•
The boatbuilder was guilty of “unpardonable negligence,” Lewis charged. August 5 came and went and only one side of the boat was partially planked. In desperation, Lewis thought of purchasing two or three pirogues. It is impossible to tell what he meant by this, as he used the words “pirogue” and “canoe” interchangeably. A pirogue is a flat-bottomed dugout, designed for marshes and shallow waters, most popular today among Louisiana duck-hunters. The pirogues Lewis had in mind, however, were much larger (and possibly not dugouts at all, but big flat-bottomed, masted rowboats built from planks). A canoe is a round- or curved-bottom craft, either dug out of the trunk of a large tree, or built to a frame and covered with bark or skins, most popular today for recreation on large, fast rivers. When Lewis said “canoe,” however, what he meant was a round-bottomed dugout much larger than today’s sporting canoes.
In his anxiety to get going, and with his doubts that the boatbuilder would ever complete the keelboat, Lewis was proposing to descend the Ohio River in pirogues until he could find a keelboat somewhere downriver to purchase. But when the local merchants told him there was no place to procure a boat below, and the boatbuilder promised to be done by August 13, Lewis abandoned the fantasy and waited and fumed.
Four days later, the builder got drunk and quarreled with his workmen, several of whom quit on the spot. Lewis threatened him with a canceled contract, but there wasn’t much reality to the threat: the boatbuilder had no competition within hundreds of miles. The builder did give a promise of greater sobriety, but this lasted less than a week. Lewis charged that he was “continuing to be constantly either drunk or sick.” Lewis spent most of his time at the work site, “alternately persuading and threatening.” He soothed himself some by buying a dog and naming it Seaman. He paid twenty dollars for the Newfoundland, a large black dog.
Each day the river sank a bit lower. It got so bad that Lewis was told “the river is lower than it has ever been known by the oldest settler in this country.”29
•
The delays all but drove him mad, but they had to be endured, because the job had to be done right. After all, Lewis was proposing to descend the Ohio, then ascend the Mississippi to the mouth of the Missouri, then ascend the Missouri to the Mandan villages in that boat. A lot of thought had gone into it, requiring skilled woodworking; the complexity of the thing must have been some part of the cause of the delay.II
Lewis had designed it, and he oversaw its construction and probably made modifications in the plans as the work progressed. It was basically a galley, little resembling the classic keelboat of the West. It seems to have been the standard type of vessel for use on inland waters at the outset of the nineteenth century, especially for military purposes. Lewis probably had been on a similar keelboat on the Ohio when he was a paymaster.
Clark’s sketch of the keelboat, from his field notes, January 21, 1804. (Beinecke Library, Yale University)
It was fifty-five feet long, eight feet wide at midships, with a shallow draft. It had a thirty-two-foot-high mast that was jointed near the base so it could be lowered. The mast could support a large square sail and a foresail. A ten-foot-long deck at the bow provided a forecastle. An elevated deck of ten feet at the stern accommodated a cabin. The hold was thirty-one feet in length and could carry a cargo of about twelve tons. Crossing the deck were eleven benches, each three feet long, for use by two oarsmen.
The boat could be propelled by four methods: rowing, sailing, pushing, and pulling. In pushing, the crew set long poles in the river bottom and pushed on them as they walked front to rear on the boat. Men or horses or ox used ropes for pulling, sometimes from the water, sometimes from the shore.30
To hurry the builder along, Lewis tried getting on his knees, he tried shouting and cursing, “but neither threats, persuasion or any other means which I could devise were sufficient to procure the completion of the work sooner than the 31st of August.”
He had hoped to be on his way on by July 20, at the latest by August 1. By the time the boat was ready, the river had fallen so low that “those who pretend to be acquainted with the navigation of the river declare it impracticable to descend it.” Lewis was going anyway.31
How anxious he was to get going he demonstrated on the morning of August 31. The last nail went into the planking at 7:00 a.m. By 10:00 a.m., Lewis had the boat loaded. To keep it as high in the water as possible, he shipped a considerable quantity of goods by wagon to Wheeling. In addition, he purchased a pirogue to carry as much as possible, to further lighten the load. He intended to purchase another at Wheeling to carry the goods coming by land. Then he was on his way.
