Lewis and Clark (9 page)

The next day, they reached St. Charles, and “the party rejoiced at the Sight . . . plyed thear ores with great dexterity,” Clark wrote. Saluting their friends with three rounds from their muzzle-loaders, the men were met by excited townspeople. After the Mandan chief Sheheke had been outfitted with some clothes from “the publick store,” their boats left the Missouri and were swept down the Mississippi the short distance to St. Louis.

On September 23, 1806, the whole town turned out to welcome the “Robinson Crusoes - dressed entirely in buckskins,” as one newspaper account described them. “About 12 oClock we arrived in Site of St. Louis,” Private John Ordway recorded. “Fired three Rounds as we approached . . . and landed oppocit the center of the Town. The people gathered on the Shore and Huzzared three cheers. We unloaded the canoes and carried the baggage all up to a Store house in Town. Drew out the canoes, then the party all considerable much rejoiced that we have the Expedition Completed. And now we look for boarding in Town and wait for our Settlement, and then we entend to return to our native homes to See our parents once more, as we have been So long from them.”

Two years and four months after it had begun, the journey was over. Lewis wrote a note to detain the United States mails at Cahokia for his first thrilling dispatch to Jefferson. “[Mr. President], It is with pleasure that I announce to you the safe arrival of myself and party . . .,” Lewis wrote on September 23. “In obedience to your orders we have penitrated the Continent of North America to the Pacific Ocean.”

Three days later, Clark made the final entry in his journal: “a fine morning. we commenced wrighting &c.”

Lewis’s report to Jefferson went into great detail about the journey’s hardships. But the captain did not dwell on the disappointment over failing to find a continuous waterway to the Pacific Ocean. Instead, they had discovered, “the passage by land of 340 miles from the Missouri (over the Continental Divide) is the most formidable part of the tract proposed across the Continent; of this distance 200 miles is along a good road, and 140 over tremendious mountains which for 60 [miles] are covered with eternal snows.” Still, Lewis struck a positive tone, noting the abundance of horses which could be purchased from Indians which “reduces the expences of transportation over this portage to a mere trifle.”

Lewis reported to the president on the potential of the route for “a most lucrative trade” in furs. He predicted that, with even very limited government aid, “in the course of ten or twelve years a tour across the Continent by the rout mentioned will be undertaken by individuals with as little concern as a voyage across the Atlantic is at present.”

The president’s choice to lead this expedition made sure to praise Clark, “that esteemable man” for his “exertions and services rendered.” To Jefferson, Lewis noted “if . . . any credit be due for the success of that arduous enterprize in which we have been mutually engaged, he is equally with myself entitled to your consideration and that of our common country.” Of all they did accomplish, Lewis noted, the good health of the men in the party “is not, I assure you, to me one of the least pleasing considerations of the Voyage.”

Jefferson responded “with unspeakable joy” to Lewis’s letter, acknowledging that he had begun to fear the worst.

“The unknown scenes in which you were engaged & the length of time without hearing of you had begun to be felt awfully,” the president wrote. “I salute you with sincere affection.”

News of the expedition’s return – and more rumors about the trials they had endured - spread quickly. Newspapers reported tales of Indians overrunning the Continent west of the Rocky Mountains; one carried the claim that even the poorest among the tribes owned as many as 300 horses. Other reports described the “wonders” that filled the expedition’s crates: the eighty-pound horns of the Rocky Mountain sheep, “several skins of Sea Otter . . . the native sheep of America . . . [and] the Mule deer.”

The people clamored for details, and Jefferson pressured Lewis to publish his journals. “Never did a similar event excite more joy through the United States,” Jefferson wrote. “The humblest of citizens had taken a lively interest in the issue of the journey, and looked forward with impatience for the information it would furnish.”

At St. Louis, the tough, disciplined group of young men who made this achievement possible broke up. Once Lewis paid off his men, he and Clark journeyed together as far as Louisville, Kentucky, where Clark stopped to visit relatives. Lewis continued his triumphant journey east, arriving in Washington just after Christmas.

On January 10, 1807, Lewis attended a gala at the White House for the “King and Queen of the Mandans” - that is, Sheheke and his wife. Four days later, Lewis was the guest of honor at a Washington banquet. Clark, who was supposed to have shared in the honors, was then in Virginia, wooing a young lady named Julia Hancock, who had been in his thoughts throughout the expedition. Clark called her “Judy,” mistaking that for her given name. On the expedition west, he had named the Judith River, in present-day Montana, for her.

