01-40 wpo nov06 3.29 - Lewis and Clark guitarist Keith Richards saying, “We’re kind of looking...

1!November 2006 We Proceeded On

ContentsLetters: $10 “bison” note; L&C meet the Rolling Stones 2

President’s Message: Welcome to Wendy 4

Bicentennial Council: Inspiration at Eads Bridge 6

L&C’s “judicious scelection” of Explorers 8The captains showed keen judgment and flexibilityin their recruiting for the expedition’s permanent partyBy Arlen J. Large

Old John’s Skillet 16Could this object be an artifact of the L&C Expedition? Burnmarks and grease stains on a Clark map raise the possibilityBy Melissa Darby

Fishing in an Angler’s Paradise, 1805 22The Corps of Discovery caught fish by the scoreas the expedition made its way through MontanaBy Kenneth C. Walcheck

Reviews 30Lewis and Clark Legacies; To the Ends of the Earth;After Lewis and Clark; Lewis and Clark Road Trips

L&C Roundup 35Wendy Raney named WPO’s new editor; Passage:Wilbur P. Werner; L.C.S.A. history

St. Louis annual meeting and bicentennial bash 37

Trail Notes 38The L&C Bicentennial is over, but the work goes on

Soundings 40So long, it’s been good to know youBy Jim Merritt

On the coverAs the illustration for this issue’s cover we chose Michael Haynes’spainting of the Corps of Discovery’s exuberant return to St. Louis onSeptember 24, 1806—a scene repeated exactly 200 years later on the lastday of the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s bicentennial commemoration.(See photo spread, p. 37.)

Recruiting, p. 9

Old John, p. 17

Fish, p. 23

2 !We Proceeded On November 2006

Letters

The 1901 bison (a.k.a. Lewis & Clark) noteNovember 2006 • Volume 32, Number 4

We Proceeded On is the official publication ofthe Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation,Inc. Its name derives from a phrase that appearsrepeatedly in the collective journals of theexpedition. ¶ 2006

E. G. Chuinard, M.D., FounderISSN 02275-6706

EditorJ. I. Merritt51 N. Main StreetPennington, NJ [email protected]

Volunteer ProofreadersH. Carl CampJerry Garrett

Printed by PRISM Color Corporation,Moorestown, New Jersey

EDITORIAL BOARD

James J. Holmberg, leaderLouisville, Kentucky

Robert C. CarrikerSpokane, Washington

Robert K. Doerk, Jr.Fort Benton, Montana

Glen LindemanPullman, Washington

Membership InformationMembership in the Lewis and Clark TrailHeritage Foundation, Inc. is open to the public.Information and applications are available bywriting Membership Coordinator, Lewis andClark Trail Heritage Foundation, P.O. Box3434, Great Falls, MT 59403.

We Proceeded On, the quarterly magazine ofthe Foundation, is mailed to current membersin February, May, August, and November.Articles appearing in this journal are abstractedand indexed in HISTORICAL ABSTRACTS andAMERICA: HISTORY AND LIFE.

Annual Membership Categories:

Student $30Individual/Library/Nonprofit $49Family/International/Business $68Heritage Club $100Explorer Club $150Jefferson Club $250Discovery Club $500Expedition Club $1,000Leadership Club $2,500

The Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, Inc.is a tax-exempt nonprofit corporation. Individualmembership dues are not tax deductible. The portionof premium dues over $40 is tax deductible.

WPO welcomes letters. We may edit themfor length, accuracy, clarity, and civility.Send them to us c/o Editor, WPO, P.O. Box3434, Great Falls, MT 59403 (e-mail: [email protected]).

I can shed some light on the questionsabout the Lewis and Clark $10 bank notementioned by W. Rayomnd Wood in hisletter published in the August issue.

In 2004, the U.S. Mint produced a num-ber of items commemorating the Lewisand Clark Bicentennial. One of them wasa set containing Lewis and Clark coins andstamps issued in 2004. In addition, the setincluded a reproduction of the 1901 $10“bison” note, along with the followinginformation:

“Produced by the Bureau of Engrav-ing and Printing, this specimen of theobverse of the United States note, Series1901, was printed from a plate preparedfrom the original master die. George U.Rose, Jr., engraved the lettering and nu-merals and Robert Ponickau engraved theornament. G.F.C. Smillie (1854-1924)engraved the portraits of Lewis and Clarkby Walter Shirlaw (1838-1909) that flankthe central motif of a North Americanbison. Marcus W. Baldwin engraved thebison from a watercolor drawing by thenoted Charles R. Knight (1874-1953),who worked from a live specimen inWashington’s Zoological Park and a pho-tograph of conservationist WilliamTemple Hornaday’s (1854-1937) bisongroup exhibit in the United States Na-tional Museum that sparked interest inconservation of native species at a timewhen the bison was threatened with ex-tinction. The same image appeared lateron the 30 cent U.S. postage stamp of 1923.Raymond Ostrander Smith designed thenote at a time when both the 1904 Loui-siana Purchase Exposition and the 1905Lewis and Clark Exposition were beingorganized and served to publicize theevents. Lewis and Clark represented ex-pansion and opportunity, while the bisonsymbolized the strength and spirit of theAmerican West. The note was legal ten-der for most debts and was in use from1901 to 1925.”

JIM ROSENBERGER

Verona, Wisc.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Michael F. Carrick ofTurner, Oregon, advises us that an articleon the bison note by the late Arlen J.Large appeared in the August 1993 WPO.

For the RecordJohn W. Fisher took issue with part ofour review of his publication Medical Ap-pendices of the Lewis & Clark Expedi-tion in the August issue. In an e-mail hestates, “Nowhere in my discussion ofTravelers’ Rest do I dispute the claims thatthe mercury came from the L&C Expe-dition. I firmly believe that it did. I ques-tioned the researcher’s misinterpretationof Peck’s book and the medicinal sourceof mercury, which I believe was mercuryointment and not Rush’s pills.” He alsopointed out that his e-mail address ac-companying the review contained a ty-pographical error. The correct address [email protected].

On a wholly different matter, the busi-ness section of theOctober 14 NewYork Times (pageC5) ran an itemabout the wrap-upof a two-year-longworld tour by theRolling Stones, themost lucrative inmusic history. Not-ing that the vener-able rockers sawtheir last few gigs asa sort of “victory lap,” the article quoteslead guitarist Keith Richards saying,“We’re kind of looking at it like we’reLewis and Clark—we’re playing theWyomings and Montanas.” To us, any-way, it’s not entirely clear what Richardsmeant (playing the biggest venues, per-haps?), but it was nice of him to men-tion the esteemed explorers. We can for-give him for not knowing that they neverset foot in Wyoming.

—THE EDITOR

Keith Richards


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THE MYSTERY OFLOST TRAIL PASS

A Quest for Lewis and Clark’sCampsite of September 3, 1805

WPO Supplementary Publication$12, plus $3 shipping

Lost Trail Book / P.O. Box 3434Great Falls, MT 59403

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PRINTS• Significantevents on theLewis &Clark Trail.

www.mhaynesart.com.MICHAEL HAYNES

• Uniformsof the Corpsof Discovery.


The Lewis and Clark TrailHeritage Foundation, Inc.

P.O.B. 3434, Great Falls, MT 59403406-454-1234 / 1-888-701-3434

Fax: 406-771-9237www.lewisandclark.org

The mission of the LCTHF is tostimulate public appreciation of the

Lewis and Clark Expedition’scontributions to America’s heritage and

to support education, research,development, and preservation of the

Lewis and Clark experience.

OfficersPresident

Jim Gramentine Mequon, Wis.

President-Elect Karen Seaberg

Atchison, Kan.

Vice-President Ron Laycock

Benson, Minn.

SecretaryPhyllis Yeager

Floyd Knobs, Ind.

TreasurerClay Smith

Great Falls, Mont.

Immediate Past PresidentGordon Julich

Blue Springs, Mo.

