Season’s Eatings

my fare is really sumptuous this evening; buffaloe’s humps, tongues and marrowbones, fine trout parched meal pepper and salt, and a good appetite; the last is not considered the least of the luxuries. — Meriwether Lewis, July 13, 1805

Happy Thanksgiving from Frances Hunter to all of you! Have a safe and wonderful holiday.

Lewis and the Hibernating Bird

In mid-October 1804, Meriwether Lewis wrote this singularly appalling entry in his journal:

This day took a small bird alive of the order of the [blank] or goat suckers.    it appeared to be passing into the dormant state.    on the morning of the 18th the murcury was at 30 above 0. the bird could scarcely move.—    I run my penknife into it’s body under the wing and completely distroyed it’s lungs and heart—    yet it lived upwards of two hours    this fanominon I could not account for unless it proceeded from the want of circulation of the blood.

If you’re an animal lover like me, you have a hard time with this passage. It’s hard to think of anyone deliberately killing a live animal. But Lewis may be forgiven for his curiosity, for he had just encountered one of the rarest behaviors in the avian world. The bird he found huddled on the ground near the mouth of the Cannonball River in North Dakota was the common poorwill, the only hibernating bird in the world.

Common Poorwill taking a long winter's nap

Birds that live in seasonally cold climates have to be able to adapt to a variety of weather conditions. To cope with a sudden drop in temperature, many birds are able to put themselves in a state of torpor for several hours. Hummingbirds, for example, can lower their body temperatures, slow their metabolism, and go more or less dormant to save energy during chilly winter nights. But the bird Lewis called a “goatsucker”—at that time unknown to science—is the only bird that can hibernate for long periods of time, going without food and lowering its body temperature almost to that of its surroundings for days or even weeks on end.

Despite his extensive scientific training, Lewis evidently mistook the goatsucker for an eastern whippoorwill, another member of the nightjar family, which it closely resembles. He didn’t realize that he had found an entirely new species. Too bad he was too far north to meet any Hopi Indians, who could have told them their name for the bird was Hölchoko, “’the sleeping one.”

The unique abilities and distinct identity of the common poorwill were finally recognized a few years later by Thomas Nuttall, a botanist who accompanied several fur trading expeditions up the Missouri a few years after Lewis and Clark. The great naturalist’s description of this bird earned him the honor of recognition in its scientific name, Phalaenoptilus nuttallii.

"Nuttall's Whip-poor-will" by John James Audubon

Tomorrow—a special Lewis & Clark salute to the bird, in honor of Turkey Day!

Lewis & Clark road trip: Bismarck, North Dakota

Sacagawea and Jean-Baptiste look out on the grand edifice of the North Dakota State Capitol. What would they think if they came back?

Today we had planned a more leisurely day, and boy were we ready for it. Being a Lewis & Clark fan is hard work! We sacked in a little and woke to an overcast, windy, and drizzly day–a good day for indoor sightseeing.

After breakfast at the hotel, we went to a nearby laundromat and soon turned our trunkful of dirty, smelly clothes into a trunkful of clean, sweet-smelling ones. Then it was off to downtown Bismarck, where we visited the unique Capitol, the so-called “Skyscraper of the Plains.” This building was constructed in 1930 after a spectacular fire destroyed the beautiful old Victorian-style capitol. We learned that the state did not have the money to recreate what they had lost, so instead they opted to build this efficient Art Deco-style palace.

The result is a capitol unlike any I have ever seen. The main hall and chambers have neat Art Deco brass art and other features, and on the lower level, we truly enjoyed touring the “Rough Rider Hall of Fame,” which features enlightening portraits and text about famous North Dakotans from Warren Christopher to Angie Dickinson. But overall this is an understated place, with plenty of office space where you can see world-weary state workers going about their business (not me! not this week!).

The old North Dakota capitol burns, December 28, 1930.

But if you really want to have fun, ride the elevator up to the observation deck on the 18th floor for a spectacular view of Bismarck, the river, and the rugged surrounding countryside. True to the practical nature of this capitol, the deck was not just ornamental, but was in use for a yoga class. We walked around and admired the view, and also some great historical photos of the various capitol buildings of North Dakota, including some of the 1930 conflagration, and a great photo of the world snow angel record set right out on the capitol lawn–over 8900 of them!

We walked around the grounds a little until we found the statue of Sacagawea. Then we went off to lunch on the riverfront. We had hoped to get a ride on the Missouri on the Lewis & Clark Paddlewheeler, but the weather didn’t cooperate. In fact, the wind had turned wet and raw. We Texans were freezing, and all the North Dakotans we talked to were depressed, as their summer days are few enough as it is. We did, however, make it a Lewis & Clark occasion with a delightful meal of sandwiches and lemonade at a cozy riverside place called Meriwether’s.

