 Captain
Lewis
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Protecting
the Lands
Explored by
Lewis and Clark
1805 - 1905 - 2005
·
Saving the Salmon
· Guarding the Grizzly
· Protecting Wild Forests
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 Captain
Clark
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Protecting
Wild America
By
John Osborn, MD Conservation Chair
Northern Rockies Chapter, Sierra Club
The
Lewis & Clark Bicentennial will be a major
event for America, perhaps second only to the July
4, 1976 celebration marking the Declaration of
Independence and birth of the United States. We
intend that America commemorate the Lewis &
Clark expedition by protecting and restoring lands
and waters, and saving species from
extinction.
The
Lewis & Clark trail stretches across a
continent: starting on the front steps of
Monticello, north to Philadelphia and then down the
Ohio River, through the Gateway Arch in St. Louis,
up the Missouri and down the Columbia to the
Pacific Ocean.
The
Corps of Discovery rendezvoused near St. Louis on
the Mississippi and launched boats up the Missouri
in May, 1804. After nearly 15 months, on August 12,
the Corps of Discovery stood on a continental
divide between two great rivers: the Missouri
flowing east, and a new (to them) river flowing
west. They drank of this cold clean water,
tributary to the great river of the American West:
the Columbia.
Lewis
& Clark, Sacagawea, and the entire
Corps of Discovery in taking those steps,
walked from the waters of the Missouri to
the Columbia, and entered a river of
life.
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Lewis
& Clark, Sacagawea, and the entire Corps of
Discovery in taking those steps, walked from the
waters of the Missouri to the Columbia, and entered
a river of life. Sixteen million wild salmon yearly
pulsed these wild forests and deserts, returning
home to natal streams, spawning, and in their death
renewing a cycle of life. Here too were great
forests and clean waters that were home to caribou,
grizzly bears, lynx, trout, and sturgeon. The Corps
of Discovery recorded 178 plants and 122 animals
new to science and described and befriended the
Indian cultures that depended on the yearly return
of the salmon.
After
Lewis & Clark came successive waves of
EuroAmericans: fur traders, Christian missionaries,
the U.S. Army, homesteaders, miners, and builders
of railroads and dams. To be sure, great cities and
towns emerged in the wilderness. The West's mineral
and natural resources have been exploited producing
great wealth (often for a few). But what about the
cost? Taxpayers continue to pay dearly for
Congress's antiquated laws frozen in time, notably
the 1872 Mining Law and 1864 Northern Pacific
railroad land grant. And viewed from the
perspective of the natural world, the environmental
cost in the wake of Lewis & Clark has been
cataclysmic.
The
Lewis & Clark Bicentennial will occur
at the same time a wave of extinction
threatens to wash over the Columbia River
watershed. This convergence provides
America with a stark
choice
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Lewis
and Clark encountered neither a single clearcut nor
logging road. Now there are thousands of clearcuts
and hundreds of thousands of miles of logging
roads. 200 years ago the landscape was entirely
wild. Now the wildness is a life-sustaining
archipelago in a sea of forest
destruction.
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200
years ago the waters of the Columbia flowed pure
and teemed with fish. No longer. Today the major
tributaries of the Upper Columbia River are
polluted with millions of tons of toxic mine
wastes. The Spokane River Basin in Idaho and
eastern Washington, and Clark Fork in Montana are
the nation's two largest Superfund
cleanups.
Lewis
& Clark found the Columbia River alive with
salmon. Where once rushing spring freshets carried
young salmon out to sea, now the "river" is a
series of slow-moving slackwater reservoirs. Where
Lewis & Clark canoed free flowing waters on the
Snake River, today the river has been stilled by
four dams.
For
America to commemorate the Lewis &
Clark Bicentennial by allowing salmon to
go extinct and wildlands to be destroyed
would be a shame of historic proportions.
America must not allow this to
happen.
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These
four lower Snake River dams form a channel of death
for the young salmon: four blockages requiring
urgent bypass "surgery" to prevent
extinction.
How
we commemorate Lewis & Clark is shaped by the
realities of our times and our moral values. 100
years after the explorers, Portland commemorated
Lewis & Clark with a world's fair trumpeting
industrial themes. 200 years after Lewis &
Clark the Columbia River is sick and dying. The
Lewis & Clark Bicentennial will occur at the
same time a wave of extinction threatens to wash
over the Columbia River watershed. This convergence
provides America with a stark choice.
The
Sierra Club has a multi-year campaign to protect
the wild America of Lewis & Clark. "This is the
premier land preservation and restoration
opportunity that Americans are going to have in the
first decade of the 21st century," noted Carl Pope,
the Sierra Club's executive director, at the
campaign's public unveiling.
"This
is the premier land preservation and
restoration opportunity that Americans are
going to have in the first decade of the
21st century."
--
Carl Pope, Sierra Club
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Although
many organizations will participate in the
Bicentennial, the Sierra Club is the one
organization that has the stature, volunteers, and
professional staff resources to carry out a
national campaign to protect the lands explored by
Lewis & Clark. So it was in 1996 that I
approached the Sierra Club's Northern Rockies
Chapter to advocate a national campaign.
