In April, he discovered and described for the first time the snow goose and the cackling goose. On April 13, Clark shot a Canada goose sitting on its nest in the top of a lofty cottonwood. Lewis climbed to inspect the nest and brought back an egg. He noted, “the wild gees frequently build their nests in this manner.” That statement later was challenged by nineteenth-century ornithologists, because east of the Mississippi geese always nested on the ground. But Lewis was right; on the Plains, geese often nested in trees as a precaution against predators. So much so that on May 3 Lewis was surprised to find a nest among some driftwood, the first he had seen on the ground. He took three eggs from it.
•
Another description later challenged—indeed, dismissed as an inexplicable error—was of the grizzly bear. On April 29, Lewis and a party of hunters brought in their first grizzly. Lewis described it in some detail. Among other observations, he said the testicles were “suspended in seperate pouches from two to four inches asunder.” He later described the same phenomenon on another bear. No one else has ever seen such a thing, but it is impossible to believe that Lewis made it up.
Lewis had seen the first grizzly sign on April 13. “The men as well as ourselves are anxious to meet with some of these bear,” he then recorded. The Indians had given the white men “a very formidable account of the strengh and ferocity of this anamal,” but Lewis had discounted the information, because the Indians had only bows and arrows or “the indifferent guns with which the traders furnish them, with these they shoot with such uncertainty and at so short a distance that they frequently mis their aim & fall a sacrefice to the bear.” It gave him a bit of pause that the Indians, before attacking a grizzly, went through all the rituals they commonly used before going on a war party; still, he, Clark, and the men had faith in their long rifles and were eager to challenge the grizzly.
On April 29, Lewis was walking on shore with one man when they spotted two grizzlies. Each man fired and hit a bear. One of the wounded beasts escaped, but the other charged Lewis, pursuing him some eighty yards. Fortunately, the bear was badly enough wounded so that Lewis and the private had time to reload. They shot again and killed it. Though not full-grown, it weighed three hundred pounds. Lewis described it as a “much more furious and formidable anamal” than the black bear of the eastern United States. “It is asstonishing to see the wounds they will bear before they can be put to death,” he admitted, but he remained cocky: the Indians “may well fear this anamal . . . but in the hands of skillfull riflemen [the bears] are by no means as formidable or dangerous” as the Indians indicated.
On May 5, his cockiness began to fade. Clark and Drouillard killed a grizzly. Lewis described it as “a most tremendious looking anamal, and extreemly hard to kill notwithstanding he had five balls through his lungs and five others in various parts he swam more than half the distance across the river to a sandbar & it was at least twenty minutes before he died; [he] made the most tremendous roaring from the moment he was shot.”
The expedition had no equipment with which to weigh the bear. Clark thought he would go five hundred pounds; Lewis thought six. This was their first disagreement. They boiled the oil and put it in a cask; it was as hard as hog’s lard.
A week later, the party saw a grizzly swim the river. He disappeared before an attack could be made on him. Lewis wrote, “I find that the curiossity of our party is pretty well satisfyed with rispect to this anamal.” The size of the beast, and the difficulty in killing the bear, “has staggered the resolution [of] several of them, others however seem keen for action with the bear; I expect these gentlemen will give us some amusement shotly as they soon begin now to coppolate.”
•
The first month of travel into the unknown was splendid all around. Progress was steady, if slower on the average than Lewis had hoped for, and it was generally straight west, directly toward the setting sun. No Indians, hostile or friendly, had been discovered—a good thing, Lewis thought, for he wanted to move as far west and as fast as possible. It is difficult to think of men who sometimes made but a few miles in one day, and never more than twenty-five, as being in a hurry, with no time to spend smoking pipes and explaining themselves to strange tribes, but this was so.
Cool or cold nights, mornings when the water froze on the paddles, gave way to warm, pleasant days—except for the wind.
