All Indians were to be out of the fort at sunset except those the captains might specially permit to spend the night. Both gates should be shut and secured overnight.
The sergeant-of-the-guard would keep the key to the meat house, and see that regular fires burned as needed. He should visit the canoes each day to make sure they were safely secured. He should report to the captains in person upon being relieved.
The huts had their own cooks, kettles, and fires. The captains furnished each mess with an ax to provide firewood. All other “public tools” deposited in the captains’ quarters could only be taken with their permission, and must be returned immediately after they were used. This was to prevent the men from falling into temptation and trading an awl or a file for sexual favors or furs. Lewis was explicit on the point: “Any individual selling or disposing of any tool or iron or steel instrument, arms, accoutrements or ammunicion, shall be deemed guilty of a breach of this order, and shall be tryed and punished accordingly.” He exempted gunsmith John Shields from the restriction.
Discipline, order, regularity. Security. Peace with the neighbors if at all possible. These were Lewis’s goals, as they have been the goals of every company commander from the time of the Roman Legions to today.
No orders, however, can guard against all contingencies or accidents or just stupid actions. On the morning of January 11, the sergeant-of-the-guard reported that the Indian canoe was missing. Lewis made inquiry and discovered that the men who had used it the previous evening had been negligent in securing her, and the tide had carried her off. He sent two parties out to search for her, but they came up empty-handed. So too the party he sent out the next morning. “We therefore give her over as lost,” Lewis sadly recorded. Fortunately, on February 5, Sergeant Gass took advantage of a high tide to explore an inlet and found the canoe, “so long lost and much lamented.”
Routine wears down vigilance. The almost daily coming and going of the Clatsops, and sometimes the Chinooks, made an Indian presence inside the fort a familiar sight. More often than not, the captains gave a chief and a small mixed party permission to spend the night. The men had frequent sexual contact with Indian women. The young braves were mild and inoffensive, men who obviously preferred fishing and trading to fighting. Even the captains grew lax.
On February 20, Lewis caught himself up short. A Chinook chief and twenty-five braves paid a visit. Lewis gave the chief a smoke and a medal. At sunset, he told the Chinooks to leave. Evidently they gave him some trouble about the order—they had come from across the estuary and would not be able to return home that night. Lewis insisted. Then he wrote a passage of justification that revealed his deeply rooted fears and suspicions of the Chinooks—indeed, of all Indians. Whatever Jefferson’s hopes for eventually incorporating the Indians into the body politic, Lewis obviously believed that there could be no living with the Indians until they had been civilized or cowed or brought into the American trading empire and thus made dependent on the government.1
“Notwithstanding their apparent friendly disposition,” Lewis wrote, “their great averice and hope of plunder might induce them to be treacherous, at all events we determined allways to be on our guard . . . and never place our selves at the mercy of any savages, we well know, that the treachery of the aborigenes of America and the too great confidence of our countrymen in their sincerity and friendship, has caused the distruction of many hundreds of us.”
But despite the clear lesson of history, Lewis complained, as the men became accustomed to the visiting coastal Indians, “we find it difficult to impress on their minds the necessity of always being on their guard.” Lewis believed that “the well known treachery of the natives by no means entitle them to such confidence,” and caught himself up short with the realization that he too had become lax. So, he told himself, as for confidence in the peaceful intentions of the Indian visitors, “we must check it’s growth in our own minds, as well as those of our men, by recollecting ourselves, and repeating to our men, that our preservation depends on never loosing sight of this trait [treachery] in their character, and being always prepared to meet it in whatever shape it may present itself.”
James Ronda protests that Lewis was too extreme. He writes that Lewis’s attitude, with its familiar themes of native treachery and brutality, was more suited to the Kentucky and Ohio frontier of the 1790s than to the coastal Indians of 1806.2 Perhaps so. And perhaps the captains could have done more to establish good relations with the Chinooks, as Ronda suggests. But had Lewis heard such criticism he could have replied, We encouraged our suspicions, did security by the book, and had no trouble.