World record for snow angels, set on the Capitol grounds by 8900 North Dakotans in 2007

For the afternoon, we decided to go back downtown and spend the afternoon at the North Dakota Heritage Center (the state museum). This turned out to be a first-rate place! North Dakota history begins 65 million years ago, with life forms that evolved from tiny clams to huge, bizarre dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts like wooly mammoths and giant buffalos. We had been pouring over fossils for an hour before we got up to 9500 B.C.! Great artifacts and displays illustrated the early Indians, the exploration and fur trade era, the rush to settle the Dakota Territory by railroads, the tragic and lonely struggles of the Scandinavian immigrants,  the growth of modern towns, and finally the bust years of the Dust Bowl.

There are some terrific exhibits in here. A couple that have stuck with me the longest are the amazing “Birds of North Dakota” exhibit and the display on the Sioux Wars, which includes several shirts and a Ghost Dance shield owned by Sitting Bull, as well as a buffalo hide that Sitting Bull painted for a man who helped him learn to write his name. The overall powerful message of the museum was that North Dakota is a hard land for tough people.

We were chased out of the great gift shop at closing time. We loafed around back at the hotel for a while, then had a fun supper at a place called Space Aliens, which is covered with outer space decor like papier-mache aliens and UFOs. Good food too! Today was a nice day and a good way to wind up our memorable visit to Bismarck.

William Clark and the New Madrid Earthquakes

Woodcut depicting the New Madrid earthquake damage.

In 1811 and 1812, a series of earthquakes of almost unimaginable power rocked America’s western frontier. It all began in the early morning hours of December 16, 1811, with a violent shock (estimated to have been over 8.0 on the Richter scale) that threw sleepers from their beds. Centered near present-day Blytheville, Arkansas, the quakes affected the entire Mississippi and Ohio river valleys, but were felt most strongly near the town of New Madrid (pronounced MA-drid) about 200 miles south of St. Louis. For miles around, chimneys tumbled, houses cracked, and the ground moaned and roared. The shocks continued about every ten minutes for the rest of the night. Lightning flashed and crackled across the ground, and black vapors obscured any visibility from the night sky.

Not long after the sun arose and the bleeding, terrified survivors began to venture out of their homes, an aftershock of equal power ripped through the area. In New Madrid it opened cracks in the earth and spewed mud, liquid sand, and sulfurous gases. Quakes followed all day, with sinkholes swallowing houses, trees being thrown like twigs in the air, and wild and domestic animals running around in terror. It seemed like the end of the world.

In St. Louis, where William Clark lived, the effect was not as devastating but still dramatic. In the first seconds of the quake, windows rattled and furniture shifted, getting everyone up out of bed. Within another minute, chimneys began to tumble and walls to split and crack. Without a doubt, Clark must have been torn between his duty as commander of the territorial militia and his desire to protect his wife Julia, and his two sons, Lewis (age 2) and William (a newborn).

Clearing the river after the New Madrid earthquakes

The worst was yet to come. Both settlers and Indians struggled to make sense of the events even as small quakes continued into the new year. On the morning of January 23, 1812, another massive quake (estimated at 8.4 on the Richter scale) thundered from an epicenter near Point Pleasant, Missouri in the Missouri bootheel. That entire community was destroyed. On the waterways, the main arteries of transportation in those days, boats were tossed and wrecked and the banks caved in. Hundreds of trees became floating missiles to menace anyone on the water, and huge sandboils formed new and permanent lakes. Hundreds of aftershocks followed.

Finally, on February 7, 1812, came the “big one.” Centered in the town of New Madrid itself, it is estimated to have been at least 8.8 on the Richter scale–ten times as powerful as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. For several days prior to the quake, a survivor recorded, the earth had quivered continuously “like a side of freshly killed beef.” At 3:15 a.m., the earthquake exploded. Instantly, a tsunami from the river roared through the town, wrecking everything that was left and killing an unknown number of people. The quake was so powerful that within three minutes, church bells were ringing and walls were cracking as far away as Charleston, Washington, and Boston. The quake itself lasted an ungodly fifteen minutes. For several hours that followed, the Mississippi River ran backwards. Two temporary waterfalls lasted for days. Needless to say, even the sturdiest brick and stone homes were tumbled from their foundations for miles around. St. Louis and Louisville suffered major damage. Aftershocks hammered the country for days.

About of a population of about 15,000 in the affected area, about a thousand people were killed and at least 2000 were homeless refugees. (The population of the same area today is five million). Besides the loss of life was the physical damage. Five settlements, one military fort, and countless Indian villages were completely gone. In many places, the land itself was completely destroyed, covered with sand boils, fissures, and crevasses. Dead trees were everywhere. Swamps had been lifted, good land submerged, and huge new lakes formed.

The United States had never experienced a disaster of such magnitude. In St. Louis and throughout the wrecked area, a wave of doomsday prophecy swept the area, with one group who called themselves the Fanatical Pilgrims wandering the streets and byways exhorting, “Repent! Repent!” For a while, at least, there was a dramatic increase in church attendance.