There were enough adventures to satisfy everyone. On the fifth day out, Clark went walking while Lewis rode in the white pirogue. Lewis ordered the fleet to cross to the larboard (south) side in order to avoid a bank that was falling into the river on the starboard side, but although all the canoes saw his signal and crossed, the red pirogue did not. It was being pulled by the towline.
By the time Lewis noticed the failure of communications, it was too late to do anything about it. “I expected to have seen her carried under every instant,” he wrote that night, but “it was too late for the men to reembark, and retreating is more dangerous than proceeding in such cases; they therefore continued their passage up this bank and much to my satisfaction arrived safe above it.”
On April 13, there was another scare. The wind was from the east. Lewis ordered the square sail and the spritsail hoisted on the white pirogue, “which carried her at a pretty good gate.” Charbonneau was at the helm. When a sudden squall of wind hit and rocked the boat, Charbonneau panicked. Instead of bringing the craft up into the wind, he laid her broadside to it, which came as close to “overseting the perogue as it was possible to have missed.”
Lewis called out orders: Drouillard, take the helm and turn her into the wind! You men there, take in the sails! It was done and the pirogue righted.
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On April 25, Lewis entered a wonderland. He decided to walk on ahead, knowing that the Yellowstone River could not be far distant, so that he could make his celestial observations and write a description of the country while the main party struggled up the Missouri against the wind. He took with him Sergeant Ordway, Drouillard, Private Joseph Field, and one other man. The party set out at 11:00 a.m., accompanied by Lewis’s dog, Seaman, who had been out all night but had returned in the morning, to Lewis’s delight. They were on the south bank of the Missouri. Shortly after noon, Lewis killed a buffalo calf. One of the men built a fire, and they enjoyed “a hearty meal” of excellent veal.
In the afternoon, Lewis ascended the hills, “from whence I had a most pleasing view of the country perticularly of the wide and fertile vallies formed by the missouri and the yellowstone rivers, which occasionally unmasked by the wood on their borders disclose their meanderings for many miles in their passage through these delightfull tracts of country. . . .”
The animal life added to the romantic quality of the place. “The whol face of the country was covered with herds of Buffaloe, Elk & Antelopes; deer are also abundant, but keep themselves more concealed in the woodland. the buffaloe Elk and Antelope are so gentle that we pass near them while feeding, without apearing to excite any alarm among them, and when we attract their attention, they frequently approach us more nearly to discover what we are.”
That evening, Lewis and his men camped on the Yellowstone, two miles south of its junction with the Missouri. In the morning, Lewis sent Private Field up the Yellowstone with instructions to follow it as far as he could and still get back to base camp in a day.
Then Lewis set about examining the country. In the bottoms, he found redberry, serviceberry, redwoods, gooseberry, choke cherry, purple currant, and honeysuckle, intermixed with willow, a favorite winter food of the hoofed animals.
At 9:41, 9:42, and 9:43 a.m., he measured the altitude of the sun with his sextant and an artificial horizon. He was obtaining his local time, trying to establish the moment of high noon, against which to compare Greenwich time. He could figure out Greenwich time with a set of “lunar-distance” measurements that he could obtain by taking the sextant angle between the moon and the star Altair. What he wanted to fix was the longitude of the junction of the r
ivers.
Toward noon, he heard the discharge of several guns, indicating that Clark and the main party were at the mouth of the Yellowstone. He sent Drouillard to tell Clark to send a canoe up the Yellowstone to collect the meat his party had killed and prepared. At 6:49, 6:50, and 6:52 p.m., he again measured the sun’s altitude. Unfortunately, clouds came up and he was not able to make his nighttime observations.
Lewis walked down and joined the main party at the camp on the point of land formed by the junction of the rivers. He found the men “all in good health, and much pleased at having arrived at this long wished for spot, and in order to add in some measure to the general pleasure which seemed to pervade our little community, we ordered a dram to be issued to each person; this soon produced the fiddle, and they spent the evening with much hilarity, singing & dancing, and seemed as perfectly to forget their past toils, as they appeared regardless of those to come.”