•
As in many frontier fortifications, life at Fort Clatsop was almost unbearably dull. Unlike most frontier garrisons, the fort suffered only one minor breech of discipline. Partly this was because the garrison was so small, partly because the men had been through so much together (and had so much more coming up), partly because they had no whiskey. No fistfights or similar troubles relieved the routine.
“Nothing worthy of note today,” Lewis wrote in his journal, day after day. With one or two exceptions, his entries recorded the comings and goings and successes or failures of the hunters, the health of the men, the diet, trading sessions with the Clatsops—more often than not unsuccessful—and nothing else.
The weather was depressing at best. Fixing latitude and longitude exactly would have provided some diversion and a sense of accomplishment, but it couldn’t be done. For the entire first month in the fort, Lewis was unable to make a single observation. “I am mortifyed,” he wrote on February 25, 1806, “at not having it in my power to make more celestial observations since we have been at Fort Clatsop, but such has been the state of the weather that I have found it utterly impracticable.”
The men had sex for diversion, but from all the evidence the captains did not. The men paid the price for their activity, not only in beads or trinkets but also by contracting venereal disease. Lewis was their doctor. “Goodrich has recovered from the Louis veneri [syphilis] which he contracted from an amorous contact with a Chinnook damsel,” Lewis wrote on January 27. “I cured him as I did Gibson last winter by the uce of murcury.”IV
Lewis was an attentive doctor. When Private Gibson came down with a violent cold, so severe it incapacitated him, Lewis first listed the cause (the constant rain, wading through streams and marshes, always wet), second the patient’s condition (“nearly free from pain”), third the patient’s appearance (“a gooddeel reduced and very languid”), and fourth the drug and physical therapy he prescribed (“broken dozes of diluted nitre [saltpeter] and made him drink plentifully of sage tea, had his feet bathed in warm water and at 9 P.M. gave him 35 drops of laudanum”).
At Fort Mandan, the men’s health had been a minor problem. At Fort Clatsop, the men’s health was a major worry. There was always someone down with a cold or a flu or a venereal-disease attack or a strained muscle. On February 22, Lewis noted that there were five men in the sick bay—17 percent of the total strength—and commented, “We have not had as many sick at any one time since we left Wood River. The general complaint seams to be bad colds and fevers, something I beleive of the influenza.”
On March 20, as the party was preparing to leave, Lewis noted, “many of our men are still complaining of being unwell; [they] remain weak, principally I beleive for the want of proper food.” He rightly figured that, along with the diet, the weather was the cause. Unfortunately, there was nothing that Dr. Lewis could do for his patients to improve their food or the climate.
For the Clatsops and Chinooks, neither the weather nor the diet had an adverse effect. To the contrary. They were thriving tribes before the smallpox hit them, still vibrant when Lewis and Clark came to spend the winter. With few enemies and fewer wars, they were rich, enjoying an abundance of fish and furs and first access to European trade goods. They loved the food and the climate, had perfectly adjusted to them, and rightly thought of the Pacific Northwest as a bountiful
provider, almost paradise.
To the captains and the men, it was a miserable place that they couldn’t wait to get out of. Lewis expressed one major reason for that point of view: “I expect when we get under way we shall be much more healthy, it has always had that effect on us heretofore.”
Fort Clatsop was almost more a prison than a fortification. The men not out hunting spent their days at hard labor, scraping elk hides and making moccasins (ten per man for the return trip), keeping the fire going in the smokehouse (difficult at best, because the timber was wet and only smoldered instead of smoking properly), and carrying out other tasks that they regarded as women’s work and resented or even hated.
Lewis supervised the work. He made no recorded excursion from the fort. His boredom is evident in some of his journal entries.
February 2: “Not any occurrence today worthy of notice; but all are pleased, that one month of the time which binds us to Fort Clatsop and which seperates us from our friends has now elapsed.”
March 3: “every thing moves on in the old way and we are counting the days which seperate us from the 1st of April [the scheduled departure date] and which bind us to fort Clatsop.”