We
have a moral duty and legal obligation to take
action. For America to commemorate the Lewis &
Clark Bicentennial by allowing salmon to go extinct
and wildlands to be destroyed would be a shame of
historic proportions. America must not allow this
to happen. The United States must honor treaties
and commitments promising the salmon will endure.
There is no better way to commemorate the upcoming
Lewis and Clark Bicentennial than to protect and
restore wild America for our families, for our
future.
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The
Bicentennial
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LEWIS
AND CLARK
Epic
adventure displays spirit of young
nation
By
Dayton Duncan
Nearly
200 years ago, in late November of 1805, the
members of the Lewis and Clark expedition huddled
near the mouth of the Columbia River, having become
the first American citizens to cross the continent
by land.
Far
from home and pinned down for weeks by a relentless
Pacific storm that William Clark (in his own
imaginative spelling) called "tempestous and
horiable," the small band of explorers nevertheless
found a tangible way to commemorate their
remarkable achievement: They began carving their
names into tree trunks - so many times, it appears
from Clark's journal entries, that few trees near
their sodden campsites escaped their knife
blades.
With
each cut, they seemed to be boasting, "I was here,"
yet also pleading, "Remember me."
Those
tree markings (and in most cases the trees
themselves) have long since disappeared. But the
story the Corps of Discovery left behind remains
embedded in our national consciousness, and each
generation etches it anew with a fresh flourish.
The overwhelming public response to our recent PBS
documentary - in some cities it even outdrew the
primetime commercial networks - is merely the
latest evidence of the persistent appeal of Lewis
and Clark. Why is that?
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Capt.
Meriwether Lewis
(courtesy
of Dictionary of American
Portraits)
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For
starters, it is a great adventure story, filled
with tense scenes of suspense, ordeals to overcome,
moments of seeming triumph snatched away by yet
another unexpected obstacle, even sudden twists in
the plot more remarkable than fiction. Underlying
it all is the timeless desire to discover what lies
around the next bend of the river, what waits just
beyond the farthest horizon.
Across
the divide of nearly two centuries, it
reminds us of what we as a people are
capable of - for good or
ill.
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Sent
by a young nation that itself would soon embark
toward the Pacific, Lewis and Clark took our first
transcontinental - "road trip." Since that time,
road trips have held a special grip on the American
imagination. Think of Huckleberry Finn,
On the Road, Travels With Charley,
Lonesome Dove or Wagon Train, Star
Trek, Thelma and Louise and so many
others. Tales of journeys are what we most readily
respond to, perhaps because journeying is so
intertwined with our past. "We proceeded on," the
most recurrent phrase in the expedition's journals,
also summarizes much of our history.
There's
also a fascinating cast of characters, beginning
with the two captains. The brilliant but troubled
Meriwether Lewis - capable of switching from
exaltation to deep melancholy at a moment's notice
- was perfectly complemented by the gregarious,
trustworthy William Clark. Sharing the command in
contradiction to military protocol, learning on the
trail to trust each other without question, theirs
became one of the great friendships in American
history; two very different men, now linked
forever.
But
this is more than a "buddy story." The crew
included rough frontiersmen from Kentucky and
Pennsylvania, soldiers from Virginia and New
Hampshire, French-Canadian boatmen, sons of white
fathers and American Indian mothers, a black slave
and a young American Indian woman who brought along
her infant son.
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Capt.
William Clark
(courtesy
of Dictionary of American
Portraits)
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By
the time they reached the Pacific, this motley,
collection of individuals had molded themselves
into a cohesive Corps of Discovery, a
community-on-the-move whose sense of shared purpose
enabled them to surmount all the odds and achieve
great things. Even now (perhaps now most
particularly), their story reminds us of an
essential American promise: from diversity,
strength, from different origins, a common
destination, e pluribus unum
The
boundless Great Plains blanketed by herds
of bison, elk and antelope, with grizzly
bears nearly as common as the prairie dogs
living in 10-acre villages, and wolves so
prevalent that the men briefly made pets
from a litter of wolf pups. The Missouri
River running wild and free all the way
from the Rocky Mountains to the
Mississippi. The Columbia River also
unimpeded, literally choked with salmon.
Skies blackened at midday by huge flocks
of geese; California condors wheeling
overhead. "It seemed," Lewis wrote at one
point, "as if those seens of visionary
inchantment would never have an
end.".
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They
remind us of more. Within Lewis and Clark's
journals is a vivid description of the West at the
dawn of the 19th century.
They
met an astonishing variety of American Indian
peoples - nomads who followed the bison on
horseback, farmers living in permanent villages of
earth lodges, refugees from tribal wars scavenging
for roots in the mountains, people who survived on
fish and traveled by boat. Lewis and Clark were
crossing their homelands and quite simply would
never have succeeded without the American Indians'
generosity .
