Undaunted Courage: The Pioneering First Mission to Explore America's Wild Frontier

Sacagawea proved herself an invaluable addition to the expedition. Not only did she take on the manual labor of setting up and tearing down camp, alongside York, she also foraged successfully for food to sustain the white men with whom she traveled. Sacagawea showed Lewis new species like the Jerusalem artichoke, which turned out to be a vital food source in the over-hunted Hidatsa territory where they now traveled. In the first four days of their travel, favorable winds and the wide waters of the river allowed them to travel 93 miles in only the first four days. They quickly reached the mouth of the Little Missouri, previously known as the farthest western point ever reached by white travelers. The expedition was entering a “heart of darkness” (216), but far from inducing terror in the men, Lewis observed that they all felt invigorated, including himself. Finally, they were reaching the main point of this mission.

From this point on, the expedition encountered huge herds of game, including buffalo, deer, elk, and antelope. Hunting was very easy, and meat was abundant as a resource. They also encountered and recorded the new species of gray wolf, grizzly bear, and Canada geese. Sacagawea gathered wild licorice and “white apple,” or prairie turnip, which proved vital to preventing malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies in the crew.

Life-threatening dangers were a frequent occurrence at this stage of the journey: a grizzly bear they hunted refused to drop after being shot four times, chasing the men down to the river and swimming after them, coming within feet of one of the men before it was finally shot in the head. Additionally, “a sudden squawl” (225) upset the white-painted pirogue on the river, the most reliable boat they had, on which they stored their priceless navigation tools, their medicines, and most importantly, their handwritten notes. Charbonneau, who was steering at the time, panicked and made matters worse. Luckily, they were able to bail the boat out and bring it to shore without sinking, but it was a very close call. After this point, Lewis and Clark began making copies of their notes, now more aware of the necessity of redundancy in their observations.

The expedition traveled through the White Cliffs Area of the Missouri River in Montana and finally beheld the Rocky Mountains. The Missouri became difficult to navigate, and the men resorted to walking along the riverbanks and hauling the boats along with ropes, which often rotted and broke. Despite these setbacks, the expedition made it to an unexpected new river flowing into the Missouri. The directions given by the Hidatsas and the Mandan had been accurate up to this point, but they had not mentioned a river fork, or a new river entirely, before the Great Falls in the Rockies.

Lewis and Clark sent scouts along the two forks of the river to determine which one was “really” the Missouri. They took great care with this because Jefferson’s instructions had been to explore the entire length of the Missouri River, and they could not afford to get sidetracked. The scouts’ reports were ambiguous, and Sacagawea had never been to this part of the river before, so Lewis and Clark each decided to take a small party and explore one fork each until they could be certain. The slippery clay along the steep banks of the north fork of the river caused Lewis and one of the men, Private Windsor, to almost fall to their deaths. Along the way, Lewis convinced himself that the south fork was the true Missouri River, and named this river Maria’s River, after his cousin. He returned to camp, and found that Clark was equally certain that the south fork was not the true Missouri. They decided to split the party again, with Clark overseeing the slower movement of the white pirogue along the south fork of the river while Lewis led a speedier group on foot, convinced that only finding the Great Falls could prove once and for all which river was the Missouri. This was a dangerous undertaking, since the journey could take months and they risked being stranded in inhospitable mountains for the winter if they were wrong.

On June 13th, Lewis and his ground party heard and then sighted the Great Falls. They saw the spray first, which rose “above the plain like a column of smoke” (236). Lewis discovered that the Great Falls were actually five separate falls joined by dangerous rapids. He sent a letter to Clark via a private, and then headed off to join his party to the expedition again. They would have to carry the boats over more than sixteen miles along the river falls, a daunting prospect.

Clark scouted the portage route, and reported that it was almost eighteen miles. Lewis decided to go ahead with a lighter load on a wagon, along with his cutting-edge iron keelboat, so that he could find pelts to cover it with and devise ways to waterproof them. However, they had been depending on the existence of pine trees for pitch, the waterproof sticky resin that was used to make boats seaworthy. The only trees around were cottonwoods, whose sap would not do the job.

On July 4th, the crew “celebrated their nation’s twenty-ninth birthday” (247) with the last of the whiskey they had packed. Lewis’s boat was assembled, its iron frame covered in stretched buffalo and bear pelts. He experimented with mixing charcoal dust, beeswax, and tallow to form a pitch-like waterproofing substance. However, nothing he tried would make the boat seaworthy. On July 9th, Lewis was forced to admit defeat and leave the boat behind in a buried cache. Luckily, some of the men, while hunting, had discovered cottonwood trees big enough to fell and hollow out for canoes. It took a further five days to hew them out and turn them into suitable boats. These delays meant that a full month passed before they successfully traversed the Great Falls, a month in which they only progressed about twenty-five miles altogether. Lewis stated that he felt “excessively anxious to be moving on” (250), aware that summer would not last long, and they had to make contact with Native Americans over the Rockies if they wanted to survive another fall and winter.

