James P. Ronda

Troubled Passages

The Uncertain Journeys of Lewis and Clark

It had not been a good day for William Clark. Cold, sick, and unable to eat even "the flesh of the Elk," the best he could do was barter a few fishhooks for roots to make some soup. But later in theday, gathering his strength, he managed to walk toward a nearby stand of pine trees. Taking out his knife, Clark carved this on one of the trees: "William Clark December 3^rd 1805. By land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805."¹ He did that at the mouth of the Columbia, with the river behind him and the ocean stretching out before him to the very horizon.

Now, two hundred years after Clark struggled through that windswept day, what he and the expedition had done seems so logical, so nearly inevitable. Of course they would make it to the Pacific. Of course there would be wagon trains and railroad trains on the way into the West. And of course all this came from the fertile imagination of Thomas Jefferson.

The American march across the continent looks so much like a straight line, the predetermined path, the will of God, the majestic design of Nature. But it was none of those things. Manifest Destiny was neither plainly manifest nor obviously a destiny. And while the prophets of empire talked bravely about one nation from sea to sea, it was not their words and schemes that made it happen. It was one hundred and one twists and turns, accidents and misadventures, what the Book of Common Prayer calls "the changes and chances" of life. What we have lost in our study of the expedition is what Lewis and Clark had — a sense of uncertainty, the sure knowledge of the power of surprise. We have smoothed out the rough places and rounded off the sharp corners. Doing that, we deny the past what we accept most about the present. Every life has its jagged edges, gaping holes, and incomprehensible moments. So as the Lewis and Clark bicentennial comes to a close, it is time to think again about what William Clark once called his "road across the Continent."² Thomas Jefferson thought it was going to be the plain path to the Pacific; but by the time Clark carved his name on that tree at the Columbia's mouth, he knew all about twisty roads and troubled passages. Down those roads and through those passages there were bound to be accident and chance, confusion and misunderstanding. As Meriwether Lewis once wrote, "accedents will happen in the best of families."³ We can trace the path of those "accedents" by paying attention to rivers, places, and people.

Cape Disappointment, at the mouth of the Columbia River

Courtesy of Washington State Parks and Recreation Commission

We should begin with rivers. Our past has been defined, shaped by ribbons of water that lace the land. They flow through our history like blood in the body. The Hudson, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Platte, the Rio Grande, and the Columbia — a catalogue of rivers is the framework of the continent. Thomas Jefferson lived on a mountain but was fascinated by rivers. The only book he ever wrote —Notes on the State of Virginia— has a long chapter devoted to rivers and the course of American empire. He imagined them as rivers of promise. And the promises were many — wealth, power, and security. Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark into the West to trace out the rivers that would be the fabled Northwest Passage. But rivers that looked so neat and sure on Jefferson's maps proved to be anything but that. Two days on two rivers can remind us of what Lewis and Clark soon learned.

Thomas jefferson never saw the Missouri, but he confidently called it "the principal river," the highway into the West.⁴ Experienced rivermen like François LaBiche and Pierre Cruzatte might have told a different story. They could have offered a long list of river dangers: snags and sawyers, sandbars and caving banks, and countless twisted channels. Looming every day was the threat of sudden thunderstorms with wind and rain that made the Missouri's promise a long stretch of rough water. John Thomas Evans, an explorer who went up the Missouri to the Mandan villages in 1796, caught the character of a river passage when he described his journey as "a long and fatiguing voyage."⁵

All that came true for Lewis and Clark on May 24, 1804. The expedition was just beginning its eleventh day out from its Wood River camp. As an infantry company on the move, it was still sorting itself out, still getting the daily drills and routines down pat. On that Thursday, the expedition broke camp early, hoping to make headway on a river that had already proved a challenge. What the river offered that morning was called "the Devil's Race Ground."⁶ Here, in what is now east-central Missouri, the river was squeezed into a narrow channel with what Clark described as "projecting rocks" on one side and a small island on the other. It was, so he wrote later, "a Verry bad part of the River."⁷ Just how bad became quickly evident. In order to avoid the Devil's rapids, the expedition navy made its way around the south side of the island. Pushing hard against the swift current of what rivermen called "the June rise," Lewis and Clark's men pitted their muscle and skill to overcome the river. They made it. They had escaped the Devil, but the day was far from over.

