Return journey created tension

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

John Krist/Star staff The peaks of the Northern Rockies tower above St. Mary Lake, just inside the eastern entrance to Glacier National Park. A few miles to the east, within view of the same peaks, Meriwether Lewis and three companions established the northernmost camp of the Corps of Discovery in 1806.

FORT CLATSOP, Ore. — Experienced mountaineers know that reaching the top of a great peak is not the part of the climb that matters most.

"Getting to the summit is the easy part," veteran mountaineer and filmmaker David Breashers told a pair of inexperienced climbers on Mount Everest during the disastrous 1996 season, which claimed 15 lives. "It's getting back down that's hard."

Something similar may be said about any true journey of discovery. Explorers who do not survive their own adventurous exploits, who do not return from the unknown to pass along what they have learned, are not truly explorers. They're mortality statistics. And it is often the trip back, when dangers remain but when a traveler's senses have been dulled by fatigue, stress and hardship, that proves most dangerous.

As they hunkered down for the winter of 1805-06 on the Pacific Coast, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and their Corps of Discovery stood atop their own Everest. At considerable peril, they had crossed more than 4,000 miles of mostly uncharted wilderness, searching at the behest of their president for the elusive Northwest Passage, an all-water route across North America that would confer great wealth and power upon the nation that controlled it.

By any measure, they had accomplished a great deal. Although they had determined the Northwest Passage to be mere fantasy, they'd made diplomatic contact for the first time between the United States and 11 of the 14 native tribes along the Missouri River, gathering reams of ethnographic information; they had compiled the first accurate map of the Western interior; they had described nearly 300 species of plants and animals new to science; they had become the first American citizens to cross the Great Plains, to stand atop the Continental Divide, and to reach the Pacific Ocean by land. They had accomplished all this while losing only a single man, and he had succumbed to incurable illness, not to violence or accident.

But they had yet to make it home. In a way, they had reached the summit of that daunting mountain called the West. It had taken them nearly two years. Now they had to get back down.

'We are now your fathers'

On Jan. 4, 1806, 45 representatives of 11 Native American tribes descended on the nation's capital to meet President Thomas Jefferson. Among them were members of the Oto, Sioux, Osage, Arikara and other Western tribes who had met Lewis and Clark 18 months earlier and who had made the long trip east at the explorers' invitation.

While tribal leaders dressed in fierce finery wondered at the bustle of the capital city and enjoyed the president's hospitality at the White House, members of the Corps of Discovery were enduring poor rations and boredom on the stormy Oregon coast within the dank, vermin-infested confines of Fort Clatsop. After months of soggy, cramped privation, they were eager to begin the return trip, recalling fondly those warm summer days on the Great Plains, where they met the Sioux and the Osage amid a plenitude of game that made the vast grasslands a hunter's paradise.

The eastbound journey would be different from the trip westward. For one thing, they knew the way this time and had a good idea of the challenges they would face. They also would be able to ride the Missouri River's current most of the way instead of fighting against it upstream. Still, returning to the comforts of home would require them again to travel a long distance through rugged, dangerous territory, and they did not take success for granted.

Investigating their store of gunpowder and lead during the Fort Clatsop winter, Lewis noted in his journal on Feb. 1 that the remaining "ammunition ... is now our only hope for subsistence and defence in a rout of 4000 Miles through a country exclusively inhabited by savages."

"Savages" was a curious choice of words. Lewis knew that he and his companions had, for the most part, been treated with civility and hospitality by the dozens of tribes they had encountered on their trip west. "Savages" had fed him and his men when they were starving after their cold crossing of the Rockies, had sold the expedition horses even when dickering delayed the tribe's crucial autumn hunt, had provided guides and information about unmapped terrain, had helped the Corps of Discovery endure the harsh northern Plains winter by sharing food and companionship.

