The Men Who United the States: The Amazing Stories of the Explorers, Inventors and Mavericks Who Made America
of small braided streams, alkaline flats, and immense buffalo herds, where small cottonwood groves grew only in the deeper stream valleys and where the rich planting soil had given way to rougher grazing land, as Lewis himself noted:
I found the country in every direction for about three miles intersected with deep revenes and steep irregular hills of 100 to 200 feet high; at the tops of these hills the country breaks of as usual into a fine leavel plain extending as far as the eye can reach … [T]he surrounding country had been birnt about a month before and young grass had now sprung up to a hight of 4 Inches presenting the live green of the spring … [T]his scenery already rich pleasing and beautiful, was still hightened by immence herds of Buffaloe deer Elk and Antelopes which we saw on every direction feeding on the hills and plains.
North of the Platte, they had now passed into the true short-grass prairie, and they would have made it farther west, perhaps into the High Plains themselves, had not winter intervened. The first snows came in October. The Missouri was by now substantially shallower, slower moving, and, free of the Platte sands, clearer and purer. As destined by its hydrodynamics it soon started to freeze, and the expedition was obliged to set down its planned winter camp.
By now the expedition had already begun to encounter scatterings of Indians—and in November would meet with one group of Native Americans—and one Native American in particular—who would profoundly change the tempo, the temper, and the reputation of their adventure.
The smallest commercial nuclear power station in America is in Nebraska, standing slightly sheepishly on the west bank of the Missouri. Since 1973 it has supplied with a fair degree of constancy (though lately interrupted by flooding) a modest amount of electric power to the city of Omaha, forty miles to its south. It is officially the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Generating Station, and it stands more or less on the very point, just around river milepost 645, where Lewis and Clark had their first official meeting with a delegation of Indian chiefs.
The encounter took place on August 3, 1804, three months out from Saint Charles. The chiefs were from one of the country’s lesser seminomadic peoples, the Otoe tribe. They were not the first Indians the explorers had seen. Every so often, Clark noted in his diary having passed by trapper boats, with usually a Frenchman and a native client aboard, but these Otoe were the first to be properly and formally met. And the explorers were fully prepared for them, backed as they were by the full authority of the White House, with dozens of preprinted forms on stiff white card ready to hand out when appropriate.
“Know ye,” the opening of each card declared, that the United States government “will be at all times extended to (your protection), so long as (you) acknowledge the authority of the same.” In other words: enter into a treaty of peace and amity with Washington and the white men, and expect protection, harmony, and good neighborliness. Refuse, and face the consequences.
It is not entirely clear from the diaries that the Otoe people were either at first given or were thought to entirely merit the gift of this handsomely printed peace offering. They were certainly not to be offered the very highest quality of the three kinds of peace medals, each with President Jefferson’s profile on one side, which the party carried with them. The Otoe were, after all, regarded as something of a second-rate tribe. They were seen as a small group of interlopers from Lake Superior. Though they may well have adopted the modus vivendi of the Plains Indians and so had once (smallpox had drastically reduced their numbers) been given to riding horses,6 hunting buffalo, carrying their goods behind them on a pair of parallel ground-scraping sticks called a travois, and living in small villages of tepees, they were not, in fact, considered quite the real thing. Such ceremonial as they might be offered would be little more than a rehearsal for the bigger events to come.
But whether giving adequate gifts or not, Lewis and Clark nonetheless made impressive-sounding speeches to their six visiting chiefs, making each side feel diplomatically important. Lewis, a dour and introspective man at the best of times, delivered a gloomy and foreboding address that would prove the model for almost all of his future speeches: it was perhaps not the kind of address to suggest amity and cooperation. “Children,” he told the assembled indigenes, “obey … the great Chief the President who is now your only great father … he is the only friend to whome you can now look for protection … He has sent us out to clear the road, remove every obstruction … lest by one false step you should bring upon your nation the displeasure of your greater father, who could consume you as the fire consumes the grass of the plains.”
Yet there were as many carrots as sticks. The men handed out packages, some for the arrivals, others of greater worth to be delivered to the absent seniors. Included in the gift boxes, besides presidential medallions of the second and third class, was a jackdaw clutch of beads, tomahawks, scissors, a comb, some mirrors, and American flags. For good measure, Lewis offered a bottle of whiskey and then fired his rifle into the air, astonishing the visitors and underlining the power and potential authority of these boat-borne strangers.
It was not necessarily the most auspicious meeting, but it was important enough for the party to name the place Council Bluff. Today there is a bright steel memorial marking the site, with a peace pipe and a shiny steel arrow shaft above the inscription, which records the event. The nuclear power plant hums just a few miles away.
(The important-sounding name of the place has since, however, been shifted both across the river, into another state, and a dozen miles downstream. Council Bluff, Nebraska, has become recast and pluralized as Council Bluffs, Iowa, a sprawling riverside city of railway trains and gambling casinos, which is now the better-known memorial to the meeting. When I visited Lewis and Clark Overlook here, a senior manager of the Federal Reserve Bank’s Omaha branch was offering at full volume an expansive history of the Corps of Discovery’s route. He seemed not to be aware—most aren’t—that the crucial first meeting with Indians actually took place upstream, where instead of this overlook there is the rather less impressive metal monument, of just the peace pipe and the arrow.)
There was actually another meeting with Indians from the same tribe two weeks later. But by then the explorers were consumed with misery over the sickness of one of their own, Sergeant Charles Floyd, who died of a ruptured appendix during the talks. He was buried nearby; his grave, a miniature Washington Monument–like affair near Sioux City, still stands. He was the only member of the party to die during the expedition, was the first American soldier to die west of the Missouri, and most probably also was the first to die west of the Mississippi.
This time they did hand one of Jefferson’s peace-and-amity cards to a quite naked Indian chief, only to be mightily offended that he handed it right back and said he preferred to have more of the enticing-looking goods the Corps had lodged in their canoes. He had to be told off, and sharply. Through an interpreter named Mr. Fairfong, words were spoken, and the Indian left with a flea in his ear.
If the Otoe were not quite the genuine article, the next native inhabitants to be formally encountered most definitely were. It was at the end of August, after the Corps had crossed what is now the James River, near the town of Yankton, South Dakota, when they encountered a third and rather more important group of native inhabitants. By this time they were becoming fascinated by the astonishing abundance of wildlife on the Plains—huge gatherings of buffalo, antelope (which they called goats, as some locals still do), prairie dogs, jackrabbits, magpies, bull snakes, mule deer, elks, coyotes. To men who had spent their years in the eastern woodlands, where wildlife was quite scarce, this was beyond belief: only the French trappers who traveled with them as hired interpreters exhibited (typically, one might say) an unimpressed sangfroid.
But late one Monday afternoon at the end of the month, a young Indian boy swam fearlessly out to their boats, and the expedition made its first encounter with the tribe for whom President Jefferson had most especially instructed the soldiers to watch out: the Sioux. Once others had gathered to supervise the youngster’s meeting,