‘We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to
explore.
What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we
know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We
may conjecture many things.’
John Wesley Powell, Old West soldier and explorer
We drove into the town at the headwaters of the longest single river in North America. All the way to the Gulf of Mexico, Three Forks was where the waters of the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin converged to form the Missouri. They were given their names in 1805 by Meriwether Lewis. Both Capt. C. and myself… agreed to name them after the President of the United States and the Secretaries of the Treasury and state.
The third woman was twelve years old when she was captured here by the Mennetaree tribe, five years earlier. They had named the local hostelry after her. Sacajawea Hotel.
The magnificent white palace of the plains also had three stories, with a row of three dormers across the top floor, and a wrap-around veranda with hanging baskets and double Dorian columns around the bottom. A flagpole with a big stars and stripes shot straight up out of the equilateral triangular Palladian atop the entrance to the lobby. We climbed the stairs. Inside, a sign outside the restaurant advertised Tonight- Snow Crab- All You Can Eat. It had come a long way, like us.
And so had Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and Sacajawea, when they arrived in 1805. It was a strange convergence that night- the Commonwealth couple, the Discovery Corps, and crustacean corpses. The main thing we had in common with the Lewis and Clark Expedition was that no one of any geographical consequence was eating snow crab in Three Forks.
We had all come because of what had been eating Thomas Jefferson in 1802. It was a book by a British-Canadian explorer, named Alexander Mackenzie. Voyages from Montreal was eating Jefferson's brain.
The Pacific Northwest had always been the last temperate Terra Incognita of the continent, an expanse of geology too large to lay claim to and, in the same space and time, a crossroads of cultures. After LaSalle's exploration through the guts of it, in 1682, the French established a chain of posts along the Mississippi, from the Great Lakes to New Orleans.
Almost a hundred years later, Thomas Jefferson was the Minister to France of the new United States. He met John Ledyard in Paris and discussed an expedition of exploration to the Pacific Northwest. He had just read Le Page du Pratz's The History of Louisiana and, more intensively, Captain James Cook's A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and was on fire to discover a practical route through the Northwest to the Pacific coast.
In 1787, the French explorer Pedro Vial gave a map of the upper Missouri River and locations of 'territories transited by Pedro Vial' to Spanish authorities. Early in 1792 the American explorer Robert Gray, discovered a big river on the Pacific coast, and named it after his ship, the Columbia Redivida. Later in 1792, George Vancouver explored over 100 miles of it, into the Columbia River Gorge.
Alexander Mackenzie’s book convinced Jefferson that Britain intended to gain control of the lucrative fur trade on the Columbia River, and that he needed to secure the territory as soon as possible. But everything west of the Mississippi was still unknown to non-natives, except for the existence of the Rocky Mountains, that the upper Missouri seemed to flow from them, and that the large Columbia River entered the Pacific on on the other side of them.
In 1803 the US acquired a considerable piece of promise in the Louisiana Purchase, and Jefferson seized his chance to jumpstart his push to the Pacific. Because of his poor relationship with his opposition in Congress, he used a secret message to ask for funding the first American expedition to cross the western United States. Different disguised explanations were provided to British, French and Spanish diplomatic officials.
Jefferson commissioned a Corps of Discovery, and a U.S. Army Captain its leader. He chose a frontiersman, Meriwether Lewis, to be the Captain Cook of uncharted America, rather than a 'qualified scientist,' because It was impossible to find a character who to a complete science in botany, natural history, mineralogy & astronomy, joined the firmness of constitution & character, prudence, habits adapted to the woods & a familiarity with the Indian manners and character, requisite for this undertaking. All the latter qualifications Capt. Lewis has… Jefferson sent him to study North American geography in his library at Monticello, navigational instrument use with astronomer Andrew Ellicott, and medicinal cures under the tutelage of physician Benjamin Rush. Lewis chose Lieutenant William Clark as his second in command. In October of 1803 they met at the Falls of the Ohio, near Louisville, and received Jefferson's departure instructions.
‘The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River, & such
principle stream of it, as, by its course and communication with the
waters of the Pacific ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado
or any other river may offer the most direct & practicable water
communication across this continent for the purpose of commerce.’
There were scientific and economic secondary objectives, to study plants, animal life, geography, and other natural resources, and to engage the Indians in such a way as to establish sovereignty. The U.S. mint prepared a series of special silver Indian Peace Medals, with a portrait of Jefferson inscribed with a message of friendship and peace, for distribution to the nations they met. The expedition was supplied with knives, blacksmithing supplies, cartographic equipment, flags, gift bundles, medicine, black powder and lead for their flintlock firearms, and an advanced .44 caliber air rifle, powerful enough to kill a deer. They carried a description of Moncacht-Apé's transcontinental route a century earlier, which neglected to mention the need to cross the Rockies. This resulted in an unfortunate mistaken belief that they could easily carry boats from the Missouri's headwaters to the Columbia.
The Corps thirty-three members of trained at the Camp Dubois winter staging area in Indiana Territory, near Wood River, Illinois, until their departure at 4 pm, May 14, 1804. The Spanish in New Mexico had already been informed of their true intentions, and sent four armed expeditions of fifty-two soldiers, mercenaries, and Indians from Santa Fe northward, intending to imprison the entire party. When they reached learned that the expedition had been there days before, but Lewis and Clark were covering eighty miles a day, and the Spaniards arrived at the Pawnee settlement on the Platte, too late.