But something had changed in the relationship between the explorers and the Indians by the time the expedition began preparing to go home. Or perhaps the stress of the long trip merely peeled back the veneer of diplomatic cordiality that had until then masked an underlying tension between Indians and the whites, a conflict of values and perceptions that would never really be overcome and which would become a tragically prominent theme in the subsequent 200 years of Western history.

As I found during my retracing of the explorers' trail last year, intimations of incipient sorrow lie scattered along the route Lewis and Clark followed back to St. Louis. Even Jefferson himself provided a hint of what was to come in his January address to the visiting chiefs from the Great Plains.

"We are become as numerous as the leaves of the trees," Jefferson told the assembled tribal leaders, after explaining to them that the land they and their ancestors had inhabited for hundreds of generations now belonged to the United States, "and though we do not boast, we do not fear any nation. We are now your fathers."

"My children," he continued, "we are strong, we are as numerous as the stars in the heavens, and we are all gun-men."

'Treachery of the aborigenes'

John Krist/Star staff Cut Bank Creek, not far from today's Glacier National Park, was the site of the Lewis and Clark expedition's northernmost camp, established during the return journey by Meriwether Lewis and three companions. Just to the south, they had a violent encounter with the Blackfeet that left two men dead.

The explorers' complaints about the natives had begun as soon as they entered the Columbia River basin the previous autumn. Some of the pique was justified: The explorers found that any object they set down was almost immediately appropriated by someone in the crowd of Indians that accompanied them any time they traveled on land.

The expedition's stock of trade goods by that time was much diminished, making it difficult to buy food such as fish, dogs and roots to offset the shortage of game in the gorge, and the Americans could ill afford the loss of tools and weapons. The explorers also found that the coastal tribes, having long acquaintance with European merchants traveling by sea, were sharp traders and charged high prices for everything if they thought they could get it.

The explorers did not conceal their disgust with the filth, vermin and odor that characterized the fishing camps and permanent settlements of the salmon-dependent tribes, with Clark referring to one as "the dirtiest and stinkingest places I ever saw in any shape whatever." They also found the language and physical appearance of the coastal natives repulsive, describing the men as "illy made" and the women "homely."

As the anticipated date of departure from Fort Clatsop drew near, Lewis felt compelled to warn his men not to trust the natives, no matter how familiar they may have become with them. His journal entry on Feb. 20, 1806, offers a penetrating glimpse of his attitudes and a bleak preview of what was to follow in the coming years as his countrymen swarmed across the landscape he had mapped for them.

"At all events we determined allways to be on our guard as much as the nature of our situation will permit us, and never place ourselves at the mercy of any savages," Lewis wrote. "We well know, that the treachery of the aborigenes of America and the too great confidence of our countrymen in their sincerity and friendship, has caused the distruction of many hundreds of us. so long have our men been accustomed to a friendly intercourse with the natives, that we find it difficult to impress on their minds the necessity of always being on their guard with rispect to them. this conficence on our part, we know to be the effect of a series of uninterupted friendly intercouse, but the well known treachery of the natives by no means entitle them to such confidence, and we must check it's growth in our own minds, as well as those of our men, by recollecting ourselves, and repeating to our men that our preservation depends on never loosing sight of this trait in their character, and being always prepared to meet it in whatever shape it may present itself."

The commanders concluded their sojourn on the Pacific Coast by stealing from the Clatsops a canoe they could not afford to buy. While the men were snatching the graceful craft, which they hoped would make their journey upriver easier, the leader of the village that owned the canoe was visiting Fort Clatsop; the white men hid the stolen craft until he had left.

Five days later, on March 23, 1806, the Corps of Discovery left the coast and began the long journey home. The commanders gave Fort Clatsop and its contents to the same chief from whom they had just stolen that fine canoe, and tacked a letter on the wall describing what they had accomplished so far and listing the members of the expedition.

"At this place," Clark wrote in his journal, "we had wintered and remained from the 7th of Decr. 1805 to this day and have lived as well as we had any right to expect, and we can say that we were never one day without 3 meals of some kind a day either pore elk meat or roots, notwithstanding the repeated fall of rain which has fallen almost continuously."