In
return, on behalf of the nation poised to move
westward, a grateful Lewis and Clark offered "the
hand of unalterable friendship" and promised that
"the Great Spirit will smile upon your nation and
in future ages will make you outnumber the trees of
the forest."
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And
they saw a natural wonderland none of us will ever
see. The boundless Great Plains blanketed by herds
of bison, elk and antelope, with grizzly bears
nearly as common as the prairie dogs living in
10-acre villages, and wolves so prevalent that the
men briefly made pets from a litter of wolf pups.
The Missouri River running wild and free all the
way from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi.
The Columbia River also unimpeded, literally choked
with salmon. Skies blackened at midday by huge
flocks of geese; California condors wheeling
overhead. "It seemed," Lewis wrote at one point,
"as if those seens of visionary inchantment would
never have an end."
Most
of those "seens of visionary inchantment" came to
an end some time ago. Likewise, most of the
promises the captains made in good faith to
American Indian peoples remain unkept. But the
story of Lewis and Clark endures.
Across
the divide of nearly two centuries, it reminds us
of what we as a people are capable of - for good or
ill. We can still follow their trail and open their
journals to re-experience the Corps of Discovery.
We can find inspiration in their perseverance and
courage. We can applaud and maybe even try to
emulate their bond of friendship and community. We
can mourn what's been lost in the time since their
epic adventure, perhaps dedicate ourselves to
honoring their promises or to restoring something
of the wonderland they beheld with awe.
And
we can learn what the explorers themselves learned
at the mouth of the Columbia. All of us leave some
sort of mark on the trail as "we proceed on." But
long after that mark has vanished, what's
remembered is the spirit with which we made our
journey.
Dayton
Duncan is the author, with Ken Burns, of Lewis
& Clark: The Journey of the Corps of
Discovery.
Missoulian,
December 14, 1997.Copyright Dayton Duncan.
Reprinted with permission of the
author.
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1814
map of the Missouri River and Columbia River
Map
of the Lewis & Clark Track, copied from the original
drawing of Capt. Clark, in "History of the Expedition under
the Command of Captains Lewis & Clark" edited by
Nicholas Biddle; Bradford and Inskeep, Philadelphia, 1814.
(courtesy of the American Philosophical Society
www.amphilsoc.org)
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Sierra
Club leads drive to guard legacy of Lewis and
Clark
By
Joel Connelly
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, National
Correspondent
Almost
200 years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
opened the American West, a major environmental
group is starting a campaign to preserve
still-intact wildlands along their routes, from a
Nebraska prairie to the Columbia River estuary.
...
For
remainder of story:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/west171.shtml
The following are excerpts from the
article:
"Our
mission is to protect their legacy, the
wildlands and wildlife we have
left."
"So
magnificent a scenery in a country thus
situated far removed from the Sivilised
(sic) world to be enjoyed by nothing but
the buffalo, elk, deer and bear in which
it abounds."-- Captain
Clark
Seventy
million wild buffalo once roamed the Great
Plains. By 1883, only 50 remained alive.
At present, about 200,000 buffalo live on
the plains.
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The
grizzly bear ranged from coastal Oregon
and California to the plains of Nebraska.
The bears numbered as many as 100,000;
today, fewer than a thousand survive in
the Lower 48.
Sixteen
million salmon returned annually to the
Columbia River when Lewis and Clark passed
through. Today, at most 2 million enter
the river, less than a half-million of
them wild stocks.
The
upper Salmon River country of Idaho
remains nearly as wild now as it was then.
But the great fish runs have disappeared
from the river, largely as a result of
four dams built far downstream on the
Snake River.
[T]he
Sierra Club is supporting partial removal
of four Army Corps of Engineers dams on
the lower Snake River as a way of
returning salmon to their wild habitat
upstream in the Snake-Salmon river
system.
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The
Corps of Discovery
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Louisiana
Purchase 1803
LOUISIANA
TERRITORY 1805 • ORLEANS TERR.
1805
The
purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon by the
United States changed the course of world history and
doubled the size of the United States. As the American flag
was raised in St. Louis, Captains Lewis & Clark were
preparing for the expedition. The Corps of Discovery
explored the newly acquired Louisiana territory. A pressing
object of the expedition was to bolster U.S. claims to the
Columbia River. (Reprinted with permission of the Lewis
& Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, from Arlene J. Large,
"Louisiana's irrelevant flag: Lewis and Clark were going
anyway," in We Proceeded On, May 1993, p.
16.)
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"You
must know in the first place that very sanguine
expectations are at this time formed by our
Government that the whole of that immense country
wartered by the Mississippi and it's tributary
streams, Missouri inclusive, will be the property
of the U. States in less than 12 Months from this
date." -- Lewis to Clark, June 19,
1803
[Donald
Jackson, Ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark
Expedition. Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana,
1978, reprinted in part from Arlene Large,
"Louisiana's Irrelevant Flag" in We Proceeded
On, publication of the Lewis & Clark
Heritage Foundation, Vol. 19, No. 2, May 1993, p.
