11 The trade items carried by Lewis and Clarkwere intended in part to show Indians the wide range ofgoods available to them once they joined the U.S. market.

SCIENCE AND SOVEREIGNTY

The advancement of science was Jefferson’s third objec-tive, and here again Indians were central. Sacagawea andother Native Americans assisted Lewis in his cataloguingof new plant and animal species, and Indians were them-selves primary subjects of the captains’ scientific curios-ity. Jefferson the Enlightenment man was fascinated bytribal cultures, and his instructions to Lewis included along list of ethnographic questions about language, cus-toms, religion, morals, and other topics.12 The captainswere diligent in gathering and recording this information.Clark alone wrote many thousands of words about theIndians of the upper Missouri and Mississippi watershedsduring the winter at Fort Mandan.13

Jefferson’s fourth objective was the extension of U.S.sovereignty over the indigenous tribes in the newly ac-quired Louisiana Territory. This vast region, encompass-ing all of the Missouri watershed, had long been claimedby France, except for a brief period (1763-1800) when itwas part of the Spanish empire. Lewis and Clark’s role asemissaries of the new governing authority was a belatedassignment. The treaty transferring Louisiana from Franceto the United States was signed in Paris on May 2, 1803,and news of it did not reach Washington, D.C., until July3, nearly two weeks after Jefferson’s instructions to Lewis,drafted June 20.14 Jefferson covered this new objective ina letter to Lewis dated January 22, 1804, when Lewis andClark were in winter quarters at Camp River Dubois, inIllinois Territory, preparing for their ascent of the Mis-souri the following spring. As the new “sovereigns of thecountry,” wrote Jefferson, the United States was now in aposition to trade directly with the tribes. He told Lewisto inform tribal leaders that the French and Spanish “have

surrendered to us all their subjects . . . settled there, andall their posts & lands: that henceforward we become theirfathers and friends, and that we shall endeavor that theyshall have no cause to lament the change.”15

THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY

The party led by Lewis and Clark is known as the Corpsof Discovery—a fitting name, given that the sovereigntyit represented was based on a legal precedent, already morethan three centuries old, known as the Doctrine of Dis-covery.16 European countries had long used this doctrineto rationalize the conquest and domination of indigenous,non-Christian, nonwhite populations and their lands. Itgranted any colonial power, having “discovered” a coun-try already well known to people who had occupied it forthousands of years, the right to claim it. A related idea,terra nullius (“empty land”), argued that any land not usedin a productive way as defined by Europeans was free forthe taking. The Doctrine of Discovery was first applied inthe New World in 1493, when Pope Alexander VI dividedthe world into spheres of “discovery” for Spain and Por-tugal as these nations were beginning their conquest ofthe Americas. English legal theory incorporated and ex-panded on the doctrine.17

The doctrine granted to the “discovering” country ba-sic property rights while denying them to native inhabit-ants. First and foremost, it prohibited indigenous peoplesfrom selling land to anyone other than the occupyingpower, which effectively retained an exclusive option onnative real estate. Without either their knowledge or con-sent, natives lost the right of “free alienation”—the op-tion to sell their land to whomever they wished, at what-ever price they could obtain. The doctrine protected na-tives to the extent that it recognized their right to con-tinue occupying and using their land, which could not betaken from them without their consent.

In the international arena, the Doctrine of Discovery pro-scribed natives’ rights to deal with nations other than thediscovering power.18 Colonial nations respected each other’sproperty rights as defined by the doctrine, even if they oc-casionally disagreed over its exact definition and legal un-derpinnings. Because nations generally abided by the Doc-trine of Discovery’s precepts, particularly the one grantingexclusive property rights to the discoverer, legal scholarscite it as one of the earliest examples of international law.

In 1823, some twenty years after the Lewis and ClarkExpedition, the U.S. Supreme Court based a decision onthe Doctrine of Discovery, in effect adopting it as federallaw. The case, Johnson v. McIntosh, involved a dispute


between Americans whose predecessors had bought landdirectly from several Indian tribes and other Americanswho purchased the same land from the United States afterthe government had acquired the land from the same tribes.In ruling for the defendant, the Court recognized the tribes’occupancy and use rights but denied them their right tosell land to whomever they wished; instead, they were le-gally restricted to selling land only to the United States.19

The justices seemed somewhat conflicted about Indians’property rights. They asked why “agriculturists, merchantsand manufacturers, have a right, on abstract principles, toexpel hunters from the territory they possess, or to con-tract their limits,” while Indians do not. They then side-stepped this question by declaring, “Conquest gives a titlewhich the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny.”20

Echoes of the Doctrine of Discovery appeared in Ameri-can law long before Johnson v. McIntosh. Colonies andstates had enacted laws limiting Indian property rights,and the doctrine’s principles are inherent in many colonialand early state and federal court cases.21 The Doctrine ofDiscovery also informed the views of Thomas Jefferson.Twice during his presidency, in 1804 and 1808, he wrotethat, notwithstanding American sovereignty in LouisianaTerritory, the United States recognized the occupancyrights of tribes within its borders and that land must bebought, not seized, from its “native proprietors.”22 Jef-ferson, in other words, realized that the “purchase” ofLouisiana conferred sovereignty over the territory but notfee-simple ownership of the land within its borders.23 The

United States paid France $15 million for Louisiana, butover the next century it would pay tribes some twentytimes more than this to acquire land through treaties.24

LEWIS AND CLARK AS AGENTS OF EMPIRE

Many commentators have argued convincingly thatJefferson’s real agenda for the Lewis and Clark Expedi-tion was the creation of a transcontinental empire thatwould include both Louisiana Territory and the PacificNorthwest, a region claimed at the time by Spain, Russia,Great Britain, and the United States.25 The “imperial” ac-tions taken by Lewis and Clark along their route under-score this point. 26 For example:

They emphasized to tribal delegations that PresidentJefferson was their new “great father” and that the Indi-ans were his “children.”27

They distributed what may be thought of as “sover-eignty tokens”—American flags, military uniforms, andJefferson peace medals. These items, presented to chiefs,conveyed the message of American authority over thetribes and the tribes’ allegiance to the United States.28 Thecaptains occasionally demanded that chiefs surrender simi-lar tokens they had received from other countries to showthat their sole allegiance was now to the U.S.29

They encouraged chiefs to visit Washington, D.C., tomeet Jefferson, and dozens of tribal delegations ultimatelydid so.30 These visits were designed to impress (and in-timidate) Indians with the immense size and power of theUnited States.

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Meriwether Lewis’smeeting with theShoshone chiefCameahwait, shownhere in a painting byC.M. Russell, took placebeyond the borders ofLouisiana Territory. Theauthor argues thatefforts to win the trustof tribes west of theContinental Divide werepart of the expedition’s“imperial reach.”


They usurped Indians’ authority to determine inter-tribal politics by ordering tribes to cease warring with theirenemies—not for the sake of tribal peace but to furtherAmerican trade and hegemony.

They aggressively pursued American fur-trade inter-ests. This was part of an ongoing effort, which includedconsulting with Indians on the best locations for U.S. trad-ing posts, to bring tribes into the American economicsphere. Whether a tribe resided within Louisiana Terri-tory or in the Pacific Northwest didn’t matter. The cap-tains’ overtures to the Shoshone and Nez Perce tribes,whose homelands were on the Pacific slopes of the Con-tinental Divide, offer further proof of the expedition’simperial reach.31

They advanced America’s claim to the Pacific North-west by posting, at Fort Clatsop, a roster of the exped-ition’s personnel with an accompanying statement thatthey had spent the winterthere after crossing overlandfrom the United States. Cop-ies of this document were dis-tributed to Clatsop and Chi-nook chiefs, with instructionsthat they should deliver themto any ship captains arrivingin the area.32 Clark also fa-mously documented theCorps of Discovery’s pres-ence on the Pacific coast bycarving, on a pine tree, hisname and the inscription “ByLand from the U. States in1804 & 1805.”33 This is justone of several instances of theexplorers’ carving their namesor initials in tree bark during their winter on the Pacific.Lewis, for his part, marked trees with a branding ironwhose inscription—“US Capt.M.Lewis”—left no doubtwhose interests he represented.34 All these actions wereritual assertions of the Doctrine of Discovery.35

***In summary, Lewis and Clark took advantage of every

opportunity to proclaim American hegemony. They rep-resented an expanding American empire that consistentlysubjugated Indian rights. Once having established a claimto sovereignty, Jefferson sought to pacify the Indians as afirst step toward assimilating them into the broader cul-ture, but he was also prepared to remove them from theadvancing path of American civilization and even to ex-

terminate them, if necessary.36 U.S. hegemony—legiti-mized by the centuries-old Doctrine of Discovery—ledultimately to policies of forced relocation and assimila-tion, the reservation system, and, for many tribes, thegovernment’s decision to terminate official recognition(and the rights and obligations that go with it).

Robert J. Miller is an associate professor at Lewis and ClarkLaw School, in Portland, Oregon.