As well as voting double pay for each member of the party, Congress proposed to give 320 acres of land to each enlisted man, 1,000 acres to Clark, and 1,600 to Lewis. Lewis, however, refused the offer. He had promised Clark before they left that their rewards would be equal, and at his urging, Congress awarded each captain 1,600 acres. There would be other rewards: A statue of Lewis was commissioned and given a place of honor in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, and poems were written about the explorers’ heroism.

That same year, Lewis was appointed Governor of the Louisiana Territory, the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase, with headquarters in St. Louis. Clark, who had already returned the lieutenant’s commission that had so insulted him to the War Department, was recommissioned a brigadier general in the Louisiana militia.

Lewis had found success as an explorer and soldier, but the problems of politics and administration were foreign to him. As Louisiana passed from the jurisdiction of one country to another, land titles had become hopelessly confused.

Life was easier for Clark, who married Julia Hancock in January 1808 and brought her to St. Louis that spring. They eventually had five children; the oldest boy Clark named Meriwether Lewis. Clark began organizing his frontier militia, building a fort on the Missouri, and strengthening the military posts there.

Governor Lewis’s problems multiplied. In July 1809, he received word from Washington that the government would not be responsible for certain expenses he had charged to official business - for instance, $500 to buy tobacco and powder for the group that escorted Chief Sheheke back to the Mandans. Already depressed by political difficulties, Lewis now saw himself on the brink of financial ruin.

Selling some of his land grants to clear up debts, he collected the receipts for the disputed items and set out for Washington to explain his problems in person. Before he left, he wrote his will – a sign that he did not expect to live to return to St. Louis. He started down the Mississippi on September 4, 1809, planning to take ship from New Orleans to the capital. Halfway there, he decided to go overland. When he left the boat at Chickasaw Bluffs (Memphis), he was ill.

He wrote a letter to President Madison filled with crossed-out words, in a scrawl quite unlike his usual neat handwriting. Visiting Fort Pickering, his strange behavior so alarmed old Army friends that they concluded he was mentally disturbed. On September 30, his party left Chickasaw Bluffs and headed east for the Natchez Trace.

The Trace, a series of old Indian trails, ran from Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville, Tennessee. On October 10, Lewis’s party stopped for the night at a place called Grinder’s Stand in Tennessee, two cabins and a stable in a small clearing owned by a Robert Grinder, who provided travelers with meals, beverages, and beds.

When everyone was asleep, a shot was heard, then a second, from the cabin where Lewis was sleeping by himself (his two servants had been put up in the stable). Mrs. Grinder, fearful because her husband was away, peered through the chinks in her cabin wall and in the dim light saw Lewis stagger out of his cabin and to her door, crying out for water and entreating her to take care of his wounds. Hour after hour, he begged for help, but Mrs. Grinder kept the door closed. At dawn, she sent her children to the stable to rouse Lewis’s two servants, who had heard nothing.

Lewis, who had managed to crawl back to his cabin, wounded in the side and head, begged his servants to end his agonies by killing him. Later that morning, his body was found sprawled beside the road.

Lewis’s mysterious death, at the age of thirty-five, appeared to be a suicide. Mrs. Grinder gave evidence that he had been acting strangely the evening before he died, and even Thomas Jefferson was convinced that his friend had killed himself. But the man who found his body believed that Lewis had been shot in the back, possibly by robbers. There were no powder burns on his clothing or flesh, as there would have been if he had shot himself. His pocketbook was gone, and his trunks of papers were in total confusion.

Lewis’s body was not examined by a doctor until forty years later, in 1848, when it was exhumed by the Tennessee State Commission for the purpose of erecting a monument at the gravesite. The Commission, which included Dr. Samuel B. Moore, concluded then that “it seems more probably that [Lewis] died by the hands of an assassin.” Descendants of Lewis began in 1993 to press to have his body exhumed again, for forensic analysis to prove he was murdered, but those efforts were ultimately denied by the Department of the Interior in 2010.

The dead governor’s financial affairs were hopelessly snarled. In 1811, two years after his death, Congress finally voted to reimburse Lewis’s estate for the disputed expenses of the expedition. But by then, other debts had mounted. General Clark, his executor, did what he could to straighten things out, but it took six years for the lawyer handling the estate to make his final report. All of Lewis’s remaining money, land, and other property was not enough to pay his debts.

