Lewis and Clark / Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

by William R. Lighton

For many days thereafter, parties of the Tetons appeared from time to time upon the river banks, following the boats, begging, threatening, doing everything in their power to harass the advance. No doubt they had already repented of their brief show of decency, and would have made an open demonstration had they dared. Through those days the men generally encamped upon islands or sand-bars in mid-stream, deeming it wise to avoid further contact with the tribe. It was a decided relief to get beyond their territory.

On October 10th they reached the land of the Ricaras, a tribe whose conduct, in all domestic and foreign relations, was in striking contrast to that of the Sioux, and indeed almost unique. The Ricaras could not be induced to drink whiskey!

Soon after the arrival at the Ricara villages, one of the privates was tried by court-martial for some act of insubordination, and was sentenced to be publicly whipped. The execution of the sentence "affected the Indian chief very sensibly, for he cried aloud during the punishment." When the matter was explained to him, "he acknowledged that examples were necessary, and that he himself had given them by punishing with death; but his nation never whipped even children from their birth." Universal sobriety, and compassionate tears from the eyes of a warrior! Surely, that tribe was curious.

By the last of October the travelers came to the camps of the Mandans and Minnetarees, 1600 miles from St. Louis; and there, being warned by the calendar and by cold, they prepared to take up winter quarters. Their first care was to find a suitable place for building log cabins and fortifications. With this work the men were engaged until November 20th, when Fort Mandan was completed and occupied.

Meanwhile, the officers had sought to extend acquaintance among the Indians, and to establish confidence and bring them into sympathy with the new conditions of government. So far as pledges were concerned, they were fairly successful; the Indians received them hospitably.

The Mandans had once been a powerful nation, living in numerous villages down the river; but continued wars with the Sioux, coupled with sad ravages of the small-pox, had reduced them to an insignificant number, and compelled them to remove out of easy reach of their strongest enemies. When Lewis and Clark came upon them, they formed only a trifling souvenir of their past grandeur; they had then but two poor villages at this remote site, where they lived in a precarious hand-to-mouth fashion, having no allies but a small force of Minnetarees near by.

But Fate had managed the matter very well, no doubt, in depriving these people of effective strength in war; for at this time the head chief of the Minnetaree villages was a man who, given opportunity, would have made the river run red with the blood of his enemies. This was Le Borgne, a one-eyed old despot, of surpassing cruelty and bloodthirstiness, whose very name, even in his present position, would compel a shiver of apprehension. A chief such as he, at the head of forces matched to his ferocious desires, would have changed the history of the Upper Missouri. As it was, he spent most of his villainous instincts for his own private amusement,—occasionally slaughtering one of his warriors who had given him displeasure, or butchering a couple of his wives whose society had grown irksome; and between times he leered with his solitary evil eye upon the traders, contriving ways for getting whiskey with which to bait his passions. The British traders of the Hudson Bay and Northwest companies had long before secured a strong foothold in this territory, and had sought by every means to monopolize the traffic. The ubiquitous French were there also, domiciled in the villages, and some of them had taken squaws to wife. With schooling from such as these, old Le Borgne had cut his wisdom teeth; he had made himself master of many low tricks and subtleties practiced by white traders and vagabonds; he was as skillful as the best of them in making promises, and as skillful as the worst in breaking them. He was a scamp, and a blackguard.

Lewis and Clark succeeded directly in effecting a treaty of peace between the Mandans and Ricaras, and among other small tribes of the region round about; but they were powerless in trying to reconcile these people to the Sioux, who were the bogie-men of the plains, and who conducted themselves in every affair of peace or war with the arrogance of incontestable power. Not death itself could extinguish the hatred that was felt for them by the weaker tribes, compelled to skulk and tremble.

Early in November the officers received a visit from two squaws, who had been taken prisoners by the Mandans, many years before, in a war with the Snake Indians of the Rocky Mountains. One of these squaws was named Sacajawea, the "Bird Woman"; she had been but a child at the time of her capture, when she had been taken to the Mandan villages and there sold to a Frenchman, known as Chaboneau, who kept her until she reached womanhood and then married her. She was destined to play a considerable part in the later work of the expedition, and to lend to it one of its few elements of true romance.

The winter was passed busily, but for the most part quietly. The men suffered no serious deprivation. Game was abundant; and one member of the party, who was a good amateur blacksmith, set up a small forge, where he turned out a variety of tools, implements, and trinkets, which were traded to the Indians for corn. Everything went well. The officers were as busy as the men, and their occupations were varied and vital.