Executive DirectorCarol A. Bronson

Directors at large.James Brooke, Colorado Springs,

Colo.• Peyton C. (Bud) Clark, Dearborn,Mich. • Chris Howell, Topeka, Kan. •Larry McClure, Tualatin, Ore. • Jim

Mallory, Lexington, Ky. • David Peck,San Diego, Calif. • Hal Stearns, Helena,

Mont. • Bill Stevens, Pierre, S.D. •Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs, Helena, Mont. •

Active Past PresidentsDavid Borlaug, Washburn, N.D. • Robert K.

Doerk, Jr., Fort Benton, Mont. • LarryEpstein, Cut Bank, Mont. • James R. Fazio,

Moscow, Id. • Robert E. Gatten, Jr.,Greensboro, N.C. • Jane Henley,

Charlottesville, Va. • Stuart E. Knapp,Bozeman, Mont. • Barbara J. Kubik,

Vancouver, Wash. • H. John Montague,Portland, Ore. • Cynthia Orlando,

Washington, D.C. • James M. Peterson,Vermillion, S.D. • Patti Thomsen

Oconomowoc, Wis. • L. Edwin Wang,Minneapolis, Minn.

Incorporated in 1969 under Missouri General Not-For-Profit Corporation Act. IRS Exemption

Certificate No. 501(c)3, ldentification No. 510187715.

President’s Message

Welcome to Wendy, and a salute to the Fourth Estate

T his is the final issue of JimMerritt’s distinguished edit-

orship of WPO. In the August issueI tried to express our admiration forwhat he has accomplished and ourgratitude for his contribu-tions to the foundation.The application of imagi-nation and high standardsfor seven years and 28 is-sues has brought We Pro-ceeded On to new heightsof excellence.

Jim is unquestionably atough act to follow, butwe believe that in Wendy Raney wehave just the woman to do so with dis-tinction. We tip our hats to Jim Holm-berg, recent chair of the Editor SearchCommittee, and to his colleagues CarolBronson, Lanny Jones, David Nic-andri, and Stephanie Ambrose Tubbsfor having the common sense to knowthat often the richest diamond is inone’s own backyard. Let me explain.

Having been our director of fieldoperations for three years, Wendy isknown for her energy, intelligence, andebullient personality. A self-starter, sheis ready to step in where needed regard-less of her own job description, andrepeatedly she has done that cheerfully.That job description lists her princi-pally as the foundation’s liaison officerto our 40 chapters and as the leader ofour commitment to the Lewis andClark National Historic Trail. In hernew capacity Wendy will retain her trailresponsibilities but will have to surren-der her formal commitments to thechapters.

Impressive to be sure, but alonethese might not be ideal qualificationsfor the job of WPO’s editor. Let’s lookfurther.

Wendy came to the foundation af-ter nearly three year’ service as publicinformation officer in the office ofMontana’s state auditor, a job that in-volved considerable writing. Beforethat, she was for three years a businessreporter for the Great Falls Tribune.

She had qualified for both of these po-sitions by taking a Master of Sciencedegree at the Medill School of Journal-ism at Northwestern University, withan emphasis on reporting and editing.

Her undergraduate ma-jor was in U.S. colonialhistory at Vassar College,in Poughkeepsie, NewYork, and she did her un-dergraduate thesis there (Ikid you not) on Saca-gawea’s role in the Lewisand Clark Expedition. Nodoubt it was something of

a revisionist approach, challenging thetraditional interpretation. Along the wayshe has also taught English in Santiago,Chile, worked in a Livingston arts-and-crafts store, and researched historicaland political issues for a consulting busi-ness. In closing, let me give credit toWendy for her three years as editor ofThe Orderly Report, a period that hasseen TOR expand and improve, and em-phasize that she will continue to be re-sponsible for this important publication.

In spite of the retirement of a trulydistinguished editor, Jim Merritt, theFourth Estate remains in the best ofhands at your foundation.

—Jim GramentinePresident, LCTHF

Wendy Raney with Seaman stand-in atL&C Bicentennial finale in September.

TED

KA

YE


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At its annual meeting in St. Louis inSeptember the LCTHF awarded kudosto the Camp River Dubois Chapter, theTravelers’ Rest Chapter, the DiscoveryExpedition of St. Charles, Missouri,and to three individuals: Roscoe (R.G.)Montgomery, Darrell Elder, and Dr.Thomas Lowry.

The Camp River Dubois Chapterreceived the foundation’s ChapterAward for its leadership role in educat-ing the public about the Corps ofDiscovery’s winter encampment of1803-04 at River Dubois, a NationalHistoric Site in Illinois. The citationnoted that the chapter “has supplied thereplica of the fort at Camp RiverDubois with about $100,000 worth oftools, weapons, and civilian and mili-tary accoutrements” and contributesmore than two thousand volunteerhours a year to operate the gift shop.

The Montana-based Travelers’ RestChapter earned the foundation’s Ap-preciation Award for its Women’s Liv-ing History Project, which focuses onthe lifestyles of women during the L&Cera. Over the last two years the chap-ter has presented a variety of programsto nearly three thousand people.

Montgomery and Elder were eachawarded the foundation’s Distin-guished Service Award. Montgomeryhas made historical presentations onLewis and Clark to more than 7,500people and helped design L&C exhib-its at the Museum of the Rockies, inBozeman, Montana. Darrell and hiswife, Ann, have taken their travelingexhibit, “Hands On with Lewis andClark and the Native Americans,” toseven states and more than 70 eventsover the past five years.

Meritorious Achievement Awardswere presented to Lowry, a medicalhistorian whose recent book, VenerealDisease and the Lewis and Clark Ex-pedition, broke new ground on its sub-ject, and to the Discovery Expedition,devoted to telling the story of the Corpsof Discovery’s boats and river life.

More information on these awards,including their complete citations, canbe found on the foundation’s Web site,www.lewisandclark.org. ■

LCTHF’s 2006 awards


Bicentennial Council

OInspiration at Eads Bridge

n September 24, the Lewis andClark Bicentennial comem-

oration came to its official closewith a ceremony called “Return to theMiddle Waters,” a service created andconducted by members of the Osagenation. On the Eads Bridge spanningthe Mississippi at St. Louis, tribal el-ders, drummers, poets, singers, andothers gathered in an atmosphere ofhomecoming, for the Osage still callthemselves Children of the MiddleWaters, even though their people havenot lived in this land for two hundredyears.

I was the only white person to be aparticipant in this ceremony, and myspecial invitation from the Osage wasboth an honor and a beautiful burden.But because this entire Lewis and ClarkBicentennial was about learning newways of looking at the world, I knewmy words would be received in thespirit of harmony and cultural sensitiv-ity that had characterized our meetingsof the past several years.

As we stood on the bridge over theMississippi, the river that defines boththe geography and human history ofthe continent, I spoke of a creek faraway in Montana. The clear water ofPrickly Pear Creek flows over andaround boulders and cuts under thebanks, leaving exposed tree roots androcks. Small, muscular trout survive inthe unceasing current, resting in theeddies on the downstream sides of theboulders. They dart out into the rush-ing water and devour insect eggs, grubs,worms, anything edible that spinsdownstream. The creek flows throughPrickly Pear Canyon and into the Mis-souri River thirty miles away. The Mis-souri meets the Mississippi just aboveSt. Louis. Looking over the edge of theEads Bridge, we could see Prickly Pearwater right down there.

This river carries water from theblizzard that piled up the snow in thenorthern Rockies last winter and thewater that trickles from springs andsnowmelt from northern Minnesota

and water from snow and rain that fellin Canada. From here south it collectswater from the Appalachians andsouthern highlands until finally it dis-poses of its burdens in the Gulf ofMexico. The river has flowed this wayforever, without ceasing.

