Undaunted Courage

  Though Lewis was authorized to draw volunteers from the garrison at Fort Massac, he was disappointed in the quality of the men who stepped forward. Only two met his standards.

  •

  On November 13, the expedition set off from Massac. There was a heavy rain. “I was siezed with a violent ague,” Lewis wrote in his journal, “which continued about four hours and as is usual was succeeded by a fever which however fortunately abated in some measure by sunrise.”

  He had malaria. When he woke, “I took a doze of Rush’s pills, which operated extremly well.” The fever passed.

  That night, the party landed on the point at which the Ohio and Mississippi flowed together. For the following week, Lewis and Clark made measurements and conducted celestial observation. With his measuring chain and circumferentor, or surveying compass, Clark determined by triangulation that the width of the Ohio at the point just before junction was 1,274 yards, that of the Mississippi 1,435 yards, and of the combined rivers 2,002 yards.

  •

  During the encampment at the mouth of the Ohio, Lewis began to apply the lessons he had learned in Philadelphia on celestial observation, and simultaneously to teach Clark what he knew.

  Establishing latitude was complicated, but doable in the field. Using the octant (in the summer) or the sextant (winter), Lewis would “shoot” the sun at noon and take its altitude. He would then consult a table to determine latitude. The angle of the sun at high noon, together with the date, would tell him for certain how far north of the equator he was.

  Determining longitude was almost impossibly complicated. If Lewis knew it was high noon in Greenwich, and he knew exactly what time it was where he was, he could figure out his longitude. But to know the time in Greenwich required an accurate chronometer. Though Lewis had bought the best available in Philadelphia, it was not reliable.

  The alternative was to note the regular movement of the moon, measured against the sun and stars. The method was to choose a bright star as a fixed point against which to measure the moon’s easterly motion in its orbit around the earth. The stars that could be used for the measurement were Antares, Altair, Regulus, Spica, Pollux, Aldeberan, Formalhaut, Alphe, Arieties, and Alplo Pegas.

  Lewis could identify those stars, and many others—a skill that he had absorbed in the course of his life. He had spent countless nights stretched out in the open, countless hours staring at the stars. He had enjoyed the privilege of walking the grounds after dark at the President’s House and at Monticello with Thomas Jefferson for his guide to the skies. The skill also grew out of his character. His intense curiosity compelled him to study the world around him and the sky above him.

  His crash course in Philadelphia enabled him to make the observations. It was complicated. With the sextant, every few minutes he would measure the angular distance between the moon and the target star. The figures obtained could be compared with tables showing how those distances appeared at the same clock time in Greenwich. Those tables were too heavy to carry on the expedition, and the work was too time-consuming. Since Lewis’s job was to make the observations and bring them home, he did not try to do the calculations; he and Clark just gathered the figures.

  It meant staying up till midnight, making observations every five minutes or so for an hour or more. It meant frustration on those nights—too frequent—when clouds came up to render observation impossible.23 The sky over the dark, murmuring river was black and transparent, free of any pollutants, far from any glowing village. Behind the captains, the men slept in their tents, the quiet sleep of healthy young men exhausted from the day’s labors. The private on guard duty kept a small fire burning. Lewis’s dog sat beside him as he called out the numbers for Clark.

  This was practice—the longitude and latitude of the mouth of the Ohio were known—but Lewis and Clark worked at it as if it were the real thing, because soon enough it would be.

  •

  Seaman was always with Lewis. On the afternoon of November 16, the captains crossed to the Spanish side of the Mississippi to make observations. They encountered a camp of Indians. One of them, “a respectable looking Indian,” offered Lewis three beaver skins for Seaman. Lewis refused, with considerable indignation. He pointed out that he had paid twenty dollars in cash for the dog. Besides, Lewis wrote, “I prised [Seaman] much for his docility and qualifications generally for my journey.”