While traveling through the mountains, Lewis records the “the majesty of the western mountains and valleys” (251), aware of the privilege of being among the first white men to ever glimpse them. However, he was anxious to make contact with the Shoshone, whose cooperation was crucial to the expedition’s survival. They worried that the sound of their rifles firing, a necessary part of their subsistence hunting, was scaring them off, since their enemies the Blackfeet hunted with rifles as well. This fear was corroborated when a large smoke signal rose into the sky, too big to have been naturally caused. The signal was almost certainly a warning from a Shoshone scout to his people to move to the interior of the mountain ranges for safety.

Clark separated from the crew with a couple of men in order to move more quickly apart from the noisy expedition, hoping to encounter the Shoshone and convince them to be friendly through the use of gifts. However, he made the confusing decision to leave Sacagawea behind. Perhaps he thought she would slow the party down, since she had an infant and had recently been ill.

At what is now called Three Forks, Montana, three tributaries of the main river meet in a picturesque valley, filled with game. The expedition made a more permanent camp, so that Lewis could be sure of their current latitude and longitude. Additionally, Clark was ill from exposure and exhaustion, and needed to recuperate.

Sacagawea informed Lewis that the expedition was now camped on precisely the place where Hidatsa raiders had discovered her Shoshone village and pursued them upriver, killing many of them and taking the rest prisoner, including herself. Lewis noted that she told the story with no visible emotion, and reflected that she seemed to be “perfectly content” (260). Ambrose, meanwhile, points out that Sacagawea was one of only two enslaved people in the expedition, the only Indigenous person, the only mother, and the only teenager. It was much more likely that she did not feel safe in expressing her emotions.

Lewis decided to set out on foot to try to make contact with the Shoshone. Clark, still unwell, was left behind. Lewis made the same inexplicable decision as Clark, to leave Sacagawea behind while trying to make contact with the Shoshone. Ambrose suspects that the two men “shared a hubris that they could handle Indians” (256) and that Sacagawea’s translating and diplomacy skills would only be necessary when they were trading for horses. However, at this point, Lewis needed the Shoshone far more than they needed him, even though he could provide a link with white traders and their weapon technology.

Lewis finally spotted a Shoshone scout on August 11th. He tried to indicate that he was a friend and a trader, unpacking some goods and laying them out, then rolling up his sleeve to show his white skin. The Shoshone, however, retreated on his horse and disappeared.

On August 13th, Lewis started to spot small groups of Shoshone out hunting and foraging. He managed to corner an old woman and a child in a ravine, and they sat on the ground and held their heads down, looking as though “they had reconciled themselves to die” (268). He showed the old woman his white skin, and gave her some small gifts. Drouillard, who was accompanying Lewis, used the sign language used for inter-tribe trading to ask the old woman to bring them to their chiefs. She agreed.

The Shoshone saw Lewis’s party long before he arrived at their settlement, and showed their “overwhelmingly superior” (269) battle prowess by sending out sixty warriors on horseback, with bows, arrows, and old British rifles.

However, the old woman showed the warriors the beads, mirrors, and paints Lewis had given her. This broke the tension, and the Shoshone leader who approached Lewis and his men embraced them. Lewis “had been exceedingly lucky” (269) that he had met the old woman first and won her over. Surviving the Hidatsa and Blackfeet raids and massacres led the Shoshone to mistrust any armed strangers. The chief, named Cameahwait, accompanied Lewis and his party back to the Shoshone settlement. While there, Cameahwait, through Drouillard, delivered the unwelcome news that there was no all-water route to the west coast of the continent, and no river route through the mountains. Lewis had previously hoped that one of the three forks of the river where they camped was actually the Columbia, but the chief informed him that the Columbia was still to the west. Not only that, but Cameahwait had never crossed the sheer cliffs and foaming rapids of the mountains to the west, and believed them to be almost impassable. However, he knew an old man in another group of Shoshone who might know a way. Additionally, he said that the Nez Perce who lived west of the mountains had told him that the Columbia ran all the way to a great body of salt water. He warned, though, that the Nez Perce crossed the mountain range on a miserable route which was steep, exhausting, and devoid of any food except berries.