NOTES

1 Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Ex-pedition, 13 volumes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1983-2001), Vol. 2, pp. 438-441; Vol. 9, p. 33 (John Ordway’sjournal); Vol. 10, p. 25 (Patrick Gass’s journal). The full text ofLewis’s speech appears in Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of theLewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783-1854, 2 volumes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968),Vol. 1, pp. 203-208. For discussion of the meeting’s larger po-

litical context, see James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark among theIndians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 17-21; Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United StatesGovernment and the American Indians (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1995), p. 74; and Francis Paul Prucha, IndianPeace Medals in American History (Lincoln, University of Ne-braska Press, 1971), pp. xiii-xv, 1-8, 11, 20, and 25-32.2 Bernard DeVoto, The Course of Empire (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1952), p. 411.3 Roy E. Appleman, Lewis & Clark: Historic Places Associatedwith Their Transcontinental Exploration, 1804-06 (Washington,D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service,1975), p. 79.4 Thomas P. Slaughter, Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections onMen and Wilderness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), p. 172.5 Stephen Dow Beckham, Lewis and Clark: From the Rockies tothe Pacific (Portland, Ore.: Graphic Arts Center Publishing,

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Clark, Lewis, and the corps’ enlisted men carved their names or initials on trees during their winter on thePacific. Such graffiti, says the author, represented “ritual assertions of the Doctrine of Discovery.”


2002), pp. 14-19. According to tribal history, initially the NezPerces thought about killing the explorers until an old womanwhom whites had once befriended talked them out of it. SeeMoulton, Vol. 5, p. 225n.6 Both captains recorded that without the Nez Perce guides theywould not have made it across the mountains, despite havingtraveled the route once before. Moulton, Vol. 8, pp. 56-57 (June27, 1806).7 Jackson, Vol. 1, pp. 10-14, 61-66, and 165-166 (Jefferson’s mes-sage to Congress of January 18, 1803, and his letters to Lewis ofJune 20, 1803, and January 22, 1804).8 Ibid., pp. 233-234 (Lewis’s letter to Jefferson, April 7, 1805)and Moulton, Vol. 5, pp. 81 and 88-91.9 Ronda, p. 7; Jackson, Vol. 1, pp. 62-64 (Jefferson to Lewis,June 20, 1803) and 166 (Jefferson to Lewis, January 22, 1804).10 Jackson, Vol. 1, pp. 10-14 (Jefferson to Congress) and 61-66(Jefferson to Lewis, June 20, 1803).11 Prucha, The Great Father, pp. 116 and 120. As Jefferson wrotein 1803, one motive for establishing these posts was to put Indi-ans in debt to the government—debts they would then be forcedto pay off with land. See also Francis Paul Prucha, AmericanIndian Policy in the Formative Years: Indian Trade and Inter-course Acts, 1790-1834 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1962), p. 57; and Robert J. Miller, “Economic Development inIndian Country: Will Capitalism or Socialism Succeed?,” Or-egon Law Review 2002, Vol. 80, pp. 807-809.12 Jackson, Vol. 1, pp. 62-63. See also pp. 50-51, Benjamin Rush’sletter of May 17, 1803, instructing Lewis on questions to pur-sue with tribes.13 Moulton, Vol. 3, pp. 388-450 (“Fort Mandan Miscellany”).14 Jefferson was careful to advise relevant foreign officials aboutthe expedition during its planning phase, and the French andBritish governments, through whose territory the expeditionwould pass, issued passports to Lewis. See Jackson, Vol. 1, pp.4-8, 14-15, and 19-20. For dates of the treaty signing and newsof its arrival, see Peter J. Kastor, The Great Acquisition: An In-troduction to the Louisiana Purchase (Great Falls, Mont.: Lewisand Clark Interpretive Association, 2003), p. 63; and Jon Kukla,A Wilderness So Immense: The Louisiana Purchase and the Des-tiny of America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), p. 287.15 Jackson, Vol. 1, pp. 165-166.16 Lewis actually referred to the party as “the corps of volunteersfor North Western Discovery,” a term he used in his journal en-try for August 26, 1804. The term Corps of Discovery first ap-peared in 1807 in a Pittsburgh newspaper. See Stephenie AmbroseTubbs and Clay Straus Jenkinson, The Lewis and Clark Com-panion (New York: Henry Holt/Owl Books, 2003), pp. 79-80.17 Robert A. Williams, Jr., The American Indian in Western Le-gal Thought: The Discourse of Conquest (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1990), pp. 78-81 and 121-147.18 Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, eds., The Writ-ings of Thomas Jefferson (Washington, D.C.: Thomas JeffersonAssociation, 1903), Vol. 18, p. 328. Jefferson, writing to the BritishMinister, George Hammond, in 1791, claims a “right to preemp-tion” of Indian lands, “that is to say, the sole and exclusive right ofpurchasing from them whenever they should be willing to sell,”and the right to regulate commerce between Indians and whites.19 21 U.S. 543 (1823), pp. 573-574.

20 Ibid., p. 588.21 For laws limiting Indian property rights, see Alden T. Vaughanand Deborah A. Rosen, eds., Early American Indian Documents:Treaties and Laws, 1607-1789 (Bethesda: University Publica-tions of America, 1998), Vol. XV, pp. 41-42, 65-66, 87-88, 247-249, and 393-396. These references are, respectively, to Mary-land, “Law to Regulate Land Purchases” (1639); Virginia, “Lawto Establish Indian Reservations” (1649) and “Law to Chris-tianize Indians and Regulate Land Sales” (1656); North Caro-lina, “Law to Improve Relations Between Indians and Colo-nists” (1716); South Carolina, “Law to Prevent Purchase of In-dian Lands” (1739); and Georgia, “Law to Regulate Purchase ofLand From Indians” (1768). For cases limiting property rights,see, for example, New Jersey v. Wilson, 11 U.S. 164 (1812);Fletcher v. Peck, 10 U.S. 87 (1810); Thompson v. Johnston, 6Binn. 68, 1813 WL 1243 (Penn. 1813); Jackson, ex dem. Gilbertv. Wood, 7. Johns. 290 (N.Y. 1810); Strother v. Cathey, 5 N.C.162, 1 Mur. 162, 3 Am.Dec. 683, 1807 WL 35 (N.C. 1807).22 James D. Richardson, ed., Compilation of the Messages andPapers of the Presidents (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of NationalLiterature, 1897), Vol. 1, p. 422 (January 15, 1808, message tothe Senate); Jackson, Vol. 1, p. 165 (Jefferson’s Letter to Lewis,January 22, 1804).23 Lipscomb and Bergh, Vol. 8, pp. 227, 394, and 417.24 Felix S. Cohen, “Original Indian Title,” Minnesota Law Re-view, Vol. 28 (1947-48), pp. 34-36.25 See, for example, Slaughter, pp. 172, 184; James P. Ronda,Astoria & Empire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990),pp. 43, 327; and DeVoto, pp. 403, 512, and 527-28.26 Slaughter, pp. 161, 172, and 188.27 Ibid., p. 186.28 Ibid., p. 188.29 Jackson, Vol. 1, pp. 207-208 (Lewis’s letter to Oto chief);Prucha, Indian Peace Medals, pp. 11 and 20. Leaders of laterexpeditions into Louisiana Territory would not distribute peacemedals until the chiefs had surrendered any previously given tothem by European powers.30 See, for example, Ambrose, p. 341, and Jackson, Vol. 2, p. 691.31 DeVoto, pp. 499 and 527-528; Mouton, Vol. 5, pp. 91-92 (Shos-hones) and Vol. 7, pp. 2 and 242-244 (Nez Perces).32 Moulton, Vol. 6, pp. 429-432 (entries for March 17 and 18,1806). As Moulton notes (p. 432), one of these documents infact was given to an American sea captain. It arrived in Bostonin May 1807, eight months after the expedition’s return.33 Ibid., p. 107 (Clark, December 3, 1805).34 Robert A. Saindon, “They Left Their Mark: Tracing the Ob-scure Graffiti of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” in Robert A.Saindon, ed., Explorations into the World of Lewis & Clark(Great Falls, Mont.: Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Founda-tion, 2003), Vol. 2, pp. 492-503; see especially p. 501. For otherexamples of the explorers’ penchant for physically marking theirpresence along the Corps of Discovery’s route, see Moulton,Vol. 8, pp. 181, 184-185, 191, and 237 (July 14-16 and July 27,1806), Vol. 6, p. 81 (November 23, 1805), Vol. 4, p. 276 (June 101805), Vol. 11, p. 18 (June 4, 1804), and Vol. 11, p. 192 (June 10,1805).35 See, for example, DeVoto, pp. 430 and 512.36 Tubbs and Jenkinson, pp. 168-169.


Reviews

New biography explores William Clark’s seminal role in American expansion

W illiam Clark, soldier, explorer,statesman, was the quintessential

family man. Equally at home in the or-bit of cabinet officers or Indian chiefs,he fretted about an elder brother en-snared by debts and alcohol, the leg-endary George Rogers Clark. His son,Meriwether Lewis Clark, periodicallythreatened to bail out of West Pointrather than sit for its dreaded exams.Clark family values, engaging in theirvery ordinariness, bulk large in thislong-awaited biography, William Clarkand the Shaping of the West. LandonY. Jones, a member of the NationalCouncil of the Lewis and Clark Bicen-tennial, has created a compelling sagaof an American dynasty.

