Reliving Lewis and Clark: Winter Finally Ends

Anthony Brandt
for National Geographic News

March 21, 2005

"The Object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river &
such principal stream of it as by it's course and communication with
the waters of the Pacific ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon,
Colorado or any other river may offer the most direct &
practicable water communication across this continent for the purpose
of commerce."

—President Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis, leader of the "Corps of Discovery," June 20, 1803.

Editor's note: These words launched one of the greatest explorations in history. Now, on the 200th anniversary of the expedition to open up the U.S. West, author Anthony Brandt follows the trail of Lewis and Clark. In this article he recounts the last months of the winter of 1805 and the start of the spring push up the Missouri River.

The year 1805 began with the men of the Corps of Discovery—Lewis and Clark's expedition team—firing off two cannon rounds to celebrate the occasion. But the cold of November and December only got worse, and the food situation was always problematic.

Shields, the Corps' blacksmith, was keeping them in corn by repairing war axes for American Indians and making new ones out of the sheet iron from an old stove they had worn out on the journey up the Missouri.

But meat was in short supply. Captain Lewis had taken a party out to hunt in the fall. On February 3 Captain Clark left with 16 men and made his way 60 miles (100 kilometers) downriver to hunt. They killed 40 deer, 19 elk, and 3 buffalo.

Many of these animals were so thin that they were useless; if the Corps of Discovery was short on food, it was worse for the animals. What meat the men could use they cached, burying it under logs to keep the wolves away from it. The party was gone for ten days.

On the last day Clark, weary and anxious to get back, walked 30 miles (50 kilometers) on the frozen surface of the Missouri River to Fort Mandan, a Mandan Indian camp. The rough surface of the ice blistered the bottom of his feet, and walking was painful, but it was better than walking on land, where the snow was knee deep.

Sioux Ambush

When Clark returned he sent four men back with horses and sleighs to pick up the meat. On the way a party of about a hundred Sioux ambushed them, stole two horses, and took most of their weapons. They also burned one of the caches of meat.

Lewis then went out with his own party of men in pursuit, but the Sioux had disappeared. Lewis found the second of the two caches, however, and shot 36 deer and 14 elk. They now had more than 3,000 pounds (1,360 kilograms) of meat. Most of it the party dried, in preparation for the trip west.

Hunting was the only real work the men had to do. The Mandan and the men of the Corps visited back and forth on a nearly daily basis. The captains came to like and admire one particular Mandan chief, Black Cat.

He often came to spend the night, and Lewis praised him as possessing "more integrity, firmness, intelligence and perspicuity of mind than any Indian I have met with in this quarter."

The Indians loved to watch the white men dance, and the men obliged. Dancing was one of their favorite pastimes. At one point Clark mentions one of the men dancing "on his head"—the first recorded instance, no doubt, of break dancing.

Clark described a bison ceremony he attended, which he described as a "curious custom. The old men arrange themselves in a circle & after smoking a pipe, which is handed them by a young man, dressed up for the purpose, the young men who have their wives back of the circle go to one of the old men with a whining tone and ask the old man to take his wife (who presents herself naked except for a robe) and sleep with him. The girl then takes the old man, who very often can scarcely walk, and leads him to a convenient place for the business, after which they return to the lodge. If the old man (or a white man) returns to the lodge without gratifying the man and his wife, he offers her again and again."

Then Clark adds: "We sent a man to this medicine dance last night; they gave him four girls."

Venereal Disease

The Plains Indians believed that spiritual power passed between people during the sex act and that the old men, thanks to their long experience as hunters, possessed the powers to ensure a successful buffalo hunt. As for the whites, they were said to have even more extraordinary powers.

The result for the white men was often venereal disease. White traders from Canada had long before infected the Mandan and most of the other Plains tribes, with syphilis and gonorrhea.

Clark treated the disease with a pill that contained a compound of mercury. It was the only treatment available. While it did not cure the disease, it did relieve the symptoms.