Cameahwait then told Lewis about the struggles of his people: that the English sold guns to the plains tribes, but the Spanish did not sell guns to the Indigenous peoples in the vicinity of their small colonies on the west coast. With no access to guns, the Shoshone and their western neighbors couldn’t fight back against the raiding parties of the plains tribes. This provided Lewis with an inroad for trading. He promised that when his expedition returned to the east coast, he would immediately send back white men “with an abundance of guns and every other article necessary for their defence and comfort” (273). On this promise, Cameahwait agreed to bring thirty horses and some mules back to the camped expedition for trading.

Clark and the rest of the expedition arrived to meet Cameahwait. One of the Shoshone women recognized Sacagawea and embraced her, and then Sacagawea “began to stare at Cameahwait” (277). She recognized him as her brother and cried while hugging him.

The main issue the expedition faced was the impassability of the mountains. The Rockies represented a continental divide. On one side, the rivers flow to the east into the Atlantic, and on the other, into the Pacific. The Rockies destroyed the illusion of a single water route from the east to the west, and they would be almost impossible to navigate.

The Shoshone were hard-pressed for any kind of advantage to ensure their survival, and after witnessing the desperation of these white men for horses to cross the mountains, they started to raise the trading price of the horses. Lewis’s expedition was a “captive, desperate market” (283) with no other means of transportation besides what the Shoshone could offer. Cameahwait and his people demanded a fair trade for their services, instead of the bargain Lewis was hoping for. Instead of acknowledging how crucial their help was to his crew’s survival, “Lewis never showed the slightest gratitude, or gave any indication that he understood what a difficult position Cameahwait was in” (282).

While with the Shoshone people, Lewis observed that, isolated from both the great plains and the west coast, they were as close to “being untouched by white men” (284) as it was possible for people in North America to be. White men had brought horses and guns, and they had both, but their culture remained their own. Lewis recorded that the Shoshone were “frank, communicative, fair in dealing” (285) and very generous despite their current poverty.

Lewis noted with disapproval that the women in the tribe performed quite a bit of labor. In his mind, chivalry demanded that women be spared as much labor as possible. Lewis failed to realize that the men had to be always available to defend their beleaguered village if a raid occurred, and that the meat and fish crucial to their diet was acquired by men as well. Lewis also did not understand that the labor that women performed in the tribe pointed to their authority and expertise, not their servitude.

“What the Shoshone valued above all else, and depended on absolutely, was the bravery of their young men” (287), tested in the field of battle and while hunting. Their leaders, including Cameahwait, became leaders because of personal acts of bravery, not elections or inherited bloodlines. Because of this, Lewis realized the futility of trying to entice the Shoshone to become fur traders. There was no glory in trapping animals and selling their hides to become part of America’s envisioned trading empire.

On September 1st, the expedition set out north to find the passage across the Bitterroots, a northern range of “rough, seldom-traveled mountainous country” (289), with a Shoshone guide they called Old Toby. These mountains were so difficult to navigate that even today, people attempting to trace the expedition’s route are unable to agree on the exact paths they took. They made it through a pass into the Bitterroot Valley, plagued by hunger since the only game they could hunt were grouse.

Now they faced the steep and snowy Bitterroot Mountain range on the western side. “The going was incredibly difficult” (293), with the pack horses slipping and falling on the steep, wet stone. Snow began to fall thickly, obscuring their path and making movement almost impossible. The horses, also starving, would stray at night looking for vegetation, and would have to be searched for in the mornings and brought back, causing further delay. This was one of the most desperate times in the expedition, when morale was lowest. They found themselves killing and eating their own horses, which endangered the prospects of a return trip.

Lewis and Clark decided to split the party to investigate possible routes. Clark’s party reached a village of Nez Perce. The chief, named Twisted Hair, gave them directions to the Columbia River from their current location.

Changing from a scanty all-meat diet to fish and camas root (a starchy vegetable) caused severe gastrointestinal distress in almost the entire party, including Lewis. The remedies used to treat the condition, mercury and quinine, caused even more suffering. According to the oral histories of the Nez Perce, at this time they privately discussed killing the white men and taking their rifles and goods for themselves. A Salish woman, Watkuweit, intervened, stating that when she had been kidnapped by Blackfeet and sold to white traders when she was young, the traders treated her with much more kindness than the Blackfeet.

Ambrose then points out that Nez Perce, far from being rewarded for their kindness and restraint towards the expedition, were driven from their lands in 1877 by the U.S. government. Some of the children present during Lewis’s convalescence were alive to see the army return to destroy their village and drive them off.