Jones sets the scene of Clark familyorigins in an American Eden wheregrape vines worthy of a rain forest andthe Carolina parakeet and ivory-billedwoodpecker still filled lush arbors darkwith shade at midday. But it was anEden where mutilated bodies might befound drifting down the river in themorning and a settler woman couldwear a knit cap for life to conceal thescar tissue where her scalp had onceresided. And Jones chooses as the open-ing set piece of his chronicle the shat-tering wintry defeat of General ArthurSt. Clair’s forces during his 1791 cam-paign against the Shawnees.

St. Clair’s fate sets the stage for theepic of Clark’s life as, alternatively, anIndian fighter and Indian mediator. Ina nice novelistic touch, Jones returns tothe scene decades later as a kind of epi-logue. While the author has given us afine personal and family history of Wil-liam Clark, this is only part of hisachievement. He has also weavedadroitly into this biography a distin-guished account of the Indian wars of

the late 18th and early 19th centuries.He has filled a substantial gap in the his-torical knowledge of many otherwiseinformed Americans. Complementingthe narrative are excellent maps by Jef-frey L. Ward.

Clark and Indian removalA focus on Clark is overdue. He hastaken enough bows as a best support-ing character. But if this thoroughly

researched volume finds its exclusiveaudience among established Lewis andClark enthusiasts, its full impact on theAmerican history bookshelf will gounrealized. For Jones gives us the rela-tively unsung story of the proud andembattled eastern nations, the Shaw-nees, Miamis, Wyandots, Mohawks,Ottawas, and Delawares and evokes insympathetic detail the Hobson’schoices facing the venerable easternchiefs—Cornstalk, Little Turtle, BlueJacket, Joseph Brant, Tecumseh, andBlack Hawk.

How the rise of the expansionistAmerican democracy foreshadowedthe eclipse of these nations is his salienthistory lesson. As long as Europeansheld a share of continental power, theIndians could form alliances and playtheir French, British, and Spanish “fa-thers” against each other and against theAmericans. But once American sover-eignty was established, they faced thefull pressure of the advancing settle-ments and the full fury of Americanmilitary might. Jones vividly demon-strates how an 18th-century world ofinterdependence, accommodation, alli-ance, and intermarriage yielded to amore race-conscious American per-spective and a bitter zero-sum game ofred versus white.

In exploring Clark’s seminal role inthis history as agent for Indian affairswest of the Mississippi and then as gov-ernor of Missouri Territory, Jones ex-poses a possibly little-recognized truthof the government’s Indian policy. Theremoval policy under which the “fivecivilized tribes” were forcibly expatri-ated to the trans-Mississippi region wasat best only half of a very distastefulstory. The red exiles were banished tolands that were by no means vacant. Theindigenous western and midwesternnations had to be bought out, swindled,or forcibly ejected from large tracts toaccommodate the newcomers. Clark’sreputation and negotiating skills wereinstrumental in concluding treaty aftertreaty facilitating this infamous bargain.

If William Clark, in his post-expedition role as Indian agent fortribes west of the Mississippi,embraced the prevailing view of theIndians’ choices—assimilate, bedestroyed, or get out of the way—he at least implemented the overtlyleast bloody and demeaning ofthese options.

William Clark and theShaping of the WestLandon Y. JonesHill and Wang394 Pages / $ 25 cloth


Thus, as Jones reveals, Clark, the“red-headed chief,” who possessed nointrinsic animosity toward Indians, andheld their trust, perhaps was respon-sible for more divestiture of tribal land-holdings than any other American. ButClark embraced the prevailing view ofthe Indians’ choices: assimilate, be de-stroyed, or get out of the way. Clark atleast implemented the overtly leastbloody and demeaning of the options.It changed little for the Indians. TheMississippi bulwark against white landhunger was temporary. The artificiallyconstructed western homelands wouldbecome forfeit as well.

Jones wisely chooses lesser-knowndetails about Clark’s life in preferenceto overworked ground. The expeditionis treated as an important but brief chap-ter in Clark’s younger days. And Jonesskips briskly over the controversy sur-rounding Lewis’s death. The network ofClark’s fellow veterans, business asso-ciates, extended family, and political al-lies and enemies which Jones unravelsfrom colonial years on is simply extraor-dinary. Had Clark lived in our times, hisRolodex doubtless would have rivaledClark Clifford’s.

The last yearsHe lived long enough to endure the se-rial passing of many of those he mostcared for—his brothers, two belovedwives, a son, a step-grandchild, Lewis,and other expedition members. Jones’sreferences indicate that Clark boresome of these losses stoically with abare journal note or a record of the costof a shroud or parson. But at othermoments his grief breaks through andreveals the toll the inexorable attritionof his cherished circle has taken on hisstalwart heart. His own passing wasobserved with the largest military fu-neral St. Louis had ever seen and a pro-cession of horsemen and carriages thatextended a full mile.

—Dennis M. O’Connell

A review of another new Clark biog-raphy, Wilderness Journey: The Life ofWilliam Clark, by William E. Foley, willappear in the November WPO.—ED.

The most enduring legacy of the Lewisand Clark Bicentennial may be the

fresh perspectives it has brought to theCorps of Discovery’s relationship withnative peoples. Lewis and Clark: Acrossthe Divide explores that multifacetedrelationship in a comprehensive and in-sightful way. This large-format vol-ume—the companion book for a trav-eling national exhibit organized by theMissouri Historical Society—tells theexpedition’s story in a strikingly origi-nal way, with a compelling text andstunning graphics.

Carolyn Gilman, who also curatedthe exhibit, mixes straightforward nar-rative with comparative analysis of therespective cultures of the explorers andtheir native hosts. Her analysis focuseson their material cultures—physicalobjects, mainly from everyday life,whose outward forms reveal deeper at-titudes about the world their ownersand makers inhabited. These objects arespringboards for engaging disquisitionson diplomacy, trade and property, ani-mals and plants, the re-spective roles of womenand men, and other topics.

The book’s title is literalbut also metaphorical, forthe explorers crossed botha physical divide (theRocky Mountains) and acultural divide, one whoseconceptual terrain was atleast as treacherous tonavigate, with many blindcurves. For Gilman the re-curring question is not“What did Lewis andClark see?” but rather,“What didn’t they see?”

The answer, in a word,is plenty. The captains

took their cue from Thomas Jefferson,an Enlightenment man whose intellec-tual curiosity about Indians came witha lot of cultural baggage and mis-perceptions. Jefferson’s and the cap-tains’ rational, materialist view of thenatural world was as incomprehensibleto Indians as the Indians’ animist viewwas to them. These contrasting worldviews were reflected, for example, in thedifferent ways whites and Indians de-picted geography. Maps drawn by In-dians invariably ignored European car-tographic conventions. “North was notalways at the top,” writes Gilman, “anddirections were not always absolute ororiented to cardinal points but mightvary with the map. The size of featuresshowed their relative importance, nottheir size in nature. Rivers were notshown naturalistically, because theirtwists and turns made little differenceto the travelers in a canoe. . . . The re-sult was an abstract and diagrammaticrendition of a river system, not a rep-resentational one.”

Indian and white value systemsLewis and Clark looked down on theChinooks and Clatsops, regardingthese Indians of the Pacific Northwestas thieving and debased. And as Gilmanpoints out, the captains persisted in

Lewis and Clark: Across the DivideCarolyn GilmanSmithsonian Books /Missouri Historical Society424 pages / $60 cloth, $34.95 paper

Crossing the real and metaphorical divides

Two illustrations fromAcross the Divide.Left: Meriwether Lewis’sMasonic apron, which waswith him when he died.Bloodstains on it may be his.Below: War robe of Washakie,a Shoshone chief who was aninfant when Lewis and Clarkpassed through his country.


viewing them as impoverished despiteample evidence of their material wealth.“Why could Lewis and Clark not seethe affluence around them?” she won-ders, then posits several answers, mostnotably that different cultures havedifferent definitions of value. Lewis de-rided the Chinooks for trading usefulitems for any “bauble which pleasestheir fancy.” But many of the thingsprized by the Chinooks “were symbolicof their strictly stratified class system,an aspect of their culture that Lewis andClark never even suspected.” Braceletsand other jewelry made from copperimported from Alaska, described byLewis as “articles of little value,” weresymbols of wealth, commanding “a pre-mium price for their prestige value,much as platinum watches or elitesportscars do today, regardless of theirutility.”

Indians, Gilman is quick to add,could be equally blind to whites’ valuesystems. As a white trader wrote of theHidatsas in 1806, “They put little valueon [beaver skins] and cannot imaginewhat use we make of such trash, as theycall it.”

Different historical perspectivesNor did Indian contact with the Corpsof Discovery necessarily loom large intribal memories. A Sioux “wintercount” robe portraying in pictures sig-nificant events of the early 1800s com-pletely ignores the coming and goingof Lewis and Clark. As Gilman pointsout, for most Euro-American histori-ans a tribe’s encounter with the expe-dition is seen as something “presaginggreat changes in their story.” But forIndians, history was a series of eventsin which individuals play “uniqueparts in a pattern as constant and vary-ing as the weather. The chroniclerschose events that reinforced the pat-tern, not those that violated it.” Thus,the winter-count icon for 1804, whenthe corps met the Sioux heading up-river, is a pipe symbolizing a war dancein preparation for an attack on an en-emy tribe; for 1806, when the explor-ers met them heading downriver, it isa dead Arikara.