* * *
I. Here Clark first wrote “on equal footing &c.,” then crossed it out and substituted “as mentioned in your letter.”
II. It took a dozen or more volunteers in Onawa, Iowa, more than sixty working days to build a replica in the late 1980s, using power tools.
CHAPTER NINE
Down the Ohio
September–November 1803
Lewis had proceeded only three miles when he pulled over at an island and at the request of the pioneers living on it gave a demonstration of his air gun, purchased from gunsmith Isaiah Lukens of Philadelphia. It was a pneumatic rifle. The stock was the reservoir, and it could be pumped full of air to a pressure of five to six hundred psi, at which point it was not much inferior in hitting power to the Kentucky rifle. That it produced no smoke or noise astonished the frontiersmen.1
Lewis fired seven times at fifty-five yards “with pretty good success.” He passed the curiosity around for examination. It went off accidentally; the ball passed through the hat of a woman about forty yards off, “cuting her temple; she fell instantly and the blood gusing from her temple. we were all in the greatest consternation supposed she was dead but in a minute she revived to our enespressable satisfaction, and by examination we found the wound by no means mortal or even dangerous.” Never again did he pass the air gun around when it was pumped up and loaded.
The expedition returned to the river. After a mile or so, “we were obledged to get out all hands and lift the boat over about thirty yards.” Then another ripple. And another. The captain got out too, and pulled or lifted. Twice. A third time. Fortunately, the water was temperate, but when Lewis had the boat put ashore for the night, having gone only ten miles downstream, he “was much fatiegued after labouring with my men all day. Gave my men some whiskey and retired to rest at 8 OClock.”2
•
That was the first entry in what became the journals of Lewis and Clark.I The journals are one of America’s literary treasures. Throughout, they tell their story in fascinating detail. They have a driving narrative that is compelling, yet they pause for little asides and anecdotes that make them a delight to read. Their images are so sharp they all but force the reader to put down the book, close the eyes, and see what the captains saw, hear what they heard. The journals never flash back or forward. From start to finish, they stick to the present. The more closely they are read, the greater the reward.
Theodore Roosevelt, no stranger to adventure, said this about the journals: “Few explorers who saw and did so much that was absolutely new have written of their deeds with such quiet absence of boastfulness, and have drawn their descriptions with such complete freedom from exaggeration.”3
It is not known when Lewis made entries in the journals. Not even the first entry. Did Lewis write it that night, before blowing out his candle? Or the next morning, on the boat? Or a week or so later, at a weather-enforced halt? There is an extensive literature on the subject, capped by an essay by Gary Moulton in the introduction to volume 2 of the modern edition of the journals. Moulton concludes, “Most of the material we now have was written by the captains in the course of the expedition.” Not all, just most. Moulton adds that it cannot be said when during the expedition the entries were written, whether on the day of the event or a few days or even a few months later. Never mind: as Moulton remarks, in
reading the journals “we are in a sense traveling with the captains and sharing their day-by-day experiences and uncertainties.”4
There is another, more important and tantalizing mystery. Lewis began his journal the day he began the expedition, August 31, 1803. He was a faithful recorder of flora and fauna, weather, the difficulties of getting down the river, unusual occurrences, people encountered. The journal, a combination travelogue and record, a description of matters new to science and of geography, and much more, obviously meant a great deal to him, and he was well aware of its importance to the success of the expedition. And he clearly enjoyed writing, thinking through the events of the day and sorting them out and making sense out of them in very long, very complex sentences that often threatened to get completely out of control but were always rescued by the last verb. Geographer Paul Russell Cutright speaks of “Lewis’s recurrent artistry in stringing apt words together colorfully,” and notes that among his virtues as a writer were “his sizable working vocabulary, his quietly authoritative statements, his active unrestrained interest in all natural phenomena, his consistent adherence to truth and, above all, his wide command of adjectives, verbs and nouns which repeatedly give color to his sentences.”5
Yet there are long periods—months at a time, nearly a year in one case—for which few and only sporadic journal entries by Lewis are known to exist. These gaps include September 19 to November 11, 1803; May 14, 1804, to April 7, 1805; August 26, 1805, to January 1, 1806; and from August 12 to the end of September 1806.
