Reliving Lewis and Clark: Beaver Tails and Grizzly Bears

Anthony Brandt
for National Geographic News

May 9, 2005

Editor's note: This article is tenth 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.

The Lewis and Clark expedition left Fort Mandan in what is now North Dakota on April 7, 1805. The expedition had waited out the winter in the Native American settlement before resuming their westward journey. For the first time Meriwether Lewis began making daily entries in his journal, while Capt. William Clark's entries tended thereafter simply to reflect or repeat what Lewis wrote.

Lewis clearly regarded their departure as a historic occasion. "Our vessels," he writes, "consisted of six small canoes, and two large pirogues. This little fleet, although not quite so respectable as those of Columbus or Captain Cook, were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs."

The keelboat, loaded with reports and mineral and animal specimens, left the same day for St. Louis, with Corporal Warfington in charge. He had four privates with him, plus the disgraced Moses Reed and John Newman, who had been discharged on the trip upriver. Reed had tried to desert the expedition, and Newman had begun to encourage a mutiny. Most of the French engages—hired boatmen—went back east with them.

The so-called permanent party—all those who were going to the Pacific—now numbered 32, not including Sacagawea's baby and Lewis's dog.

Lewis was proud of his little group, and thrilled to be on his way. "Entertaining … the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten years of my life," he writes, "I could but esteem this moment of our departure as among the most happy of my life."

"The party," he added, "are in excellent health and spirits, zealously attached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed; not a whisper of murmur or discontent to be heard among them, but all act in unison, and with the most perfect harmony."

They would need to act in harmony as the voyage proceeded. "We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden, " Lewis writes.

All knowledge of it, indeed, was pure conjecture. The geographers of the time believed that the Rocky Mountains consisted of a single ridgeline, easily crossed. Nobody knew that Lewis and Clark would have to cross nearly 200 miles (320 kilometers) of the most rugged terrain in North America to reach the Pacific.

But never mind the mountains; their first enemy was the wind. All through April and into May the explorers labored through North Dakota and into eastern Montana, making 20 miles (32 kilometers) or so on good days, only 6 miles (10 kilometers), sometimes less, on bad.

Whether the days were good or bad depended entirely on the wind. Spring is the season of wind on the High Plains. There are no trees or mountains to obstruct the wind, and it mostly blows from the west and north, making waves on the Missouri River sometimes 2 or 3 feet (0.6 to 0.9 meter) high, flooding the dugout canoes.

It was the hardest of work to make headway against it. Some days the wind blew so hard the explorers simply had to stay where they were, in camp.

With the wind came sand, blown up from the sandbars and the Plains. "The particles of this sand are so fine and light that they are easily supported by the air," Lewis wrote, "and are carried by the wind for many miles, and at a distance exhibit every appearance of a column of thick smoke."

"So penetrating is this sand that we cannot keep any article free from it," he continued. "[W]e are compelled to eat, drink, and breathe it very freely." Sand got into Lewis's pocket watch, despite the fact that it was double-cased, and stopped it from running.

Otherwise, April 1805 was a relatively uneventful month for the explorers. Only in the first week did they see Indians, a Minitari hunting party from the villages the corps had just left. It was on the other side of the river from where they were camped, and the wind was too high for them to cross and make contact.

Those were the last Indians they saw until they reached the Rockies.

The crew saw plenty of abandoned Indian encampments, and once they came upon an Indian scaffold burial. It was the custom among some of the Plains tribes to place their dead on scaffolds built to a height of 6 or 7 feet (1.8 to 2.1 meters), to keep the bodies away from wolves.

In this case, the expedition saw the body of a woman, and the scaffold had collapsed. She was wrapped in buffalo hide tied tightly around her. Her dog lay dead—killed—beside her, no doubt, they concluded, to accompany her in the afterlife.

Only once or twice during this month do we hear about Sacagawea. It was the custom of the captains to walk on shore every day, although never together; they believed that one of them should be with the party at all times.

When Clark walked on shore he sometimes took Charbonneau with him, and his "squar"—Sacagawea—as well. Clark mentions her once bringing him a berry plant much like a currant, which she told him was abundant in the mountains where she had been raised.

Clark was growing fond of her. She also gathered roots similar to the Jerusalem artichoke, but smaller. She knew what all Indians had to know in order to survive: how to live off the land.

Game was scarce at first, the Indians in Mandan villages having hunted out nearly everything within 50 miles (80 kilometers). What the expedition did find was often so thin and bony that they couldn't use it, or else they took only the tongue and marrow bones.

The crew discovered, however, how much they liked beaver. The men hunted the animals primarily for their skins, which the expedition hoped to be able to bring back to St. Louis and sell on the return trip. But the animals were also good eating.

The tails especially were a delicacy and could feed two men. On one occasion a single beaver was taken in two traps, a foot in each trap, belonging to different men. Lewis saw a dispute coming and adjudicated ownership before an argument could spring up.

As the team moved farther west, the amount of game multiplied enormously, and it was relatively tame. Both Lewis and Clark remark on how when they walked through herds of buffalo, the animals hardly looked up, and the bulls would not move out of the way.

One day a buffalo calf followed Clark all the way back to camp. More than once the captains emphasize in the journals that they shot only what they needed to eat.

On April 29 Lewis and another man, walking on the shore, shot at two grizzly bears, wounding them both. The other man's escaped, but Lewis's "pursued me seventy or eighty yards [64 to 73 meters], but fortunately had been so badly wounded that he was unable to pursue so closely as to prevent my charging my gun; we again repeated our fire and killed him."

It was the expedition's first grizzly kill. The men had all heard so much about the dangerousness of grizzlies from the Indians that they expected to encounter more.

But Lewis was not impressed. "The Indians may well fear this animal, equipped as they generally are with their bows and arrows or indifferent fuzees [muskets], but in the hands of skillful riflemen [grizzlies] are by no means as formidable or dangerous as they have been represented."

By the end of the summer Lewis would rue these words.

On May 5 the expedition killed another grizzly, much larger than the first and much tougher. It took ten bullets to bring the bear down, and the animal weighed, they believed, about 600 pounds (270 kilograms).

They had reached the mouth of the Yellowstone River by this time, and they looked for a site where it might be advantageous to locate a trading fort. Subsequently two forts would be built at the site, one in 1828 and another in 1832, by two separate fur-trading outfits.

By May 5 the expedition was well into Montana, still fighting the wind, still marveling at the amount of game everywhere they looked.

Expedition reenactors are on the river right now, fighting the same wind upriver. Both parties—Lewis and Clark and their modern reenactors—will soon be facing the stretch known as the Missouri Breaks, the last section of this mighty river that still looks almost exactly as Lewis and Clark found it 200 years ago.

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