15]
"
It is hourly expected that the American's will take
possession of the other side of the Mississippi.
All the Inhabitents appear anxious except the
people of St. Louis, who are ingaged in the Indian
Trade which they are doubtfull will be divided,
amongst those whome will trade on the best terms. "
-- Capt. Clark, January 15,
1804
[reprinted
from "We Proceeded On", Lewis & Clark Heritage
Foundation, Vol. 19, No. 2, May 1993, p.
32]
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"It
must be constantly remembered that in 1801 . . .
Louisiana was Spanish territory and destined to
become French, and that the United States had a
recognized prior claim to the Columbia country, to
which Spain had some claim and which both Great
Britain ... and Russia might also make claim. ...
[The Columbia] region, in January 1803, was
a legitimate field for American expansion as
Louisiana was not. The American prior claim to it
was, according to usages of nations, so good that
in the same year as Gray's discovery of the
Columbia, Vancouver had to take the stand for Great
Britain that Gray had never really entered the
river, whereas his lieutenant, Broughton, had. This
remained the official British stand till the Oregon
question was settled.
"In
January 1803, the attractive force, therefore, was
the Columbia region, a detached portion of the
American economy, to sovereignty over which the
United States had a prior but unadjudicated and
untested claim. The tacitly assumed force was the
extension of American settlement into Louisiana."
-- Bernard DeVoto, 1953
[The
Journals of Lewis and Clark, Houghton Mifflin
Co, Boston, 1981 p. xxxiv, footnote 11]
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Monticello,
Virginia home of Thomas Jefferson. The Lewis & Clark
Trail starts here on the front steps of Monticello.
President Thomas Jefferson selected his Virginia neighbor,
Meriwether Lewis, as his personal secretary and to lead the
expedition. Lewis prepared for the journey under Jefferson's
tutelage in North American geography, botany, mineralogy,
astronomy, and ethnology. Prior to departing for St. Louis
in 1803, Capt. Clark studied under America's leading
scientists in Philadelphia. (courtesy of Monticello/Thomas
Jefferson Foundation, Inc., www.monticello.org)
"As
soon as Jefferson learned that Louisiana was to be
ceded to France [by Spain], he moved to
settle the Mississippi question permanently. He
directed the American minister to France, Robert R.
Livingston, to open negotiations for the purchase
of New Orleans, or failing that for the right of
deposit or some other means of temporarily saving
the situation. Napoleon's foreign minister,
Talleyrand, completely frustrated Livingston,
refusing to come to grips with his
proposals....
-- Bernard DeVoto
[The
Journals of Lewis and Clark, p.
xxiii]
"[Napoleon,]
abandoning his plan of attacking the British Empire
by way of the Western Hemisphere, ... prepared to
attack it in the center, by way of Germany and the
English Channel. It was certain that on the
outbreak of the war he now proposed to make Great
Britain, the mistress of the seas, would seize
Louisiana. It was primarily to deny her such an
enormous increase of wealth and power that Napoleon
determined to sell Louisiana to the United
States."
-- Bernard DeVoto
[The
Journals of Lewis and Clark, p.
xxiii]
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President
Jefferson's
instructions to Capt.
Lewis
"The
object of your mission is to explore the Missouri
river, & such principal streams of it, as, by
it's course & communication with the waters of
the Pacific Ocean, may offer the most direct &
practicable water communication across this
continent, for the purposes of
commerce."
".
. . make yourself acquainted, as far as a diligent
pursuit of your journey shall admit, with the names
of the nations & their numbers; their relations
with other tribes or nations; their language,
traditions, monuments; their ordinary occupations
in agriculture, fishing, hunting, war, arts, &
the implements for these; their food, clothing and
domestic accommodations; the diseases prevalent
among them & the remedies they use. . .
."
"[Observe]
the animals of the country generally, &
especially those not known in the U.S. the remains
and accounts of any which may [be] deemed
rare or extinct"
Original
Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition
1804-1806, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites (New
York, 1904-5), as quoted in Lewis & Clark:
Pioneering Naturalists, Paul Russell Cutright,
Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1969, pp. 1-9.
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Gateway
Arch, St. Louis. The Corps of Discovery headed up the
Missouri River on May 22, 1804, and returned on September
23, 1806 to St. Louis. Their two-and one-half-year journey
covered 8,000 miles. (courtesy of Jefferson National
Expansion Memorial, www.nps.gov/jeff)
Honored
Parents: I now embrace this opportunity of writing
to you once more to let you know where I am and
where I am going. I am well thank God and in high
Spirits. I am now on an expedition to the westward,
with Capt Lewis and Capt Clark, who are appointed
by the President of the united States to go on an
Expedition through the interior parts of North
America. We are to ascend the Missouri River with a
boat as far as it is navigable and then go by land,
to the western ocean, if nothing prevents. This
part consists of 25 picked men of the armey and
country likewise and I am so happy as to be one of
them picked men from the armey and I and all the
party are if we live to return to receive our
discharge when ever we return again to the united
Stated if we choose it we expect to be gone 18
months or two years, we are to receive a great
reward for this expedition 15 dollars a month and a
least 400 ackers of first rate land and if we make
great discoveries as we expect the united States
has promised to make us great rewards, more than we
are promised
I
have received no letter since Betsey's yet but will
write next winter if I have a
chance.