St. Louis is not the first city alongits banks at this place. A thousand andmore years ago, native people built cit-ies here on both sides of the river.This is a river of life. There islife in the river; life around itand life teeming on its sea-sonally flooded margins.Despite the dams andbridges and factories andpollutants, the river stillflows in a great cleansingcycle. The water evaporatesinto the sky. You can feel it in theair on any St. Louis summer day. Itcomes down as gentle rains, in violentdestructive torrents, as snow and iceand hail. This river extends into theskies and around the earth. This wateris life itself.

Doing what rivers doI come to the river often, in all sea-sons. Now, in fall, the river is calmer.In late spring, the river swirls in deadlyvortices that suck down foolhardypeople in small craft, spewing themout downstream. The river carrieswhole trees ripped from the banks. Insome years the river disposes of allthose puny human efforts to controlit, and the waters rage into towns andfields and over floodwalls and levies,doing what rivers are supposed to do,spreading life-giving water and siltacross the land.

I come to this river to put my ownlife into perspective, to know that I amnot alone but rather joined with all lifein an enormous river that began in adistant past and extends to an unfath-omable vanishing point. The river istimeless, unlike my own life, with itsinevitable limits. It is huge and wide anddeep and brown. T.S. Elliot called the

Mississippi “a strong brown god.”This river is to be respected, feared,

and celebrated. It is raw power, at onceterrifying but strangely comforting.This river defies hubris, that foolishsense that humans are the measure ofall things. Rather, it is a reminder of mysmall place in the universe; but it is alsoa reminder that I do have a place.

The Mississippi is a river of unity.Here the waters of half a continent

mingle and circle back throughoceans and air. Untold gen-

erations of humans went upand down these watersfrom one place to anothertrading, traveling, visiting,

creating connections be-tween distant places and

people. It is also a river ofconquest, exploited and in some

cases despoiled. Sometimes it has beenan obstacle to be crossed, and some-times it has been a dividing line betweennations or between slave and free.

But above all this river is a livingyardstick of our own health. If the riveris not healthy because we continue topollute it, channel it, dam it, and ma-nipulate its flow, it is not good for usand it is not good for our children. Ifthe diversity of life in and around theriver decreases, it represents a net lossfor life on the earth. It means that wehave made decisions that are not goodfor life on earth, of which we are anintegral part. Let us take this river veryseriously as our bellwether, our litmustest for planetary health, a sacred placein recognition of its vital role in sus-taining the great planetary cycles thatboth cleanse and sustain. In this river’shealth we can read the future. Let uslook and listen closely. Let us makewise decisions for the generations towhom we are connected in the greatchain of life but whom we will neverknow.

The river divides but this river alsounites. Let us remember.

—Robert R. ArchibaldPresident, Bicentennial Council


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We usually hear that the explorers of the Lewisand Clark Expedition called themselves theCorps of Discovery. But the party’s full name

actually was the Corps of Volunteers for North WesternDiscovery. That’s helpful to remember when looking athow this military outfit was put together.

Volunteers. That meant nobody was ordered to go—maybe with one exception, which I’ll get to later. Therewere no Army impressment gangs hanging around fron-tier saloons to grab drunken soldiers for this mission. Onthe contrary, the officers had the luxury of taking theirpick from the many young hot dogs who wanted to go.

Meriwether Lewis described the recruitment task in anAugust 1803 planning letter to William Clark: “Much mustdepend on a judicious scelection of our men. Theirqualifycations should be such as perfectly fit them for theservice—otherwise they will reather clog than further theobjects in view.”

The selection process began with President Jefferson’schoice of Lewis to lead the army expedition tothe Western Sea. Lewis was a native Virginian,born near Charlottesville in 1774. By 1803 he

LEWIS & CLARK’S

“JUDICIOUS SCELECTION”OF EXPLORERS

was an army captain serving on detached duty as thepresident’s secretary in Washington, D.C.

A problem immediately confronted Jefferson andLewis: how many people should Lewis take with him?That threshold question would determine the size of therecruitment task. How do you decide how big the unitshould be?

The numbers kept changing—and growing—as themagnitude of the project gradually became apparent. Thecommon thread running through the whole recruitmentprocess was improvisation, try this try that, play it by ear.

In January 1803, Jefferson started off by telling Con-gress that the mission could be performed by “an intelli-gent officer with ten or twelve chosen men.” He said ex-penses would be held down if these men were taken fromthe ranks of soldiers already serving in the army. That waythe government wouldn’t have to hire anybody new.

Why did Jefferson think a dozen guys would beenough? I suspect his template for the project was Alex-

ander Mackenzie’s successful Canadian trip tothe Pacific in 1793. That whole party, includingMackenzie himself, numbered just 10 men. Jef-

BY ARLEN J. LARGE

The captains showed keen judgment and flexibility whenrecruiting for the expedition, which originally called for

just a single officer and 10 or 12 men

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is adapted from a talk by the late Arlen J. (Jim) Large. A prolificLewis and Clark scholar and frequent contributor to WPO, Large delivered it in early 1996 ata meeting of the Homefront Chapter in Charlottesville, Virginia. He died later that year.We are indebted to former LCTHF President Jane Henley for sending it to us.1

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

MICHAEL HAYNES


ferson probably read Mackenzie’s book about that im-portant journey in 1802, and it not only inspired him tolaunch a competitive American trip to the Pacific, but alsogave him a model for planning its size and equipment.

So an American force of an officer and 10 or 12 sol-diers was the understanding on which Congress voted theexpedition’s initial $2,500 appropriation, in February 1803.The party’s size began growing almost immediately. Lewiswas soon authorized to pick another officer as his backup.By April and May, he was assembling enough equipmentin Harpers Ferry and Philadelphia for 15 people: 15 newrifles, 15 powder horns, 15 knapsacks, 15 blankets.

Lewis originally wanted to get most of his soldiers fromSouth West Point, an army post in eastern Tennessee. Hewould march them to Nashville, on the Cumberland River,where they would pick up two previously ordered boats,float them down to the Ohio River, proceed up the Mis-sissippi to the Missouri, and then head west.

That was Plan A, and it didn’t even begin to fly. TheNashville boats couldn’t be lined up. Worse, the winnow-ing process at South West Point turned up too few goodmen. The local commander wrote to Lewis that 20 men

there had volunteered for the trip, but only a handfulseemed qualified to go.

So on to Plan B. Lewis decided to have his main boatbuilt at Pittsburgh, on the Ohio River, and get most of hissoldiers from other army posts when he reached Illinois.and that in turn forced him to take an important new tackin his whole recruitment policy. He asked the army for atemporary detachment of eight soldiers to join him at Pitts-burgh, soldiers who already had been scheduled for trans-fer to garrisons on the Mississippi. He wanted them justto help take his keelboat down the Ohio to Illinois. Therethey would leave him and join their new units in Missis-sippi Territory.

See what’s happened: Lewis for the first time was di-viding his manpower into two categories: a “permanent”party of people who would go with him all the way to thePacific, and temporary groups of people who would helphim with specific logistical jobs, and then peel off. Thatwas a major departure from the original Jefferson plan.

In June 1803, Lewis was back in Washington. There helearned of a new development that would increase hisnumbers again. From Paris came word that Napoleon was

November 1803, Fort Massac: A company of infantry stands atattention for inspection by Meriwether Lewis and the post’scommander, Captain Daniel Bissell. Behind the two officers

stands George Drouillard, hired by Lewis at Massac as a civilianinterpreter. At least two other men—Joseph Whitehouse

and John Newman—were also recruited there.

MICHAEL HAYNES; FROM T AILOR M A DE , TRAIL W ORN, BY MICHAEL HAYNES AND ROBERT J. MOORE, JR.

10!We Proceeded On November 2006

willing to sell the Americans all of Louisiana, instead ofjust the port of New Orleans, as Jefferson had originallyproposed. If that deal materialized, the explorers wouldbe going through their own territory all the way to thecrest of the Rocky Mountains. There would be no needfor a low profile to avoid any diplomatic trouble withFrance or Spain.

