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Introduction to the Bicentennial Edition

Henry David Thoreau once asked, "how many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?" Thoreau's question was his way of acknowleding the power of print to transform and redirect lives. Thomas Jefferson would have agreed. The idea for the Lewis and Clark expedition was born in the summer of 1802 when he read Alexander Mackenzie'sVoyages from Montreal and realized that John Bull might claim the West before Uncle Sam made it over the mountains. For me the book that changed everything was John L. Allen'sPassage through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest, first published by the University of Illinois Press in 1975. Reading it set me to studying western exploration in general and the Lewis and Clark expedition in particular. It was Passage through the Garden that prompted me to ask if anyone had written about Lewis and Clark and native people. The topic seemed an obvious one to me, and I was sure that many books must explore so rich and compelling a subject. When I learned there were none, I impetuously decided to try my hand at the topic. Lewis and Clark among the Indians would not have come into existence without Passage through the Garden. Books make a difference; reading changes lives.

Lewis and Clark among the Indians was sparked by reading what John Allen wrote about geographic exploration, but the book also developed at a unique time in the writing of American history. Beginning in the 1960s many historians and other scholars were deeply involved in a comprehensive reevaluation of race in the American experience. While some scholars centered their attention on African Americans and Asian Americans, others probed the complexities of Native American cultures and communities. Until that time much Native American history centered on federal Indian policy and formal tribal histories. The story was most often told from Washington, D.C., and the principal actors were bureaucrats, soldiers, missionaries, and white settlers. But a different approach—something called ethnohistory—offered a new way to tell old stories. Inspired by the shared perspectives of history and anthropology, ethnohistorians expanded the field of inquiry, asked fresh questions, paid attention to often-neglected native sources, and listened carefully to Indian voices. Throughout the 1970s the ethnohistory I wrote described native people, Christian missionaries, and the changes sweeping throughout the colonial Northeast. In retrospect that work—so far from the Native American West of Lewis and Clark—prepared me to ask new questions about the larger western exploration story. As I wrote in the preface to this book, what captured my imagination was the possibility of writing "exploration ethnohistory."

At the very time Native American history experienced both transformation and renewal, the field of western American history underwent profound changes. While Lewis and Clark among the Indians was never identified with what became known as the "New Western History," the book was undoubtedly influenced by reading and listening to Patricia Nelson Limerick, Bill Cronon, Richard White, and Donald Worster. Their struggles to redefine western history and escape the intellectual straitjacket of the Turner Thesis impressed me and encouraged me. At the same time I did not want to abandon the narrative power and broad appeal I admired in the writing of Francis Parkman and Bernard DeVoto. Like them, I also wanted to engage a wider audience that included readers beyond the academic ranks. Quite simply, I hoped to write narrative history informed by a reinvigorated Indian history and a renewed western history. Exploration history—with its journey structure and memorable cast of characters—seemed to offer that possibility.

Because I was not trained as a western historian, I knew I needed a mentor, someone to guide me up the trails and over the mountains. In January 1980 I wrote to Donald Jackson—the dean of Lewis and Clark scholars—asking his help with my project. Don's answer was quick and gracious. As the senior editor at the University of Illinois Press and later as founding editor of the George Washington Papers at the University of Virginia, he never had students. Now Don became a professor. I was his sole student and our often-weekly letters were a seminar in the writing of western exploration history. Those letters continued until his death in December 1987. Rereading them now I can see Don cajoling and correcting me, keeping me on the trail, and reminding me not to lose track of the narrative line. If the dedication page had not been promised to someone else, it surely would have gone to Don.

When Thomas Jefferson prepared exploration instructions for Meriwether Lewis in June 1803 he repeated one phrase—"the object of your journey"—again and again. The president used the word "object" to mean "objective." Lewis and Clark among the Indians also has its objects. Perhaps the most important of those objects is to tell a familiar western journey story in a new way. I wanted to give readers a different angle of vision, another way to appreciate a story that had grown too familiar and perhaps a bit stale. Simply put, Lewis and Clark among the Indiansasks readers to get off the expedition's boats and get on the bank. What had always been seen through the eyes of Lewis and Clark needed to be experienced through the eyes of native people. By shifting points of view and introducing new speakers I hoped to tell a richer and more compelling story, one that would reflect the diversity of the West itself.