Yours
&c - John Ordway Segt., April the
8th 1804, Camp River Dubois
[reprinted
from We Proceeded On, Lewis & Clark
Heritage Foundation, Vol. 19, No. 2, May 1993, p.
32]
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"The
Louisiana Purchase was one of the most important
events in world history. It was an event of such
magnitude that, as Henry Adams said, its results
are beyond measurement. Not only did it double the
area of the United States, not only did it add to
our wealth resources of incalculable value, not
only did it provide a potential that was certain to
make us a great power, not only did it make equally
certain that we would expand beyond the Rockies to
the Pacific, and not only did it secure us against
foreign victory on any scale conceivable in the
nineteenth century - it also provided the
centripetal, unifying force that would hold the
nation firm against disruptive forces from within.
Whether or not the rebellion that became the Civil
War was inevitable, the Purchase had made certain
that it could not succeed. And there is no aspect
of our national life, no part of our social and
political structure, and no subsequent event in the
main course of our history that it has not
affected." -- Bernard DeVoto
[The
Journals of Lewis and Clark, p.
xxiv]
"It
may be that to secure the Columbia country - Oregon
- was the earliest as it was certainly the most
urgent of Jefferson's proposes. The expedition
served it vitally; in fact, one is justified in
saying, decisively. The land traverse bolstered the
claim established by Robert Gray's discovery and
was of equal or greater legal importance; in
international polity the two combined to give the
United States not only a prior but a paramount
claim. More, it was the journey of Lewis and Clark
that gave the American people a conviction that
Oregon was theirs and this conviction was more
important than the claim. And pragmatically, the
establishment of Fort Astoria by Astor's party won
the British-American race to the Pacific. Astor's
American Fur Company and Pacific Fur company were
established not only as a result of the
expedition's reports but in exact accordance with
Lewis's analysis of the practices required." --
Bernard DeVoto
[The
Journals of Lewis and Clark, p.
l]
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Boston
Centinel, Lexington, June 19,
1805
THE
party of discovery, under the command of Capt.
Lewis and Clark, left the mouth of
the Missouri on the 19th day of May, 1804.
An express with dispatches from their winter
quarters, which left them the 14th April, has
returned to St. Louis. By the express,
letters were received from Captain Clark to
his correspondents in Kentucky. A gentleman
from Jefferson county, has obligingly
favored the Editor of the Kentucky Gazette
with the following account, which he obtained from
one of the men who returned with the express, and
from letters from some of the party. They fortified
themselves in November last, on the bank of the
Missouri, 1609 miles from the mouth, by
actual measurement, in latitude 47, 21, N; called
then Fort Mandane, after a nation of
Indians, who reside in the neighborhood, and who
have been very friendly to them. - On their passage
up, they were delighted with the beautiful
appearance of the country for about 200 leagues, or
to the mouth of the river La Plata, which
comes in from the South; after which, to their
winter quarters, it is described not to be so
fertile. The person who brought the dispatches,
speaks of the opening made by the river, being
about one mile wide with high cliffs on each side.
- The bed of the river occupies about a fourth part
of it, the remainder of the bottom entirely
composed of coarse sand, covered with cotton wood.
From
such information as they have received of
the country above there, it is about 600
miles to the great falls, which are made
by a ledge of mountains, called Rocky
Mountain, in which it is presumed the
Missouri
terminates.
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This
bottom continually giving way either on one side or
the other, and gaining on the opposite side. - The
cliffs in some places are covered with red cedar,
which, with the cotton and a few small black ash
trees, is the only timber described to be in that
country. From the height, there is not a tree or
twig to be seen, as far as the sight can extend, or
as they have explored. Out from the river the land
goes off perfectly level, with but few exceptions -
and their plains covered with grass. They passed
the mouths of a number of streams, the most of
which had names given by the French. One they have
named Floyd's river, to perpetuate the name
of a young man of the party, named Charles
Floyd, who died much regretted on the 20th
August.
Buffaloes
are said to be in great numbers, and of a
large size
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They
represent the Indians to have been friendly, with
but a few exceptions. The Soux are the most
numerous, are organized in bands bearing different
names, move about from place to place, from the
banks of the river out to the plains, in pursuit of
game and plunder having no fixed place of residence
and continual state of warfare. These were the most
troublesome Indians to the party of discovery, as
they expressed a jealousy, least they would supply
their enemies higher up with arms &c. - The
higher up they went, the more friendly they found
the savages, and the better armed. - They have a
more regular trade with the North West Company, and
the Hudson Bay company; which supplies come to them
by the way of Lake Winnepeck. The Mandanes
cultivate corn, which is of a small kind, from whom
the party was supplied during the winter, and their
hunters kept them in abundance of meat.