There is no explanation for the gaps. Possibly he was depressed, or maybe it was just a severe case of writer’s block. Neither explanation seems likely, however. In any event, as Moulton warns, no one is ready to say that no Lewis journal exists for those gaps, because scholars are always discovering new documentation about the expedition.
So maybe the entries Lewis made for those dates are just lost. But that too seems unlikely, because of internal evidence and because there exists no known letter lamenting the loss of daily journals kept by Lewis, either at the time or after his death.6 Meanwhile, we are grateful for what we do have.
•
On the morning of September 1, fog over the river kept Lewis and his party ashore until 8:00 a.m. Lewis took care to load as much as possible in the pirogue, to lighten the load in the boat, but nevertheless ripples and shoals forced him again and again to unload and then lift the empty boat over the obstacle. At the last ripple of the day, Lewis was forced to seek out a local pioneer and hire a team of oxen to pull the boat off. The expedition made but ten miles.
September 2 was a repeat performance. The water was the lowest ever seen on the Ohio, sometimes but six inches deep, so low and clear Lewis could see catfish, pike, bass, and “stergeon” swimming. Stuck again, Lewis went ashore to hire a horse and an ox. “Payd the man his charge which was one dollar,” Lewis noted in his journal. Then he passed his judgment on the Ohio River pioneers, circa 1803: “The inhabitants who live ner these riffles live much by the distresed situation of the traveller [They] are gnerally lazy charge extravegantly when they are called on for assistance and have no filantrophy or contience.”
On the 3rd, at dawn, the air temperature was sixty-three, that of the river seventy-five. Lewis noted that “the fogg thus prodused is impenetrably thick at this moment” (one of the few times Lewis makes a reference to his precise time of writing). The party made six miles that day; Lewis discharged one of the men, for reasons unstated.
The following day, Lewis purchased another pirogue, for eleven dollars. He was cheated; it leaked badly. Goods got wet; guns began to rust. The party pulled over and spent the afternoon airing the articles, oiling the rifles, putting perishables into oilcloth bags, and otherwise repairing the damage. Lewis hired another hand, to replace the man dismissed.
On September 6, the wind came up strong from the north in a stretch of river free of ripples. Lewis hoisted the foresail on the mast and experienced the inexpressible joy of running downstream with a wind dead astern and a good sail to catch the power of that wind. “We run two miles in a few minutes,” Lewis wrote, almost unbelieving. Unfortunately, the wind strengthened to the point where Lewis was obliged to haul in the sail lest it carry away the mast.
At the next ripple, the exhilaration gave way to consternation. Lewis hoisted the mainsail on the mast to run the stuck boat over the ripple, only to break the crosspiece. “My men woarn down by perpetual lifting,” Lewis wrote, “I was obliged again to have recourse to horses or oxen.” He went to “Stewbenville,” on the Ohio bank of the river, and found it a “small well built thriving place has several respectable families residing in it, five yers since it was a wilderness.” He got the oxen and soon was afloat again. He concluded his entry with the sad news that, on the day during which he had covered two miles in but a few minutes, his total mileage for the day was but ten.
On September 7, he reached Wheeling, Virginia, which he found to be “a pretty considerable Village of fifty houses.” He dined that evening with Dr. William Patterson, son of the Robert Patterson of Philadelphia who had been one of Lewis’s teachers. Young Patterson was enthusiastic about Lewis’s expedition. “He expressed a great desire to go with me,” Lewis recorded, and Lewis was receptive, at least in part because Patterson had the largest collection of medicines west of the mountains—a pharmacy worth one hundred pounds.