Private Field came in, to report that the Yellowstone wandered, had a gentle current, many sandbars, and a sand-and-mud bottom. Clark took measurements: the Missouri at the point of junction was 330 yards wide with a deep channel, whereas the Yellowstone was 297 yards wide and 12 feet deep at its deepest channel.
The Hidatsas had told Lewis that the Yellowstone was navigable for pirogues and canoes nearly to its source in the Rocky Mountains (at today’s Yellowstone National Park), and that at one point it passed within less than a half-day’s march of a navigable part of the Missouri. They also said that the sources of the Yellowstone were adjacent to those of the Missouri, Platte, and Columbia Rivers. They were right about the Missouri and Columbia, which do have their ultimate sources in the Yellowstone plateau, but wrong about the Platte, which rises in the Colorado and Wyoming Rockies.
The captains apparently never gave it a thought, but had they listened more closely to the Indians, and had Jefferson’s instructions not been so contradictory (he wanted the explorers to follow the Missouri to its source, but he also wanted them to follow the shortest route across the continent; the president’s assumption that these were one and the same was badly wrong), they might have abandoned the Missouri and ascended the Yellowstone. At today’s Livingston, Montana, where the Yellowstone makes a sharp bend from a northerly to an easterly flow (or from west to south going upstream), the party could have abandoned the river and continued west to cross the divide between the rivers over a relatively low pass (today’s Bozeman Pass) and gotten to Three Forks some weeks, maybe even two months, sooner.
But they continued upstream on the Missouri, as Jefferson had ordered. On May 3, Lewis, walking on the north bank among “vast quantities” of game, came to “a beatifull bold runing stream, 40 yards wide at its entrance; the water transparent.” He called it Porcupine River, from the unusual number of porcupines he spotted.II Clark named its first tributary “2,000 mile creek” (today’s Red Water), since the expedition was now two thousand miles above the mouth of the Missouri. Lewis wrote of Porcupine River, “I have but little doubt that it takes it’s source not far from the main body of the Suskashawan river, and that it is probably navigable 150 miles. . . . it would afford a very favorable communication to the Athebaskay country, from whence the British N[orth]-W[est] Company derive so large a portion of their valuable furs.”
Lewis wrote something similar about every river flowing into the Missouri from the north (there are not very many of them). Jefferson wanted it so, because any stream coming in from the north that reached up into the Canadian prairie might extend the boundaries of Louisiana and would certainly give the Americans access to the most valuable portion of the British fur-trading country. But, as badly as Lewis wanted to please Jefferson, it was all wishful thinking; even for the smallest canoe, at the height of the spring runoff, Porcupine River would not be navigable much more than a couple of dozen miles, and its sources are south of the forty-ninth parallel.
On May 8, the expedition “nooned it” just above another river, coming in from the north. While the men ate, Lewis walked up it some three miles. “I have no doubt but it is navigable for boats perogues and canoes, for the latter probably a great distance,” he wrote. “From the quantity of water furnised by this river it must water a large extent of country; perhaps this river also might furnish a practicable and advantageous communication with the Saskashiwan river.”
The Hidatsas had told Lewis and Clark of this river, which they called “The River Which Scolds at All Others.” Lewis named it Milk River, from the color of its water. It retains that name today. It rises in Glacier National Park, flows slightly north of west into southernmost Alberta, then bends back to a southwesterly flow to re-enter Montana. At no point does it come anywhere near the Saskatchewan.
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That afternoon, Drouillard, Charbonneau, and Sacagawea went walking. She found some wild licorice and dug up a quantity of roots called the white apple. Lewis gave the root a full five-hundred-word description, concluding that, although it was “a tastless insippid food of itself . . . our epicures would admire this root very much, it would serve them in their ragouts and gravies in stead of the truffles morella.” He never mentioned Sacagawea’s contribution (Clark did), but he did write that it was a very healthy food.