Eight miles upriver loomed yet another uncertainty. Once again Clark described what he saw as "a Verry bad part of the River."⁸ At first, what was ahead seemed a promising channel between a small island and the south bank of the river. It would be a narrow passage, a tight fit for the keelboat, but surely worth the trouble. It soon went wrong. Undercut by the rapid current, the riverbanks were caving in. Their passage now at risk, Lewis and Clark pointed their heavy keelboat toward the north side of the river. But that channel was just as tricky, and the keelboat was quickly stuck on a sandbar. Clark's simple, vivid prose catches all the danger in the next few moments. "The Swiftness of the Current wheeled the boat, Broke our Toe rope, and was nearly over Setting the boat."⁹ Reacting quickly to the crisis, several crewmen jumped overboard and pushed the craft to safety. The keelboat twisted three times in the swirling current before several men were able to carry a line to shore and secure the boat. It had been a harrowing day. In his rough field notes, Clark labeled this part of the river "the retrograde bend," writing that it was "the worst I ever saw."¹⁰ Preparing a more formal diary entry, he admitted that the entire party "were So nearly being lost."¹¹ Patrick Gass, not yet a sergeant, remembered the day more simply but no less powerfully: "This day our boat turned in a ripple, and nearly upset."¹²

Missouri River, which Thomas Jefferson characterized as the "principal river" to the West

Courtesy of US Geological Survey

Jefferson's "principal river" had more lessons to teach the president's men, but what happened that Thursday in May should have been lesson enough. The river had the power to wash away all certainties; its current could sweep away illusions of an easy road across the continent. Lewis and Clark were not yet ready to abandon the dream of the Northwest Passage; but up past the Devil's Race Ground and the "retrograde bend," it would be harder to dream with unbounded confidence.

Seventeen months later to the day, the Lewis and Clark expedition was far to the west on another demanding river with uncertain passages. Thomas Jefferson had once called it the Oregan. Now, in a strange twist, the river carried the name of an American ship bound out of Boston some fifteen years before — the Columbia, the River of the West. On October 24, 1805, Lewis and Clark faced a passage on the river that would test all their skill and resolve. And like so many other passages through suspect terrain, the outcome was by no means assured. They confronted the Short and Long Narrows, The Dalles of the Columbia. They are gone now, lost under the waters behind The Dalles Dam; but in October 1805, The Dalles put in question progress to the sea.

Jefferson had dreamed of rivers as great highways for commerce and empire. The Missouri might be like the Hudson, he thought, the Columbia like the Ohio — broad rivers that would secure the West for the young republic. By October 1805, Lewis and Clark knew better. The Missouri was not the Hudson, and what they saw now was proof that the Columbia was not the Ohio.

The Columbia was supposed to be one of Jefferson's rivers of promise, but promise seemed about to be swallowed up by trouble on the morning of October 24. The day began on a discordant note when the expedition's two Nez Perce guides announced their determination to go home. Clark knew the guides had "appeared verry uneasy" the night before.¹³ Now the reasons became clear. The Dalles was something of a boundary separating the Nez Perce from their lower Chinookan enemies, and passing that line would put the guides in considerable danger. Beyond The Dalles the guides would be in unfamiliar linguistic territory as well. It was only at the insistence of the captains that the Nez Perce men agreed to stay a bit longer.

Reluctant guides and rumors of an attack by river Indians were the least of Lewis and Clark's troubles that morning. What the Columbia promised was not a plain path but white water and a wild ride. About nine o'clock, Clark did a quick survey of the Short Narrows. What he found was not very encouraging. Catching all the fury of the Short Narrows, Clark described "the horrid appearance of this agitated gut Swelling, boiling & whorling in every direction."¹⁴ Jefferson had chosen Lewis to write the expedition's final report; he should have tapped Clark. For all his rough and ready spelling and syntax, Clark was a superb writer.

Gambling on Pierre Cruzatte's skill as a waterman, Lewis and Clark decided to run the Short Narrows. The men who could not swim were sent around by land along with expedition papers, guns, and ammunition. The canoes ran the roiling stretch of water two at a time. And they made it, as Clark said, "to the astonishment of all the Inds."¹⁵ The next day, the expedition faced the Long Narrows. This "bad whorl & Suck," as Clark reported, was different.¹⁶ It could not be run no matter how skilled Cruzatte was. Instead, the canoes were lined through the Long Narrows by ropes. Clark breathed a sigh of relief and admitted that he "felt my Self extreamly gratified and pleased."¹⁷ In retrospect, Lewis and Clark must have wondered how the Columbia could ever be the navigable river that danced in Jefferson's imagination. Wouldn't it always be trouble's river?