William Clark, by John Wesley Jarvis (circa 1810)

So did the federal government rush troops to the scene bearing tents, the fixings for hot meals, and cash to tide the survivors over until they could get back on their feet? Not exactly–the quake victims got exactly bupkis for over two years. Nor is there any evidence that the territorial government or Clark’s militia played any role in the cleanup or restoring order. Clark was almost immediately swept into the frontier combat of the War of 1812. The earthquake victims just had to shift for themselves.

One such victim was John Ordway, the lovable and reliable first sergeant of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. After the expedition, Ordway had married and settled in New Madrid, where he had made a success of his farm. He was entirely wiped out by the disaster and died in poverty a few years later, never able to get back on his feet.

By 1815, William Clark had become governor of the Missouri Territory. The war was over, and attitudes about disaster relief had begun to shift, not least because of another earthquake half world away. When a terrible earthquake destroyed Caracas, Venezuela, killing more than 10,000 people, the U.S. Congress voted to send $50,000 to the suffering city. Needless to say, this decision got the attention of both politicos and residents in Missouri, who wondered why federal dollars were available to foreigners while they were still struggling to put their lives back together in the face of a similar disaster.

Clark and the territorial legislature petitioned Congress for relief for those who had lost their land in the quake. Unwilling to vote cash, Congress agreed to do the next best thing: they granted those whose property had been destroyed the right to choose a new homestead of the same size from other public lands in the Missouri Territory. Clark’s petition goes down as the first application for federal disaster relief in the nation’s history.

The Earthquake America Forgot, by David Stewart and Ray Knox (1995)

As it so often does, what began as tragedy ended as farce. Speculators from St. Louis and the eastern United States descended on the hapless citizens, many of whom had made new starts in Indiana and Arkansas. These humble folk didn’t understand what the certificates really were, and often thought they were selling their worthless land back in New Madrid, happy to take a few pennies on the dollar. To make matters worse, counterfeit certificates soon began to circulate. The New Madrid land rush soon became synonymous with fraud and helped set back the cause of federal disaster relief until after the Civil War.

For more reading, check out The Virtual Times: The Great New Madrid Earthquake and The Earthquake America Forgot, by David Stewart and Ray Knox.

William Clark and the Notorious Simon Girty

On Monday, March 26, 1804, William Clark made a remarkable journal entry:

a verry Smokey day    I had Corn parched to make parched meal, workmen all at work prepareing the Boat, I visit the Indian Camps, In one Camp found 3 Squars & 3 young ones, another 1 girl & a boy    in a 3rd Simon Girtey & two other familey—    Girtey has the Rhumertism verry bad    those Indians visit me in their turn, & as usial ask for Something    I give them flour &c.

Clark’s attitude about encountering Simon Girty is remarkably nonchalant. A 21^st century equivalent would be: “You’ll never guess who I saw at Starbucks. Osama bin Laden! He was reading the paper and drinking a vanilla latte.” For in the early 19^th century, Simon Girty was one of the most vilified, feared, and hated men in America.

Simon Girty

Born in 1741 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Girty personified the era of frontier violence. His father, an Irish drover and trader, was killed during a drunken frolic by an Indian named The Fish, who was in turn killed by a man named John Turner, who later married Simon’s mother. During the French and Indian War in 1756, the family was captured at Fort Granville by a band of Delaware, Shawnee and Seneca Indians.  They burned the stockade and marched the captives away to a nearby Indian village. Girty’s stepfather was tortured, scalped, and burned at the stake, while his wife and her five sons watched in horror. Simon was adopted by the Seneca Indians and readily learned their language, though he could neither read nor write English.

Released as part of a peace agreement in 1759, Girty found work as an interpreter and scout. He was involved in translating the famous speech of Logan, chief of the Mingoes, during the conflict known as Lord Dunmore’s War. At one point, Lord Dunmore asked Girty and his brother to dance in the Indian fashion, which they did, to the astonishment of an observer: “They interspersed the performance with Indian songs and yells that made the welkin ring.”

When the revolution broke out, Girty wavered in his loyalties. He joined the American army, but in the spring of 1778, he deserted Fort Pitt and struck out for Indian country, determined to help the British and Indians fight the Americans. Hired as an interpreter by the “Hair-Buyer” General Henry Hamilton at Detroit, Girty took up the hatchet and participated enthusiastically in marauding and raiding parties against settlers on the Kentucky frontier.

As the Revolution dragged on in the west, Girty returned to live with the Wyandot Indians. He participated in raids and supported the Wyandot chief, known as the Half-King, in his efforts to harass, persecute, and drive out Moravian missionaries in the area who were trying to Christianize the Indians. In May 1782, a force of about 500 mounted men under Colonel William Crawford marched against the Wyandots.  With the help of British agents, the Indians along the Sandusky River quickly mobilized and defeated the Americans on June 5, 1782. Colonel Crawford ended up a prisoner. When Crawford learned that Girty was at the Half-King’s town, he asked to be taken there, somehow hoping that Girty would persuade the Indians to spare his life.