On July 2, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn gaveLewis new orders allowing him to recruit “suitable men”in addition to the party’s previously revised target of 15,which consisted of: two officers, 12 soldiers, and a hiredcivilian interpreter for dealing with the western Indians.Lewis took Dearborn to mean that the 12 soldier quotaapplied just to men already in the army, and that he couldbring aboard as many additional civilians as he wanted.Therefore, in his letter to William Clark offering thecocaptaincy of the expedition, Lewis said he planned onhis way down the Ohio to “engage some good hunters,stout, healthy, unmarried men, accustomed to the woods.”He suggested that Clark in Louisville start a similar searchfor local civilian talent. The 12 soldiers would be pickedup later at army posts in Illinois.

Lewis arrived in Louisville in October 1803. He toldClark that among several woodsmen who had traveledwith him “on trial,” he had selected two. Clark meanwhilehad been turning away applications from “gentlemenssons” who “are not accustomed to labour,” while signingup “the best woodsmen & Hunters of the young men inthis part of the country.” He finally picked seven, plus afamily slave to be his personal valet.

Now the officers faced a problem of how to reconcileall this civilian recruitment with their written guidelinesfrom Washington. Those orders might seem to allow twodistinct contingents going to the Pacific—one made up ofregular soldiers subject to military discipline, and a sepa-rate group of civilian woodsmen to be treated as hiredemployees. Both Lewis and Clark had enough army ex-perience to know that wouldn’t work. Everybody wouldhave to be in the army and follow orders on the same ba-sis. Before departing down the Ohio, in late October, allof the so-called “Nine Young Men from Kentucky” wereformally sworn into the army at Clarksville, where Clarkwas living just across the river from Louisville.

Everybody would be entitled to a private’s pay of $5 amonth, plus an allowance for clothing and rations. (Thatcompared to Lewis’s $40 monthly pay as a captain.) Also,the new soldiers got a $12 one time enlistment bounty,and so would the old soldiers who agreed to re up if theirenlistments expired during the expedition. On Jefferson’s

authority, Lewis was able to drop tantalizing hints ofgreater generosity to come when they all got back. Thatcame true: In early 1807, Congress voted to doubleeverybody’s regular pay during the time of the expedi-tion, and gave each enlisted man 320 acres of land.

The Clarksville recruits almost filled the expedition’sauthorized strength under Dearborn’s 12 soldier quota.But it seems the officers decided to keep adding more men,the quota notwithstanding. A Louisville newspaper storyattempting to describe the expedition said “about 60 menwill compose the party.” That was a little exaggerated, butit indicated the captains were already thinking big.

The next stop was Fort Massac, commanded by Cap-tain Daniel Bissell and located on the Illinois side of theOhio River, where the officers picked up at least two men(Joseph Whitehouse and John Newman). Reaching theOhio’s mouth, the party turned north into the Mississippi.Now the explorers got their first taste of trying to makethe big keelboat go upstream, which probably nailed downthe officers’ conviction that a small crew wouldn’t do. Inlate November, they pulled into the big army post atKaskaskia, on the Illinois shore. Lewis wrote to Jeffersonthat at Kaskaskia “I made a selection of a sufficient num-ber of men from the troops of that place to complete myparty.” He didn’t say how many, but it probably was abouta dozen. That included some escort soldiers specificallyassigned to accompany the Pacific explorers only part wayup the Missouri River in a separate boat, and then return.

The keelboat continued north to the mouth of the Mis-souri, where in late December 1803 Clark set up camp onthe Illinois shore. There at Wood River (River Dubois)some new recruits were signed up, and others were dis-charged as unfit. On paper Clark kept juggling optionsfor an initial party of 25 men, or 30, or 50. He took intoaccount the warnings from fur traders in St. Louis abouta blockade danger from the Teton Sioux high up the Mis-souri River.

When the expedition finally nosed into the Missouri inMay 1804, the group had swollen to at least 45 people,including eight or nine French boatmen hired for the firstleg of the trip. That leg took them upriver to the Mandanvillages, in present-day North Dakota.

Clark later offered an explanation for the size of theparty that left Illinois. “Those additions . . . were for car-rying the stores as well as for protection in case of hostili-ties from the Indians who were most to be dreaded fromWood river to the Mandans.” Personnel turnover contin-ued as the party moved upstream to its winter fort at theMandan villages. With the coming of spring 1805, the


Kaskaskia escort soldiers and the French boatmen wentback downriver to St. Louis in the keelboat, droppingaway like the first stage of a modern rocket. The “pay-load” stage of 33 people in the permanent party contin-ued on up the Missouri on their way to the Pacific. Thoughreduced from the original Wood River departure groupof 45, it was three times as many as the number Jeffersonhad sold to Congress.

That wasn’t the end of the improvisation. The officerskept having to change their plans about the party’s size asthe trip progressed. They had planned to send a progressreport back home with three or four men in a canoe oncethe expedition had reached the Missouri’s head of naviga-tion. But after the tough portage around the river’s greatfalls, in Montana, Lewis and Clark decided not to risk areduction in strength. So everybody kept going.

The conviction that every man was needed again influ-enced the officers’ plans at the Pacific terminus of the trip.Jefferson had suggested that they send home two men bysea with a copy of the expedition’s outbound journals, ifany ship was found in the Columbia estuary. No ship hadbeen seen by the time the party was ready to return over-land in March 1806, but two men could have been detailedto stay behind and wait. Clark ruled out that option: “Ourparty are too small to think of leaveing any of them.”

There’s no evidence that the powers in Washington everauthorized a party of this size. When the explorers gotback to St. Louis in September 1806, Lewis went out ofhis way to defend the expedition’s size in his first written

report to Jefferson: “We have more than once owed ourlives and the fate of the expedition to our number, whichconsisted of 31 men.” (This number included Char-bonneau but not his wife Sacagawea or their boy, Pomp.)

How could Washington quarrel with success? The armyhonored its payroll obligations to all of the extra people,and the officers got into no trouble about their recruit-ment decisions. Lewis and Clark made their own assess-ment of their recruitment needs, and took control of thenumbers—never mind the original rules laid down inWashington.

CASE HISTORIES

One of the very first men on Lewis’s recruitment list wasa man named John Conner, living in Indiana. Early in 1803,Conner had written to Lewis offering his services as aninterpreter. Lewis already knew Conner, and wanted tosign him up. A messenger tracked Connor down that sum-mer. Told he would be paid $25 a month, or $300 a year,Connor said he wanted $5,000 to even consider the job.That was the end of him.

On his way down the Ohio from Pittsburgh in earlySeptember 1803, Lewis saw the opportunity to pick up areal medical doctor. At Wheeling the captain met Dr. Wil-liam Ewing Patterson, who said he was eager to join theparty. Young Patterson was the son of Robert Patterson,the University of Pennsylvania mathematician who hadcoached Lewis the previous spring on methods of celes-tial navigation. Lewis said okay, but specified that

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June 1804, on theMissouri: With thekeelboat anchorednear the mouth of theMoreau River, Lewisand Clark stand onshore with three oftheir ablest men—privates Joseph andReuben Field and thehunter-interpreterGeorge Drouillard,who examines somedeer tracks. The Fieldbrothers, two of theNine Young Men fromKentucky, wererecruited by Clarkthe previous fall atLouisville.


Patterson had to be ready to leave on the keelboat at 3o’clock the following afternoon. The next day Lewis madethis terse entry in his journal: “The Doctor could not getready. I waited untill three this evening and then set out.”That probably was for the best, because Dr. Patterson wassaid to be very fond of strong drink, which might have be-come the kind of “clog” that the recruiters wanted to avoid.