The Long Narrows of the Columbia River, above The Dalles

OHS neg., CN# 002998

Where did these rivers lead? Their river road across the continent took Lewis and Clark through troubled waters to uncertain places. We might consider two of them. Today, the country around what was once Fort Mandan seems quiet enough. Tourists poke around a recent reconstruction of the fort, and a few drop in at the new visitors center in nearby Washburn. It is much the same story half a continent away at Fort Clatsop. There are no hints that the northern Great Plains and the lands around the mouth of the Columbia were once contested, once troubled, once up for grabs. But they were, and Lewis and Clark found themselves in the middle of an epic struggle for empire. So this is also a tale of two forts, two places that are emblems for our larger continental history.

Bird's Eye View of the Mandan Village, 1800 Miles Above St. Louis, 1837–39, by artist George Catlin

Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/Art Resource NY

Far up the Missouri from St. Louis, where the Knife River joins the Missouri in what is now North Dakota, there was a cluster of five important Indian towns. Seeing them from a distance, Canadian explorer David Thompson described them in 1797 as "so many large hives clustered together."¹⁸ He was right. They were hives, and they did buzz with activity. These were the Mandan and Hidatsa villages, the crossroads of the northern Great Plains. In 1800, more human beings lived at those villages than called St. Louis home. The trade fairs held there drew Indians from distant tribes and Canadians in search of furs. More than that, the Europeans who had been coming for half a century before Lewis and Clark all thought they could shape Indian realities to the wishes and designs of outsiders like themselves. French and Spanish visitors hoped to extend imperial claims, English adventurers sought trading partners, and American explorers were confident they could bring "red children" into the Great Father's family. When they built their winter quarters in the Knife River backyard, Lewis and Clark put themselves at the crossroads and in the crossfire.

The morning of November 30, 1804, came bright and cold to the people of Knife River and their new American neighbors. It should have been like any other plains winter day; but there had been some trouble the night before in Mitutanka, the Mandan village across the river and nearest the fort. The early morning quiet was suddenly broken when a villager called out to the fort, asking to be ferried over. Once inside the fort, the Mandan told a story at once worrisome and strangely welcome. Five Mandans, he reported, had been out hunting when they were surprised by Sioux and Arikara raiders. In the fight that followed, one Mandan was killed, two were wounded, and horses were missing. There was more. The Hidatsa village of Mahawha reported four of its men missing. The chilly morning air was soon hot with rumors of an imminent attack.

For Lewis and Clark, the news from across the river seemed to come at just the right time. The captains had already decided that the real Great Plains power struggle pitted the aggressive horse Indians like the Teton Sioux and their reluctant Arikara allies against the supposedly peace-loving village farmers like the Mandans and Hidatsas. Lewis and Clark had tried to broker a peace between the Arikaras and the people of Knife River, but that had pretty much gone nowhere. Thinking that the plains world was simply divided between hostiles and friendlies, Lewis and Clark promised American support to the farmers. It was a simpleminded response to a very complex situation. Thinking that the raiders might still be close by, Lewis and Clark decided to muster their troops, round up Indian allies, and chase down the attackers. It would be a show of force sure to impress Fort Mandan's neighbors.

Sometime before noon, Clark, Sgt. John Ordway, interpreter René Jusseaume, and twenty troopers made their slow, painful way on foot through heavy snow and matted brush in the river bottom to the Mandan village. Clark probably thought the Mandans would welcome him and would quickly join his war party. But Chief Sheheke and the people of Mitutanka were stunned by the unexpected arrival of so large an armed body of men. Sheheke nervously invited the Americans in, but he must have wondered — what do they want? Why are they out on so cold a morning? While Clark's soldiers warmed up in several Mandan lodges, Clark boldly announced that he was there to "Chastise the enemies of our Dutifull Children."¹⁹ This was surprising news to the Mandans, and they offered Clark only blank stares. Now frustrated and perhaps a bit embarrassed, Clark turned to Black Cat, principal chief at another Mandan village. Clark and Black Cat had become good friends. When Clark asked Black Cat if there had been an attack, the Indian agreed that it was so; but to Clark's utter astonishment, Black Cat seemed completely uninterested in chasing down the Sioux.