Colonel William Crawford

Crawford’s fate was related later by the only surviving witness, Dr. John Knight, who did more than anyone to seal the reputation of Simon Girty in the American mind. According to Knight’s account, when he and Colonel Crawford reached the Half-King’s town on the Upper Sandusky, they were stripped naked and forced to sit on the ground, while a crowd of sixty or seventy Indians beat them with sticks and fists. Crawford was tied by his wrists to a post. The Indians took up their guns and shot powder into his naked body. The mob then cut off his ears. They built a fire six or seven yards from the post to which he was tied, and the men took turns picking up burning hickory poles and touching them to Crawford’s body, surrounding him. They also threw hot coals at him, so soon he had nothing to walk on but burning coals and ashes. In the midst of this torture, Crawford called to Girty and begged him to shoot him. Girty replied, laughing, that he had no gun.

Crawford lasted about two hours before he gave out and lay down on his stomach, at which point the Indians fell upon him and scalped him. They threw the scalp in Knight’s face. As Knight was dragged away from the dreadful scene to be taken to the Shawnees, Crawford was roasting alive in the slow fire. After he died, it was said the Indians heaped sticks upon his body and danced around his charred remains for hours. According to Knight, Girty made no effort at all to end Crawford’s suffering.

When the Revolution ended, Girty returned to Detroit, still in the pay of the British. He played a prominent role in agitating among the frontier Indians for the next ten years. Girty led a force of 300 warriors against the Ohio River settlement of Dunlap’s Station in January 1791. Girty’s party killed several soldiers outside the fort, captured another, and fiercely but unsuccessfully laid siege to the fort. The captured prisoner was tortured within earshot of the fort, so the soldiers within could hear his agonized screams as flaming brands were “applied to his naked bowels” and the Indians kindled a fire on his belly.

After Anthony Wayne defeated the Indians in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in August 1794, Girty tried to dissuade as many chiefs as possible from going to the treaty negotiations at Greenville, but most of the chiefs were tired of fighting and wanted to bury the hatchet. In November 1794, John Jay negotiated a treaty with Britain, which stipulated that the Western posts should be vacated by British soldiers.

Simon Girty memorial stone, Detroit Riverfront, Malden, Ontario

When the Americans arrived to take possession of the fort at Detroit, they found that “the wells had been filled with stones, the windows broken, the gates locked, and the keys deposited with an aged Negro, in whose possession they were afterward found.” There were no British officers on hand to transfer possession of the fort, but Simon Girty was in the town, drunk and raving, declaring that he would not stir one inch unless driven out. However, at the sight of American troop boats coming up river, Girty became so alarmed that he plunged his horse into the stream without waiting for the ferry-boat, and, at the risk of drowning, made for the Canada shore.

The last known sighting of Girty in America—besides the March 1804 account of William Clark—occurred during the War of 1812, when Detroit was temporarily recaptured by the British. As the redcoats took possession of the town, Girty crossed the river, exclaiming, “Here’s old Simon Girty again on American soil!” He visited the town frequently over the next few  months.

After Commodore Perry’s victory over the British fleet in September 1813, Girty’s friends persuaded him to leave before American troops invaded Canada. Old, nearly blind, and crippled with rheumatism, Girty sought refuge with a band of Mohawks on the Grand River. He returned to his home in Canada in 1816, blind and depressed. In February 1818, he died in the presence of his wife and family, having asked forgiveness for his sins. He was buried on his farm, and British soldiers fired a salute over his grave.

The British see it differently than we do.

Lewis & Clark road trip: The Knife River Villages

Mary at the Knife River Villages site

From Fort Clark it is a pretty drive to Stanton, North Dakota, and the Knife River Villages. This national historic park encompasses three village sites where the Hidatsa Indians (also called the Gros Ventres or the Minitarees) lived from about 1500 to 1845. One of these villages was the home of a pregnant teenager named Sacagawea. Back in the winter of 1804-05, as she got ready to become a mother for the first time, she couldn’t have imagined that one day this village would be named for her–let alone that she would become the most memorialized woman in America.

A Hidatsa woman hoes her squash with a bone hoe, circa 1912. Courtesy Minnesota Historical Society.

This turned out to be another great site. We started off in the visitor center, where we looked at the museum exhibits and saw a touching film narrated in the words of Buffalo Bird Woman, a real Hidatsa woman who supplied interviews in the early 20th century with precious details about the all-but-vanished life and culture of the people here. In lifestyle, the Hidatsas lived in large agricultural communities with earth lodges, just like the Mandans. Interestingly, though, their languages were completely unrelated and unintelligible to one another. The Hidatsas were much more warlike than the Mandans, and made frequent journeys into Montana in the summers to hunt buffalo and raid their enemies.