  On November 18, Lewis complained that the men had discovered a nearby illegal trading post, with whiskey as the main trade item. He issued orders to stay away, but a number of the men went anyway and got drunk. Whiskey and whiskey traders were the bane of frontier life; Lewis had to anticipate more trouble with drinking during the long winter nights coming up.

  On November 20, the expedition set out for St. Louis. Now it was headed upstream—and would continue to labor upstream until it reached the Continental Divide somewhere in the Rocky Mountains.

  * * *

  I. There are many editions of the journals. By far the best is Gary Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, published in eight volumes by the University of Nebraska Press between 1987 and 1993. My quotations are taken from the Moulton edition. I have not annotated quotations from the journals, because it is just as easy to look up the original by searching for the date of the entry as by searching for volume 3, page 76, or whatever. Also, relying on the date will allow those who wish to see the full entry to do so in the Reuben Gold Thwaites eight-volume edition, or the Biddle paraphrase, or any of the various other editions.

  II. The squirrel population today is much reduced, and the migrations Lewis saw are all but extinct.

  III. Complicating everything was the 1783 treaty between the United States and Britain. It ran a line west from the source of the Mississippi River relative to the Lake of the Woods, or latitude 49 degrees. It was not clear whether the Purchase or the treaty would prevail in setting the boundary.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Up the Mississippi to Winter Camp

  November 1803–March 1804

  The expedition headed out into the Mississippi, then turned upstream. Lewis and Clark scholar Arlen Large speculates that this may have been the instant when the captains decided they needed more men.1 The power of that river, with its boils and swirls and floating obstacles, awed them.

  Back east, Robert Fulton was doing his first experiments with a steamboat, but on the Mississippi, the expedition was proceeding at a pace closer to that of the first century than to the age of steamboats. Lewis now was face-to-face with what would be his major problem almost until he reached the Continental Divide, moving relatively large craft upstream on a major river.

  The pirogues were badly undermanned; the keelboat was woefully so. They had to cross the river, east to west, west to east, at every bend, because only in the relatively slack water downstream from a point of land could they make any significant progress north. In eight hours of constant rowing or paddling, the expedition made ten and a half miles. Much more muscle power was needed. In addition, one man would have to stay constantly at the bow of the keelboat, watching for huge uprooted trees rushing downstream on the boiling current. More men would require more supplies.

  Lewis had a lot to think about while the men dug in for all they were worth as the tiny fleet slowly inched its way north. He and Clark were not men who made snap judgments, but in this case it is likely that Arlen Large got it right: they decided on the first day to expand the party by more than 100 percent.

  Over the next few days, the men worked the craft upstream, seldom making more than one mile per hour. Even more maddening, the river twisted and turned to such an extent that the twenty-five air miles to Cape Girardeau were forty-eight river miles. It took four days to reach the cape.

  The village had been founded by Louis Lorimier some twenty years earlier. A French Canadian, he had been a Loyalist during the revolution and had fought George Rogers Clark, who had burned down one of his establishments, worth twenty thousand dollars.
“This broke him as a mercht,” Lewis noted in his journal on November 25, but Lorimier was a high-risk-taking, fast-talking, hard-bargaining, vigorous, and ambitious frontier entrepreneur, a man who could recover from disaster.

  After General Clark burned him out, Lorimier talked the Spanish into giving him a land grant on the west bank of the river. He built a trading post at Cape Girardeau. He encouraged American emigration into the area, which consequently flourished.

  Lewis called on Lorimier and was told that the boss was at a horse race. Lewis went to the course. “The seane reminded me very much of their small raises in Kentucky among the uncivilized backwoodsmen, nor did the subquent disorder which took place in consequences of the decision of the judges of the rase at all lessen the resembleance. . . . it is not extrawdinary that these people should be disorderly. they are almost entirely emegrant from the fronteers of Kentuckey & Tennessee, and are the most dessolute and abandoned even among these people; they are men of desperate fortunes, but little to loose either character or property.”

