Pilots of the Republic: The Romance of the Pioneer Promoter in the Middle West

by Archer Butler Hulbert

The very absence of incident in the story is significant to one who remembers the countless dangers that beset Lewis and Clark as they fared slowly on up the long, tiresome stretches of the Missouri; surprises, accidents, misunderstandings, miscalculations, and mutinies might have been the order of the day; a dozen instances could be cited of parties making journeys far less in extent than that now under consideration where the infelicities of a single week surpassed those known throughout those three years. These splendid qualities, which can hardly be emphasized save in a negative way, make this expedition as singular as it was auspicious in our national annals. Good discipline was kept without engendering hatred; the leaders worked faithfully with their men at the hardest and most menial tasks; in suffering, risking, laboring, they set examples to all of their party. In dealing with the Indians good judgment was used; even in the land of the fierce Dakotas they escaped harm because of great diplomacy, presenting a more bold and haughty front than could perhaps have been maintained if once it had been challenged. With all Indian nations conferences were held, at which the purchase of Louisiana from France was officially announced, and proper presents were distributed in sign of the friendship of the United States.

The Winter of 1804-1805 was spent at Fort Mandan, on the Missouri River, sixteen hundred miles from its junction with the Mississippi. In the Spring the party, now thirty-two strong, pressed on up the Missouri, which now turned in a decidedly westward direction. Between the Little Missouri and the upper waters of the Missouri proper, game was found in very great quantities, this region having been famous in that respect until the present generation. One game animal with which white men had not been acquainted was now encountered,—the grizzly bear. Bears in the Middle West were, under ordinary circumstances, of no danger; these grizzlies of the upper Missouri were very bold and dangerous. Few Indians were encountered on the upper Missouri. Fall had come ere the party had reached the difficult portage from the Missouri to the Columbia; the distance from the Mississippi to the Falls of the Missouri, at the mouth of the Portage River, the point near which the land journey began, was 2,575 miles. The Portage to the Columbia was 340 miles in length. Having obtained horses from the Shoshones, the Indians on the portage, the explorers accomplished the hard journey through the Bitter Root Mountains.

The strange white men were received not unkindly by the not less strange Indians of the great Columbia Valley, though it needed a bold demeanor, in some instances, to maintain the ground gained. Yet on the men went down the river and encamped for the Winter on the coast near Point Adams,—the end of a journey of over four thousand miles. Here the brave Captain Gray of Boston, thirteen years before, had discovered the mouth of the Columbia and given the river the name of his good ship. The Winter was spent hereabouts, the explorers suffering somewhat for lack of food until they learned to relish dog-flesh, the taste for which had to be acquired. By March, 1806, they were ready to pull up stakes and begin the long homeward journey.

This was almost as barren of adventure as the outward passage, though a savage attack by a handful of Blackfeet,—henceforward to be the bitter foes of Rocky Mountain traders and pioneers,—and the accidental wounding of Lewis by one of his party, were unpleasant interruptions in the monotony of the steady marching, paddling, and hunting. It is remarkable that, throughout the western expansion of the United States after the Revolution, our northern pioneers from Pennsylvania to Oregon should have felt—in many cases bitterly—the tricky, insulting hatred of British traders and their Indian allies. As Washington in 1790 laid at the door of British instigators the cause of the long war ended by Wayne at Fallen Timber, so, all the way across the continent our pioneers had to contend with the same despicable influence, and were driven by it to deeds which made them, in turn, equally despised by their northern rivals. "I was in hopes," wrote an early pioneer, "that the British Indian traders had some bounds to their rapacity ... that they were completely saturated with our blood. But it appears not to have been the case. Like a greedy wolf, not satisfied with the flesh, they quarrelled over the bones.... Alarmed at the individual enterprise of our people ... they furnished [the Indians] with ... the instruments of death and a passport [horses] to our bosom." Even at the very beginning these first Americans on the Columbia and the Bitter Root range had a taste of Indian hatred from both the Blackfeet and the Crows.

On the way back to the Mandan villages the explorers had an experience which was by no means insignificant. As they were dropping down the upper Missouri, one day two men came into view; they proved to be American hunters, Dickson and Hancock by name, from Illinois. They had been plundered by the fierce Sioux, and one of them had been wounded; it can be imagined how glad they were to fall in with a party large enough to ward off the insults of the Sioux. The hunters did remain with Lewis and Clark until the Mandan villages were reached, but no longer. Obtaining a fresh start, the two turned back toward the Rockies, and one of Lewis and Clark's own soldiers, Colter (later the Yellowstone pioneer), went back with them. These three led the van of all the pioneer host under whose feet the western half of the continent was soon to tremble.

Holding the Sioux safely at bay during the passage down the Missouri, Lewis and Clark in September were once again on the straggling streets of the little village of St. Louis, then numbering perhaps a thousand inhabitants.

From any standpoint this expedition must rank high among the tours of the world's greatest explorers; a way to the Pacific through Louisiana, which had just been purchased, was now assured. Knowing as we do so well to-day of Russia's determined effort to secure an outlet for her Asiatic pioneers and commerce on the Pacific Ocean, we can realize better the national import of Lewis's message to President Jefferson giving assurance that there was a practicable route from the Mississippi Basin to the Pacific by way of the tumbling Columbia. Without guides, save what could be picked up on the way, these men had crossed the continent; and as the story told by returning Kentucky hunters to wondering pioneers in their Alleghany cabins set on foot the first great burst of immigration across the Alleghanies into the Ohio Basin, so in turn the story of Lewis and Clark and Gass and the others set on foot the movement which resulted in the entire conquest of the Rockies and the Great West.

But as the stories of others besides Kentuckians played a part in the vaulting of the first great America "divide," so, too, others besides Lewis and Clark influenced the early movement into the Farthest West. One of these, who stands closest to the heroes of the Missouri and Columbia, was Zebulon M. Pike, a son of a Revolutionary officer from New Jersey, the State from which the pioneers of Cincinnati and southwestern Ohio had come. During Lewis and Clark's adventure this hardy explorer ascended the Mississippi, August, 1805, in a keel-boat, with twenty regular soldiers. The Indians of the Minnesota country were not openly hostile, but their conduct was anything but friendly. The Winter was spent at the beautiful Falls of St. Anthony, at Minneapolis. Pike explored the Leech Lake region but did not reach Lake Itasca. He found the British flag floating over certain small forts built by British traders, which he in every case ordered down. An American flag was raised in each instance, and the news of the Louisiana purchase was noised abroad. The British traders treated Pike's band with all the kindness and respect that their well-armed condition demanded. The expedition came down the Mississippi in April, 1806, to St. Louis.

There were other regions, however, in Louisiana where the United States flag ought to go now, and General Wilkinson, who had sent Pike to the North, now ordered him into the Far West. Pike's route was up the Osage and overland to the Pawnee Republic on Republican River. His party numbered twenty-three, and with him went fifty Osages, mostly women and children, who had been captured in savage war by the Pottawattomies. The diplomatic return of these forlorn captives of course determined the attitude of the Osage nation toward Pike's company and his claims of American sovereignty over the land. And it was time for America to extend her claim and make it good. Already a Spanish expedition had passed along the frontier distributing bright Spanish flags and warning the Indians that the Spanish boast of possession was still good and would be made better. Pike travelled in the wake of this band of interlopers, neutralizing the effect of its influence and raising the American flag everywhere in place of the Spanish.