Lewis expected some soldiers who had survived thatbig cut at South West Point, in Tennessee, to join up withhim at Fort Massac, but they didn’t show. Not until mid-December did eight men from South West Point straggleinto Clark’s camp at Wood River. They looked like po-tential “clogs” to Clark, except for a corporal named Ri-chard Warfington, and before long four of them werewashed out as too sorry to keep. Somebody namedLeakens, recruited from somewhere, was booted out ofcamp for stealing.

After departure up the Missouri River in 1804, the partyin various ways lost no less than five men on the way tothe Mandan villages—three of them members of the Pa-cific-bound permanent party. Less than a month out, theexplorers met some traders in canoes taking furs back toSt. Louis. One of the Kaskaskia escort soldiers in the whitepirogue joined them, and went back. Nobody reportedthe reason, or the soldier’s name—it could have beenEbenezer Tuttle or maybe Isaac White.

North of the Platte River, Moses Reed, who had beenriding in the keelboat as a permanent-party member, justup and deserted for no reason that has been written down.Vanishing at the same time from the red pirogue was ahired French boatman named La Liberté. He made goodhis escape, but deserter Reed was caught, made to run thegauntlet, and dismissed from the permanent party.

Just two days later, Sergeant Charles Floyd died of ap-pendicitis, creating a second vacancy in the keelboat. Athird member of the permanent party was lost near theArikara villages with the conviction of John Newman formutiny. Nobody recorded exactly what he did or said,but a court martial stuck it to him. Newman got 70 lasheson his bare back and was “discarded” from the keelboatto the red pirogue. His gun was taken away and the offic-ers condemned him to “such drudgeries as they may thinkproper.” Like Reed, he too was dismissed from the per-manent party—both men returned to St. Louis aboard thekeelboat the following spring.

At Fort Mandan, Lewis and Clark turned down twomen who wanted to fill vacancies in the permanent party.One was François Antoine Larocque, a clerk for the NorthWest Company, a Canadian outfit that was doing heavy

trade with the Mandans and Hidatsas. He was “verry anx-ious to accompany us,” said Clark. But one big purposeof the expedition was to steer western Indians away fromtheir trade connections with Larocque’s company. Thecaptains not surprisingly turned him down.

The other rejectee at Fort Mandan was John Newman,the disgraced mutineer. Newman begged the captains tomake him a Pacific explorer again, saying he was sorryfor his bad behavior and had reformed. Lewis was sympa-thetic, acknowledging that Newman had committed hiscrime “at an unguarded moment,” and noting that since hiscourt martial he had been a model soldier. Nevertheless,the officers feared unit discipline would suffer if they backeddown. Said Lewis: “Deeming it impolitic to relax from thesentence, altho’ he stood acquitted in my mind, I deter-mined to send him back.” So poor Newman had to joindeserter Reed on the keelboat commanded by the reliableCorporal Warfington, headed downriver to St. Louis.

ASSEMBLING THE PERMANENT PARTY

The very first man that Lewis recruited as a Pacific ex-plorer, other than Clark himself, appears to have beenGeorge Shannon. He was a native Pennsylvanian whosefamily had moved to Ohio. According to several sources,he was in Pittsburgh in late August 1803 and was one ofthe “young men on trial” that Lewis took with him downthe Ohio River on the new keelboat. Shannon was about17 at the time, making him the expedition’s youngest sol-dier. Despite his youth, Shannon was already seen as brightand well spoken. After the expedition he became a law-yer, judge, and state senator. Elliott Coues, one of the edi-tors of the expedition journals, said Shannon was “per-haps the one man on the expedition whom either of thecaptains would have been most likely to meet at home onterms of social equality.”

John Colter was the second woodsman picked by Lewison his way down the Ohio. Colter was born near Staunton,Virginia. He got aboard the keelboat at Maysville, Ken-tucky, not far upriver from Cincinnati. He was then 28 or29 years old, described as five feet ten inches tall, blue-eyed, and somewhat shy, with a quick mind. Somebodysaid he looked a little like Daniel Boone. Lewis appar-ently referred to Shannon and Colter in a letter sent aheadto Clark from Cincinnati: “I have two young men withme whom I have taken on trial and have not yet engagedthem, but conditionally only, tho’ I think they will an-swer tolerably well.”

A good prediction. Both Shannon and Colter distin-guished themselves on the expedition as hunters and


scouts. In August 1806, the captains had to decide all overagain about Colter’s place on the expedition roster. Theparty had returned to the Mandan villages, in North Da-kota, on the way home to St. Louis. Colter asked per-mission to go back upriver to Montana with two trap-pers the party had met a few days before. All during thetrip, the captains had resisted reducing their strength byeven one man. But now the exploring was basically over,and the captains said okay, on the understanding that noother member of the expedition would seek an early dis-charge. They were cutting some military corners, butClark made it clear that Colter had earned it: “we weredisposed to be of Service to any one of our party whohad performed their duty as well as Colter had done.”The decision launched Colter on his new career as a pro-fessional mountain man.

Now back to 1803 and Clark’s recruitment of thoseseven neighbors who greeted Lewis, Shannon, and Colterwhen the keelboat reached Louisville. Two of the sevenwere brothers, Joseph and Reuben Field. They also provedto be excellent choices. Lewis called them “two of the mostactive and enterprising young men who accompanied us.”

A Kentucky historian named George Yater has an in-teresting theory about Joe Field. Yater has traced the lo-cation of the Field family farm to a 200-acre tract south of

Louisville, where the family had come from Virginia. Thefarm wasn’t far from a productive salt spring, where JoeField’s oldest brother Ezekial ran a salt-making business.Yater speculates that Ezekial had hired Joe to help withthe salt-making. The expedition connection came when theexplorers needed a new supply of salt boiled from seawateron the Pacific coast. Here’s the way Yater makes the con-nection: “I suggest that Joseph Field was in charge of thesalt-making operation and that he gained his knowledge atthe salt licks south of Louisville, a fact that would have beenwell known to William Clark.” Two others on the Pacificsalt making team, William Bratton and George Gibson, werealso Clark recruits from the Louisville area in 1803.

Two other Clark recruits were first cousins—CharlesFloyd and Nathaniel Pryor. Though neither of them hadany previous army experience, both showed enough lead-ership talent to be made sergeants on the expedition.

Clark went out of his way to get the ninth of the NineYoung Men from Kentucky enrolled in the army atClarksville. Both he and Lewis knew well the vital needfor a man who knew how to repair guns and work withother metal used by a military unit in the field. With greatforesight, Lewis had already brought 14 sets of spare fir-ing locks for the expedition’s guns, but someone wouldbe needed who knew how to install them.

November 1804, FortMandan: ToussaintCharbonneau pays avisit to the captainswith his two Shoshonewives, Otter Womanand Sacagawea(foreground), whopresents them with abuffalo robe. Lewisand Clark hiredCharbonneau andSacagawea tointerpret with theShoshones when theexpedition reached theContinental Divide.They were the lastones recruited for thepermanent party.M

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John Shields lived in the Louisville area, but he had beenborn near Harrisonburg, Virginia. He learned black-smithing as a boy in Tennessee, and Clark wanted himbadly enough to overlook the recruiting guideline forbachelors only. (Shields had acquired a wife named Nancyshortly after moving to Kentucky.) Clark also ignoredShields’s advanced age. He was 34, making him the oldestman on the expedition. Once he was signed up, Shields gavethe officers some advice on the kind of equipment he wouldneed, such as a bellows and some tongs—tools that hadn’tbeen on Lewis’s original shopping list. Possibly Shieldsbrought his own bellows and tongs, or maybe they wereacquired later in St. Louis. They came from somewhere,because they were on the list of items that the expeditioncached at the junction of the Missouri and Marias rivers inthe summer of 1805. Shields proved a winner as a skilledblacksmith—praised repeatedly by the officers during thetrip. He was a relative of Daniel Boone, which may be whyhe also proved one of the party’s best hunters.

There actually was a 10th young man from Kentucky—York, Clark’s slave. Both Clark and York were born onthe same Caroline County, Virginia, farm. William Clarkformally inherited York upon the death of his father, JohnClark, after the family had moved to Louisville.