Finally, another prominent Mandan who Clark knew only as Big Man paused to explain. Attacks like this, he said, were commonplace. They were simply part of a complicated cultural landscape. The dead man's family could be revenged in the spring. That would be soon enough. Ever the pragmatist, Big Man bluntly told Clark: "the Snow is deep and it is cold our horses Cannot travel thro the the [sic] plains,— those people who have Spilt our blood have gorn [gone] back."²⁰ Big Man's wise words and the warmth of the lodges soon drained away the passion for a winter excursion.

William Clark should have learned a valuable lesson that day. Clark wanted to see the world in starkly simple terms: There were dangerous Sioux raiders and their foolish Arikara accomplices. They were the oppressors. The victims were the innocent village farmers — victims just waiting for the Americans to arrive and liberate them. But Big Man was trying to tell Clark that the Knife River world was a tricky one, not black and white but many shades of gray. Big Man wasn't afraid to fight. He just wanted the over-eager Americans to realize that a cold winter day was better spent inside a warm lodge than out in the snow.

Fort Mandan had its own troubled passages. Those were dangerous times, confusing times, and sometimes even embarrassing times. Despite the troubles, Natives and newcomers shared common ground on the Northern Plains. On most days, Indians came to the fort, often for trade and sometimes just to visit with the strangers. Trouble, yes, but also a shared life.

Another winter at another place tells a different story. Fort Clatsop's story seems an endless tale of rain, spoiled food, and grinding boredom. One day seeped into another in mind-numbing succession, and the truth is that Lewis and Clark neither liked nor trusted their Native neighbors. The Americans did not like how the peoples of the Columbia looked, sounded, or behaved. And because the newcomers learned only a few words of the Chinook trade jargon, there was a language barrier that seemed hard to overcome. While the Clatsops and their neighbors came often to the fort to trade, they soon learned that the welcome was half-hearted at best and openly hostile at worst. At Fort Mandan, there was some common ground; at Fort Clatsop, space like that grew narrower by the day. All this became painfully clear on the first day of January 1806. Some days are emblems, signatures on history's page. This New Year's Day was a portent, the shape of things to come. It was a sign that what later generations would confidently call "the opening of the West" was really a closing of it for many who once called it home.

A sketch of Fort Clatsop by Rolf Klop, on the occasion of the Lewis and Clark sesquicentennial in 1955

OHS neg., OrHi 646

On that first day of January, Lewis and Clark issued new regulations about Native people at the fort. The regulations reflected growing suspicion and mounting hostility, the belief that Fort Clatsop's neighborhood was a geography of danger. For the first time, Lewis and Clark felt surrounded, cut off, truly alone in a physical world they did not like and among people they did not trust. The new rules reflected all of that. Sentries on guard were ordered to carefully observe all Indians approaching the fort and report their presence to the sergeant on duty. Once Indians were inside, their movements were strictly controlled. If a Native person became what the captains called "troublesome," then the visitor could be sent out immediately and not readmitted for the rest of the day.²¹ And since the Americans found Native ways of doing business "troublesome," ordinary trade negotiations could be easily misunderstood and the Indian trader promptly sent packing. Even the simplest gesture might have been seen as provocative, perhaps signaling an attack. Nothing quite like this had ever happened at Fort Mandan.

There was one more thing. Being invited to stay overnight with the Americans was seen by some Native people as a sign of respect, perhaps even of friendship. That was how it had been at Fort Mandan. Now, at Fort Clatsop, the rules had changed. Only on rare occasions would individual Indians be allowed to stay the night. All others were hurried out at sundown, made strangers in their own country. Exactly one year before — on New Year's Day 1805 — men of the expedition had joined their Mandan neighbors in a festive round of singing, dancing, and general good cheer. Now the words and the music were different, more discordant than harmonious. What lay ahead was the divided heart, the segregated neighborhood. The triumph Clark might have felt carving his name on that pine tree slipped away in days of suspicion and ill will.