That was my intention. I soon found that the telling involved a research task of considerable size and complexity. The task was more than thinking out a new research design. It involved enlarging the Lewis and Clark story in particular and the western exploration story in general. Writing history is always an act of the imagination. What I needed to do was reimagine the expedition and the western worlds through which it moved. In the popular mind Jefferson's Corps of Discovery had only three members—Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea. Donald Jackson's magisterial Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition changed all that for those who were paying attention. Jackson put it with characteristic bluntness: "It is no longer useful to think of the Lewis and Clark Expedition as the personal story of two men. Their journey . . . was an enterprise of many aims and a product of many minds." Jackson's cast of characters ranged from the attorney general of the United States to obscure craftspeople in Philadelphia and St. Louis. Challenged by Jackson's words and our correspondence, I went in search of an even larger cast, one that acted on a stage that stretched up the Missouri, across the mountains, down the Columbia, and on to the shores of the Pacific. If this journey story was to have any cultural meanings within the larger American experience, it needed a telling that paid attention to native aims and minds.

Enlarging the expedition story called for more actors on a wider stage; it also meant broadening the range of sources and methodologies from those typically used in writing history. Lewis and Clark among the Indians drew heavily on the available anthropological and archaeological literature, especially the site reports from digs along the Missouri and Columbia Rivers. Here I had the good fortune to meet W. Raymond Wood, one of the foremost northern Great Plains archaeologists. He introduced me to unpublished materials, including specialized studies done for the National Park Service. From there the research spread out to formal, academic tribal histories and the invaluable oral traditions preserved in many different ways. But in all of this I repeatedly came back to the expedition's journals. Don Jackson once called the expedition's journal keepers "the writingest explorers" in American history. What I found in a close and critical reading of Lewis, Clark, John Ordway, Patrick Gass, Joseph Whitehouse, and Charles Floyd was a wealth of material about expedition-Indian relations. The biases and prejudices are surely there; but so are the native voices. The journals name the names and mark out the places. And it is more than simply names and places. At a certain level writing history is an act of rescue. Historians rescue and restore lost voices. The Lewis and Clark journals make that kind of rescue and restoration possible. Again and again Corps of Discovery journal keepers recorded what native people told them about everything from plants and animals to geography and relations with tribal neighbors. Despite what were surely inadequate translations we can still hear the voices of Mandan chief Black Cat, Clatsop headman Coboway, and Nez Perce chief Twisted Hair. It is those voices that give depth and richness to the Lewis and Clark story.

In the nearly twenty years since the publication of Lewis and Clark among the Indians interest has only grown in the expedition and its place in the history of the American West. That fascination has been fueled by a tidal wave of books, television documentaries, guided tours, and museum exhibitions. The shared bicentennials of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Louisiana Purchase add that much more to a widespread enthusiasm for the Corps of Discovery and its journey. While many in the general public still cling to the notion of Jefferson's explorers as "captains courageous," historians have come to appreciate the expedition story as an emblematic moment in the larger history of the continent. The central argument in Lewis and Clark among the Indians has gained considerable acceptance. Most who write about the expedition now acknowledge that native people were at the heart of the enterprise. Without those Indian voices and views the story is at best only half told.

Some two decades later I would have said some things more forcefully. One of those would be the importance of Indians as explorers. Just as Lewis and Clark explored the lives and cultures of native people, so too did Indians explore Jefferson's travelers and the things they carried with them. What happened from the Missouri to the Columbia was mutual discovery, shared moments of exploration encounter. Much of that discovery was done through the fog of confusion, misunderstanding, and ambiguity. But when Black Cat went to Fort Mandan inquiring about the expedition's "fashions," he was part of a Corps of Discovery far larger than Thomas Jefferson ever imagined.

Perhaps nothing has contributed more to Lewis and Clark scholarship over the past twenty years than the appearance of Gary E. Moulton's magnificent Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, published by the University of Nebraska Press. When I wrote Lewis and Clark among the Indians in the early 1980s, only the atlas volume of the Moulton edition was available. My research was in the Reuben Gold Thwaites edition, with its reasonably reliable text but woefully inadequate annotations. Had I started a bit later, my book would have benefited substantially from the comprehensive ethnographic and linguistic scholarship that informs the entire Moulton edition. Examples abound. I would have spelled and translated names like Untongarabar (Black Buffalo Bull) or War-cha-pa (The Stabber) differently. I would have more precisely located important Nez Perce and Columbia River villages and fishing camps. I would have had much more to say about the native use of medicinal plants and medical practices. Perhaps most important, I could have made use of the superb linguistic scholarship present in every Moulton volume.