James P. Ronda’s pioneering 1984study, Lewis and Clark among the In-dians, was the first comprehensive ef-fort to place the Corps of Discoveryin a broader context of Native Ameri-can politics and culture, and hislengthy introduction to Lewis andClark: Crossing the Divide provides ahelpful overview of the expeditionwhile reinforcing Gilman’s themes. Hewrites, for example, about Jefferson’sdirective that the expedition’s supplyof Indian gifts include hand-operatedcorn grinders: “Like peace medals orguns, these machines expressed a num-ber of messages. Jefferson surely un-derstood the corn mill as emblematic ofthe entire federal policy to civilize Indi-ans by making them into Euro-Ameri-can farmers.” Clark, writes Ronda,noted that the Mandans appeared “de-lighted” when the captains presentedthem with a device of such obvious util-ity. The Indians, however, “promptlyredefined the corn mill, seeing it not asan agricultural machine but as a conve-nient supply of metal.” A trader visitingthe Mandan villages in 1806 “found thatsome of its parts had become arrowpoints and hide scrapers. The largest partof the mill was attached to a woodenhandle to fashion a pounder for makinggrease from buffalo bones. Like manyother trade goods, the corn mill hadmoved from one world of meaning toanother.”

—J.I. Merritt

As noted, Lewis and Clark: Crossingthe Divide is the companion book forthe Lewis and Clark National Bicen-tennial Exhibition, organized by theMissouri Historical Society. The exhi-bition recently closed in St. Louis inpreparation for a national tour and isscheduled to appear in the followingvenues: Academy of Natural Sciences,Philadelphia, November 2004–March2005; Denver Museum of Nature andScience, May–September 2005; OregonHistory Center, Portland, November2005–Match 2006; National Museum ofNatural History, Smithsonian Institu-tion, Washington, D.C., May–Septem-ber 2006.—ED.

Reviews (cont.)

The Journals of Lewis and Clark, ed-ited and abridged by Anthony Brandt.National Geographic Adventure Clas-sics. 445 pages. $16, paper. Orderthrough bookstores or http://shop.nationalgeographic.com.

This thoughtfully conceived work isan excellent one-volume version of theLewis and Clarkjournals. It is anabridgment of thejournals, one of atleast six in print,but differs fromall but one of theothers in a signifi-cant way: the edi-tor has tinkeredwith the sacredtext. Purists may gasp at Brandt’s radi-cal decision to clean up the captains’(especially Clark’s) erratic spelling,grammar, and punctuation, but the re-sult is prose that is far easier to digest.As he explains without apology, hisvolume is “not meant for scholars butfor the general reading public.”

The book’s structure divides theexpedition into 25 chronological seg-ments ranging from several weeks toa month, beginning with Lewis’s de-parture from Pittsburgh on August30, 1803. These segments in turn al-ternate between day-by-day journalentries and transitional sections inwhich the editor summarizes events.Where needed, Brandt inserts itali-cized explanatory text into the jour-nal segments.

Here, for example, is Clark’s entryfor November 4, 1804 (during thebuilding of Fort Mandan, in present-day North Dakota), first in the origi-nal (from Gary E. Moulton’s 13-vol-ume edition) and then in Brandt’s ed-ited version:

In Brief: “improved”journals; guides toplains, geology, rivers;L&C encyclopedia


a fine morning we Continued toCut Down trees and raise ourhouses, a Mr. Chaubonée, inter-preter for the Gross Vintre nationCame to See us, and informedthat he came Down with SeveralIndians from a Hunting expedi-tion up the river, to here what wehad told the Indians in Counclthis man wished to hire as aninterpeter, the wind rose thisevining from the East … Cloudedup— Great numbers of Indianspass hunting and some on the re-turn—

* * *A fine morning. We continued

to cut down trees and raise ourhouses. A Mr. Charbonneau, in-terpreter for the Gros Ventrenation, came to see us and in-formed us that he came downwith Several Indians from a hunt-ing expedition up the river to hearwhat we had told the Indians incouncil. This man wished to hireon as an interpreter. The windrose this evening from the eastand clouded up. Great numbersof Indian pass hunting and someon the return.

An italicized paragraph then followsexplaining who Charbonneau is andproviding salient details about him, hiswife Sacagawea, and their roles in theexpedition.

Brandt’s introduction, which dealsmainly with the journals themselvesand his methodology for abridgingthem, offers just enough historical con-text to get the reader started. Anafterword by Herman J. Viola expandson the expedition’s history and legacy.Additional materials include the fulltext of Jefferson’s instructions, thumb-nail sketches of expedition members, alist of supplies, and an index.

Brandt is a professional journalistspecializing in the literature of adven-ture, and Viola is a curator emeritus atthe Smithsonian.

!As Told: The Journals of Lewis andClark, edited by Ronald R. and Gregory

P. Turner. The Narrative Press. 481pages. $24.95, paper. Order throughbookstores or www.narrativepress.com.

The Turners (father and son, a re-tired surgeon and a journalist, respec-tively) take an ap-proach similar toBrandt’s—theiro n e - v o l u m eabridgment of thejournals cleans upspelling and punc-tuation and addswords (in brackets)where needed forclarity. Brief footnotes provide context.Here, for comparative purposes withthe above examples, is their renderingof Clark’s entry for November 4, 1804:

We continued to cut down treesand raise our houses.

A Mr. Charbonneau, inter-preter for the Hidatsa nation,came to see us and informed [us]that he came down with severalIndians from a hunting expedi-tion up the river to hear what wehad told the Indians in Council.This man wished to [be] hired asan interpreter.

Unlike Brandt, whose abridgmentrelies exclusively on the captains’ jour-nals, the Turners also draw from thejournals of the enlisted men. WhileBrandt’s version includes portions ofLewis’s Ohio River journal and winterat Camp River Dubois, in Illinois, theTurners’ chronology begins with thecorps’ departure up the Missouri, onMay 14, 1804. The Turners include abibliography and a helpful glossary, buttheir volume lacks an index.

!Lewis and Clark on the Great Plains,by Paul A. Johnsgard. University ofNebraska Press/Bison Books. 143pages. $14.95, paper. Order throughbookstores or www.unebraskapress.unl.edu.

This little book, with pen-and-inkillustrations by the author and six maps,identifies more than a hundred animaland plant species observed by Lewis

and Clark and is a guide to more thanseventy L&C sites of zoological or bo-tanical interest. The explorers spent 14of their 28 months on the trail on theGreat Plains, a region they first encoun-tered in late June 1804, when the Corpsof Discovery reached the mouth of theKansas River, at present-day KansasCity. Great Plains flora and fauna pre-dominated until theyreached the ThreeForks of the Missouri,in today’s’ westernMontana. The authorhas divided the corps’route into six segmentsand discusses the ani-mals and plants en-countered in each. Ahistorical overviewthat functions as an introduction pro-vides a helpful summary of the captains’contributions to the natural sciences.

!Geology of the Lewis & Clark Trail inNorth Dakota, by John W. Hogansonand Edward C. Murphy. MountainPress. 247 pages. $18, paper. Orderthrough bookstores or www.mountain-press.com.

Mountain Press enjoys a solid repu-tation for its series of state geologyguides. This work by two professionalgeologists lives up to the publisher’shigh standards, with clear, nontechni-cal writing and manycolor photographs. Itsexcellent maps show ma-jor geologic features,known Lewis and Clarkcampsites and other his-

White-tailedjackrabbit

“Frothy” clinker (top), and Knife River flint


Reviews (cont.)

This handsome large-format bookcontains more than ninety paintings

by 23 artists, from Lewis and Clark’scontemporary Charles Willson Peale tomodern visual interpreters of the expe-dition such as Gary P. Miller, C. Ed-ward Fisher, Gary R. Lucy, and RonUkrainetz. Evenson has wisely in-cluded all the L&C paintings by JohnF. Clymer and Charles M. Russell, two20th-century artists with unrivaled giftsfor pictorial narrative. (See, for ex-ample, Clymer’s Visitors at Fort Clat-sop on the cover of this issue of WPO,and Russell’s paintings on pages 25 and27.) Michael Haynes, one of the mostgifted and prolific artists portraying theexpedition today, is also well repre-sented. These works are complementedby those of earlier artists, includingKarl Bodmer, George Catlin, AlfredJacob Miller, Frederic Remington, Tho-mas Moran, and E.S. Paxson.

Art of the Lewis & Clark ExpeditionJeff EvensonWhisper’n Waters189 pages / $42.95 cloth

Each two-page spread presents apainting on the right-hand side oppo-site text—mainly journal excerpts—exploring some topic, one often relatedto natural history. There are 20 worksby Robert Bateman, a painter wellknown to connoisseurs of wildlife artbut whose canvasses are not usuallyassociated with Lewis and Clark.

