Two years later, in 1806, when the captains redescended the river, they saw how the peace they'd stitched together had fared. The whole valley seemed at war: Arikaras versus Mandans, Hidatsas raiding Shoshones, Sioux attacking Mandans. The disappointment seems to have hardened Lewis. Three years later, as governor of the Louisiana Territory, he sent a small army to escort a Hidatsa chief up the Missouri with orders to be ready, should the Arikaras make trouble, "to exterpate that abandoned nation if necessary."
So much for the first Pax Americana.
Chad Crowe
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THE FIRST UGLY AMERICANS
Thomas P. Slaughter, in his provocative new study, Exploring Lewis and Clark, recounts that a later trader found the Hidatsas "disgusted" at those heroes' manners and eager to foist the "ill luck" of the gifts they'd bestowed onto their worst enemies. They and other tribespeople were especially horrified at the American practice of flogging soldiers for transgressions.
Lewis, in particular, seemed to grow testy and intolerantright up to the ghastly night of July 28, 1806, when a group of young Blackfeet tried to steal his and several companions' guns and horses. The Blackfeet offered no violence, and Lewis' group managed to recover their guns and capture the braves' horseswhat would have been a desperate emergency was averted. Lewis nevertheless cornered one of the Blackfeet as he fled and shot him dead, and one of Lewis' companions fatally stabbed another. In a final insult, Lewis draped one of Jefferson's gift medalsperhaps a peace medal, showing clasped handson one of the Blackfeet bodies.
Earlier, the Corps had stolen a canoe and firewood from friendly Clatsops and scammed natives' scanty food by scary "magic" tricks with matches and magnets. Lewis raged at what might have been reciprocal pilfering by the Clatsops and threatened to kill them all and burn their houses. Self-righteousness and double standards arose early in this nation's dealings with others.
Nevertheless, however hotly Lewis reacted, his intentions and Jefferson's were more benign than those of presidents and commanders who followed. Jefferson even directed Lewis to take a smallpox vaccine for the Indians. But the vaccine soon lost its virility, and pax turned to literal and figurative pox. The first fur traders inspired by Lewis' early reports were leaving St. Louis just as the Corps returned. Trappers, miners, ranchers, farmers, railroads, and the U.S. cavalry soon followed.
Lewis and Clark were plague Johnnies, harbingers of disaster for the tribes they met, including those who made their journey (and survival) possible. That disaster struck with particular poetic injustice for the Nez Perc鬠who welcomed the expedition (and whites who followed) and tended its horses till it returned the next year. Seventy years later, another generation's soldiers drove the trusting Nez Perc頦rom their lands.
Two hundred years later, expansionist fever has struck again. This time, the frontier is still commercialwith oil replacing furbut global and political rather than strictly territorial. It lies in any corner of the world where the American writ doesn't run. The hubris is grander but essentially the same. This administration's visionaries imagine they can shake, bake, and shuffle regimes in the Middle East just as Jefferson and Lewis imagined rewriting tribal politics on the upper Missouri. Then, bribes and threats failed, and conquest followed. Some things haven't changed.
AND SO WE PROCEED with Lewis and Clark, celebrating their voyage anew but understanding it no better. Until we do, we will, in writer Slaughter's words, "keep repeating their journey over and over again." In his view, Lewis and Clark failedfailed to cross the continent first, to pacify the plains, to understand what they had found. "Lewis knew he had failed," Slaughter surmises, and the knowledge killed him.
Perhaps, although the list of internal and external torments that could have driven poor Lewis to take his own life is a long one; Clay Straus Jenkinson, in a probing new study, The Character of Meriwether Lewis, weighs many and concludes that the fearless explorer's personality disintegrated in the passage from civilization to wilderness and back again, to a point where he no longer had "a home in either world." Let that be a warning to the re-enactors who would follow in his footsteps.
But perhaps Lewis' knowledge, won at the price of his life, can still benefit us. There might be less to celebrate in the republic's first spectacular triumph than we like to think, but there's much more to learn. It's not just an inspiring tale, but a cautionary one.
escigliano@seattleweekly.com