The Indians also came to Clark with medical problems, though not venereal disease. His favorite medicine was the famous Rush's Pills, a powerful laxative that Benjamin Rush—the best known, and probably the best, physician/scientist in the United States at the time—had devised.

On March 7 one of the chiefs brought Clark a sick child, and Clark gave him some of these pills. The men called them thunderclaps.

Lewis treated another Indian child for frostbite. The 13-year-old boy had stayed out all night when the temperature hit –40° Fahrenheit (–40° Celsius), with no other cover than moccasins, a small bison robe, and the thin clothing made from pronghorn antelope skins. He had no campfire, either.

His feet were frozen, yet he managed to make his way to the fort, where they put his feet in cold water and gradually thawed them out. In the end he lost his toes—Lewis amputated them two weeks later—but was otherwise unharmed.

The Indians, Clark noted in his journal, could "bear more cold than I thought it possible for man to endure."

Sacagawea's Son

On February 11, 1805, another medical emergency arose when Sacagawea, a teenage Shoshone Indian living with the Mandan, gave birth to her child, and the birth proved difficult. Clark was out hunting, so Lewis was the attending physician. He noted that "her labor was tedious and the pain violent."

One of the translators, a French trader named Jessaume, told Lewis that on other such occasions he had administered the rattle from a rattlesnake to the mother and that had shortened the labor.

"Having the rattle of a snake by me," Lewis goes on, "I gave it to him and he administered two rings of it to the woman broken in small pieces with the fingers and added to a small quantity of water. Whether this medicine was truly the cause or not I shall not undertake to determine, but … she had not taken it more than ten minutes before she brought forth."

The child was a boy, and Charbonneau, the father, named him Jean Baptiste. Clark became extremely fond of him, nicknamed him "Pompey," after the ancient Roman statesman, and named the odd stone pillar that stands on the banks of the Yellowstone in Montana "Pompey's Pillar." He would go on to have a remarkable career.

After the expedition, Clark would educate the boy in his own home in St. Louis, Missouri. Later, the European traveler Prince Paul of Wurttemburg would meet Jean Baptiste when he was still a young man and take him to Europe for six years.

When Jean Baptiste returned to the United States, he would work as a mountain man, fur trader, and later as a guide for John Charles Fremont during his exploration of the West.

Translator Strike

But the infant almost didn't make the trip to the Pacific with Lewis and Clark.

On March 11 Charbonneau demanded new terms for his employment as a translator on the trip west. He did not want to do any of the daily work on the expedition. He would not, he said, stand guard. He wanted to leave whenever it moved him to leave.

The captains must have smiled at all this. They hired another Frenchman in his stead, and Charbonneau moved, with his family, outside the fort. For almost a week he brooded over his situation.

On the 17th he sent a messenger to the captains to say he was "sorry for the foolish part he had acted and if we pleased he would accompany us agreeable to the terms we had proposed and do everything we wished him to do."

The captains hired him back. They wanted Sacagawea as much as him. She came from the Snake tribe, which lived in the Rockies along the Continental Divide.

The Snakes were essential to Lewis and Clark's plans. The explorers hoped to obtain horses, guides, and food from the Indians. To have someone along who spoke the language and knew the landscape was important, if not essential, for no white man had been where they were going.

Spring Breakup

The two captains spent much of the winter conferring with all the Indians they could find in nearby villages who knew something about the upper Missouri and the mountains beyond.

Clark talks about making a map from their information. It would turn out not to be entirely accurate.

And then they began preparing to leave. As March wore on they dug the boats out of the ice and began to pack.

The keelboat would be going back downriver to St. Louis with a small contingent of men carrying journals, descriptions of the Missouri's tributaries and the eastern Indian tribes, maps of the river as far as the Mandan villages, mineral samples, animal skins and skeletons, even some live animals.

The captains sent men upriver to find trees large enough to make dugout canoes from. The explorers made six. The ice on the Missouri was beginning to break up. On March 29 insects appeared for the first time.

On April 7 the party set off upriver into unexplored territory.

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