This is the third L&C–related bookpublished by Whisper’n Waters (basedin Bismarck, North Dakota), and likeThe Lewis & Clark Cookbook and TheSacagawea Cookbook, it showcases the

aesthetic eye of Jeff Evenson. While thisvolume includes many of the best-known historical paintings depicting theCorps of Discovery, the title Art of theLewis & Clark Expedition is in someways misleading, implying as it does acomprehensive treatment of art specifi-cally devoted to the expedition. In fact,many of the paintings, while of westernsubjects, have nothing to do per se withthe expedition. It is, rather, a collectionof paintings based on one man’s keen,but ultimately subjective, vision.

—J.I.M.

Spread with text (journal excerpts) and Charles Fritz’s painting of Lewis at the Great Falls.

“Art of the Lewis and Clark Expedition” is a feast for the eyes

toric locations related to the expedition,and the river bed of the Missouri as itis today and was in 1804. (The changeis astonishing). The authors explain theorigins of Knife River flint, a type ofsilicified peat formed 30 to 50 millionyears ago and mined in the region forthousands of years before the Corpsof Discovery’s arrival. Indiansthroughout North America consid-ered it a premium-grade material forknapping arrowheads and knives, andintertribal trade routes took it to thefar ends of the continent. You can readabout the “exploding rocks” thatvexed the explorers during their win-ter stay at Fort Mandan. The authorsalso discuss “clinker,” a type of min-eral, familiar to North Dakotans,formed from sedimentary rocks whenthey are cooked by burning veins of

underlying coal. The rocks closest tothe heat source may trap air bubblesand come to resemble pumice, a typeof lightweight igneous rock. Indiansused chunks of this “frothy” clinkeras abrader tools. The captains called it“pumice stone” or “lava” and were in-trigued by its ability to float. AsHoganson and Murphy note, “Theiruse of these terms implies that, at leastinitially, they thought these rocks hada volcanic origin, but it is clear fromthe journals that before they left NorthDakota they understood how clinkerformed.”

!Exploring Lewis & Clark’s Missouri, byBrett Dufur. Pebble Publishing. 256pages. $16.95, paper. Order throughbookstores or www.pubblepublishing.com.

The publisher isbased in Rocheport,Missouri. This titleis part of its ShowMe Missouri seriesof travel guides, andthe portion of theMissouri River cov-ered extends fromSt. Louis to the Kan-sas-Nebraska border. The author, whothinks of the Mighty Mo as the “origi-nal superhighway,” offers a brief his-tory of the modern river and how it haschanged in two hundred years, notingthat the removal of snags and otherobstacles had begun by 1824. A cen-tury later, the U.S. Army Corps of En-gineers, operating on the theory that theonly good river is a straight river, hadchannelized the Missouri beyond rec-


ognition, removing its oxbow turns andbuilding wing dams to impede erosion.The author observes that in the after-math of major floods in 1993 and 1995,agencies have become more environ-mentally friendly toward the river andin many places are letting it reassumeits natural meanders. This guide offerstips on travel by boat, barge, bike, car,bus, train, and air, with points of inter-est from Fort Massac State Park, in Il-linois, to Brownville, Nebraska.

!

The Lewis and Clark Columbia RiverWater Trail: A Guide for Paddlers, Hik-ers, and Other Explorers, by Keith G.Hay. Timber Press. 237 pages. $19.95,paper. Order through bookstores orwww.timberpress.com.

The Corps of Discovery covered 450miles of the Columbia River, but thisguide deals with the free-flowing 146-mile stretch from today’s BonnevilleDam to the river’s mouth—the officiallydesignated Lewis and Clark ColumbiaRiver Water Trail. The author, a veteranpaddler and L&C buff, worked on thefirst Lewis and Clark Trail Commission,back in the early 1960s, and knows thissection of Columbia as well as anyone.He is also a founder and past presidentof the Oregon Chapter of the LCTHF.Hay covers more than 260 sites of his-torical, cultural, geological, and ecologi-cal interest in this helpful volume, whichincludes 18 first-rate maps and an ap-pendix with lists of Lewis and Clark vs.current place names, plant and animalspecies encountered by the captains,boat-rental liveries, the GPS coordinatesof L&C campsites, and notes on riversafety and trail etiquette.

Columbia River water trail map, from Cotton-wood Point to Government Island.

Encyclopedia of the Lewis & ClarkExpedition, by Elin Woodger and Bran-don Toropov. Facts On File, Inc. 438pages. $65, cloth. Order through book-stores or www.factsonfile.com.

The Lewisand Clark Expe-dition is longoverdue for itsown encyclope-dia, and Facts OnFile has provideda splendid one,with more than350 entries onsubjects rangingfrom alcohol to York—and a great dealmore besides. The up-front materialsinclude a detailed chronology subdi-vided into three parts: a pre-expeditionsection with events relevant to Lewisand Clark and westward expansion (be-ginning with Sir Francis Drake’s explo-ration of the Pacific Northwest coast,in 1578, and ending with Jefferson’s ap-pointment, in 1801, of Lewis as his per-sonal secretary); a comprehensive 15-page section, with 10 route maps, onthe expedition per se (starting withJefferson’s request to Congress to fundthe expedition and ending with theCorps of Discovery’s return to St.Louis); and a post-expedition sectioncommencing with the 1806 Pike andDunbar expeditions and ending withthe U.S. Census Bureau’s declaration in1890 that the frontier was closed. Ap-pendices include a list of tribes encoun-tered on the expedition (those with en-tries are boldfaced) and 10 more mapscovering other aspects of the journey.A 22-page index leads readers to itemssubsumed under general subject head-ings (e.g., “flounder,” under “fish, newspecies”).

Another reader-friendly feature isthe typographic device of cross-refer-encing all subject entries using smallcapitals (i.e., SMALL CAPITALS). Thus, inthe volume’s entry for “Flathead Indi-ans (Salish)” one knows to look else-where for entries on Plateau Indians,Cascade Mountains, Rocky Mountains,bitterroot, camas root, horse, GreatPlains, Plains Indians, tipis, Blackfeet

Two Incredible Exhibits,Showing August throughOctober in North Dakota!

Art of theLewis & Clark

ExpeditionFeaturing over 40 original paintings

by Michael Haynes—the largestcollection ever assembled of thisimportant Lewis & Clark artist’swork! On display at the North

Dakota Lewis & ClarkInterpretive Center.

Literature of theLewis & Clark

ExpeditionThe incredible display of books,

maps and other Expedition artifactsfrom the famed collection of

Lewis & Clark College, Portland!On display at the Headwaters Fort

Mandan Visitor Centerat Fort Mandan.

For inform ation about thesespecial exhibits, call the

Le wis & Clark Fort M andanFoundation , Washburn , N D at

877-462-8535 or visit us atw w w .fortm andan .co m .


Reviews (cont.)

Fort Peck Dam spillway

Anyone who insists on a window seatwhen booking an airline flight will

enjoy this book. The photographer JimWark has flown the entire Lewis andClark Trail, including its eastern por-tion, and the 111 images in Discover-ing Lewis & Clark from the Air wereculled from 3,182 slides he took at el-evations ranging from five hundred tothree thousand feet. Most of the pho-tos were taken during a week-longflight from St. Louis to Oregon thatbegan on May 14, 1999, the 195th an-niversary of the Corps of Discovery’sdeparture from Camp River Dubois.

Lewis and Clark would find littlefamiliar in the landscapes captured byWark’s Leica. The rivers, prairies,mountains, and bottomlands they tra-versed have long since been dammed,drowned by reservoirs, bisected byhighways, and paved over by parkinglots. But whatever we may feel aboutthe loss of wilderness, our eyes aredrawn to the captivating details of thistransformed world—whether the viewis of strip-mined mountains of coal nearFalkirk, North Dakota, a massive rockbreakwater protruding from Cape Dis-appointment at the mouth of the Co-lumbia River, or what Joseph A.Mussulman’s text calls the “fractal ge-ometry” of the shoreline of Montana’sFort Peck Lake.

Wark’s visual narrative begins atMonticello, where Thomas Jeffersonfirst envisioned an expedition to thePacific, and ends on the Two MedicineRiver near Cut Bank, Montana, whereMeriwether Lewis had his deadly en-counter with a band of Blackfeet Indi-ans on the homeward journey. Accom-panying each photo is a brief, lucid textby Mussulman. Few contemporary

Lewis and Clark scholars have a morecommanding grasp of their subject—he founded, and oversees, the Univer-sity of Montana–based Web site “Dis-covering Lewis & Clark” (www.lewis-clark.org), the go-to Internet source forserious L&C researchers. Mussulmanwrites with authority and a light touch.He explains, for example, how near ElkPoint, South Dakota, the captainsfound deposits of what they thoughtwere arsenic and cobalt. When Lewisbecame ill after apparently sniffing andtasting these minerals, he treated him-self, according to Clark, with “a doseof salts to carry off the effects.” But asMussulman informs us, “Lewis hadmerely been poking around in a cliff ofsoft white limestone. The ‘cobalt’ wasjust silky, lustrous selenite gypsum, andthe other rocks he found were second-ary minerals from interactions betweencalcareous chalk and iron pyrite—‘fool’s gold.’ They may not have pleasedLewis’s nose or palette, but theyweren’t poisonous.”

Two days later, he notes, “Lewis wasstill sick, not from the poison but fromthe medication.”

—J.I.M.