We then attended a presentation of a park ranger, who told us that the Knife River was so-named from ancient times because of the outstanding quality of the flint near this place. The Hidatsas and their ancestors were known throughout the North American trade network for the high quality of the knives and arrowheads they produced here.

The Knife River

We then took a great walking tour of the site. The weather was beautiful again. It was easy to see the many earthlodge depressions and imagine the vibrant community that once lived here. The river itself is gorgeous and peaceful.

It’s hard to imagine it now, but over 6000 people lived at this spot during the time of Lewis and Clark’s visit. This was a very large urban area by the standards of early America! But of all the people there, the girl everyone remembers wasn’t even a Hidatsa. Sacagawea (spelled Sakakawea in North Dakota) was a Shoshone who had been captured at about age 12 in a Hidatsa raid on her village near present-day Salmon, Idaho. Not much is known about the girl’s next few years or how she ended up one of the two wives of Toussaint Charbonneau, a 47-year-old French-Canadian trader and local ne’er-do-well who had lived with the Hidatsas for about five or six years. “Consensual” isn’t the word that comes to mind.

Shoshone woman and baby, 1884. Courtesy of First People.

Charbonneau most often found employment as an interpreter between the French-Canadian traders and the Hidatsas. When Lewis and Clark hit town, with their blank check for exploring the continent, it didn’t take long for Charbonneau to hustle over and offer his services for the journey. Since Charbonneau didn’t speak English, or any Indian languages except Hidatsa, the captains weren’t too interested–until they found out about Sacagawea. Sacagawea was a Shoshone and spoke both her native tongue and Hidatsa. Lewis and Clark would need to make friends with the Shoshones and buy horses from them when they reached the Continental Divide. The captains agreed to hire Charbonneau, provided he brought the Shoshone girl along. Within a week, Charbonneau had moved into Fort Mandan bag and baggage with his two wives, and it was there that baby Jean Baptiste (Pomp) was born on February 11, 1805. Three months later, the little family (minus wife #2) sailed west with the Corps and into history.

Lewis and Clark and the men of the Expedition made close friends with the Mandans; their relations with the Hidatsas were reasonably cordial, but not so tight. The Hidatsa chief, a much-feared warrior named One Eye or Le Borgne, made only one visit to Fort Mandan, which Lewis reciprocated. But it seems the Hidatas weren’t too impressed. As one chief later explained to a British trader, only the “worker of iron and the mender of guns” (probably Alexander Willard and John Shields) seemed to have any sense.

Good Bear of the Hidatsa and his family, 1908, by Edward S. Curtis

 Part of the reason for Le Borgne’s attitude may have been that the Hidatsas, much more than the Mandans, were already deeply involved with the British fur trade and their French-Canadian representatives. Relations between the United States and Great Britain were terrible during this period, and the fur company representatives doubtless encouraged Le Borgne to keep his distance from the upstart Americans. As for Meriwether Lewis, a trader recalled, he “could not make himself agreeable” in encounters with the British representatives. Perhaps the captain was just carrying out Jeffersonian policy; or perhaps he was recalling his father, who died in the Revolution when Lewis was only six.

In addition, the Mandans weren’t such good neighbors that winter. They saw a lot to be gained from making friends with the Americans. Here was their chance to get one up on the more enterprising Hidatsa, and they took advantage of their opportunity, telling the Hidatsas that Lewis and Clark were probably going to attack Knife River as soon as they got the chance. It was a loss for Lewis and Clark too. With their extensive raiding experience in Montana, the Hidatsas could have given them a lot of good information about the journey ahead.

In this 1948 photo, chairman George Gillette of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) breaks down as Secretary of the Interior J.A. Krug signs the agreement giving the green light to Garrison Dam.

Fast-forwarding ahead, the Hidatsas, like the Mandans, were devastated by the 1837 smallpox epidemic. They stuck it out along the Knife River until 1845, when they moved to Like-A-Fishhook Village near Fort Berthold. Tragically, this home too was destroyed by the construction of the Garrison Dam in 1953, which flooded over 550 miles of Indian reservation land and dealt a terrible blow to the surviving members of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people.

This was a day to drink deeply of history. These North Dakota sites connected me of the present with Lewis & Clark, and back to the whispers of the generations of people who lived here for centuries before. Our day spent seeing Fort Mandan, Fort Clark, and Knife River was as enlightening and satisfying as I dreamed.

We putted on back to Bismarck, where we had a very good dinner at the Hong Kong Chinese buffet across the street from the hotel. A tremendous, fine day in the annals of our Lewis & Clark explorations.

The Great Falls of Meriwether Lewis

Exploring is not for sissies. Although only one man died during the Lewis & Clark Expedition, injuries, illness, and accidents were a part of the daily life of the Corps of Discovery. In the rugged and sometimes hostile wilderness, close calls were unavoidable.  Captain Lewis himself, in addition to being shot in the butt, was chased by grizzly bears, fell ill for weeks after crossing the Great Divide, and narrowly escaped being shot during a confrontation with the Blackfeet. In addition, over the course of the trip he suffered several spectacular falls.