On May 13, 1804—the day the Corps of Discovery left its camp at Wood River—William Clark wrote that the expedition's "road across the continent" would take it through a "multitude of Indians." Almost a year later, as the company prepared to head out from Fort Mandan on its way to the Pacific, Meriwether Lewis declared that he and his fellow travelers were "about to penetrate a country . . . on which the foot of civillized man had never trodden." In that contest of images—a West filled with native people and an empty, savage land—Clark had it right. He recognized something fundamental about his own journey and the larger American journey. The expedition was a diverse human community moving through the lands and lives of other communities. This was no "tour of discovery" through an empty West. Lewis and Clark among the Indians is an attempt to tell that story. What has so often been recounted in terms of high adventure, national triumph, and male courage needs to be told again as a complex human story. Lewis and Clark among the Indians aims at overturning the old narrative and replacing it with one more subtle, more nuanced, and, I hope, more compelling. I remain persuaded that this story and its many voices has much to offer as we struggle to understand our troubled past and often-uncertain present. This larger Corps of Discovery is a reminder that we are all pilgrims on the way, making our way by the kindness of strangers.

Preface

The Lewis and Clark expedition has long symbolized the westering impulse in American life. No other exploring party has so fully captured the imagination of ordinary citizens or the attention of scholars. In ways that defy rational explanation, the picture of Lewis and Clark struggling up the Missouri and across the mountains to the great western sea continues to stir our national consciousness. Books, highway markers, museum displays, and a foundation dedicated to preserving the Lewis and Clark trail all bear witness to a fascination that time has only deepened.

Over the generations since the expedition returned from the Pacific, its achievement and significance for America heading west have undergone constant reappraisal. From an early emphasis on the journey as an epic of physical endurance and courage, Lewis and Clark have emerged in this century as pioneer western naturalists, cartographers, and diplomats. Thomas Jefferson, the man William Clark once called "that great Chaructor the Main Spring" of the expedition, would have heartily endorsed an evaluation of the Corps of Discovery that included sharp minds as well as strong bodies. And Jefferson would have reminded us that his explorers were part of that long encounter between Euro-Americans and native Americans. In its daily affairs and official actions, the expedition passed through, changed, and was in turn changed by countless native lives.

In the simplest terms, this book is about what happens when people from different cultural persuasions meet and deal with each other. The Lewis and Clark expedition was an integral and symbolic part of what James Axtell has aptly called "the American encounter." Nearly two and a half years of almost constant contact between explorers and Indians illuminate the larger and longer series of cultural relationships that began centuries before on the margins of the continent. This book is not a retelling of the familiar Lewis and Clark adventure. That story has been told with grace and skill by Bernard DeVoto and in the magnificent photographs of Ingvard Eide and David Muench. But readers will find moments of high drama not previously well known or clearly understood. This book is not an attempt to dress up exploration history with feathers and paint to satisfy current political needs. Nor is it a stitching together of capsule tribal histories and ethnographies. Finally, readers need not expect a catalog of every ethnographic observation recorded in the journals of the expedition.

What this book does offer is something new for the history of exploration in general and Lewis and Clark literature in particular—a full-scale contact study of the official and personal relations between the explorers and the Indians. In 1952, Bernard De Voto wrote that "a dismaying amount of our history has been written without regard to the Indians." While much has changed since then, the history of exploration remains largely the story of the explorers themselves.Lewis and Clark among the Indians is an effort to meet DeVoto's challenge by looking at the very explorers he wrote about with such passion and perception. Lewis and Clark were indeed what William Goetzmann has labeled them, "diplomats in buckskin," but they and their party amounted to something more as well. The Corps of Discovery was a human community living in the midst of other human communities. The word among in the title was chosen to suggest that sense of living together. The daily dealings of Indians and explorers touched the full range of action and emotion. What is treated in these pages runs the gamut from high policy to personal liaisons, from the careful collection of ethnographic data to the sharing of food and songs around a blazing fire.