The company's relationship with the natives would continue to deteriorate in the next few weeks. And in a distant and lonely spot near the Canadian border, antagonism and distrust would finally erupt into violence and death.

Splitting up

As they fought their way upstream against the Columbia's powerful current, members of the Corps of Discovery grew increasingly irritated by the natives' constant efforts to steal weapons, tools, even Lewis' dog, Seaman. Lewis repeatedly threatened to have the thieves shot and their villages burned, and directed his men to fire on the natives who had stolen his dog if they refused to give it back.

Clark, too, succumbed to the degenerating mood; when he entered a house in one village and was rebuffed in his attempt to buy some roots, he intimidated the inhabitants — a blind man and several old women — by tossing a piece of cannon fuse into the fire, causing the flames to shoot up and change color, while using a magnet to make the needle of his compass spin crazily. The terrified villagers hastily tossed him several packets of food.

The Corps of Discovery finally reached the end of the Columbia Gorge in mid-April and, deciding to travel overland from there to the Nez Perce village on the Clearwater River in Idaho, managed to purchase some horses from the Columbia tribes. As a final symbol of disdain, Lewis ordered the group's abandoned canoes, paddles and other implements burned rather than see them fall into the hands of the natives. When he saw a man trying to make off with a piece of castoff iron, he chased him down and beat him.

Leaving the river near the site of present-day McNary Dam — a transition point where the Columbia abruptly swerves north — the party hiked across what is today southeastern Washington to the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers. There, they met up with the Nez Perce band that had helped save them from starvation the previous autumn when they stumbled out of the Bitterroot Range. They reclaimed the horse herd they had left there, and established a camp near today's Kamiah, Idaho, to rest and prepare for the return crossing of the mountains.

They remained in that camp for a month. In their eagerness to leave Fort Clatsop and the dreary Oregon coast, they had jumped the gun: It was only May when they reached the Nez Perce village, and snow still lay deep on the high country, making it impossible to cross the mountains. On June 10, the explorers headed up into the Bitterroots, disregarding warnings that it still was too early, and they were forced to turn back when they found drifts 12 to 15 feet deep. Setting out again in late June, they managed the crossing uneventfully this time, arriving on the other side of the range on June 29.

They paused again for a few days just south of Missoula, Mont. There, according to a plan the commanders had devised during the winter at Fort Clatsop, the party intended to split up and follow several paths.

Lewis planned to take several men overland to the Great Falls of the Missouri, following a shortcut over a mountain pass they'd been told about by the native tribes; it would be much more direct than the big, looping bend to the south they'd been forced to take the previous year by sticking to the river and seeking its headwaters.

At the Great Falls, Lewis' group would divide again, with several men retrieving boats and baggage stored there the previous summer and proceeding down the Missouri by water. The other group would head north following the Marias River to see where it led and to pin down the northernmost extent of the Louisiana Territory.

Clark's group would go back the way it had come the previous year, following the rivers downstream to the Three Forks of the Missouri. There, his group would also split: One party would take canoes down the Missouri to Great Falls and reunite with half of Lewis' band. Clark would take the rest overland to the Yellowstone River and explore it to its confluence with the Missouri, where all the groups would reunite for the final push downstream to St. Louis.

The separate explorations would allow the Corps of Discovery to add greatly to its store of geographical knowledge. But by dividing their already small expedition into even smaller units, the commanders left themselves vulnerable to potentially hostile tribes — vulnerable, and nervous about it.

Two Medicine

From Great Falls, following in the footsteps of Lewis and his companions, I drove Highway 89 northwest across the Plains to the Blackfeet Indian Reservation, 1.5 million acres of rolling, terrain bordering Glacier National Park and bumping up against the Canadian province of Alberta. Near the town of Browning, location of reservation headquarters, a secondary road leads east toward Cut Bank. About midway between the two towns, a small county road heads north and crosses Cut Bank Creek.