There’s no record of whether York went on the expe-dition willingly or not, but he must have had mixed feel-ings. I’ll bet most unmarried young men of any station inlife would have jumped at the chance. Going to see thewestern ocean certainly sounded more exciting than fetch-ing Clark his mint juleps on the front porch. However,York also had a wife in Louisville, a slave woman work-ing for another owner. That would have tugged York inthe direction of staying home, but for owner Clark a slave’sdomestic attachments didn’t mean much. No matter howYork felt about going, in the end he probably had nochoice.

At Fort Massac, Lewis and Clark heard good thingsabout a hunter and sign-language expert named GeorgeDrouillard, the son of a French-Canadian father and aShawnee mother. The secretary of war had specifically au-thorized Lewis to hire a civilian interpreter, at $25 a month.That made Drouillard the third-highest paid man on theexpedition, which sounds about right, because he becamein effect the expedition’s third officer. At the end of thetrip Lewis regarded Drouillard so highly as a hunter, signtalker, and general wilderness wizard that he thought thearmy should pay him an extra bonus.

Lewis and Clark could afford to be selective during theirstop at Kaskaskia, because there were a lot of men to pick

from. Kaskaskia was an old French town of about 200houses on the east bank of the Mississippi. Garrisoned ona hillside about a quarter of a mile out of town was a com-pany of infantry commanded by Captain Russell Bissell(the brother of Fort Massac’s commander) and an artil-lery company captained by Amos Stoddard. One of theartillerymen selected was Alexander Hamiliton Willard,whose famous namesake was still alive. Willard used toboast that the officers chose him while rejecting a hun-dred others.

Another soldier chosen was John Ordway, from NewHampshire, who had resigned himself to being stuck inKaskaskia for the rest of his enlistment. Arrival of theLewis and Clark keelboat in late November 1803 wasOrdway’s ticket to adventure. “I am so happy as to beone of the picked men from the Army,” he later wrote ina pre departure letter to his “Honored Parence.” He saidthe government had promised the soldiers “Great Re-wards” upon their return. Ordway became theexpedition’s top sergeant, and historians can thank good-ness that he was picked, because he made an entry in hisown diary for every day of the whole trip.

Joseph Whitehouse was born in Virginia, probablyFairfax County. Scholars used to think he had been recruitedby Lewis and Clark at Fort Massac, until the discovery ofWhitehouse’s own statement saying he joined the expedi-tion at Kaskaskia. Whitehouse also kept a journal for mostof the trip. The men came to value his skill as a tailor.

There’s a story about the recruitment at Kaskaskia ofPrivate Patrick Gass that helps illustrate the high prioritythe government gave to the expedition. Gass was fromPennsylvania and 32 years old at the time, about five feetseven, broad in the chest, and strong. He had been a car-

Lewis and Clark did most of their recruiting in the Louisville-Clarksvillearea and at Forts South West Point, Massac, and Kaskaskia. Theypicked up several other men at Maysville and Wood River.


penter before joining the army, and because of that skill,Captain Bissell tried to keep Gass from volunteering forthe expedition. Gass ignored all the proper channels,hunted up Lewis, and made his pitch directly. After that,according to one Gass biographer, Lewis “used his au-thority to override Bissell.” What was that authority?Lewis could wave a War Department order telling Bisselland other frontier commanders that you will detach anysuitable soldiers from your units who volunteered to go.Upon the death of Sergeant Floyd, Gass later became anexpedition sergeant. He also kept a journal, which I thinkis a more valuable source of information than some histo-rians give it credit for.

It was probably after the expedition reached its wintercamp at Wood River that the officers decided they neededin the regular outfit a couple of local experts on navigat-ing the Missouri River. They signed up Pierre Cruzatteand François Labiche, though they weren’t formally sworninto the army until the expedition went a short way upthe Missouri, to St. Charles. The case of Labiche showshow a man recruited for one kind of expertise can latersurprise the recruiters with other talents. Labiche was halfFrench and half Omaha, and particularly showed a knackfor translating between French and English. Lewis thoughtthat his services as an interpreter entitled him to a postexpedition bonus.

As noted, on the way up the Missouri in 1804, deserterReed and mutineer Newman had been kicked out of thepermanent party riding on the keelboat. The captains filledone of those vacancies by promoting Robert Frazer, oneof the escort soldiers in the white pirogue, to the roster ofPacific explorers. The other vacancy wasn’t filled until thefollowing winter at Fort Mandan. Jean Baptiste Lepagewas a French-Canadian trader who had been hangingaround the Mandan villages and said he knew the BlackHills and the northern plains. The captains enrolled himin the army as a permanent member, but he seems to havebeen pretty much a cipher for the rest of the trip.

The recruitment of the Charbonneau family at FortMandan is a familiar story. Toussaint Charbonneau, anative of Montreal, originally was hired just to help thecaptains communicate with the Hidatsa tribe living inthe Mandan neighborhood. He didn’t seem all that valu-able until Lewis and Clark learned that his wife was aShoshone, from the Rocky Mountains. That wouldmake Sacagawea another useful interpreter when it cametime to get local help in crossing the mountains—andshe fully fulfilled those expectations. If they took her,they also had to take her infant son, Jean Baptiste, born

in February 1805, who became a sort of pet of the ex-plorers and particularly charmed William Clark.

The North Dakota addition of little Pomp—Clark’snickname for the boy—completed the roster of 33 peoplewho would go all the way to the beaches of Oregon.

They came from a lot of different places. Private JohnPotts made the longest trip to Oregon—he was born inGermany. Sacagawea was from the Idaho-Montana bor-der. There were men from Massachusetts, Connecticut,New Hampshire, and Kentucky. John Collins came fromMaryland. At least six were born in Pennsylvania. But itwas Virginia that topped the list with 10 of its sons—nearlya third of the permanent party. The native Virginians in-cluded both of the officers and York, plus Colter, the Fieldbrothers, Pryor, Shields, Bratton, and Whitehouse.

It’s obvious that skillful recruitment played a big partin the success of the expedition, both in the quantity andquality of the people selected. Lewis and Clark’s partywas three times the size of Mackenzie’s. That allowed themto gather more new information about the West thanMackenzie did. Having more men to do logistical choresgave the officers more time to draw maps, make celestialobservations for the fixing of latitude and longitude, andto write it all down.

Above all, Lewis and Clark had good people. Theyweeded out the thieves, the worst drunks, the smart alecswho couldn’t take orders. They carefully picked special-ists they knew in advance they would need: Shields theblacksmith, Drouillard and Sacagawea the language ex-perts, Gass the carpenter, Cruzatte and Labiche the boat-men, Ordway the ramrod sergeant. Some were just allpurpose useful guys to have around—the Field boys, Shan-non, Colter, York, Gibson. Yes, there were some—likeHugh Hall, Thomas Howard, and Lepage—who didn’texactly shine by their own inner light. But nobody turnedout to be a real “clog.” The selections, as Lewis wantedfrom the beginning, really did prove to be “judicious.”

NOTES1 Because the author did not write this article for publication hedid not reference his sources, and because he is deceased wecannot ask him to do so retroactively. Many of the quoted pas-sages are dated and can be easily found in Gary E. Moulton, ed.,The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition (Lincoln, Uni-versity of Nebraska Press, 1983-2001), and in Donald Jackson,ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with RelatedDocuments, 1783-1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1968 and 1978). We are grateful as always to Carl Camp—whofor the last three years has rendered exceptional service to WPO

as a copy editor, proofreader, and fact-checker—for his carefulreading of this article and his suggestions concerning it.


Any discovery of an artifact potentially associatedwith the Lewis and Clark Expedition must beviewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. This

is especially true for archaeologists (I am one)—reputa-tions can be made or dashed to ruins on such claims.Hence, I present an artifact that I can only say may (ormay not) be associated with the Corps of Discovery. Sev-eral intriguing but equivocal bits of evidence support thepossibility, not the least of which is the artifact itself. Thereis also a map, not marked with an X but with a ring, butwe will get to that later.