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Buffaloes
are said to be in great numbers, and of a large
size - two description of deer are described; those
resembling the common kind of this country being
larger, and the tails 18 inches long, and the hair
much longer on their bodies; the other kind having
a black tail. Elks and goats are numerous. The
grouse, or praire are in plenty; and before the
closing of the river in the fall, water fowls in
abundance. Fish scarce, and those principally of
the cat kind. Some of the white bear-skins, had
been brought to the fort by visiting Indians from
higher up; but the party had seen none of those
animals. The Indians keep horses, which are used
entirely for the chase, and in war.
They
have sent on to the President of the
United States an accurate journal, with a
map of the country through which they
passed.
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From
such information as they have received of the
country above there, it is about 600 miles to the
great falls, which are made by a ledge of
mountains, called Rocky Mountain, in which it is
presumed the - Missouri terminates. At their
winter quarters the river is nearly a mile wide; is
equally as muddy as at its mouth, and has continued
its rapidity with very little alteration, as high
as they have gone, though it has become
considerably more shallow, so that they will not be
able to take their large barge any higher. From
what information they have obtained of the course
of the upper part of the river, the most are at the
northwardly part. - From where they wintered to the
falls, is nearly a south course. The description
given by McKenzie of the head waters of the
river, is accurate.
They
have sent on to the President of the United States
an accurate journal, with a map of the country
through which they passed. Six of party were sent
back - the party now consists of 28 men, exclusive
of the two officers. They have enjoyed perfect
health - not one having been sick, except the
unfortunate young man before mentioned, and he was
taken off in a few hours by the cramp in his
stomach. The greatest friendship has existed with
the party; and the men who have returned, speak in
the highest terms of the humanity, and uncommon
pains and attention of both Captains, -Lewis
and -Clark, toward the whole of them; and
that they left them in good spirits, fully
convinced that they would winter on the Pacific
Ocean.
They
were told of six nations of Indians they would have
to pass, before they would arrive at the falls from
only one of which they apprehended any difficulty -
they are called the Snake tribe; and reside high
up.
Curiosities
of different kinds, live beasts, birds, several
boxes of minerals, a pair of uncommon ram's horns,
from the rocky mountains, scions of a new
discovered berry, &c. have been brought on by
the returned party, and deposited with the
commanding officer at St. Louis, to be sent
by him to the President.
We
expect in a few days further particulars relative
to this interesting voyage.
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White
Salmon. (Oncorhynchus kisutch, coho salmon), March
16, 1806. Shown here is a page from the
expedition's journals describing and illustrating a
salmon. The Corps of Discovery first tasted salmon
near Lemhi Pass. (courtesy of the American
Philosophical Society www.amphilsoc.org)
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The
trail [took us to the most distant fountain of
the waters of the Mighty Missouri in surch of which
we have spent so many toilsome days and wristless
nights. thus far I had accomplished one of those
great objects on which my mind has been unalterably
fixed for many years, judge then of the pleasure I
felt in all[a]ying my thirst with this pure
and ice-cold water . . . .
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we
proceeded on to the top of the dividing ridge from
which I discovered immence ranges of high mountains
still to the West. here I first tasted the water of
the great Columbia river. -- Captain Lewis,
August 12, 1805
[Bernard
DeVoto, The Journals of Lewis and Clark,
pages 188-189]
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Lemhi
Pass. After nearly 15 months, on August 12, 1805, the Corps
of Discovery stood on a continental divide between two great
rivers: the Missouri flowing east, and a new (to them) river
flowing west: the Columbia. Lewis & Clark, Sacagawea,
and the entire Corps of Discovery entered a river of life:
the Columbia River, richest salmon fishery on earth.
Photo:© jonathan stoke
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Nez
Perce Indians meeting Lewis & Clark -- and the meeting
of two cultures, 1805. The Corps of Discovery was on the
brink of disaster: cold, starving, and exhausted. Captain
Clark and six hunters went forward in search of food. On
September 20 Clark first met the Nimipoo (Nee-me-poo), the
Nez Perce. At this most vulnerable moment the Nez Perce
welcomed them, fed them salmon and camas root, and turned
disaster to triumph. The Nez Perce Tribe saved the Corps of
Discovery.
(Courtesy
of National Park Service, Nez Perce National Historical
Park. Photo number NEPE-HI-1773)
The
explorers traveled to Traveler's Rest near the town of
Missoula, and proceeded west into the Bitterroot Mountains.
The Corps of Discovery was cold, wet, and starving, and the
whole expedition was on the verge of collapse. Part of this
harrowing story is now told by historical signs where the
expedition camped, quoting from the journals.
Historical
signs,
Clearwater National Forest,
Idaho
SNOWBANK
CAMP
Lewis
and Clark ascended the steep mountains from the
Lochsa River below to a place a short way above
here and camped for the night on September 15,
1805. This site is commonly called "Snowbank
Camp".