Lewis and his companions camped nearby. The actual site is on private property, and the owner has built a crude commercial establishment — Meriwether Meadows RV Camp — to take advantage of public interest in this northernmost camp of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Not far to the south, on the bank of the Two Medicine River, the Corps of Discovery had its only fatal encounter with the people of the West. That site is also on private property and even harder to reach for there are no directional signs.

Like Cut Bank Creek, the Two Medicine River is lined by willows and cottonwoods. Away from the water, the landscape is dry and empty, grazed by cattle or planted in grain and used for little else. It's broad, open, lonely country, and the ranches do not look prosperous, although their inhabitants are compensated somewhat by spectacular views of the ice-sculpted peaks of Glacier and the northern Rockies.

When Lewis and his companions were exploring this region, they encountered a group of eight young Piegan Blackfeet men. The explorers had heard alarming things about the Blackfeet, who dominated the Northern Plains by virtue of their ties to British traders in Canada, from whom they obtained sufficient arms and ammunition to out-gun every other tribe in the region.

"As they are a vicious lawless and reather an abandoned set of wretches I wish to avoid an interview with them if at possible," Lewis had written nine days earlier, on July 17, 1806. "I have no doubt but they would steel our horses if they have it in their power and finding us weak should they happen to be numerous wil most probably attempt to rob us of our arms and baggage."

When the encounter occurred anyway, the Blackfeet seemed as nervous as the white men. "In fact I believe they were more allarmed at this accidental interview than we were," Lewis wrote. The two groups warily agreed to camp together for the night, and Lewis reported that he "had much conversation with these people in the course of the evening."

Lewis thought he was delivering his standard diplomatic overture about peace and commerce, informing the Blackfeet that the U.S. government intended to establish trade with the other tribes of the Northern Plains. What the Blackfeet heard, however, was that the U.S. government planned to arm their enemies and overturn the established political order in the region. It could not have come as good news.

Two deaths

The next morning, Lewis and his men awoke to find the Blackfeet trying to steal the expedition's guns. During the struggle that ensued, Rubin Fields stabbed one of the Blackfeet to death. Thwarted in their effort to steal rifles, the remaining Blackfeet tried to drive off the explorers' horses. Lewis gave chase, and when one of the Blackfeet wheeled on him, armed with a musket, Lewis shot him fatally through the belly. The dying Blackfeet fired back and just missed.

"Being bareheaded," Lewis wrote, "I felt the wind of his bullet very distinctly."

Lewis and his men hurriedly rounded up their remaining horses, as well as four belonging to the Blackfeet, and began a pell-mell dash for the Missouri River, hoping to reunite with the larger party before revenge-minded Blackfeet could overtake them. They covered more than 100 miles in 24 hours, arriving at the Missouri just as the companions he'd left behind at the Great Falls happened to arrive. Cutting loose their horses, the enlarged party set off down the Missouri by boat.

Lewis' troubles, however, were not over. Just east of today's Williston, N.D., at a site now drowned beneath the waters of Lake Sakakawea, Lewis went hunting with Pierre Cruzatte, the expedition's best boatman and musician, in dense brush on a sandbar in the river.

Lewis, dressed in elkskin, and Cruzatte, blind in one eye, had each killed an elk. As Lewis was aiming at his second elk, he was struck by a bullet, which eventually turned out to have been fired by Cruzatte. In Lewis' words, the bullet hit his left "thye" and passed through it, grazing his right thigh as well. He described the entry point, however, as being about an inch below his hip joint — well above what would anatomically be considered the thigh.

At first, Lewis did not know who had shot him. After a tense few moments, during which Lewis called on his men to prepare for an Indian attack, it became clear what had happened and Lewis spent much of the remainder of the voyage home to St. Louis in some discomfort. Americans don't like to think of one of their national heroes returning from his great deeds with a bandaged butt, which is perhaps why this near-disaster — had the bullet struck a couple inches higher, Lewis would not have returned home at all — receives rather little attention in history books.