Discovering Lewis & Clarkfrom the AirJim Wark (photographs)Joseph A. Mussulman (text)Mountain Press261 pages / $40 cloth

A bird’s eye view of the Lewis and Clark TrailIndians, Bitterroot Mountains, Corpsof Discovery, Ross’s Hole, WilliamClark, Meriwether Lewis, Welsh Indi-ans, interpretation, Shoshone Indians,buffalo, Bitterroot River, Travelers’Rest, and Lolo Trail. Because of myinterest in, and relative ignorance of, thesubject, I turned to the entry for “in-terpretation” and read a 1,400-wordessay covering, it seemed, all the salientpoints on the captains’ often frustrat-ing efforts to communicate with Indi-ans. In the “Further Reading” sectionat the end (there is one for each entry)three of the five references listed werecompletely new to me.

Such an exhaustive Lewis and Clarkknowledge base begs comparison toThe Lewis and Clark Companion: AnEncyclopedic Guide to the Voyage ofDiscovery, written by Stephenie Amb-rose Tubbs with Clay S. Jenkinson andpublished last year by Owl Books. (Areview appeared in the November 2003WPO.) The Woodger-Toropov volumeis the more comprehensive and hasmuch more to say about many subjects,especially Indian tribes, which inTubbs-Jenkinson don’t even warrantseparate entries. Nor does the latterhave an index. Each volume has itsstrengths, weaknesses, and quirks. Anyhardcore Lewisandclarker, for example,knows all about boudin blanc, the buf-falo sausage made by Toussaint Char-bonneau. Although the subject doesn’tloom large in the history of the expedi-tion, Tubbs-Jenkinson rightly deem itworthy of an entry. By contrast, inWoodger-Toropov one has to search forboudin blanc—there’s no entry or in-dex listing for it, although I managedto find it in the entry for “food.” Othertopics found in Tubbs-Jenkinson butmissing in Woodger-Toropov includebranding iron (Lewis’s), the artist KarlBodmer, bier (mosquito netting), be-zoar (hair ball), and the chiefs Big BlueEyes and Black Moccasin.

The Tubbs-Jenkinson volume is areader’s companion and not, strictlyspeaking, an encyclopedia. Both worksbelong on the shelf of any serious stu-dent of Lewis and Clark.

—J.I. Merritt


Farcountry Press1/2H

Mountain PressPickup from

February issue, p. 41


Reviews (cont.)

Elements of the Schmidts’ creativeand effective use of sound includevoices in the background, some of themin French, to bring the journals to life.The CD is also alive with the soundsof nature—waterfalls, waves, wind,rain, hail, and bird songs—to encour-age the listener to fantasize about theencounters faced by the captains and

their men. We hear prai-rie dogs barking, grizzlybears growling, and mengrunting and strainingagainst elkskin ropes asthey haul the exped-ition’s boats upriver. Butthere are also contentedsounds of men laughing.I missed only a fewsounds, such as a baby’schortling or fussing, and

the buzzing of mosquitoes—but theCD has at least one sharp slap, whichis almost as good.

The casting of the captains’ voices(Karl Schmidt takes the role of Clark,while Jim Fleming plays Lewis) con-veys the difference in their characters,although Virginia tidewater accentsmight have been in order. The journalexcerpts illuminate the captains’ per-sonalities and the differences in theirtemperaments, but it is important toremember that these are “dispatches”—the CD does not attempt to cover ev-ery detail of the journey. The Schmidtshandle the expedition’s meetings withthe native tribes skillfully, using JamesRonda’s insights as a compass. Fortribal terms and geographic and othernames I appreciated the effort made toget pronunciations right.

This is an easy-listening CD. It doesnot demand heavy concentration orweigh the story down with excessivenarration. Grandparents and theirgrandchildren will enjoy this offering,and educators and tour guides will findit helpful, especially on those longdrives between trail stops. Plug it in andyou will be transported.

—Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs

A two-disk CD directed by the father-son team of Karl and Thomas

Schmidt, Listening toLewis & Clark is an au-dio account of the Lewisand Clark Expeditioncombining excerpts fromthe journals with narra-tion, original music, andsound effects. If NPRwere doing a series onthe expedition, this iswhat it would sound like.

Karl Schmidt, in fact,was one of the founders of NPR, andhis experience with radio documenta-ries is evident throughout this profes-sional production, which sparks theimagination while retelling highlightsof the expedition’s journey to the Pa-cific and back. The two-and-a-halfhours of running time is broken intosegments, most ranging from two tofour minutes. After a brief preambleand introduction, the narrative followsa straightforward chronology, startingwith the departure from Camp RiverDubois, on May 14, 1804, and conclud-ing with the return to St. Louis, on Sep-tember 23, 1806.

Thomas Schmidt, a seasoned chroni-cler of the Corps of Discovery, is theauthor of National Geographic’s Guideto the Lewis and Clark Trail and thecoauthor (with his brother Jeremy) ofThe Saga of Lewis and Clark: Into theUncharted West. He narrates the CD,but for the most part the productionrelies on the journals themselves to tellthe story. The quotes from the journals,original music by Paul Micksch (an ac-complished fiddler), and sound effectsare skillfully blended in a way that en-courages us to close our eyes and con-jure up the details in our heads.

Listening to Lewis & Clark: Dispatchesfrom the Voyage of DiscoveryKarl and Thomas SchmidtBridger Press / $21.95, CD-ROM

A fine audio rendering of the Corps of Discovery

Inspiring Journey: Lewis and Clarkthrough the Eyes of the Artist, featur-ing Ron Ukrainetz. 50 minutes. VHS,$39.95; DVD, $49.95. Order throughwww.crizmac.com (800-913-8555).

Crizmac, a Tucson-based firm special-izing in education materials, has pro-

duced this two-part video as a supple-mentary curriculum resource for teach-ers, but it would be of interest to anyLewis and Clark buff. The first part isa short narrative about the expedition.To tell the story it largely relies onworks of art, a few by 19th- and 20th-century masters such as Charles M.Russell and John F. Clymer but mostlyby painters working today. Some ofthese artists—Michael Haynes, CharlesFritz, and R.L. Rickards—are wellknown to readers of WPO, but others—Sherry Gallagher, Jeff Walker, and Den-nis Grismer—may be less familiar.

The second part focuses on the con-temporary artist Ron Ukrainetz. AMontana native, Ukrainetz has recre-ated on canvas the activities of the ex-plorers during their month-long so-journ at the Great Falls in 1805 (seeabove). The video follows him throughthe steps of a painting of Clark and sev-eral of the men building dugout canoesfrom concept through field sketches tothe completion of a signed 24-by-36-inch canvas in the studio.

Ukrainetz is a reenactor with theGreat Falls–based Lewis and ClarkHonor Guard, and he says his living-history experience has made him a bet-ter artist when it comes to historical de-tails and the hardship etched into the ex-plorers’ faces: “I know what it feels liketo get prickly pear in your feet.”

—J.I.M.

Artists’ eyes on L&C

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O’Library Gallery1/2H

Bridger Press1/3S

AD RATESInside front or back cover:Black & white, $650; color, $750Outside back cover:Black & white, $800; color, $900

Inside pages (black & white):Full page: 71/4 X 91/2 $6002/3rd vertical: 43/4 X 91/2 $4001/2 horizontal: 45/8 X 71/4 $3001/3rd square: 43/4 X 45/8 $2001/3rd vertical: 21/4 X 91/2 $2001/6th vertical: 21/4 X 45/8 $1001/12th: 21/4 X 23/16 $50

Address inquiries to Karen Rickert,P.O. Box 3434, Great Falls, MT59403. 406-454-1234/fax: 406-771-9237. [email protected].

Advertise yourL&C productsand services

in WPO!


When people celebrate the Lewisand Clark Tricentennial, in 2103-

2106, will they be able to visit anyplaces that still look—and feel—asthey did when the Corps of Discoveryvisited them? A program calledUndaunted Stewardship is workingtoward the goal of making sure that inMontana, at least, the answer to thisquestion will be “Yes.”

Conceived by the Helena-basedMontana Stockgrowers Associationand funded by congressional grants,Undaunted Stewardship (whose nameechoes Jefferson’s praise of Meri-wether Lewis’s “courage undaunted”)has grown into a public-privatepartnership managed jointly by theassociation, Montana State University(MSU), and the U.S. Bureau of LandManagement. The nonregulatory,incentive-based program preservesprivately owned historic sites on theLewis and Clark Trail and helpsranchers throughout the state toimprove their land-stewardshippractices. It’s also creating interpretivedisplays at eight locations along theLewis and Clark National Historic Trail.

“Montana still looks more as it didwhen Lewis and Clark saw it than anyother state they passed through,” saysSteve Pilcher, the association’sexecutive vice president. “Familyranching over the course of gener-ations is one of the reasons for this, notjust along the Missouri Breaks but allover the state.” This is so in partbecause livestock grazing if properlymanaged “mimics the effects that bisonherds once had on rangeland. We’recelebrating the fact that ranch familiespreserve natural landscapes and areworking to help ranching continue as asustainable business so these beautifulplaces can persist for generations.”