Captain
Clark recorded: " when we arrived at the top as we
Conceved, we could find no water and Concluded to
camp and make use of the Snow we found to cook the
remn of our Colt & make Supe. evening verry
cold and cloudy From this mountain I could observe
high ruged mountains in every direction as far as I
could see."
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LONESOME
COVE CAMP
Traveling
westward, the Lewis and Clark expedition camped
approximately one mile below this point to the
northwest on September 16, 1805. A trail has been
marked to the area believed to be the campsite. The
walk begins to your right. The return walk is a
strenuous uphill climb. This has since been named
"Lonesome Cove Camp."
Captain
Clark described the day thus: " Continue today, and
a thickly timbered Countrey of 8 different kinds of
pine, which are so covered with Snow, that in
passing thro them we are continually covered with
Snow. I have been wet and as cold in every part as
I ever was in my life. Indeed I was at one time
fearfull my feet would freeze in the thin
Mockirsons which I wore. after a Short Delay in the
middle of the Day, I took one man and proceeded on
as fast as I could about 6 miles to a Small branch
passing to the right, halted and built fires for
the part agains their arrival which was at Dusk,
verry cold and much fatigued. We Encamped at this
Branch in a thickly timbered bottom men all wet
cold and hungary. Killed a Second Colt which we all
Suped hartily on and thought it fine
meat"
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"September
20 saw [Captain Clark and six others in
advance] down from the mountains to 'leavel
pine country … a butifull Countrey,' today's
Weippe Prairie, where they found a camp of Nez
Perce Indians collecting camas roots. … The
Nez Perce welcomed them with a feast of fish, a
little bison meat, some fish, dried berries, and
camas roots cooked various ways."
[excerpt
from: Along the Trail with Lewis and Clark, by
Barbara Fifer and Vicky Soderberg, Montana
Magazine, 1998, p. 129]
"the
pleasure I now felt in having tryumphed over the
rockey Mountains and descending once more to a
level and fertile country where there was every
rational hope of finding a comfortable subsistence
for myself and party can be more readily conceived
than expressed, nor was the flattering prospect of
the final success for the expedition less
pleasing." -- Captain Lewis, Sept. 22,
1805
[excerpt
from: Along the Trail with Lewis and Clark, by
Barbara Fifer and Vicky Soderberg, Montana
Magazine, 1998, p. 129]
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"[William
Clark became] a kind of culture hero . . . .
All the Plains and Northwest tribes knew of the Red
Headed Chief and came to depend on him for
friendship and, if not justice, at least advocacy.
He was the white man whose tongue was straight, our
elder brother. Miracles were expected of him,
indeed he was able to perform miracles on their
behalf, but if he had been able to obtain for them
any substantial measure of justice it would have
been a transcendent miracle. He did what he could;
he was able to procure occasional decencies and
often able to prevent or moderate indecencies and
he accomplished more for the Indians than anyone
else in Western history. If a delegation of Indians
went to St. Louis, it sought out Clark first of
all; if a fur company sent a brigade up the
Missouri or into the mountains, it provided itself
with a passport in the form of messages and
greetings from Clark. If the U.S. government had to
send an embassy to the Indian country it began by
trying to get Clark to accompany it, and if Clark
consented he was invariably able to get fairer
treatment for the Indians and more amenable
behavior from them. This subsequent function is a
bright strand in a dark history."
-- Bernard DeVoto,
[The
Journals of Lewis and Clark, pp. xlviii -
xlix]
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Fort
Clatsop camp site. Near the mouth of the Columbia and after
weeks of rain and high winds, the Corps of Discovery voted
on November 24 where to build their winter camp. On December
7, the Corps moved to what became Fort Clatsop. On March 22,
1806 they began their journey home. Photo courtesy:
Astoria-Warrenton Chamber of Commerce
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Editorial
The
day everyone voted with Lewis and with
Clark
The
executive director of the Washington State
Historical Society thinks we should pay special
attention to the site where Lewis and Clark went so
far as to let a woman and a black man vote on a
group decision almost two centuries ago. He's right
about that.
In
the context of today it was nothing at all. In the
context of that time it was a remarkable event. The
explorers were deciding which would be the safer
and more comfortable side of the mouth of the
Columbia River to spend the winter. They put it to
a vote - a vote that included everyone, not just
the white males but also Sacajawea, an Indian
woman, and York, Clark's black slave. The decision
affected everyone so everyone got to
vote.
The
vote that day at the mouth of the Columbia
did, indeed, symbolize the rational
reasoning behind tolerance that would
eventually sweep over this
country.
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By
comparison with freeing York, it wasn't exactly a
democratic masterstroke. But given the attitudes of
the time, it was decades ahead of the rest of the
nation.
Perhaps
it was no coincidence that the exceptional vote
took place in the situation it did. When you have
people pulling together in the wild for common
survival, it tends to bring the worth of
individuals to the fore and to suppress myths about
alleged incompetence because of some supposedly
inferior category of humanity to which a person
belongs. Sacajawea and York pulled their weight and
then some. End of discussion.