•
The food at Fort Clatsop contributed to the monotony. Getting enough of it was a daily worry for Lewis, getting some variety into the diet almost impossible. The expedition lived on elk. Over their more than three months on the coast the hunters killed 131 elk, along with 20 deer, a few beaver and otter, and a raccoon.3 Drouillard was the most productive, sometimes killing a half-dozen or more elk in a day. On January 12, Lewis wrote that Drouillard had killed seven elk that day and commented, “I scarcely know how we should subsist were it not for the exertions of this excellent hunter.”
Despite Drouillard’s success, not enough game was coming in to feed the party. The captains supplemented the meat with dried fish and roots purchased from the Clatsops. It is odd that the captains, after their experience of doing so well fishing in the Missouri River, seldom if ever sent out fishermen. And apparently, despite the high prices charged by the Indians and the nearly spent supply of trade goods, no man—nor Sacagawea—ever went out to dig roots. Hunters sometimes brought back berries.
Occasionally the captains were able to purchase dogs. A good thing too, Lewis believed: “while we lived principally on the flesh of this anamal we were much more healthy strong and more fleshey than we had been since we left the Buffaloe country.” Fortunately, the men were extremely fond of the dog meat; “for my own part,” Lewis commented, “I have become so perfectly reconciled to the dog that I think it an agreeable food and would prefer it vastly to lean Venison or Elk.”
Within a day of Lewis’s resumption of journal writing, Clark had established a practice of copying Lewis’s journal verbatim. He continued that practice as long as Lewis kept writing. But on this entry, of January 3, Clark made one change: “as for my own part,” he concluded the entry on dog meat, “I have not become reconsiled to the taste of this animal as yet.”
One of the captains’ other differences of opinion also concerned food. On January 5, the salt-makers brought in a sample of their product. “We found it excellent, fine, strong, & white,” Lewis wrote. “This was a great treat to myself and most of the party. . . . I say most of the party, for my friend Capt. Clark declares it to be a mear matter of indifference with him whether he uses it or not; for myself I must confess I felt a considerable inconvenience from the want of it.”
Clark copied the passage, then added as an explanation, “I care but little [about salt] . . . haveing from habit become entirely cearless about my diat.”
Lewis remarked that he didn’t care what kind of meat he got, whether elk or dog or horse or wolf, so long as it was fat. “I have learned to think,” he wrote, “that if the chord be sufficiently strong, which binds the soul and body together, it does not so much matter about the materials which compose it.”
The cord that bound body and soul together at Fort Clatsop was made of elk. At breakfast and supper, day after day, it was boiled elk, dried and jerked elk, leftover elk from the previous meal, more elk. When there was fresh elk that could be roasted, the men gorged themselves.
But the meat was seldom fresh, because the hunters had to extend their range though the winter, and by mid-January the kills were taking place miles from the fort. Men had to go out to bring in the meat, which sometimes took days.
There often wasn’t enough meat at all. Because the men devoured the fresh meat so prodigiously, Lewis worried about a steady supply. He ordered that all the meat would hereafter be jerked, then was surprised when it turned out they ate the jerky at a prodigious rate also. On January 20, there was only three days’ supply on hand. But, he wrote, “no one seems much concerned about the state of the stores; so much for habit, we have latterly so frequently had our stock of provisions reduced to a minimum and sometimes taken a small touch of fasting that three days full allowance excites no concern.”
Anyway, Lewis wrote, “our skill as hunters afford us some consolation, for if there is any game of any discription in our neighbourhood we can track it up and kill it.”
Lewis tried to be charitable to elk. He noted on January 29 that he was enjoying “the most perfect health . . . on this food.” And after all it wasn’t so bad: “a keen appetite supplys in a great degree the want of more luxurious sauses or dishes, and still render my ordinary meals not uninteresting to me, for I find myself sometimes enquiring of the cook whether dinner or breakfast is ready.”