In the last two years, UndauntedStewardship has reviewed and certifiedstewardship plans for 20 ranches withtotal holdings of more than 300 squaremiles. By later this fall, the programexpects to certify the plans of another

27 ranches encompassing an additional300 square miles.

The plans, which must be re-certified every five years, encourageagricultural practices that arecompatible with environmental valuesby addressing issues such asovergrazing, pollution runoff, andbalancing the needs of livestock andwildlife. Certification is done by range-management scientists at MSU, inBozeman. Before a ranch can becertified as an “Undaunted LandSteward,” explains Jeff Mosley, thecertification program’s director, ”it mustuse a grazing management approachthat is documented and monitored, witha written prescription for landmanagement that conserves naturalresources. A team of range scientistsvisits and studies the ranches and helpsthe ranchers develop written grazingplans. They also help each ranchestablish a range-monitoring programto collect baseline data that can beused to judge, refine, and continuallyimprove land management.”

Displays highlight historyInterpretive displays now in devel-opment will be erected on manyproperties taking part in the program.

Dispatches

Program helps preserve and interpret L&C sites on private lands in Montana

Those related to the Lewis and ClarkExpedition are expected to be in placeby the 200th anniversary of the eventsthey describe. A display on thePavlovick Ranch, at Judith Landing, oneof the busiest take-out points forfloaters through the White Cliffs and theMissouri Breaks National Monument,will tell what happened in the earlyhours of May 29, 1805, when a lonebuffalo charged through the Corps ofDiscovery’s camp and came close totrampling several of Lewis and Clark’smen while they slept. (Seaman, Lewis’sNewfoundland dog, chased it off.)

Another display will be installedoverlooking the Ayrshire Dairy Farm onthe southern edge of Great Falls. This isthe site of the expedition’s UpperPortage Camp, next to the White BearIslands, two of which remain. Theexplorers spent nearly a month in thisarea while portaging the Great Falls,constructing Lewis’s iron boat, fendingoff grizzlies, and stockpiling meat.

“The time the expedition spentaround here is one of the most profoundand fascinating phases of the entireLewis and Clark story,” says HarryMitchell, who was born and raised, andstill lives, at the dairy farm his grand-father started in 1906. “We would like to

Members of the Mitchell family, owners of Ayreshire Dairy Farm, at Upper Portage Camp site.

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see the campsite land area preservedas open space forever, perhaps as apublic park or a place children couldcome to learn and play.”

At least two displays will be atranch sites accessible only to floatersthrough the Missouri Breaks. The ABNRanch lies just downstream from CoalBanks Landing, and the Terry Ranch isabout five miles upstream from theBLM’s Eagle Creek Campground, whereLewis and Clark camped on May 31,1805. Other display sites include Gates ofthe Mountains, off Interstate Highway 15north of Helena (the Sieben and HilgerHereford ranches); BeaverheadGateway Ranch, by Beaverhead Rock,north of Dillon; the Hamilton Ranch, nearBannack (where Lewis and Clark met theShoshones); and the Mission Ranch,east of Livingston (immediately acrossthe Yellowstone River from one of Clark’seast-bound campsites). A possible ninthdisplay site is along the Missouri River atthe Crawford Ranch, which lies insidethe White Cliffs area.

Finding common groundUndaunted Stewardship draws on thesupport of a 19-member advisorycouncil with representatives from arange of agricultural and environmentalorganizations, from the MontanaFarmer’s Union and Montana GrainGrowers Association to AmericanRivers and the Montana WildernessAssociation. Some of these groups holdsharply different positions on land-useissues but manage to work together infurthering the goals of UndauntedStewardship. Bruce Bugbee, whorepresents the Conservation Fund, anational group that encourages private-land stewardship, credits the organ-ization for expanding “common groundand strengthened partnerships be-tween conservation and agriculture.”

For more information aboutUndaunted Stewardship and thelocations of interpretive displays, visitthe Web site www.undauntedstewardship.com or contact TamaraBeardsley at the Montana Stock-growers Association, 406-442-3420.

—Tom Daubert

Judges’ Choice

Corps of Discovery: “A Most Perfect Harmony”

The year is 1805 and it is daybreak onthe Columbia River. The Corps of

Discovery begins this day as a whole,each member fulfilling his assignedduty, each helping ready the group fordeparture. They are like a well-oiledmachine; each gear in place and the mo-tor humming. Today they have rapids,and tomorrow, more unexpected ob-stacles. They proceed on.

The Corps of Discovery was indeeda group of powerful individuals, led byunfailingly reliable captains. Remark-able leadership in combination with thestrength and camaraderie of the menallowed these individuals to conquer acontinent.

Lewis and Clark led the way, unify-ing an expedition of soldiers and trap-pers, fiddlers and translators, a blackslave and a Shoshone woman, who to-gether blazed a trail that generations ofAmericans soon followed. This is nosmall feat. The character traits of thesetwo men balanced in perfect harmony.

Lewis’s “melancholia,” or severe de-pression, was complemented by Clark’sunfailing optimism and friendliness.They aided each other in scientificdiscovery as well, with Lewis catalog-ing flora and fauna, and Clark using theskies to map an unknown land. To-gether, these men took all the right risks,made all the right choices. From theforks of the Missouri to the vote at Sta-tion Camp, they increased morale byinvolving the men in decisions. Lewisand Clark were valuable leaders, but as-suredly these two men would never havegotten to the Pacific Ocean without theother individuals of the corps.

As the vote was being held at Sta-tion Camp to decide where to spend thewinter of 1805-06, there were twomemorable “firsts.” A black man andan Indian woman took part in what his-torian Dayton “Duncan calls “democ-racy exemplified” west of the Appala-chian Mountains. These two minoritiesaccomplished more than just express-ing their opinions during the vote.York, a strong man with deep blackskin, was key to the success of the jour-ney. He was entrusted with importantmissions and helped immensely withthe piloting of canoes down the GreatChute of the Columbia. In addition, heis one of the more memorable individu-als of the corps for his dancing humor

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following essay, byStephanie Craton of Mansfield, Mas-sachusetts, won the Judges’ ChoiceAward at the 2004 U.S. Academic De-cathlon, held April 14-17 in Boise,Idaho. Some 370 high-school studentsparticipated. The decathlon’s themewas “Growth of a Nation,” and in theessay category, Lewis and Clark wasone of the subjects students couldchoose to write about. The competitorswere given James Ronda’s essay “AMost Perfect Harmony,” then had 50minutes to compose their own essaysbased on it. Stephanie will be a juniorthis fall at the Wheller School, in Provi-dence, Rhode island. The essay judgesincluded Ron Laycock, the presidentof the LCTHF, and Joe Musselman, aformer board member. “A Most Per-fect Harmony” was originally pub-lished in the November 1988 WPO andis included in James P. Ronda, ed., Voy-ages of Discovery: Essays on the Lewisand Clark Expedition (Montana His-torical Society Press, 1998).

Ron Laycock, LCTHF president, presents Steph-anie Craton with Judges’ Choice Award, a rep-lica of a Jefferson Peace Medal.


with the Native Americans, who calledhim respectfully “great medicine.” An-other key member was a Shoshonewoman, Sacagawea. Though distin-guished as the only Native American andthe only woman in the group, Sacagaweaearned her remembrance in historythrough her deeds. She saved supplieswhen they fell overboard, she acted as atoken of peace, and she gathered foodwhen the corps could not find any. Thesetwo individuals shaped the American epicof Lewis and Clark into a form that allcan appreciate and relate to.

There were, of course, other peopleon the expedition, people often obscuredby the passage of time. Primarily, theseare the journal writers, Whitehouse andGass among others, whom one has tothank because without their journals (of-ten written with what historian James P.Ronda calls “inspired spelling”) theexpedition’s story would not have livedon to this day. There were also the inter-preters, Labiche and Drouillard included,who aided the captains significantly incommunicating with tribes like theShoshone, Nez Perce, and Clatsop. Therewere the trappers and hunters, Shannonand Colter to name two, who providedthe food on which the corps existed fortwo and a half years. There was PierreCruzatte, who, although he shot Lewisaccidentally in the bottom, was an excel-lent fiddler and cheered the corps as wellas many Native American tribes. Therewere the sergeants, Ordway, Pryor,Floyd, and Gass, who showed tremen-dous leadership. There were more thanforty people who were at one point oranother members of the expedition, andeach played his or her role as a spoke inthe wheel, a gear in the machine that wasthe Corps of Discovery.

Return now to dawn with the corps.The canoes are packed and boarded,and some unnamed individual deftlypushes them off the bank of the river,jumps in the back, and grabs a paddle.Rhythmically, paddles stir tiny whirl-pools in the Columbia. The body of theCorps of Volunteers for North West-ern Discovery, as Lewis formally calledit—a body greater than the sum of itsparts—moves downstream. ■

Judges’ Choice (cont.) Passages

Martin Plamondon II, a noted Lewisand Clark historian and author of

a three-volume reconstruction of theexplorers’ maps, died May 28 at hishome in Minnehaha, a suburb ofVancouver, Washington. He was 58years old and had long suffered fromheart, lung, and digestive ailments.