The artifact is a three-legged cast-iron camp skillet thatbelonged at one time to Old John, a Klickitat Indian. Helived on the lower Columbia River in the broad valleynow known as the Portland basin (called Wapato Valleyby Meriwether Lewis).1 Old John was probably associ-ated with the village near the mouth of the Sandy Riverknown as Stand of Pines (Ne-cha-co-lee), a satellite vil-lage of some of the people who lived along the Great Nar-rows of the Columbia River.2 By his own account he livedin the vicinity of Stand of Pines with his parents when theCorps of Discovery traveled through the region in 1805and 1806.3 When the historical record picks up in 1855, he

OLD JOHN’S SKILLET

Could this object at the Oregon Historical Society be an artifact ofthe L&C Expedition? Burn marks and grease stains on one of

Clark’s maps offer tandalizing evidence that it might.

BY MELISSA DARBY

is present, and he continued to live in the area until hedied, in 1893.

Two things impress me about Old John. The first ishow well-documented his life is by his close friends andneighbors, who reminisced about him in newspaper ar-ticles, diaries, and letters. 4 The second is how importantand well respected he was in the community. Old Johnmade his living in part by fishing, tanning hides, and help-ing his neighbors around butchering time. He also tookcare of their cattle, hoed their potatoes, and watched theirfarms when they were away. He brought them huckle-berries in season. He was a frequent visitor at his neigh-bors’ houses around mealtimes, no matter that he wouldstuff food in his shirt for later. He stored his money boxat Doc Hartley’s house.

Doc Hartley’s daughter Margaret wrote of the death,from diptheria, of John’s wife in the late 1850s, followedshortly by his daughter’s death, and how for a time OldJohn was inconsolable.

Two accounts describe the stories Old John told aboutthe time before white men, including his recounting ofhow Elk Rock, a local landmark, got its name. MamieEverett remembered that, when she attended the local


Old John, a Klickitat Indian who died in 1893,in an undated photo. He lived on the lowerColumbia and as a child may have been partof a village visited by the Lewis and ClarkExpedition in the spring of 1806.

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grade school, “During noon hour we children would godown to the Zimmerman ranch to see and talk with oldIndian John who was loved and respected by all who knewhim.”5 In his last years, when he was very old, neighborsbuilt a new frame house for him to replace his Chinookiancedar-plank, bark-roofed traditional house. His new househad windows, of which he was very proud—he called them“windys.”6 When he became feeble with palsy, the localwomen brought him food and took care of him until hewas sent to the county poor farm after he could no longercope for himself.

The reminiscences are united in their praise of Old Johnduring a critical time when Oregon was still a territory. Inthe early 1850s, Old John was one of a community of In-dians living along the Columbia Slough near Fairview, inMultnomah County. When some of the Indians decidedto attack white settlers in the area, Old John had advanceknowledge of their plans. By all accounts, Old John ranfrom one farmhouse to another with the alarm. The set-tlers took heed. Some of the men grabbed their guns andtook up a defensive position at the mouth of the SandyRiver. No one from the neighborhood was caught in theuprising.

The neighbors were grateful to John for warning them.After the conflict, when vigilantes rode the countrysideshooting Indians on sight, a group of them encounteredOld John on the trail. Its leader leveled his rifle at him,but Henry Holtgrieve, one of John’s friends, put his handon the gun and begged him not to shoot. The vigilanteslet Old John go.

Though most Indians were sent to reservations, no onetried to remove Old John and his family from their homeon the Columbia Slough. Old John lived on the land claimof Patrick Hogan. Later this was leased to the Wilkes fam-ily and subsequently purchased by the Zimmermans.7

Regardless of these land transfers, Old John kept his ten-ure on the slough.

Old John was so well-known that when he died, bothPortland newspapers printed his obituary. The followingis from the Evening Telegram of March 28, 1893:

Old Indian John, a well-known character of uncer-tain age, died Friday at the poor farm, where he wastaken last Wednesday, being at that time unable tomove or help himself. He is believed to have beenabout 125 years of age and was an old man so longago that the memory of the oldest white inhabitanthere runneth not to the contrary.8

THE SKILLET

Doc Hartley’s daughter, Margaret Hartley Sales, grew uparound Old John. She recalled him saying that when hewas a young man he visited a camp of’“Bostons” (Ameri-cans) near the mouth of the Sandy River. Old John saidthat his father was given the skillet by these men, and laterOld John inherited it. Old John gave the Wilkes familythe skillet, which they later donated to the Oregon His-torical Society. The 1905 accession record states:

Iron Skillet. Owned a great many years by “OldJohn” … who died in 1893; and was believed by allwho knew him to have been more than one hun-dred years old. He always claimed that this skilletwas given to him by white men long before DoctorMcLoughlin’s arrival in Vancouver, which was in1824. Hence it is possible that he received it fromLewis and Clark’s exploring expedition.9

Another note in the Oregon Historical Society states,“Old John received this artifact from the first white men heever saw, when he was approximately fifteen years old.”10

Old John’s skillet has all the characteristics of campskillets manufactured between 1780 and 1840.11 These weresometimes called “spiders.” This example is small: 8 3/8

inches wide and approximately 2 3/4 inches deep, with legsof 1 5/8 inches and a handle of 8 1/2 inches. Originally it mayhave had a raised lid for use as a bake skillet. It has thelong legs of skillets manufactured during this time ratherthan the shorter, stubby legs of later skillets. Also, the

Old John’s skillet: top and bottom views.

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handle is attached low on the side ofthe vessel, not near the rim as it is onlater skillets. Skillets manufacturedafter 1840 had “hang holes” in theirhandles so they could be hung from apeg. This skillet has no eyelet hole.

The skillet is in excellent condi-tion. Early cast-iron vessels were castwith iron ore that was smelted withcharcoal rather than coke, giving it ahigher carbon content. When molten,charcoal-smelted iron is very ductileand easy to pour. Cast iron from circa1855 and later is recognizable fromearlier cast iron because it has a cer-tain brittleness, and even whencleaned can easily become rusty andpitted.

Our knowledge of the Corps ofDiscovery’s inventory is woefully in-adequate and mostly based on Lewis’sequipment list and receipts for pur-chases made in Philadelphia in 1803.Among the items recorded are 14 brasskettles, a black tin saucepan, and somenested copper kettles for presents forthe Indians. On another list he men-tions six nested copper kettles ranging in size from one tofive gallons.12 There is no mention of an iron skillet. Weknow, however, that the expedition had more cookwarethan the items listed in Lewis’s inventory because JosephWhitehouse, one of the corps’ journalists, mentions cach-ing a Dutch oven on June 11, 1805.13 It is possible thatWilliam Clark, some of the engagés, and ToussaintCharbonneau brought their own cooking equipment onthe journey.

It is also possible that the brass kettles listed by Lewiswere used for frying, but a cast-iron pan would be a bet-ter utensil. In her book on the foods of the expedition,Feasting and Fasting with Lewis and Clark, the lateLeandra Zim Holland notes that frying as a method ofcooking is mentioned several times in the journals. Theexplorers began the journey with a keg of pork lard, andthe frequent rendering of grizzly fat indicates more fry-ing. Lewis wrote that he ate fried squirrel (caught in theOhio River by his dog, Seaman) on several occasions inSeptember 1803. Frying is used in the second-stage brown-ing of boudin blanc (white pudding sausage), Char-bonneau’s specialty and one of Lewis’s favorite dishes.