"Meriwether Lewis Escapes Death Above Tavern Cave" by Michael Haynes

Lewis’s first tumble down a cliff  came on May 23, 1804, just a couple of days out from St. Louis. In present-day Franklin County, Missouri, the Corps passed a local landmark called Tavern Cave, and Lewis climbed up the bluff to have a closer look. Clark wrote in his journal about what happened next:

passed the Tavern Cave, Capt Lewis’ assended the hill which has peninsulis projecting in raged points to the river, and was near falling from a Peninsulia  Saved himself by the assistance of his Knife. Capt. Lewis near falling from the Pencelia of rocks 300 feet, he caught at 20 foot.

Lewis evidently never went anywhere without his espontoon, because he had it handy the next time he plummeted off a cliff. On June 7, 1805, in present day Choteau County, Montana near the mouth of the Marias River, Lewis and Private Richard Windsor had a very close call. Lewis wrote:

In passing along the face of one of these bluffs today I sliped at a narrow pass of about 30 yards in length and but for a quick and fortunate recovery by means of my espontoon I should been precipitated into the river down a craggy pricipice of about ninety feet. I had scarcely reached a place on which I could stand with tolerable safety even with the assistance of my espontoon before I heard a voice behind me cry out god god Capt. what shall I do    on turning about I found it was Windsor who had sliped and fallen abut the center of this narrow pass and was lying prostrate on his belley.

Lewis remained calm and managed to help Windsor to safety, then ordered the rest of the men coming behind to take a safer route.  His journal reveals that he took the incident in stride, seeming to feel that all’s well that ends well: “we roasted and eat a hearty supper of our venison not having taisted a mosel before during the day; I now laid myself down on some willow boughs to a comfortable nights rest, and felt indeed as if I was fully repaid for the toil and pain of the day, so much will a good shelter, a dry bed, and comfortable supper revive the sperits of the waryed, wet and hungry traveler.”

On the return trip, Lewis suffered one more spectacular fall while traveling along Grave Creek, in present-day Missoula County, Montana, on June 30, 1806. Lewis wrote in his journal about the incident:

in descending the creek this morning on the steep side of a high hill my horse sliped and both his hinder feet out of the road and fell, I also fell off backwards and slid near 40 feet down the hill before I could stop myself such was the steepness of the declivity; the horse was near falling on me in the first instance but fortunately recovers and we both escaped unhirt.

Richardson's red squirrel

Typically blasé about the near-miss, he immediately added: “I saw a small grey squirrel today much like those of the Pacific coast only that the belly of this was white. I also met with the plant in blume which is sometimes called the lady’s slipper or mockerson flower.”

Lewis & Clark: Did They Pray?

On the Discovering Lewis & Clark site, I recently came across Joe Mussulman’s fascinating article about the religious aspects of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. On the surface, religion didn’t seem to be very important to the Corps of Discovery. No chaplain was part of the Corps, and the discoverers never make mention of the Sabbath. The only religious holiday ever mentioned in the journals is Christmas, and it seems to have been celebrated entirely with secular traditions such as feasting (with what food was available), dancing, and shooting off guns. There is no instance in which Lewis or Clark records that the men stood together in prayer or asked for the help of God or Jesus in their journey. The journals do record that a sermon was preached, probably by Meriwether Lewis, over the body of Charles Floyd, the young sergeant who died of a burst appendix early in the journey.

"Religious Camp Meeting" by J. Maze Burbank (1839)

But this in no way implies that the men of the expedition were “Godless.” Mussulman goes beyond the journals to discuss what would have been the major spiritual influences on the men of the Corps. First was the Great Revival, also known as the Second Great Awakening, an evangelical movement that swept the South a few years prior to the Expedition. Undoubtedly, some or all of the men would have been touched by the huge camp meetings that spread the gospel with fervent emotion and audience participation. At least one man, Alexander Willard, was known by his fellows to be deeply religious. The other young men were probably thunderstruck when they learned that Willard had vowed to remain chaste outside of marriage. True to his word, he did not join in with the other men in sexual escapades with the Indians.

Founding Fathers

As for the captains themselves, they were Deists. Deism was the primary religion of the Founding Fathers. It is a religious tradition that emerged in light of the scientific advances of the 18th century, and combines belief in a Supreme Being (usually referred to as “providence” rather than “God”) with belief in reason and the power of the rational mind. Nature, rather than the scriptures, is the primary source of inspiration for a Deist.

Lewis and Clark both were Masons. While not a religion, freemasonry does promote a non-denominational belief in a Supreme Being. According to John J. Robinson, author of A Pilgrim’s Path, “Masonry leaves it up to the individual Mason to choose his pathway to God, and that policy naturally includes no rules, advice, or admonitions as to the means of salvation. The Mason is expected, quite properly, to get that spiritual guidance from his own denomination, which he is encouraged to support with both his energy and his personal finances.” Lewis, as the grand master and founder of the first Masonic lodge in St. Louis, no doubt took this responsibility seriously.