The two captains had hoped that publication of their journals would bring them fortune as well as fame. After Lewis’s death, with not a line of the manuscript written, Clark took over the task. In 1810, he persuaded Nicholas Biddle, later president of the Bank of the United States, to edit the immense mass of material into publishable shape. Although Biddle did a superb job - for which he accepted neither pay nor credit - there was endless trouble getting the two-volume edition of the “History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark” into print. Two years after its publication in 1814, Clark still had not been sent a copy. Even then, the work was not complete – leaving out much of the explorers’ scientific notes and observations. The complete journals were not published until 1904 – during a celebration of the expedition’s centennial – by which time others had been credited for many of Lewis and Clark’s discoveries.

Other members of the expedition published their writings. The first was Sergeant Patrick Gass’s
A Journal of the Voyages and Travels of a Corps of Discovery
in 1807. Lewis and Clark had ordered all sergeants on the expeditions to keep journals. Many pages have been preserved by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, but others mysteriously disappeared.

In 1813, Clark was appointed Governor of Missouri Territory, which was actually Lewis’s old post, renamed. He was also made Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Since the War of 1812 was in progress, Clark spent two years checking British efforts to incite the Indians. One measure of his success is that, although Indian raids took place, there was no outright war.

Unlike Lewis, Clark was an extremely successful territorial governor, although he did not enjoy the position. Thanks to his ability to get things done without fuss, he spent seven years in office without making a single enemy. When Missouri became a state in 1821, he was forced against his will to run for governor and was probably relieved when he was defeated.

His work as Superintendent of Indian Affairs continued, however, although his responsibility was limited to tribes north and west of the new state. He held this position until his death seventeen years later. Clark’s understanding and respect for Indian ways and views played a vital part in opening up the lands his expedition had traversed. In return, the Indians honored and trusted him, and those who came to St. Louis were always welcomed at the home of their “Red Head Chief.”

Among Clark’s many visitors were Charbonneau and Sacagawea, who brought their son Baptiste for Clark to raise, as he had promised, “as my own child.” Charbonneau tried farming but soon tired of it and went back up the Missouri in 1811. Sacagawea had given birth to a daughter, named Lizette. Baptiste and his little sister stayed behind, with Clark as their guardian. Clark paid for Pompy’s education at St. Louis Academy, a Jesuit Catholic School. When the boy was nineteen, he was befriended by a visiting German prince, who took him to Europe for five years. After his return, Baptiste guided travelers into the western wilderness, and he ended his days among the Shoshone Indians in the Rockies. He may have been headed to a gold strike in Montana when his stagecoach overturned, killing him, on May 16, 1866, at age sixty-one. Other accounts list his cause of death as pneumonia. A marker installed at his gravesite in 1973 reads: “This site marks the final resting place of the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Born to Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau at Fort Mandan (North Dakota), on February 11, 1805, Baptiste and his mother symbolized the peaceful nature of the ‘Corps of Discovery.’”

Baptiste’s mother likely also lived out her last days with the Shoshone, although there are conflicting stories, and it is difficult to be sure. In later years, an old woman named Sacagawea living among the Shoshones knew many details of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and Baptiste acknowledged her as his mother. When she died in 1884, the papers that would have proved her story were buried with her on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming.

There are also conflicting stories about York, who had so impressed every Indian on their route. In time, Clark freed him and set him up in the freight-hauling business, but two of York’s horses died, and he sold the others and went to work for wages. Clark believed he had died of cholera in Tennessee while on his way to enter his old master’s service once more.

However, in 1832, a black man among the Crow Indians claimed to have come to the country first with Lewis and Clark. A chief with four wives, he was treated by the Indians with respect.

Clark tried to maintain contact with members of the expedition when he could. But most of the men who had gone with the captains vanished into obscurity, returning to their farms, or more likely, settling on the frontier. The expedition’s youngest member, George Shannon went to law school, became a legislator in Kentucky, then a state senator and U.S. attorney in Missouri. Blacksmith Alexander Willard – once punished with 100 lashes for falling asleep on sentry duty – took his wife and twelve children back west by stagecoach during the gold rush in 1852.

Just as Thomas Jefferson had foreseen, the land they discovered was filling up fast with new settlers. At first, they clung to the banks of the Missouri; then their homesteads began rising on the fertile plains beyond. The Upper Missouri attracted thousands of fur trappers and buffalo hunters, who risked scalping to make fortunes from beaver pelts and buffalo robes.

The Indians were becoming openly hostile, resentful of the white men and ruined by their whiskey. In 1830, Clark, who had noted in 1804 how the Arikaras refused to drink liquor at all, wrote sadly: “Not an Indian could be found among a thousand who would not . . . sell his horse, his gun, or his last blanket, for another drink.”