Reliving Lewis and Clark: Up the Missouri Beyond Kansas

Anthony Brandt
for National Geographic News

July 19, 2004

This article is fifth in a series. The author is following the trail
of the Lewis and Clark expedition across the North American West.
Along the way, he's reporting on 200th-anniversary events at pivotal
locations—and on what happened all those years ago.

Lewis and Clark Expedition No. 2—the reenactors—reached Kansas City a few weeks ago, spent ten days there, and are now moving north toward the mouth of the Platte River, which joins the Missouri River below Omaha, Nebraska.

The long layover in Kansas City was necessary to fulfill all the ceremonial and educational responsibilities these men find themselves responsible for. Virtually everywhere they stop, people want to meet with them, ask questions, visit the boats, and look at their equipment.

Scott Mandrell, who is playing Lewis, has to give talks and grant interviews all along the route. Their days in Kansas City were fully scheduled.

And a few spectators want to go along. Twice in June people offered to join the group and play the role of York, Clark's slave, for a while. One of them was an African visiting the United States. Volunteers should know that it's not all fun and speeches. A certain amount of work has to get done every day on the three boats the reenactors are traveling in.

One day the mast of the keelboat was tangled in grapevines hanging from a tree. The only way to cut it free was for someone to climb the mast. Mandrell one day made an oar, from scratch. (Lewis and Clark had to do this periodically as well.)

In between cities and towns the country can be wild, and when men are walking on shore, difficult. In one spot in Missouri they came upon the bones of cattle that had been attacked and killed by a mountain lion.

Moment of Real Sadness

And there has been a moment of real sadness. In mid-June Scott Mandrell woke up to find that his dog, Seaman, named for Meriwether Lewis's dog, the amazing Newfoundland retriever that accompanied Lewis and Clark across the continent and back, had died during the night.

Lewis and Clark also paused at the junction of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers—the site where Kansas City now stands—in order to rest their men, who were exhausted from the constant heavy labor of moving the expedition's three boats up the Missouri.

Two-thirds of the crew were afflicted with boils and a few had dysentery, but they were "in spirits," as Clark put it. Clark twice mentioned the amount of sweat they produced. On June 20 he noted, "the sweat runs off our men in a stream when they row hard." And on July 6, again astonished, Clark attributed the amount of sweat the men produced to the water of the Missouri, which of course they were drinking.

This water, he said, "throws out a greater proportion of sweat than I could suppose could pass through the human body." He did't seem to notice how much it was the work, and the temperatures, which one day hit 96 degrees (35 degrees Celsius), that producied the sweat.

The French engages, or boatmen, complained about the scarcity of the provisions. They were accustomed, they said, to four or five meals a day under similar circumstances. And they were in fact burning calories at a prodigious rate. Clark would have none of it. The expedition ate large quantities of food. The country the party passed through was well stocked with deer, bear, and elk. The expedition's hunters sometimes shot nine or ten deer a day.

Someone has estimated that the men during this stage of the journey ate up to nine pounds (four kilograms) of meat per man per day. What they did not eat, they "jerked"—dried—for future use.

Punishment by Lashing

For the most part the men took the work quite well. But there were problems. On June 29 the expedition held its first court martial. John Collins, while on guard duty, had stolen some whiskey from the provisions he was guarding. He let Hugh Hall have some, too.

The members of the court were all enlisted men, and they found both men guilty. Hall admitted his guilt, however Collins did not. Hall got fifty lashes "on his bare back." Collins got a hundred. This was a military expedition. The lash was the common form of punishment then.

A couple of weeks later on July 12, a private named Alexander Willard was tried by the two captains for sleeping on guard duty, which was a capital offense. Willard could have been hanged. It's unlikely, Lewis and Clark would have ordered such an extreme punishment: The men were exhausted, and it was understandable that a man might fall asleep while standing guard.

But such an offense was not pardonable. The expedition was in Indian country. A surprise attack at night could have wiped out the entire party. Willard received a hundred lashes as well, spaced out over four days.

The men may have been in Indian country, but they had yet to see any Indians—or even their trace. The Kansas Indians lived on the Kansas River perhaps 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the river's mouth, but they were much reduced from their former numbers.

The explorers had a scare one day when they saw a fire on the opposite side of the river and thought it might be Indians. But the blaze came one of the expedition's own hunting parties, which every day went out and walked or rode the sides of the river. The expedition had four horses with them, two of which they had found on the open plains, lost by Indian hunting parties.

Lewis, and sometimes Clark, also walked the riverbanks. This could be nearly as difficult as rowing the boat upriver, as the re-enactors have themselves discovered. To this day the banks of the Missouri can be swampy, entangled with undergrowth, and sometimes just plain impassable. Clark described crawling through the mud at one point to escape a marsh.

July 4 on the Trail

Nevertheless the explorers found the country beautiful. On July 4 Clark remarked, after climbing to a vantage point, that "the plains of this country are covered with a leek green grass, well calculated for the sweetest and most nourishing hay, interspersed with copses of trees spreading their lofty branches over pools, springs, or brooks of fine water. Groups of shrubs covered with the most delicious fruit are to be seen in every direction, and nature appears to have exerted herself to beautify the scenery by the variety of flowers … delicately raised above the grass, which strikes and perfumes the sensation, and amuses the mind."

And then he wondered why such magnificent scenery should be found there, in "a country — far removed from the civilized world, to be enjoyed by nothing but the buffalo, elk, deer and bear in which it abounds, and — savage Indians."

That July 4 was the 28th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The expedition celebrated by shooting off the swivel gun mounted on the bow of the keelboat once in the morning and again in the evening. Lewis and Clark gave the men each an extra gill of whiskey. The crew passed two creeks during the day and named one of them Independence Creek, the other 4th of July Creek. Independence Creek retains the name to this day.

Scroll down for a link to previous installments in this series and for links to related stories and sites.