It certainly was a welcome addition to the virtually all-meat diet. “We can send out at any time and obtain whatever species of meat the country affords in as large quantity as we wish,” Lewis wrote. But all that meat, if not complemented by vegetables or fruit, might well lead to scurvy, and there are some indications that the men of the expedition at various times did suffer from scurvy. It was an age in which almost nothing was known about a balanced diet, making Lewis’s comment on a “healthy food” notable. According to Dr. Eldon “Frenchy” Chuinard, the expert on medical aspects of the expedition, “malnutrition was an almost constant condition of all soldiers.”1
Almost all American soldiers of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 suffered from malaria, dysentary, diarrhea, rheumatism, ophthalmia, and other scourges. So did the men of the expedition. Venereal disease, including syphilis, was so common it was scarcely commented upon. Lewis noted on April 24 that “soar eyes is a common complaint among the party.” He attributed it to the fine sand driven by the wind: “so penitrating is this sand that we cannot keep any article free from it; in short we are compelled to eat, drink, and breath it very freely.” Chuinard suggests that venereal disease may also have been a factor; Moulton posits the constant glare of the sun on the water as another.2
On May 4, Lewis, who did most of the doctoring, reported that Joseph Field was sick with dysentery and a high fever. Lewis treated him with Glauber salts (a strong laxative), “which operated very well,” plus thirty drops of laudanum (a tincture of opium), which would have helped Field sleep. For sore eyes, he used a wash made of two parts white vitriol (zinc sulphate) and one part sugar of lead (lead acetate). For the “boils and imposthumes” that were common among the party and were probably caused by scurvy, he used “emmolient poltices,” without specifying how he made the poultices.3
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May 9 was a good day. The party made twenty-four and a half miles, and Lewis shot and described a willet, new to science. He was able to make astronomical observations after darkness fell. The buffalo had become “so gentle that the men frequently throw sticks and stones at them in order to drive them out of the way.”
Lewis selected a fat buffalo and saved “the necessary materials for making what our wrighthand cook Charbono calls the boudin blanc; this white pudding we all esteem one of the gretest delicacies of the forrest.” Lewis wrote a long, detailed recipe on the subject of Charbonneau’s method of making the sausage. The recipe ended, “It is then baptised in the missouri with two dips and a flirt, and bobbed into the kettle; from whence after it be well boiled it is taken and fryed with bears oil untill it becomes brown, when it is ready to esswage the pangs of a keen appetite or such as travelers in the wilderness are seldom at a loss for.”
Altogether, a pe
rfect day and evening, except that the river was as broad here as at its mouth. Were it not much shallower, Lewis wrote, “I should begin to dispair of ever reaching it’s source.” And he confessed, if only to himself, “I begin to feel extreemly anxious to get in view of the rocky mountains.”
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At about 5:00 p.m. on May 11, Private William Bratton came running along the bank, shouting and making signs. Lewis ordered the pirogue to put to. Bratton was so out of breath when he came up that it was some minutes before he could explain that he had shot and wounded a grizzly, but the bear had turned on him and pursued him a considerable distance.
Lewis was not about to allow a bear to defeat one of his men so ignominiously or so completely. He ordered the crew of the white pirogue to join him on an expedition “in quest of this monster.” Finding a trail of blood, they pursued the bear for a mile through thick brush before finding him concealed. They shot him through the head, twice. Examination disclosed that Bratton’s shot had gone through the bear’s lungs, “notwithstanding which he [the bear] had pursued him [Bratton] near half a mile and had returned more than double that distance.”
Lewis concluded, “these bear being so hard to die reather intimedates us all; I must confess that I do not like the gentlemen and had reather fight two Indians than one bear.”
Three days later, there was another battle between bear and party. The six men in the two rear canoes saw a bear on the bank. They put to shore and planned their attack in some detail. They sneaked up to within forty yards of the enemy without being spotted. Four men fired simultaneously, while two soldiers held their rifles in reserve. All four balls hit the mark, two passing through the lungs. The bear rose with a roar and launched an immediate counterattack, charging with open mouth. The two-man reserve force fired; one ball hit muscle only, but the other broke the bear’s shoulder; this, however, only slowed him for an instant.