•
One welcome change in diet came on January 10. Four days earlier, Clark had set out in canoes with a party of eleven to find the whale that had washed ashore south of the salt camp. (Lewis had proposed to lead a party himself, earlier; why Clark took over, Lewis doesn’t say.) Among the party was Sacagawea. In a charming passage, Lewis explained how she got to go along: “The Indian woman was very impotunate to be permited to go, and was therefore indulged; she observed that she had traveled a long way with us to see the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be seen, she thought it very hard she could not be permitted to see either. . . .”
When Clark returned, he brought back three hundred pounds of blubber and a few gallons of rendered oil. He had hoped for much more, but the carcass had been stripped by the time he arrived, and he had to buy what he got from the natives.
Despite Clark’s disappointment, Lewis was more than satisfied. After eating, he felt so good he ventured a small joke.
“Small as the store is,” he wrote, “we prize it highly, and thank the hand of providence for directing the whale to us, and think him much more kind to us than he was to jonah, having sent this monster to be swallowed by us in stead of swallowing of us as jona’s did.”
•
But soon the whale blubber and oil were gone. It was back to elk. Lewis wrote on February 7: “This evening we had what I call an excellent supper it consisted of a marrowbone a piece and a brisket of boiled Elk that had the appearance of a little fat on it. this for Fort Clatsop is living in high stile.”
Toward the end of February, the eulachon, or candlefish, began to run in immense numbers. The Clatsops netted them and sold them to the expedition, after showing them how to prepare the fish (which Lewis called “anchovy”). Each eulachon was about seven inches long; the Clatsop method was to string them together on a wooden spit and roast them. “They are so fat,” Lewis found, “they require no additional sauce, and I think them superior to any fish I ever tasted.” From then until they left, the captains bought all the eulachon they could afford.
•
Supervising the men’s work and trading with the Indians took up only a part of Lewis’s time. He spent much of each day at his desk, in his damp, chilly, smoky quarters, with only a candle for illumination, writing in his journal. It was an almost monklike existence. But he thrived on scholarship, and most of what he wrote was scientific. The subjects were botany, zoology, geography, and ethnology.
Lewis’s great outpouring during the Fort Clatsop winter constituted an invaluable contribution to knowledge.
Lewis’s sketch of a eulachon, in his journal. (Courtesy American Philosophical Society)
Lewis’s sketch of a maple leaf, in his journal. (Courtesy American Philosophical Society)
Botany was the subject he wrote the most about, partly because of the astonishing growth of trees and plants on the Northwest Pacific Coast, partly because it was Jefferson’s favorite scientific study.
Jefferson considered Lewis a better zoologist than botanist. Lewis agreed with that judgment. On February 4, 1806, writing about the fir trees in the vicinity of Fort Clatsop, he apologized by saying, “I shall discribe [them] as well as my slender botanicall skil will enable me.” But he was skillful enough in both fields to provide descriptions of dozens of previously unknown plants and animals so accurate and complete that modern-day botanists and zoologists have little difficulty in recognizing the species.
Only rarely did Lewis use Latin-derived taxonomic botanical words, but his range of knowledge included at least two hundred technical botanical terms in English. At Fort Clatsop, he discovered and described in great detail (often hundreds of words) ten new plants and trees, including the magnificent Sitka spruce. He collected, labeled, and preserved to bring home to Jefferson dozens of plants, leaves, and cones. He demonstrated familiarity with their eastern counterparts by consistently comparing what he was seeing on the West Coast with what he remembered from the East Coast.4
Jefferson had ordered Lewis to observe “the animals of the country generally, & especially those not known in the U.S.” Lewis faithfully obeyed. During that winter, he wrote about some hundred animals altogether—thirty-five mammals, fifty birds, ten reptiles and fish, and five invertebrates. Of these, eleven birds, two fish, and eleven mammals were new to science. In his classic study Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists, Paul Russell Cutright points out that, though Lewis used a minimum of technical words in his description of new birds, “he nevertheless supplied adequate data on color, shape of wings, number and length of tail feathers, color of iris, and note.”5