Rivers, places, and finally people. Lewis and Clark made atroubled passage across the continent and the road Clark talkedabout could have an unwelcome surprise around every corner.Jefferson's captains had trouble and sometimes caused it. I say that not as an unthinking critic of Lewis and Clark but as someone who has devoted most of his professional life to exploring the wider, richer meanings of the expedition story. So — they had trouble and brought it along in their baggage. Two Native people can help us understand that trouble.

His name comes down to us as Cameahwait. He also had a name as a warrior — Black Gun. Remember that war name. As headman of the Lemhi Shoshones, he had seen his people suffer at the hands of well-armed enemies. Cameahwait could have told us that his part of the West — the part that is now western Montana and eastern Idaho — was caught in an arms race. Some Indians, such as the Blackfeet and the Hidatsas, had guns, thanks to Canadian traders; others, such as the Lemhi people, had almost none. Shoshone life was circled by fear. Cameahwait knew that. So did the young woman Sacagawea, who had been taken captive in a Hidatsa raid. Cameahwait also could have told us that just a few months before Lewis and Clark suddenly appeared in the Lemhi Shoshone's territory, a raiding party had killed twenty Lemhis. Others were taken prisoner. Lodges were burned and horses taken. It had all happened before, and Cameahwait was sure it would happen again.

In mid-August 1805, most of Cameahwait's people were in their fishing camps along the Lemhi River, west of the Continental Divide in what is now Idaho. But soon enough they would be heading east into buffalo country for the annual hunt. It would be a dangerous time, when the Lemhis were vulnerable to attack by gun-toting rivals. For two days, there had been rumors in camp that strangers had been seen coming from the east. At least one report said they were men with guns but no horses. Someone else said those men had faces "as pale as ashes."²² But these were just stories, rumors made larger by unequal measures of fear and anticipation.

On August 13, everything changed. A small advance party led by Meriwether Lewis had crossed the Continental Divide at what is now Lemhi Pass and was heading toward the Lemhi River. Quite unexpectedly, Lewis and his men came upon three Shoshone women out digging roots. One woman fled for her life. The other two — an elderly woman and a young girl — crouched down as if to accept their fate. After some initial confusion — the women thought they were about to be killed — everyone headed toward the river and the Indian camp. Somehow, perhaps by way of the woman who fled, word of the advance reached the Shoshones. The news must have spread quickly, because soon enough Cameahwait and some sixty mounted warriors galloped out to confront the strangers.

Riding ahead of the main body, Cameahwait soon spotted Lewis. Seeing each other, both men stopped dead in their tracks. Lewis took the initiative, dropped his rifle, picked up an American flag, and walked directly toward Cameahwait. Cameahwait paused while the two women told him that the strangers were not enemies. It would not be the last time that women interceded to save the expedition. It was the decisive moment — for both the Shoshones and the Americans. Would Cameahwait and his superior force believe the women and welcome the strangers, or would they kill them? If the past meant anything, there would soon be bloodshed. The choice belonged to Cameahwait. This was the hinge moment, perhaps the single most dangerous moment in all the expedition's troubled passages, and in that moment Cameahwait made his choice. He gambled that the women were right. As Lewis later recalled, "these men then advanced and embraced me very affectionately."²³ Cameahwait had made his choice, and the tension had been broken. Now he and Lewis sat in a circle on the ground, took off their moccasins, and smoked together.

Why did Cameahwait make that decision? The answers have run the gamut from Divine Providence protecting Lewis to characterizing Cameahwait as a coward afraid of a fight. Perhaps a better answer lies in his name — Black Gun. Lewis and Clark later learned that the entire band had only three old North West Company trade guns. The Lemhis were nearly defenseless in a heavily armed world. Cameahwait and his men could not miss one unmistakable fact about the strangers. They had guns. As Cameahwait later explained, "they had long been anxious to see the whitemen that traded guns."²⁴ Cameahwait believed the women, but it was the guns that made the difference.