A cartographer bytrade who spent mostof his working life withthe Clark County,Washington, Map De-partment, Plamondondevoted some thirtyyears to researching theLewis and Clark Expe-dition and creating aseries of 530 annotatedmaps of its route acrossthe continent. Volume1 of Lewis and ClarkTrail Maps: A Carto-graphic Reconstruction,was published in 2000by the University of Washington Pressand was followed by Volume 2 in 2002.The third and final volume is due outthis year. By correlating Clark’s fieldmaps and course and distance recordswith known landscape features he wasable to chart the trail with greater pre-cision than previous cartographers.

“Many people have done maps ofthe route and tried to locate places, butnever with the skills and the technicaldetail that Martin brought to it,” GaryE. Moulton, the editor of Lewis andClark’s journals, told the Portland Or-egonian. In his introduction to Volume1, Moulton wrote, “We find our waywith the Corps of Discovery becausewe now know exactly where they were.William Clark would love these maps.”

Plamondon, who was born in Port-land and moved across the ColumbiaRiver to Clark County as a child, be-came interested in Lewis and Clark af-ter visiting the reconstruction of FortClatsop, the Corps of Discovery’s win-ter encampment of 1805-06, nearAstoria, Oregon. His lifelong project

put him on intimate terms with the ex-plorers. Working on his maps late intothe night at his home, he recalled inVolume 1, “Many were the times …that, as I wrote or mapped, it seemedas if the two men were seated in theroom with me.”

A longtime member of the LCTHF,which partially fundedhis work, Plamondonwas the 2003 recipientof its Distinguished Ser-vice Award. Over theyears he contributedfour articles to WPO, in-cluding “The ColumbiaRiver Gorge” (Novem-ber 1996) and “Deci-sion at Chinook Point”(May 2001). He wasalso a former chair ofthe Washington Gover-nor’s L&C Trail Com-mittee. He is survivedby his wife, Evelyn,

and by his father, two daughter, twosons, a sister, four brothers, and agranddaughter. ■

L&C cartographer and author Martin Plamondon II

Martin Plamondon

The LCTHF has a new and vastly im-proved Web site—complete with

links to the best and most authoritativeof other Internet sites devoted to L&C,a timeline of the expedition, genealo-gies, and a searchable library catalogand WPO index. Visitors can access in-formation about chapters, tribal re-sources, trail stewardship, and educa-tion. They will also find a kid’s page andan e-mail feature that allows them toask questions and receive answersabout the expedition. These are only afew of the many features available. JillJackson, the foundation’s librarian, ar-chivist, and Web master, says it has“lot’s of cool things.” She’s right. Formore information or to give it a spin,check out www.lewisandclark.org. ■

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Key to May 2004 Lewis & Clark crossword

L&C Roundup

Karen Rickert has been named theFoundation’s director of member

and donor services.Working at the Foundation’s head-

quarters in Great Falls, Montana, shewill develop and promote newly ex-panded membership programs, overseethe merchandising programs, manageaccounts, and serve as WPO’s director ofadvertising.

Rickert managed the Portage CacheStore in the Lewis and Clark Interpre-tive Center in Great Falls prior to join-ing the Foundation. She has previouslyworked as a staffwriter for theGreat Falls Tri-bune and as anassistant man-ager for the In-terstate BrandsCorporation.

She replacesRebecca Bogden,who resigned totake a new job asdirector of a community recreationcenter in Great Falls.

Rickert earned a bachelor’s degree incommunications and computer soft-ware integration from the Universityof Great Falls. A lifelong resident ofMontana, Rickert was born and raisedin Butte and attended Western MontanaCollege, in Dillon. She moved to GreatFalls in 1970. She and her husband,John, are parents of five children andgrandparents of four.

Catlin exhibitAn exhibit of original works by GeorgeCatlin, an artist who painted the Indi-ans and landscapes of the Upper Mis-souri in the 1830s, opens October 23 atthe North Dakota Heritage Center, inBismarck, North Dakota. Five of thepaintings are on loan from theSmithsonian Institution’s American ArtMuseum. The exhibit coincides with aNational L&C Bicentennial SignatureEvent in Bismarck. A related exhibitwill feature 16 paintings by local artist

Vern Erickson depicting the Corps ofDiscovery in North Dakota.

New Corps II superintendentThe National Park Service has namedStephen E. Adams, a 32-year veteranof the NPS, as superintendent of theCorps of Discovery II traveling L&CBicentennial exhibit. A 1970 graduateof the University of Arkansas, Fay-etteville, he succeeds Gerard Baker,who now heads the Mount RushmoreNational Monument.

L&C in other publicationsThe Fall 2003–Winter 2004 GatewayHeritage, the quarterly journal of the

Missouri Historical Society, is devotedto “Lewis & Clark: New Perspectives.”Its 11 articles include pieces on theMandan and Hidatsa views of Lewisand Clark, expedition maps, women’sroles in tribal cultures, the difficulty ofriver travel in 1804, and William Clark’sfailed 1820 campaign to be elected gov-ernor of Missouri. An article by Fred-erick Fausz and Michael A. Gaun onthe “unsolved mystery” of MeriwetherLewis’s death makes a good case for re-serving judgment about the now pre-vailing view that he killed himself. Theissue is available for $10 through thesociety’s gift shop (www.mohistory.org, 314-454-3119). ■

Karen Rickert

New staffer for member services; Catlin in N.D.; Corps II; new perspectives


he William P. Sherman Li-brary and Archives of the Lewis

and Clark Trail Heritage Founda-tion has received a major donation ofLewis and Clark–related first-editionbooks. Several of the major books inthe donation are currently part of Lit-erature of an Expedition: The Journalsof the Corps of Discovery, an exhibitshowing now through December 31.The family of the late Earle B. Barnes,contacted the library almost a year agoto inquire about making this donation.I picked up the books in Jackson Hole,Wyoming, the first week in April.When I drove there from Great Falls,Montana, I had no idea of the scope ofthe collection. What a wonderful sur-prise to receive such significant items!

Included in the donation is a copyof Sergeant Patrick Gass’s journal. Thefirst edition of this journal was printedin 1807 in Pittsburgh. The library re-ceived a copy of the 1808 edition,printed in London. Gass’s journal wasthe first in print, even before CaptainsLewis and Clark, a fact that dismayedLewis. The first edition of the Lewisand Clark journals, edited (actuallyparaphrased) by Nicholas Biddle, wasprinted in Philadelphia in 1814. Thanksto the generosity of the Barnes family,the Sherman Library now has a copyof this first edition as well.

In 1893, Elliott Coues produced an-other edition of the Lewis and Clarkjournals. This heavily annotated four-volume update of the Biddle paraphrasewas printed in a limited edition of 1,000copies. The Barnes donation includeda set of the Coues volumes. We thinkthe great Montana artist Charles M.Russell may have read the Coues edi-tion soon after it was published, for hisinterest in painting the Lewis and ClarkExpedition dates from this period.Russell’s first Lewis and Clark pieceswere a pen-and-ink drawing entitled“Lewis and Clark Meeting theMandans” and an oil entitled “The In-dians Discovering Lewis and Clark,”both dating from 1896.

The first complete edition of thejournals as they were written by Lewisand Clark was published in 1904. Ed-ited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, it wasproduced in three editions. A set boundin red was printed for the popular mar-ket. The library has owned a set of thered volumes for several years. A green-bound set, printed on hand-made pa-per and limited to 200 copies, was in-cluded in the Barnes donation. We pre-viously owned two partial sets of theGreen Thwaites edition, and now wehave a complete set. Many other sig-nificant works about the Lewis andClark Expedition were included in thedonation, and we thank the Barnes fam-ily for its generosity.

Earl B. Barnes was born July 14,1917, in Pueblo, Colorado. He joinedDow Chemical Company in 1940 andprogressed to general manager of itsTexas division. In 1971 he became presi-dent of Dow Chemical U.S.A. He re-tired in 1982. He and his wife, Lucile,owned the Dead Shot Ranch nearBoudurant, Wyoming, where theyraised Arabian horses and Red Anguscattle. He was a long-time member ofthe LCTHF.

The William P. Sherman Library andArchives is housed at the L&C Na-tional Historic Trail Interpretive Cen-ter, located at 4201 Giant Springs Road,Great Falls. It is a hidden gem in thisnationally known facility. Its collec-tions include books, videos, journals,and other materials related to the L&CExpedition, westward expansion, trap-pers and traders, mountain men, Indi-ans, and the Lewis and Clark NationalHistoric Trail. The Sherman Library isopen to the public. It is a research fa-cility used by students, the press, na-tionally known authors, researchers,genealogy buffs, and many others in-terested in the expedition and relatedtopics. Hours are by appointment. Call406-761-3950 or visit www.lewisandclark.org for more information.

— Jill JacksonLibrarian and Archivist, LCTHF

T

From the Library

Barnes family donates rare Lewis & Clark books

Yellowstone SafariPickup from5/04, p. 10

Lewis and Clark:What Else Happened?

What else happenedin America whileLewis & Clark

explored the West?

www.LewisandClarkandWhatElse.com

THE MYSTERY OFLOST TRAIL PASS

A Quest for Lewis and Clark’sCampsite of September 3, 1805

WPO Supplementary Publication$12, plus $3 shipping

Lost Trail Book / P.O. Box 3434Great Falls, MT 59403

1-888-701-3434