Lewis and his companions met Clark and the remainder of the party the next day, Aug. 12, 1806. Clark's exploration of the Yellowstone had been less eventful than Lewis' detours, but it produced one of the most precious of all the expedition's historical artifacts.

Physical graffiti

John Krist/Star staff On the bank of the Yellowstone River, the sandstone butte that William Clark named Pompey's Tower has been a notable landmark in southern Montana for centuries.

From Billings, Mont., I followed the Yellowstone River east, along the route taken by Clark and his party on the return trip to explore the Yellowstone to its confluence with the Missouri. The river flows through a narrow valley, the bottomlands planted in hay, cottonwoods lining its banks. There are cliffs to either side of the valley, eroded sandstone of pale yellow, buff and white.

The cities and towns along the river do not treat it with much respect; oil refineries and other industrial facilities crowd up against it. Eventually, though, the towns fall behind and the landscape opens up.

For all its significance to students of history, Pompey's Pillar is not terribly imposing, about 150 feet tall, a small sandstone butte that appears to be a section of the riverside bluffs isolated by erosion. The formation is now the centerpiece of Pompey's Pillar National Monument, about 30 miles east of Billings, where there is a small visitor center and picnic area in a wooded flat alongside the Yellowstone River. (Clark named the formation Pomp's Tower after the nickname he had given Sacagawea's son, but an early editor of the expedition journals changed it to Pompey's Pillar and so the name remains.)

A boardwalk and staircase climb part of the way up the sandstone tower, allowing visitors to ascend and view the rarest of all expedition mementos. Clark, who arrived here on July 25, 1806, carved his name and the date into the soft stone, and his bold, graceful signature remains visible today — the only physical evidence of the Lewis and Clark expedition to be found anywhere along their route. It is protected by glass and surrounded by motion detectors, cameras and alarms.

John Krist/Star staff Explorer William Clark, leading his party down the Yellowstone River during the expedition's return to St. Louis, paused to carve his name and the date in the soft sandstone of Pompey's Pillar. Protected by glass, it remains the only physical evidence of the Corps of Discovery's journey across the Western landscape.

Clark's graffiti is accompanied by figures painted on the sandstone tower by American Indians. They and their ancestors had lived there for more than 11,000 years by the time Clark and his men arrived, but it would not be long before the tidal wave of Western settlement swept them away.

It is not far, perhaps 40 straight-line miles, from Pompey's Pillar National Monument to another of the region's notable features: the Little Bighorn River, which lies at the heart of another national monument.

This one serves as a somber reminder that the relationship between whites and American Indians in the years after Lewis and Clark explored the West more often reflected the mistrust and hostility that characterized their homeward journey than the diplomacy and friendship so prevalent during the outbound leg.

Confronting the gun-men

Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, on the Crow Indian Reservation in southern Montana, commemorates the most decisive victory won by Native American tribes in their long fight with American military forces over possession of the Western landscape.

John Krist/Star staff A view from the visitor center at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument encompasses the rolling, grass-covered terrain where several thousand Lakota and Cheyenne warriors destroyed a U.S. Army force under the command of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer in 1876. It was the high point of the Plains tribes' resistance to white settlement.

The story is well known in its basic outlines: how Lt. Col George Armstrong Custer and his 7th Cavalry blundered into a fight with a much larger force of Indians on the banks of a stream known to the natives as the Greasy Grass and to the whites as the Little Bighorn; how on two hot days in June 1876 more than 260 American soldiers died in a series of skirmishes and battles with thousands of Lakota and Cheyenne warriors, culminating in a desperate "last stand" by Custer and his men in blue atop a low hill overlooking the river.

Less often told is the story of the betrayal that set the conflict into motion: how the Northern Plains tribes signed the Treaty of Laramie in 1868, agreeing to move onto a large reservation in Wyoming that included many of their sacred sites, in return for the American government's promise to protect them from depredation by whites; how the U.S. government ignored its treaty obligations once gold was discovered in the sacred Black Hills — a discovery confirmed and then publicized by Custer — setting off a stampede of settlers and miners into lands guaranteed to the Lakota and Cheyenne; how the Indians attempted to defend their lands only to have the U.S. Army dispatched to quell the rebellion.