Meriwether Lewis's Masonic Apron

The spirituality of Clark’s slave, York, is an intriguing question. According to Ira Berlin’s book Many Thousands Gone, at the turn of the 18th/19th century, only about ten percent of slaves had become Christians. This would skyrocket during the Second Great Awakening. Even so, it’s likely that York probably wasn’t any more devout than William Clark. If religion was important to him at all, he probably combined fading remnants of African belief with some tenets of Christianity.

Hunting and the Lewis & Clark Expedition

Hunting the Grizzly Bear, by Karl Bodmer

Last week I wrote a post about the embarrassing hunting accident in which Captain Meriwether Lewis was accidentally shot in the butt by one of the men. I thought it might be fun today to talk more generally about hunting on the Expedition and how the men got fed.

A block of portable soup

From the beginning, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark understood that they would not be able to carry nearly enough food to keep the Corps of Discovery in trim. They would be gone, they thought, for at least eighteen months (the reality was two and one-half years). Almost four dozen men would make the journey from St. Louis to the first winter camp at Fort Mandan, and the so-called permanent party, which traveled from Fort Mandan to the Pacific and back, included 33 people. Lewis packed some flour and cornmeal and 193 pounds of “portable soup,” a gelatinous precursor of condensed soup, as emergency provisions. Otherwise, the Corps would eat what it could catch, trap, or shoot along the trail.

Lewis & Clark on the Lower Columbia, by Charles M. Russell

Lewis and Clark also understood just how much food the men would need in order to do the incredible heavy labor they were expecting–to row, pole, or haul three heavy boats full of supplies upstream against the Missouri’s unpredictable current, snags, and sandbars and later to paddle heavy dugouts, engage in frequent portages, and travel on foot over unbroken mountain trails. The concept of the calorie in nutrition hadn’t yet been invented, but the men would be expending a whopping 5000 calories a day. To put that in perspective, the average male office worker needs about 2200 calories a day; an elite male athlete in training about 3500.

In other words, the men of the Corps needed an enormous number of calories just to keep going, and that meant meat and lots of it–about six to nine pounds of meat per person per day. In other words, vegetarians need not apply! Lewis and Clark attacked this problem in two ways: with technology and personnel.

Harper's Ferry in 1803

One of Lewis’s jobs was to outfit the Expedition. He ordered 15 new .54-caliber flintlock rifles from the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, as well as high-quality tomahawks and knives. In the meanwhile, Clark recruited the frontiersmen known as the “Nine Young Men from Kentucky,” each of whom brought his own “high-tech” Kentucky long rifle. Though each of the U.S. Army soldiers on the Expedition was issued a smoothbore musket, it was the rifles that would be the mainstay for the Expedition’s hunters.

George Drouilliard, by M.O. Skarsten (1964)

Lewis and Clark had the right weapons, but they still needed the right men for the job.  Everyone’s lives would depend on the hunters, who would have to work long hours every day and endure every kind of weather and terrain just to keep the Corps fed. At Fort Massac in Kentucky, Lewis recruited an elite civilian hunter named George Drouilliard (pronounced Drewyer). It was one of the best decisions he ever made. The 28-year-old Drouilliard was of mixed Shawnee Indian and French Canadian blood and had already earned a reputation as a remarkable hunter, tracker, and interpreter. Drouilliard’s worth is reflected in his pay–$300 a year vs. $60 for a private–and in his status, in which he was treated almost like another officer.

Drouilliard was  the lead hunter, and was frequently assisted by Lewis or Clark, both of whom were elite riflemen and fine hunters. The journals identify at least fourteen of the other men as frequent hunters. Interestingly, York, Clark’s slave, often hunted, the prohibition on slaves carrying weapons being abandoned almost as soon the Corps was out of sight of St. Louis.

The final piece of the hunting puzzle was Clark’s recruiting of John Shields, a blacksmith and gunsmith from Kentucky. Shields kept the weapons in good working order, a task that required more and more ingenuity as the Corps got further into the wild. Shields also made bullets by melting down the lead Lewis had packed for the purpose.

Feasting and Fasting with Lewis & Clark, by Leandra Zim Holland (2003)

Each landscape and leg of the journey featured different hardships and challenges for the intrepid hunters and the hungry Corps. Want to know more? Then pick up a copy of Feasting and Fasting with Lewis & Clark by Leandra Zim Holland. This fascinating and comprehensive look at how the Expedition lived is a must-read for history buffs, re-enactors, and lovers of pioneer lore.