  Lorimier, on the other hand, intrigued him. Nearly sixty years old, he could not read or write. He had a “remarkable suit of hair; . . . it touched the grond when he stood errect. . . . when cewed it is kept close to his back by means of a leather gerdle.” Lorimier’s wife was a Shawnee woman. He had many children by her, including a daughter who caught Lewis’s eye: “She is remarkably handsome & dresses in a plain yet fashonable stile or such as is now Common in the Atlantic States among the respectable people of the middle class. she is an agreeable affible girl, & much the most descent looking feemale I have seen since I left Louisville.”

  •

  On November 28, the expedition reached the army post at Kaskaskia, on the Illinois side, some sixty miles below St. Louis. It was home to Captain Russell Bissell’s infantry company and to Captain Amos Stoddard’s artillery company. Lewis’s first act was to show the captains his orders from Dearborn, authorizing him to raid their companies. Then he called for volunteers and made his selections. The exact number is not known; Arlen Large thinks it was something more than a dozen.2 Not all would go all the way to the Pacific; Lewis was thinking of sending a detachment back to St. Louis from the Mandan villages, where he anticipated spending the winter of 1804–5. Lewis also requisitioned Stoddard for seventy-five pounds of powder and a cask to hold it.3

  On December 4, Clark set out with the boat party, headed for the mouth of Wood River, upstream from St. Louis on the Illinois side, directly opposite the mouth of the Missouri. The word was that it was well timbered, with plenty of game and a nearby settlement of pioneers.

  Lewis traveled up the Illinois bank by horseback. He arrived at the village of Cahokia, almost directly across from St. Louis, on December 7. The next morning, Lewis crossed the river to St. Louis, along with Nicholas Jarrot (a Cahokia fur trader) as interpreter to meet the Spanish lieutenant governor of Upper Louisiana, Colonel Carlos Dehault Delassus. The meeting had some rough spots. Delassus denied Lewis permission to go up the Missouri until the transfer of sovereignty had taken place in St. Louis. Lewis did not argue the point. It was too late in the season to press on anyway, and Lewis needed to be near St. Louis to purchase supplies for the extra men.

  Lewis told Delassus that his objective was to explore the Missouri country, purely for scientific purposes. Delassus, in a report to his superiors, said he had heard different: “According to advices, I believe that his mission has no other object than to discover the Pacific Ocean, following the Missouri, and to make intelligent observations, beause he has the reputation of being a very well educated man and of many talents.”4

  •

  Built on a bluff above the flood plain, St. Louis when Lewis arrived was four decades old, with a population of a little over a thousand, mainly French Canadians. For so young and so small a town, St. Louis had a critical role to play in a vast empire. It was the center of the fur trade for the huge region drained by the Missouri. Most of the trade goods came from across the ocean, then crossed the continent to reach St. Louis. From that central point, the goods fanned out via individual traders to the farthest reaches of the frontier. And the pirogues and keelboats that carried the trade goods to the Indians brought back stacks and stacks of beautiful furs that brought king’s ransoms in Europe.

  Business opportunities abounded, in short, and continued to expand, because of the American pioneers slipping across to the Spanish side and making farms on the pieces of ground they had cleared. When the formal transfer of Louisiana from Spain to France and then to the United States took place, expected sometime in the coming spring, Americans would be rushing into the Missouri country. They would need outfitting.

  As if things weren’t good enough for the St. Louis merchants, here came Meriwether Lewis, with only enough supplies in hand for a party of fifteen, instead of the amounts needed for a party of forty-five, and armed with an authorization from the president to buy whatever he might need and charge it to the army. The merchants of the day had suddenly become the first military contractors in St. Louis.

  In addition to supplies, Lewis was going to need men, voyagers with strong backs who could paddle the pirogues up the Missouri to the Mandan villages. He would be spending a lot of time in the town, haggling with merchants, sizing up volunteers. Before Lewis left Washington, Jefferson had given him oral instructions to gather as much statistical information as possible on Upper Louisiana, which meant another job to do in St. Louis.