Cameahwait lived in a world of horses and mountains, fishing camps and buffalo hunts. On the edge of the Pacific Ocean, where the big river meets the great salty water, Coboway found a home in a world shaped by fish, rivers, and the Great Western Sea. From the Clatsop village on what is now called Point Adams, headman Coboway surveyed an amazingly cosmopolitan world — one where ships flying British and American flags crossed the Columbia bar to trade for fur, where Indians from The Dalles brought all manner of goods, and where, as one tribal story had it, "the Clatsop became rich."²⁵

Secure in his world, Coboway had every reason to be suspicious of the strangers who arrived in December 1805. Consider how it looked to Coboway and his people. The Clatsops had seen white men before. They were pâh-shish�-e-ooks, the "cloth men" who came on ships in search of furs and did not stay long. But these new cloth men were different. They came from the east, not the west. And for white men, they came at the wrong time of the year. Ships in the fur trade came much earlier, and surely not as the dark days of winter closed in. The strangers from the east built an odd-shaped house and seemed ready to stay the winter. Most puzzling of all, these new cloth men wanted to trade but had few trade goods. They did not know the rituals — the dance — that shaped every bargain. For the Clatsops and their neighbors, trade was as much a social affair as a business transaction. Haggling was part of the dance, and the newcomers simply did not know the steps.

Despite all this puzzling behavior, Coboway made his choice. While he was not the first Clatsop to visit the strangers' odd-shaped house on the Netul River, Coboway came soon enough to visit and trade. When Lewis and Clark issued orders restricting Indians from the fort, Coboway accepted that as just one more part of a trading life. Ship captains in the fur business had their rules; this was just the way these new cloth men ran their lives. Perhaps he didn't even know that the fort's password was the offensive phrase, "No Chinnook."²⁶ Coboway evidently did his best to smooth out the troubles, settle disputes, and ignore the strangers' bad behavior. Lewis described Coboway as "friendly and decent," "kind and hospitable," but what happened to Coboway at the end of the winter was anything but decent.²⁷

This is a familiar story. Toward the end of the winter at Fort Clatsop, Lewis and Clark began to make plans for their homeward journey. One part of the plan required purchasing canoes from their neighbors, but that proved harder than they imagined. Canoes were valuable objects, not easily parted with. Certainly such a sale would demand a long, intricate negotiation. Short at least one canoe, the Americans concocted an elaborate scheme to steal one of Coboway's. The captains justified this extraordinary act by saying that it was proper payment for several elk that the Clatsops had taken from one of George Drouillard's hunting caches. Never mind that Coboway had already paid that debt.

This mean-spirited act and the trumped-up justification for it began to make some twisted sense when put in the context of something Lewis said later, in February 1806. After a visit from a large Chinook delegation, he exploded in a furious verbal attack on his Native neighbors. Summoning up words and images from two centuries of trouble between Indians and Euro-Americans, Lewis denounced the Indians as treacherous savages. Knowing that relations between the expedition and Native people had been generally peaceful and friendly, he warned his men that violence was just beneath the Native surface. For Lewis, things were never as they seemed. Ever suspicious of Indians, Lewis insisted that "not withstanding their apparent friendly disposition, their great averis and hope of plunder might induce them to be treacherous."²⁸ That it was the men of the expedition who practiced treachery on their neighbors evidently did not occur to Lewis.

Fort Clatsop had always been a place divided, walled off from the rest of its neighborhood. Lewis's hard words took all that trouble and exposed it. The days at Fort Clatsop laid bare generations of uncertainty, suspicion, and open hostility. All of that swirled around Coboway like the powerful currents at the bar of the Columbia.

History provides the retrospective look, the glance over thenational shoulder, but all too often that look back shows uswhat we want to believe — that the past is tied to the presentby a straight, unbroken line. Because we all fear chance and worry about accident, it is easy to dismiss the power of contingency and chance in the past. It is much easier to believe that large and momentous events were in some way part of a larger, even predetermined plan.

So we tell our history as a single story with one set of voices reading from the same script and without any chance that other words and lines might also be possible. Any notion that accident or miscalculation might nip at the story's heels never quite makes it into our thinking. Examples abound. The American Revolution seems a straight line from Lexington and Concord to Independence Hall and on to the British surrender at Yorktown. The Civil War seems much the same — an undeviating highway from Fort Sumter to Gettysburg to the final moments at Appomattox. The way we often describe the creation of the American empire in the West has that same air of inevitability about it. Were not the present political boundaries of the United States somehow predetermined by Nature or Nature's God? As historical geographer D.W. Meinig reminds us, "no one ever envisioned exactly that extent and shape for the nation during this era of expansion; no far-sighted statesman ever sketched that geographical design on the map as the objective of national policy."²⁹ Instead, as Meinig shows us, the current lines that separate the United States from Mexico and Canada "were the result of a complex series of events that involved surprises and compromises as well as specified geographical objectives."³⁰ If we take surprise and accident out of the story, then all the life and vitality are drained from the past.