Custer and the men of the 7th rode out on their fateful mission from Fort Abraham Lincoln in the Dakota territory, just a few miles down the Missouri River from the location of Fort Mandan, where members of the Corps of Discovery had wintered in 1804-05 and enjoyed warm hospitality from the Indians who lived nearby. Custer met his violent end on a lonely patch of prairie only a day's ride from one of the Lewis and Clark Trail's most enduring landmarks, just 70 years after the Corps of Discovery passed through the area.

It had taken only two generations for the optimism of Thomas Jefferson's diplomatic overtures, carried into the wilderness by the explorers he had sent there, to be subsumed by the violence and dispossession implicit in the speech he delivered to the tribal representatives Lewis and Clark had sent to meet him: "We are as numerous as the stars in the heavens, and we are all gun-men."

The home stretch

Clark and his party had lost almost all their horses to Indian raiders after leaving Lewis and the others back at the foot of the Bitterroot Range, but otherwise their journey had been relatively uneventful. After its members reunited just downstream of the Missouri-Yellowstone confluence, the Corps of Discovery began moving fast, riding the swift current 40, 50, even 80 miles a day.

The explorers reached the Mandan villages and the site of their 1804-05 winter camp on Aug. 14 and stayed several days.

When they departed, they left behind Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea, whose services they no longer needed, as well as Pvt. John Colter, who wished to stay and try his luck as a trapper. Remarkably, Clark offered to raise Sacagawea's son, Jean Baptiste, who by then was 19 months old, and his parents promised to send him to Clark in a year.

In late August, the Corps of Discovery passed through the area where the Teton Sioux had accosted them two years earlier and given the commanders their first serious test. The white men and the Sioux exchanged insults this time but there were no direct confrontations. On Sept. 4, they paused at Charles Floyd's grave near today's Sioux City, Iowa, to pay their respects to the memory of the only member of their party to die during the journey.

Over the next few days, the explorers met boatloads of traders and trappers traveling upstream, obtaining from them the first liquor they'd enjoyed since running out the previous Fourth of July.

On Sept. 20, they spotted cows grazing on the bank of the Missouri, "which was a joyfull Sight to the party and caused a Shout to be raised for joy," Clark wrote.

On Sept. 23, 1806 — 864 days after they had originally set off up the Missouri River — the tired explorers pulled up to the St. Louis waterfront, greeting the town with a rifle salute. They were welcomed by old acquaintances, and set about locating storage space for their baggage and rooms for themselves. They bought new clothes, dashed off letters to family and friends, and made a round of visits to the town's prominent citizens. On Sept. 25, they enjoyed a dinner and ball held in their honor.

They had, indeed, made it back down from their Everest.

The final entry in the commanders' journals, recorded on Sept. 26, 1806, is the briefest of all, and to a writer who spent months following in their footsteps, it is among the most poignant.

Lewis and Clark, in addition to their other achievements, were pioneering journalists in the most literal sense: Their meticulous journals, more than a million words in all, constitute the first reportorial dispatches from the West, accounts of its people, the landscape, the weather, the events of the day from mundane to momentous. Their final remaining task, now that all the exploring was done, was to tell the public what they had found.

As a reporter trudging along in their footsteps two centuries later, I was reminded by their writing that all journalism is at its heart no more complicated than this: an effort to record as faithfully as possible what the writer has seen and heard, and to try to weave each individual story into the grand, rich tapestry of history.

And so it is that these pioneering journalists' final words, penned by William Clark on a warm Indian summer day in the frontier town of St. Louis, speak so clearly across the years to any who might hope to follow their path across the West and tell others about the marvelous things to be seen and done there:

"A fine morning," Clark wrote, laconic to the end. "We commenced wrighting."