  At the time he arrived in St. Louis, Lewis had not yet received Jefferson’s direct orders to abandon his risky plan to ride to Santa Fe during the winter months, but he had put the foolish thought out of his mind anyway. His problem was going to be finding enough time to do all that needed to be done, not how to pass time.

  First came winter camp. On December 9, Lewis crossed to the Illinois side and met Clark and the party at Cahokia. He reported that the Spanish would not allow a movement up the Missouri, but Jarrot had a claim to a four-hundred-acre tract at the mouth of Wood River and suggested Lewis would find it a good place to build huts for the winter, to get started on modifying the keelboat for the long haul up the Missouri, and to select and train the men for the permanent party. Clark went on to the site to look it over.

  Lewis returned to St. Louis to get going on his tasks. He began by doing his research on Upper Louisiana. It was the first survey done by an American of any part of the Purchase. Lewis worked up a questionnaire, with such queries as the population, the number of immigrants from the United States into Louisiana, how much land had been granted to individuals, the value of the imports and exports to and from St. Louis, and so on. Then he set out to talk to the men in town who had some knowledge of the local and regional situation.

  He turned first to Antoine Soulard, surveyor general of Upper Lousiana for the Spanish government. Soulard, a Frenchman, told Lewis that the 1800 census recorded a population of about ten thousand in Upper Louisiana, two thousand of whom were slaves. About two-thirds of the whites were Americans. That was three years ago. In 1803 alone, it was estimated that another hundred American families had crossed over into Upper Louisiana. Scouts from North Carolina and elsewhere had come to look over the Missouri country, “in serch of some eligible positions to form settlements as soon as the American government is in operation.”

  In reporting these and other matters to Jefferson, Lewis referred to an idea Jefferson had often expressed to him—that the American pioneers in Upper Louisiana could be persuaded to accept land in Illinois in exchange for their holdings. It was Jefferson’s notion that the land west of the Mississippi could be turned into a vast Indian reservation, where the Indians could learn to farm and become good citizens. That way there could be an orderly progression of the frontier, across Ohio and Indiana and on to Illinois, and a frontier free from Indian troubles, since all the Indians would be removed to the far shore.

  This absurd notion showed how little Jefferson knew about Americans living west of the Appalachians.
With the Purchase, or even without the Purchase, there was no force on earth that could stop the flow of American pioneers westward. Good, cheap land was a magnet that reached all the way back to Europe. The pioneers were the cutting edge of an irresistible force. Rough and wild though they were, they were the advance agents of millions of Europeans, mostly peasants or younger sons of small farmers, who constituted the greatest mass migration in history.

  When Lewis and Clark arrived on the Mississippi River, they were following the first American settlers in Missouri and were but a jump ahead of thousands of others who were thinking about or already on their way to Missouri. Napoleon had gotten it right: he might as well sell and get some money for the place, because the Americans were going to overrun it anyway.

  Lewis must have known that the government couldn’t get the pioneers to abandon the land they had cleared and cultivated, yet he wrote Jefferson, “I am fully persuaded, that your wishes to withdraw the inhabitants of Louisiana, may in every necessary degree be affected in the course of a few years.” With a bit more realism, he added that the slaveholders might cause trouble—they would not want to cross into the free territory of Illinois.5

  •

  Lewis also did research for his tour. Soulard gave him a map that traced the Missouri to the mouth of the Osage River. Lewis got two other maps, one a general map of Upper Louisiana, and another, the so-called Mackay map, made by Scottish trader and explorer James Mackay, which Lewis sent Jefferson. In 1795, Mackay had gone as far up the Missouri as the village of the Omahas, and the following year he had sent a young assistant, John Evans, on a mission to the Pacific. Evans got no farther than the Mandan villages, but at least that gave Mackay the information he needed to extend his map of the Missouri as far up as the Mandans.