Lewis told Patterson that a doctor was not authorized, but if he went on to St. Louis, where Lewis expected to spend the winter, there would be an opportunity to get Jefferson’s authorization for Patterson to join the party.
This was Lewis’s first admission that he would not have time to ascend the Missouri River for any distance at all before winter set in. Progress down the Ohio was so excruciatingly slow, he had to adjust. But he was eager to get going. Lewis told Patterson to be ready by 3:00 p.m. on September 9 and they’d be off together. Wouldn’t miss it for the world, the doctor replied.
In Wheeling, Lewis picked up the shipment of rifles and ammunition he had sent overland from Pittsburgh and found it in good order. To carry it, he purchased another pirogue. That took up the better part of the day on September 9. By midafternoon, everything was finally packed and ready to go—but no sign of Dr. Patterson.
Lewis shoved off. That night, he opened his journal entry on a laconic note: “The Dr. could not get ready I waited untill three this evening and then set out.” Thus did Dr. Patterson miss the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It was undoubtedly just as well; his reputation was one of constant drunkenness, which may well have been the cause of his being late.
That night, the rain came down in torrents. Lewis covered the pirogues with oilcloth to no avail. He was up past midnight in a cold rain, wet to the skin. Finally, “I wrung out my saturated clothes, put on a dry shirt and turned into my birth.” In the morning, he stopped at an Indian earth mound on the Virginia bank and described it in considerable detail. Even with the stop, he made his best distance to date, twenty-four miles, because the river below Wheeling was relatively free of riffles and other obstructions. The next day, September 11, it was twenty-six miles. The highlight of the day was a performance by Seaman, Lewis’s Newfoundland, described by Lewis as “very active strong and docile.”
Squirrels were migrating across the Ohio River, north to south, for reasons obscure to Lewis, since their principal food, hickory nuts, was in abundance on both banks.II Seaman started barking at them; Lewis let him go; Seaman swam out, grabbed a squirrel, killed him, and fetched him back to Lewis, who sent the dog out for repeated performances. Lewis had the squirrels fried and declared “they were fat and I thought a plesent food.”
On the morning of September 13, Lewis saw another natural-history phenomenon: passenger pigeons flying over the river, north to south, on their migration. They flew in such great flocks they obscured the sun.
The river he was descending continued to broaden and deepen. It still sparkled in the sunlight, especially as the angle of the sun on
the water became more acute with the shorter days. The water was dark, almost black, after the recent heavy rains. The banks were lined with hardwoods, deep green, enclosing. All the sounds on the river, other than the splash of the oars, were from nature’s chorus—frogs and birds mainly, and the wind through the trees.
Although clearings were rare and villages even rarer, this was not wilderness. Lewis and at least some of the men in the boat party had been down the river before, as had thousands of other Americans. It had been mapped, so Lewis had no reason to use his instruments to determine longitude and latitude. Still, it was wild enough to suit.
When Lewis pulled into Marietta at 2:00 p.m., he was in high spirits. He wrote a report to Jefferson, outlining his progress since Wheeling, describing his several methods for getting over obstructions, and indulging himself in a little joke: “Horses or oxen are the last resort; I find them the most efficient sailors in the [riffles], altho’ they may be considered somewhat clumsey.”7
Marietta, founded in 1788, was the oldest settlement in Ohio. Only a handful of children had been born there; indeed, only a few adult residents had been born in Ohio. Lewis spent a night there. He dismissed two of the men, for unstated reasons, reducing his party to a dozen. He had a visit with Colonel Griffin Greene, one of the founders of Marietta “and an excelant republican.” That last qualification had gotten Greene the appointment as postmaster.
Two men got drunk in the village and failed to report back to the boat. In the morning, Lewis went looking for them, found them “so drunk that they were unable to help themselves,” had them picked up and thrown into the boat, and set off.