Every historian must first come to terms with his sources. Because the thoughts and actions of men like Weuche, Yelleppit, and Coboway are as central to the story of the expedition as the plans and designs of the explorers themselves, it is important to note the evidence and method used in this study. Donald Jackson once described Lewis and Clark as "the writingest explorers of their time." Lewis, Clark, Sergeants John Ordway, Charles Floyd, and Patrick Gass, and Private Joseph Whitehouse all wrote long, often perceptive passages in their diaries about native people. Despite the kinds of obvious cultural biases that scholars have long since learned to deal with in documentary analysis, the Lewis and Clark records provide a store of information about Indians unequaled in the literature of exploration. When joined to other contemporary evidence produced by the likes of David Thompson, Alexander Henry the Younger, Pierre-Antoine Tabeau, and Prince Maxmilian of Wied, the historical record is rich indeed. But by itself that written documentary record cannot fully explain the intricate patterns of encounter that bound Indians and explorers together. To that evidence this study brings the findings of anthropology and archaeology. Site reports and culture element distributions are used here not as fashionable window dressing but as a vital means to give depth and meaning to the behavior of native people. Tribal history is here meant to suggest context in human action. Ethnohistory has been usefully defined by Mildred Wedel and Raymond DeMallie as the critical examination of written evidence in the light of anthropological perspectives. This book is exploration ethnohistory, a deliberate effort to probe the complexity of Indian-white encounters in North America by examining a memorable venture that has come to represent the westward movement.

The Lewis and Clark drama had actors drawn from both sides of the cultural divide. As Lewis and Clark were important players with powerful lines, so too were Black Buffalo, Cameahwait, and the Nez Perce woman Watkuweis. If the expedition was what the western photographer Ingvard Eide called it, "the American odyssey," then all the argonauts—those who ventured to the sea and those who watched in wonder—must have their voices heard. The Lewis and Clark expedition has come to mean something special if indefinable in our national history. All the participants in that odyssey require their measure so that the story of the expedition and the nation not be half-told. This book is about that measure and those voices.

Acknowledgments

Meriwether Lewis once called the expedition "a darling project of mine." This book has been that for me during the past four years. Thanking friends, colleagues, and companions for support, encouragement, and criticism is the most pleasant task any writer can undertake. This book began when I read John Allen's brilliant Passage through the Garden and wondered if anyone had made a study of the Corps of Discovery and native peoples. My earliest research on explorers and Indians was aided and abetted by two institutions—the Youngstown State University Research Council and Mike Faklis, gifted bookman and supplier of endlessly delightful volumes. As that research progressed I steadily incurred debts that demand at least interest paid here. I am especially grateful to the staff at the Missouri Historical Society, William Lang at the Montana Historical Society, Joseph Porter at the Joslyn Art Museum, and Stephen Catlett at the American Philosophical Society. John Allen, William Goetzmann, and Alvin Josephy, Jr., provided comments and inspiration in greater measure than hoped for. Five minutes with John Ewers cleared up a whole knot of Blackfeet questions. I owe a special debt to Ray Wood for anthropological services rendered. Gary Moulton, editor of the new Lewis and Clark Journals project, has been both friend and long-distance colleague.

Anyone pursuing Lewis and Clark must eventually encounter the wonderful people who make up the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation. Among those in the foundation who gave me support and encouragement were Irving Anderson, E. G. "Frenchy" Chuinard, Robert Lange, and the best guide any greenhorn could want, Wilbur Werner of Cut Bank, Montana. Closer to home, research was made easier by the services of Hildegard Schnuttgen, who heads the Interlibrary Loan Department at Maag Library, Youngstown State University. Mrs. Margaret Carl took drafts filled with strange names and distant places and made sense of them all. Colleagues in the Department of History—especially Fred Blue, Lowell Satre, Agnes Smith, and Martin Berger—have heard more about Lewis and Clark than they ever wanted to know.

If this book did not already have a dedication promised long ago, it would be sent with affection and thanks to three extraordinary people. From the beginning of this venture, Donald Jackson has read each chapter with the kind of critical eye for both style and substance that only he has. Don's enthusiasm prodded me on when several chapters got stalled on the wrong side of the Great Divide. Jim Axtell was part of my life long before it was invaded by Lewis and Clark. His patient, perceptive reading of the chapters has meant more than I can tell. That both of us appear in each other's acknowledgments, books, and articles only hints at what more than ten years of conversations and letters have yielded. But no one has lived more with this enterprise than my wife, Jeanne. She braved five weeks of demanding dirt camping in the summer of 1980 as we retraced the Lewis and Clark route. Her faith never wavered; my gratitude is equally unwavering. All of these friends share in what is good between these covers, but not in the shortcomings, which are mine.