Lewis & Clark road trip: Fort Clark, North Dakota

Fort Clark, by Karl Bodmer

Our next stop on the Lewis & Clark trail was Fort Clark, once the site of a major American fur trading outpost and a Mandan village named Mitu’tahakto’s (pronounced me-toot-a-hank-tosh). Fort Clark was named after William Clark and was situated very near the site of Lewis & Clark’s original Fort Mandan. However, Lewis & Clark never visited  Mitu’tahakto’s, because the town was not founded until 1822. The fur trading fort was set up adjacent to the village in the early 1830s; American trade goods and liquor arrived by steamboat each year and were exchanged with the Indians for beaver pelts and bison robes.

Before exploring the site, we decided to eat our sandwiches at a little picnic shelter in the parking area. It was a day for unstable weather, and in just a few minutes a fierce rainstorm drove us back to the Kia Rio for refuge! We munched the rest of our lunches in comfort and watched a downpour of rain and tiny hail sweep across the park.

Liz standing outside the depression left by an earth lodge at Fort Clark, North Dakota. This was once someone's home.

Fortunately, the  storm passed as quickly as it had arrived, and we took a great walk around the site, which at first glance looks like an empty field beside the river. But as the excellent interpretive signage and hundreds of circular depressions scalloping the earth testified, that wasn’t always the case. Once, there was a bustling town, a busy fort , and a nexus in the world-wide trade in furs.

Statue of Karl Bodmer and Prince Maximilian at the Castle of Neuweid in Germany

Fort Clark played host to all the travelers on the Upper Missouri, but the most notable visitors ever to spend time here weren’t even Americans. The German nobleman Prince Maximilian of Weid was a self-taught but seasoned explorer, naturalist, and pioneering ethnographer who had cut his teeth on a major exploration of the plants, animals, and native cultures of Brazil. Karl Bodmer was a 24-year-old Swiss artist hired by the prince to paint landscapes of the country and portraits of the Indians they encountered. Together they would preserve the memory of an ancient way of life that was about to be swept from the scene.

By 1832, the 50-year-old prince had decided to undertake a second expedition to the Americas, this one to the Upper Missouri of the United States. Not since Lewis & Clark had any serious scientist traveled up the Missouri; and since Lewis & Clark’s journals were only partially published, many of the region’’s unique cultures and natural wonders remained largely unknown.

Herd of bison on the Upper Missouri, by Karl Bodmer

In 1833, with help from 63-year-old William Clark, by now the country’s leading Indian diplomat, Maximilian and his entourage, including Bodmer, boarded a steamboat operated by the American Fur Company and set out on their exploratory tour through Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Montana. The prince hoped to replicate Lewis & Clark’s journey and made plans to cross the Rocky Mountains and strike out for the Pacific Ocean, but the Blackfoot Indians turned back his expedition at Fort MacKenzie, near present-day Fort Benton, Montana.

Four Bears, by Karl Bodmer. A great chief and warrior, Four Bears was friendly and hospitable to whites and took a great interest in the artwork being done by Karl Bodmer and George Catlin. He and his entire family perished in the smallpox epidemic.

Maximilian’s loss was history’s gain. The Prince returned to Fort Clark to winter over, and devoted his time to a complete study of the Mandan and Hidatsa people he encountered, writing thousands of words on their customs, language, culture, and ceremonies. As for Karl Bodmer, the painter was producing the work of his life. Over the course of the expedition, the watercolorist produced 81 scenes of the West and North American Indian life, painstakingly reproduced in almost photographic detail.

The prince, the artist, and the expedition departed the United States in the spring, never to return. And in a few short years, everything changed. On June 19, 1837, the steamboat St. Peters docked at Fort Clark with the usual trade goods and at least one passenger infected with smallpox. Within days the disease was rampaging through the Mandan village. The toll was absolutely horrific. By the middle of August, over 90% of the residents of Mitu’tahakto’s were dead. The survivors fled to live with relatives, abandoning the village forever.

Surprisingly enough, though, Mitu’tahakto’s did not remain uninhabited for long. The Arikara Indians, who had also suffered a terrible toll in the smallpox epidemic, came in and cleaned up the village and took it over. The Arikara and the fur traders hung on at Fort Clark, weathering fires, another smallpox epidemic, and a cholera outbreak, until attacks by the Sioux finally led to the abandonment of the village and the fort in 1861. Before long, the earth lodges fell to ruins, and the remains of Fort Clark were completely scavenged for firewood by passing steamboats. 

Inside a Mandan Lodge, by Karl Bodmer

Mitu’tahakto’s people and ways were gone–but not forgotten. In 1839, Prince Maximilian published a detailed two-volume account of his travels in North America; he continued to publish scientific and ethnographic articles about the Upper Missouri until his death in 1867. Bodmer’s drawings illustrated the work. Together they provided the most complete and reliable eyewitness accounts of life on the Upper Missouri ever recorded, a treasure for history and a delight for the art lover.

The ghosts of Fort Clark made us want to linger here for some time. The thrilling sight of a long train crossing the rugged landscape brought us back to at least the 20th century. The skies had brightened again, and we had more to see before the day was done.