We go about understanding the past as if it was a jigsaw puzzle. We like to think that all the pieces are here and that they all fit neatly together. But a thoughtful look at the puzzle past shows that not all the pieces fit to make a single complete picture. Edge to edge, not every piece has its perfect mate. There are pieces missing as well, some of them essential and yet irretrievably lost. The incomplete face of the puzzle is another reminder of the role of accident and chance, surprise and unintended consequences.

Consider two more brief stories from the Lewis and Clark narrative. French boatmen once told Lewis that the booming heard echoing in the distance around present-day Helena, Montana, was really the sound of silver bursting out of the mountains. This puzzle piece would not fit easily with a modern scientific understanding of mountain geology and the mineralogical properties of silver. But if we listen to the boatmen, they may help us appreciate how the world looked and sounded to people not part of Lewis and Clark's enlightenment universe. We would be richer for that by accepting puzzle pieces that do not easily fit.

And what should we make of the conversation Clark had with the Arikara chief Arktarnarshar? "This Chief," Clark later recalled, "tells me of a number of their Treditions about Turtles, Snakes, &, and the power of a perticiler rock or Cave on the next river which informs of everr thing." Perhaps Clark was surprised by what seemed to him "extroadenary Stories." But like us, Clark shied away from surprise and dismissed the Arikara stories as not "worth while mentioning."³¹ Arktarnarshar offered Clark another way to talk about the Great Plains landscape, a place where turtles and snakes had spirit power and rock stood between the world that was visible and the one that was not.

For Lewis and Clark, the road ahead was never as clear as we have imagined it was. Their uncertain future has become our seemingly predetermined past. But each day brought Jefferson's travelers its own confusions and its own choices, with unforeseen consequences everywhere in the expedition's wake. By making the rough places plain as level ground, by rounding off the sharp edges in the human condition, we rob past lives of their humanity. Henry David Thoreau once wrote that "the universe is wider than our views of it."³² By rediscovering the wild cards of chance and accident, we reinvigorate and expand our understanding of the American passages.

Notes

This essay was drawn from a lecture given as part of the Mark O. Hatfield Distinguished Historians Forum, November 10, 2005.

^1. Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 13 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983–2001), 6:107. [hereafter JLCE].

^2. JLCE, 2:215.

^3. Ibid., 5:32

^4. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1958), 8.

^5. "Extracts of Mr. Evans Journal," in A.P. Nasatir, ed., Before Lewis and Clark: Documents Illustrating the History of the Missouri, 1785–1804, 2 vols. (St. Louis: St. Louis Historical Documents Foundation, 1952), 2:495.

^6. The present-day location is charted in James D. Harlen and James M. Denny, Atlas of Lewis and Clark in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 50–51.

^7. JLCE, 2:250.

^8. Ibid.

^9. Ibid.

^10. Ibid.

^11. Ibid., 2:251.

^12. Ibid., 10:9.

^13. Ibid., 5:328.

^14. Ibid., 5:333.

^15. Ibid.

^16. Ibid., 5:338.

^17. Ibid.

^18. Richard Glover, ed., David Thompson's Narrative, 1784–1812 (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1962), 173.

^19. JLCE, 3:245.

^20. Ibid., 3:246. According to Clark, Big Man (Oh-he-nar, "To be full") was an adopted Cheyenne prisoner.

^21. JLCE, 6:157. The full text of the regulations can be found in JLCE, 6:156–58.

^22. James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark among the Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 277 n25.

^23. JLCE, 5:79.

^24. Ibid., 5:92.

^25. Franz Boas, ed., Chinook Texts, Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin 20 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894), 277–78.

^26. "Biddle Notes," in Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783–1854, 2 vols., rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 2:541.

^27. JLCE, 6:384

^28. Ibid., 6:332.

^29. D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America, vol. 2: Continental America, 1800–1867 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 3.

^30. Ibid., 197.

^31. JLCE, 3:179–80.

^32. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 309.

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