Youngstown, Ohio
January 1984

The Voyage Begins

"In all your intercourse with the natives, treat them in the most friendly and
conciliatory manner which their own conduct will permit."

—Thomas Jefferson, "Instructions to Lewis, June, 1803"

The Indian relations of the Lewis and Clark expedition began long before the explorers nosed their boats into the Missouri current and headed upriver. Thomas Jefferson knew that as his explorers moved over the visible world of rivers, mountains, and plains, they would also pass through a more important world—a sometimes invisible universe of Indian politics and European rivalries. He grasped what so often escaped others, that the American West was a crowded wilderness. Although nudged by reading Alexander Mackenzie, Jefferson did not need the dour Scot to tell him that lands from St. Louis to the great western sea were neither empty nor unclaimed. The political and economic face of the land had already been transformed by a generation of intense competition between tribal peoples and agents of Spain, France, and Great Britain. The president understood at least the outlines and implications of that struggle and the place of a latecoming American republic in it. If the Lewis and Clark expedition was to be successful, whether for science, commerce, or statecraft, it would need to navigate through troubled Indian waters.

From the beginning, Jefferson sought to fashion an expedition capable of gathering valuable information about western Indians while living at peace with them. That search became plain as he drafted instructions for his young secretary, Meriwether Lewis. The president loved questionnaires. He used them to explore new areas of knowledge and then to organize what he had learned. Jefferson's only published book, Notes on Virginia, was written in response to a questionnaire from the French diplomat and scientist François Barbé-Marbois and retained the question-and-answer form in its chapters.  [1] Jefferson's instructions to Lewis were a series of interlocking questions ranging from mineralogy to medicine. The ethnographic queries covered nearly every aspect of Indian life, including languages, customs, occupations, diseases, and morals.

Where did those very precise questions come from? The traditional answer has been that the Indian objectives pursued by Lewis and Clark reflected Jefferson's lifelong fascination with native American cultures. But there was more than one mind and one set of motives behind the expedition's Indian questions and its general policy toward native people. Early in 1803 Jefferson began to write friends both in and out of government asking their aid and advice for his western enterprise. In February he wrote three prominent Philadelphia scientists, Caspar Wistar, Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton, and Dr. Benjamin Rush, asking each to prepare some thoughts "in the lines of botany, zoology, or of Indian history which you think most worthy of inquiry and observation."  [2]

Even before his consultants submitted their questions, Jefferson began to prepare a preliminary draft of the instructions. By mid-April 1803 he was ready to circulate it among certain cabinet members for their responses. The remarks of Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin focused on western geography and the future expansion of the United States. Later in his career Gallatin made a major contribution in collecting and systematizing Indian material in his "Synopsis of the Indian Tribes." But just how much he had to do with framing the expedition's Indian questions remains unclear.  [3] On the other hand, the reply from Attorney General Levi Lincoln clearly influenced Jefferson's thinking. This important member of Jefferson's official family has not received much attention from students of western exploration. Lincoln, an able New England lawyer and a skillful Republican politician, understood that the expedition served many purposes. Lincoln's April 17 letter to Jefferson suggests that the early draft of instructions he saw contained very little about Indians. To remedy this deficiency, Lincoln urged Jefferson to include questions about tribal religions, native legal practice, concepts of property ownership, and Indian medical procedures. Although Jefferson was acquainted with smallpox inoculation, it appears that Lincoln was the first to suggest that Lewis take some cowpox matter along to administer to the Indians. If they were to have extensive contact with whites, they needed to be protected against smallpox. Dead Indians could not participate in an American trade network and dying natives could only blame the explorers for spreading disease. The attorney general's suggestions were of major importance, although he made them more out of political expediency than scientific curiosity. Lincoln was very sensitive to Federalist opposition to the journey, and indeed to any American westward expansion. He realized that the administration would need to justify the expedition on the high ground of science if it failed.  [4]