The only member of the Corps to die, Sergeant Charles Floyd, succumbed to the rotten guts of acute appendicitis on August 20, 1804, and was buried on a bluff on the river where Sioux City now stands. The Sioux called themselves the Lakota, and were there before the city. They had a reputation for hostility, and had proudly boasted of the almost complete destruction of the once great Cahokia nation, along with the Missouris, the Illinois, the Kaskaskia and the Piorias tribes, that lived in the upper Mississippi and Missouri river basins. Determined to block free trade on the water, Clark described them as the 'vilest miscreants of the savage race.'
They were in a particularly vile mood when Lewis and Clark arrived, anticipating a retaliatory raid from the Omahas further south, for killing 75 of their braves, burning 40 of their lodges, and taking four dozen prisoners. When the Teton Sioux under Black Buffalo, received gift offerings before their rivals, the Partisan tribe, the resulting tensions required more tribute, including tobacco, and lubrication with a bottle of whiskey, to negotiate further westward passage. Never follow good whiskey with water, unless you're out of good whiskey.
The Corps of Discovery stopped near present day Washburn, North Dakota, and built Fort Mandan to overwinter in. Here, they were visited by nearby Hidatsa tribes in numbers, and interviewed prospective trappers who might be able to interpret or guide the expedition up the Missouri River in the spring. On November 4, 1804, Clark wrote in his journal. A french man by Name Chabonah, who Speaks the Big Belley language visit us, he wished to hire & informed us his 2 Squars were Snake Indians, we engaged him to go on with us and take one of his wives to interpret the Snake language.
Toussaint Charbonneau was a Quebecois trapper, who had either purchased his two wives, or won them gambling. One was named Otter Woman but it was the other, Bird Woman, pregnant with her first child at the age of eighteen, who would be of the greatest value, because of her fluent Shoshone, and her gentile presence, which served to emphasize the mission’s peaceful intent.
When she went into a difficult labour on February 11, 1805, Charbonneau suggested that crushed rattlesnake rattles be administered, to speed the delivery. Lewis just happened to have some, and Sacajawea delivered a healthy baby boy named Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, who Clark nicknamed ‘Pompei.’
The Corps left Fort Mandan in April, in pirogues, poled against the current and sometimes pulled from the riverbanks, following the Missouri to its headwaters.
On May 14, Sacajawea rescued items that had fallen out of a capsized boat, including the journals of Lewis and Clark, who named the river in her honor. She encouraged the Shoshone to barter horses, and provide guides to lead the expedition over the Rockies. The trip was so hard that they were reduced to eating tallow candles. On their descent, over the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass, Sacagawea helped the Corps find camas roots to help them regain their strength. She became dangerously ill at Maria’s River, but recovered by drinking from the sulfur mineral spring that fed it.
The group carried on down the Clearwater River, the Snake, and the Columbia, past Celilo Falls. As they approached the mouth of the Columbia River, Sacagawea gave up her beaded belt of blue beads in trade for a fur robe for President Jefferson.
The Discovery Corps spent its second bitter winter, on the Pacific coast near Astoria, building Fort Clatsop. The decision had been put to a vote, which had included Sacajawea and Clark’s slave, York, the first time in American history a woman and a slave had been allowed suffrage.
In late March of 1806, the expedition started its return through Idaho, collecting 65 horses to cross the Bitterroot Mountains, still covered in snow. Lewis and Clark split into two teams. Lewis’ dog was stolen by Indians, and retrieved. Blackfoot tribes tried to steal his weapons, and two braves were killed in the melee. Clark had half his horses stolen by the Crow in the night, but no one had seen them do it. In July, Sacajawea took the Corps through Gibbons Pass and the Rocky Mountains, and across the Yellowstone basin at Bozeman Pass, which would later be chosen as the optimal route for the Northern Pacific, to cross the continental divide. On August 11, 1806, as the two parties reunited, one of Clark’s hunters mistook Lewis for an elk, and shot him in the thigh. A month later they had arrived in St. Louis, and made Jefferson’s history.
Clark invited Charbonneau and Sacajawea to settle there, and enrolled Jean-Baptiste in the Saint Louis Academy boarding school. In 1810 Sacajawea gave birth to a daughter, Lizette, and two years later, on December 20, 1812 …the wife of Charbonneau, a Snake Squaw, died of putrid fever.
The expedition she had guided, comprised of the first Americans to cross the continental divide, to see Yellowstone and enter into Montana, that had produced 140 first accurate maps of the area, recorded the whereabouts, lifestyles, customs, activities, social codes, and cultures of at least 72 native American Indian tribes, established legal title to their indigenous lands under the Doctrine of Discovery, and recorded more than 200 plants and animals new to science, would be largely forgotten, scarcely appearing in history books, even during the United States Centennial in 1876, until today.
By any measure, the room we had booked was tiny, so tiny in fact, that there was no way the large bellies we saw, gorging on Alaskan king crab in Pompei’s Grill downstairs, would have fit through the door, or on the bed. We asked for a room we could move in, but the desk clerk had to track down the manager, who was possibly a Crow brave, because no one had seen him in the night. We wandered outside for the sunset, backlighting the sky with a blazing radiance. Red Cloud. A motorcycle gang, a Discovery Corps of subdermal ink and transdermal metal, had taken over the veranda.
“I’m allergic to pigs and bull.” Said one particularly vocal member. But they were out of crab in Pompei’s by the time we were seated, and that’s what Robyn and I were left with for dinner. She had the pulled pork, and I had the Bison burger. It was my first taste of buffalo.
I don’t really know what Sacajawea would say about the trail she left, or the paradise room in the hotel they named after her. But that buffalo burger, in the restaurant named after her son- that buffalo burger was a hell of a lot better than eating candles.
‘I am not a coward, but I am so strong. It is hard to die.’
The last words of Meriwether Lewis
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