That
element probably has something to do as well with
the fact some frontier states, including Wyoming
and Idaho, were so far ahead of the rest of the
nation in granting women the vote. At the time, in
the last century, women all over these rural States
were working shoulder to shoulder with the men
carving lives out of difficult terrain. No man with
the eyes to see doubted the worth of women mentally
and physically in the common cause of everyday
life, let alone participating in a relative trifle
like government.
The
stark reality of individual variation within human
categories and the irrelevance of sex and race in
individual worth would have been abundantly
apparent to the Lewis and Clark party. So that vote
that day at the mouth of the Columbia did, indeed,
symbolize the rational reasoning behind tolerance
that would eventually sweep over this
country.
Dave
Nicandri, the executive director of the historical
society, thinks that makes the site of the vote one
of the focal points for all the commemoration of
the explorers on the 200th anniversary a few years
hence of their grand adventure. He's right. If they
could do that well back then - given so many myths
regarding equality - then think how much better we
can do, given their example, in this supposedly
more enlightened time. - Bill Hall
Lewiston
Tribune. December 24, 1997.
Reprinted with permission.
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Column
at Astoria, mouth of the Columbia River depicting,
in part, the Lewis & Clark expedition. In 1811,
five years after Lewis & Clark left Fort
Clatsop, John Jacob Astor founded the fur trading
post of Astoria. Competing territorial claims to
the Columbia River region started in 1792 when
Capt. Gray sailed the American ship Columbia to the
mouth of the river, and eventually were
resolved in 1846 when the U.S. and Great Britain
drew the international boundary along the 49th
parallel. Photo courtesy: Astoria-Warrenton
Chamber of Commerce
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Baltimore
Federal Gazette 1806
Concerning
the safe arrival of Messrs. Lewis and Clark, who
went 2 years and 4 months ago to explore the
Missouri, to be anxiously wished for by everyone, I
have the pleasure to mention that they arrived here
about one hour ago, in good health, with only the
loss of one man who died. They visited the Pacific
Ocean, which they left on the 27th of
March last. They would have been here about the
1st of August, but for the detention
they met with from snow and frost in crossing
mountains on which are eternal snows. Their journal
will no doubt be not only importantly interesting
to us all, but a fortune for the worthy and
laudable adventurers. When they arrived 3 cheers
were fired. They really have the appearance of
Robinson Crusoes - dressed entirely in buckskins.
We shall know all very soon - I have had no
particulars yet.
[Extract
from letter to editors, under date of St. Louis,
September 23, 1806. Reprinted in Original
Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
1804-1806, Vol 7, Appendix LXVII, p. 347]
National
Intelligencer 1806
It
is a pleasure to announce the arrival of Captain
Lewis with his exploring party at St. Louis. They
wintered near the mouth of the Columbia river;
leaving thence Mar. 27, were detained by snows in
the mountains until June 24. He found it 2575 miles
from the mouth of the Missouri to the great falls;
thence by land over the Rocky mountains 240 miles,
of which 200 would admit a good road, the rest over
tremendous mountains. Then 73 miles down the
Kooskooske into a south eastwardly branch of the
Columbia, 154 miles down that to the Columbia, and
then 413 miles to the Pacific; 3555 miles in all.
Speaks of the whole country furnishing valuable
furs. Says it was fortunate he sent no men back,
since they owed their lives more than once to their
numbers. Captain Lewis will remain a few days in
St. Louis, and then proceed to Washington
accompanied by the Mandan chief. He speaks of his
colleague Captain Clark in the most affectionate
terms, and ascribes to him an equal share in the
success of this enterprise.
[Based
on Lewis's letter to the president, October 27,
1806. Reprinted in Original Journals of the
Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806, Vol 7,
Appendix LXVII, p. 347]
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"[The
Lewis and Clark expedition] gave not only
Oregon but the entire west to the American people
as something with which the mind could deal. The
westering people had crossed the Mississippi with
the Louisiana Purchase and by that act had acquired
the manifest destiny of going on to the Pacific.
[T]he
entire wilderness expanse, more than twice
the size of the United States at the
beginning of Jefferson's administration,
was a blank, not only on the map but in
human thought.
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But
the entire wilderness expanse, more than twice the
size of the United States at the beginning of
Jefferson's administration, was a blank, not only
on the map but in human thought. It was an area of
rumor, guess, and fantasy. Now it had been crossed
by a large party who came back and told in
assimilable and trustworthy detail what a large
part of it was. Henceforth the mind could focus on
reality. Here were not only the Indians but the
land itself and its conditions: river systems,
valleys, mountain ranges, climates, flora, fauna,
and a rich and varied membrane of detail relating
them to one another and to familiar experience. It
was
It
was the first report on the West, on the
United States over the hill and beyond the
sunset, on the province of the American
future. There has never been another so
excellent or so influential.
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the
first report on the West, on the United States over
the hill and beyond the sunset, on the province of
the American future. There has never been another
so excellent or so influential." -- Bernard
DeVoto
[The
Journals of Lewis and Clark, p.
lii]
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