Reliving Lewis and Clark: Learning the Ways of Indians

Anthony Brandt
for National Geographic News

December 23, 2004

This article is eighth 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.

It is a typical North Dakota winter and the temperatures have already dropped below zero many times. The lowest temperature ever recorded in North Dakota is 60° below zero Fahrenheit (minus 51° Celsius). It never got quite that cold for Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery, wintering near the Mandan villages on the Missouri River in the vicinity of present day Bismarck, but Clark did record a temperature of 43 below (minus 42° Celsius) on December 17, 1804. Nobody ventured outside that day.

The re-enactors from St. Charles, Missouri, whose progress we have been following in this series, packed up their uniforms and equipment, pulled their boats out of the water, and left for home early this November. We won't be hearing from them again until the spring.

Things slowed down for Lewis and Clark as well. Clark's journal entries get shorter, to the point where one day he says nothing except that the moisture in the air froze and fell as frost, and the frost crystals drifted into the hollows. Once in a while it warmed up, but for the most part it was bitterly, dangerously cold. Clark lined his cap and gloves with the fur of a lynx. Frostbite was common.

The Corps of Discovery tried to get as much hunting done as early in the season as possible. A party sent out in November and gone for over a week brought back 32 deer, 12 elk, and one buffalo. It took a great deal of game to feed so many men. They traded with the Mandans and Hidatsa in both goods and services for corn.

The Corps had a small forge with them, and two men, John Shields and Alexander Willard, who knew the craft of blacksmithing, repaired the iron tools and axes of the Indians in exchange for food.

Lewis credits Shields, indeed, with saving them that winter from having to endure periods of serious hunger, if not starvation. Lewis had so much regard for him that he asked Congress to give him a bonus for his work after the expedition returned home. Thereafter Shields made a living trapping game in Missouri with the elderly Daniel Boone, who was a relative.

The Indians visited Fort Mandan regularly after it was built. The Fort consisted of two rows of log huts set at an angle to each other, and an 18-foot-high (5.5-meter-high) balustrade surrounding them, all in the shape of a triangle.

The Indians had seen white men before, fur traders from the Hudson Bay and Northwest Companies out of Canada, and some of them had spent winters with them. But a whole company of white men like this was a real novelty, and they were fascinated. Shields could not work at his forge without Indians coming to sit and watch. If the whites were interested in Indian customs, the Indians were equally interested in white customs.

Indian Anecdotes

The Mandans were an especially agreeable people, and the Mandan chiefs liked to come visit the Fort and spend the night. Clark mentions again and again the "anecdotes" of Indian life that he heard, and you want to curse him out when he fails to write them down. That winter may have been tedious to the men of the expedition, but it isn't to us. The notes Clark took are one of the first accounts we have of Plains Indian life.

And we can watch in the notes as Clark becomes more sophisticated about the complicated relationships among the tribes of the High Plains. The Mandan villages themselves constituted a complex social structure. Not just Mandans lived there, but the Hidatsa as well, three villages of closely related but not identical bands along with the two villages of Mandans.

Each village had its own chief and sub-chiefs, all strung out along the Missouri and Knife Rivers within about six miles (about ten kilometers) of each other. The Hidatsa were also known as the Minitaris, the Shoe Indians, and the Gros Ventres, or Big Bellies, even though they did not have bigger bellies than any other tribe and another tribe further west was also known as the Big Bellies.

The five villages cooperated with each other and socialized with each other, but they were in many ways independent of each other, living together for mutual protection against their common enemy, the Sioux.

Relations among the different village chiefs were sensitive. Relations among the tribes in the area were even more so. When Lewis and Clark arrived the Mandans and the Arikara were at war, and the captains made a point of persuading an Arikara chief to come with them to the Mandans and arrange a peace between them.

Peace Pipe

They were trying to break the Arikara away from their dependence on the Sioux and isolate the latter tribe. So the chiefs smoked the peace pipe. The Mandan chief noted that the Arikara had started the war, but it was nothing to him. They "killed [the Arikara] like birds." He would desist if the Arikara would desist. In the end they agreed not to attack the other.

But the captains failed to see that, while the Sioux dominated the Arikara, they also needed them. The Sioux were a source of arms for the Arikara, which they obtained from the British, but they relied upon the Arikara, who were an agricultural people like the Mandans, for corn and horses in trade.

The two tribes were mutually dependent on each other, in other words, and had been for a long time. Within weeks this long-standing relationship re-established itself, and a small party of Sioux and Arikara warriors ambushed Mandan hunters out for buffalo and killed two men.

When Clark heard about this he showed up at one of the Mandan villages with his own troops, ready to join any retaliatory force in pursuing the Sioux war party. The Mandans, to his surprise, had no interest in doing so. It was winter, they pointed out. The snow was deep. The weather was exceedingly cold. The Sioux and Arikara had gone home. Many thanks for your offer of help, but maybe in the spring.

This was another aspect of Indian life it took Lewis and Clark a long time to understand. War was a way of life with these people, and it was seldom full-scale. Small raiding parties from each tribe would steal horses, and possibly kill a few men. The courage shown in these raids was what made men chiefs.

Not until much later, when settlers moved into the Plains on a large scale, did Indians stop fighting each other and unite to fight the white man.

Powerful "Medicine"

It is the little things, however, that make the time come alive. Lewis and Clark had to adjudicate between a Mandan husband and wife when the husband became jealous at the wife's involvement with one of the sergeants.

White men and Indian women had sexual relations that were usually instigated by Indian men, who believed that in sex the "medicine" of one person was somehow transmitted to the other. And the whites had powerful "medicine"—cannons, metal-working ability, mirrors, the blue beads Indians loved so much, scientific and musical instruments, superior rifles, the keelboat. The men hoped to acquire some of that medicine through their wives.

York with his black skin and his great size was a genuine phenomenon in their eyes, and he made much of it. When Lewis went to visit one particularly haughty chief he gravely informed Lewis that he was "not at home." Clark noted that the Mandans believed they had originated under the earth, in a kind of utopia full of gardens. Soon after they arrived at the Mandan villages a prairie fire swept over the area and two people died, but one boy saved himself when he hid under a "green" buffalo robe—one not yet tanned—and the fire swept over him and left him unharmed.

It is these little details that give the journals their charm.

Just a few days after Lewis and Clark arrived at the Mandans, a French trader named Toussaint Charbonneau came up to them and offered his services as a translator on the trip west. He had recently purchased two women who had been seized in a raid on the Shoshones in the Rocky Mountains, and made them his wives. They might be useful when they reached the Rockies.

When they left for the mountains the following April, accordingly, Lewis and Clark took Charbonneau and one of his wives with them. She was about 17 years old and had just given birth to a little boy named Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau. Her name was Sacagawea.