While wintering at Fort Clatsop, the explorers purchasedwhale oil, presumably for frying. On October 26, 1805,they ate steelhead trout “fried in a little bears oil.”14

THE EXPEDITION ON THE LOWER COLUMBIA

Lewis and Clark had numerous opportunities to tradetheir skillets to members of Old John’s tribe, both down-river near the mouth of the Sandy River, and upriver alongthe Long Narrows. Most of Old John’s people lived up-river, but as noted, some of them lived at Stand of Pines,near the mouth of the Sandy River. On November 2-3,1805, during its descent of the Columbia River, the expe-dition camped on the south side of the Columbia, a mileor so upriver from the mouth of the Sandy River. On theirreturn journey the explorers camped six nights (March31–April 5, 1806) on what Lewis described as a “hand-some prairie” on the north side of the Columbia, oppo-site the mouth of the Sandy River. They had planned tostay in the area for just two days, long enough to map andexplore it. However, after hearing accounts of the lack ofgame and food upriver, they decided to remain several dayslonger, until they could procure enough food to last them

Old John stands by hisplank house on theOregon shore of theColumbia estuary. Itsconstruction is identicalto that of the joinedsingle-room housesdescribed byMeriwether Lewisand drawn in hisjournal entry forApril 6, 1806.

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for the several weeks they expected to take traversing thedry Columbia Plateau.

On April 2, some Indians came into camp. In a dis-course with Clark they pointed to some “tall pine trees” inthe bottomland across the river and indicated it was theirvillage.15 This was Stand of Pines Village, and perhaps thesewere some of Old John’s people. Clark visited the villagethe next day and drew a sketch of it in his journal. (A simi-lar sketch, probably copied from Clark’s, appears in Lewis’sjournal entry for April 6.) The inhabitants lived in a kind ofapartment complex—a row of seven planked-wall roomsjoined together under a long gabled roof. The individualrooms were separated by either a four-foot-wide breeze-way or a shared plank wall. Doorways off the breezewaygave access to the rooms, and the breezeway itself gave ac-cess to a waste-disposal area behind the complex.

Remarkably, the only known photograph of a plankhouse on the Columbia River is one of Old John’s, who isposed near the doorway. The photograph recently cameto the attention of historians, archaeologists, and Indiansof the region. It was taken in the 1870s or 1880s. Old Johnlived in a single-room house, and Clark was looking at arow of these houses linked together. The photographshows the roof clad with three sheets of peeled cedar barkheld between (and lashed to) long poles set on the planksof the wall. Clark described just such an arrangement whenhe wrote that the roof was “built of the bark of the WhiteCedar Supported on long Stiff poles resting on the endsof broad boards which form the rooms.”16 The planks ofthe walls are set vertically into the ground and buttressedby an earthen mound. The bark extends out, shelteringthe planks and conducting rainwater onto the earthenmound and away from the house.

Clark writes that the houses were in the same style asthose of Indians of the Great Narrows, “with whom thesepeople were connected.” The Great Narrows (today’s TheDalles) was 85 miles upriver from Stand of Pines Village.Lewis notes that the language of the Stand of Pines peoplewas the same as those of the Great Narrows, “with whomthese people claim affinity.”17 These observations are con-sistent with one detail about Old John that lends credenceto his association with Stand of Pines Village. Old Johnidentified himself as “Klickitat,” according to a censusrecord left by his surviving daughter.18 The Klickitat andWishram shared territory near The Dalles. (When his otherdaughter died, Old John took her remains upriver in acanoe and buried her on Memaloose Island, identified byClark as “Sephulchar” Island in the fall of 1805.)19

The explorers left their campsite opposite the Sandy

River on April 5 and 10 days later reached the Great Nar-rows. They stayed there two days. Their main camp wason the south shore, but on April 16, Clark led a party of13, including Charbonneau and Sacagawea, across the riverfor the purpose of trading for horses they would need fortraversing the Columbia Plains.

Great numbers of Indians visited Clark’s camp that dayand the next. They were from all over the country andincluded Nez Perces from the Chopunnish River, far up-stream, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. On April17, Clark took the opportunity to sit down with the Indi-ans to query them about the region’s geography; in a jour-nal entry for that day, Clark says he “obtained a Sketch”of the Columbia and “Clark’s River” (today’s Bitterroot/Clark Fork/Pend Oreille system). A rough map that Clarkmay have drawn on that day or the next corresponds tothe geographical information he obtained.20 The map (Plate102 in The Atlas of the Lewis and Clark Expedition) clearlyshows the circular burn mark of what may be a skillet lid,and within the circumference of the mark are drip stains.

This burn ring exactly matches the inside measurement

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Clark’s rough map of the upper Columbia, drawn in the spring of1806, shows grease stains and a burn ring perhaps left by a skillet.The ring’s circumferenceexactly matches that of Old John’s skillet.


of the rim of Old John’s skillet. (To check this I made aphotocopy of the skillet rim and laid it over a photocopyof the original map; the fit was perfect.) One could imag-ine Charbonneau, the cook for the captains’ mess, thought-lessly setting down the lid on Clark’s map. The size ofcookware at the time was generally based on volume (e.g.,a gallon kettle), but dimensions would have varied fromone manufacturer to another in what was essentially ahandicraft industry, so the chance is low that two skillettops would have had identical dimensions.

During this period, the captains were desperately bar-tering whatever they had left in their meager stores forhorses.21 Among those items were kettles. On April 28,Lewis lamented that they had “disposed of every kettlewe could possibly spear.”22 Assuming he used the termgenerically, it is possible that a skillet may have been amongthe “kettles” traded.

It must be noted that, from 1812 on, there were manyexplorers and travelers in the region from whom OldJohn’s family could have obtained the old skillet. This dis-cussion is conjectural, and the question will be forever anintriguing mystery—one perhaps best mulled over underthe stars, in front of a campfire by a river, while fryingfish in a cast-iron skillet.

Foundation member Melissa Darby is the founder of LowerColumbia Research and Archaeology, in Portland, Oregon.Her research for this article was underwritten in part by afund established in the memory of Leandra Zim Holland.

NOTES

1 Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Ex-pedition, 13 volumes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1983-2001), Vol. 6, p. 24. All quotations or references to journalentries in the ensuing text are from Moulton, by date, unlessotherwise indicated.2 Ibid., Vol. 1, Atlas of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Map 79.3 “William and Margaret Sales Remember Indian John,” Park-rose-East County Enterprise, June 8, 1955, p. 7.4 These authors include the following: E.L. Thorpe, “Namingof Elk Rock,”Gresham Outlook, February 4, 1913 ( Thorpe re-lates the story of the Naming of Elk Rock told to him by OldJohn thirty years prior); Corra Starks, Early Childhood atTroutdale, Oregon (manuscript at the Troutdale Historical So-ciety, Troutdale, Oregon); H.S. Robinson, “Chief’s Aid to EarlySettlers Unrewarded, Says Pioneer,” Parkrose Enterprise Cou-rier, ca. 1950 (undated newspaper article in vertical file aboutOld John in the collection of Sharon Nesbit, local historian andreporter for the Gresham Outlook); Winifred Anderson, IndianJohn, “The Last Chief of the Multnomah’s” (manuscript datedApril 21, 1976, and submitted to the Gresham Outlook; also inthe collection of Sharon Nesbit).

5 Mamie Vance Everett, May 15, 1936, letter in the GreshamOutlook in response to an anniversary issue printed in earlyMarch 1936.6 Myrtal Weatherhead, letter to Sharon Nesbit, February 10,1992. This is in regard to a manuscript written by her sister aboutOld John, correcting the manuscript’s note from “Winder” to“Windy”; Anonymous, “Sales Remember Indian John,”Park-rose-East County Enterprise, June 8, 1955, p. 7.7 “William and Margaret Sales Remember Indian John,” p. 7.8 Evening Telegram (Portland, Ore.), March 28, 1893.9 “Accessions for Quarter Ending September 30, 1905,” OregonHistorical Society Quarterly, Vol. 6, p. 340.10 This is from notes taken by Carolyn Gilman at the O.H.S. in1997. An attempt to locate the record on which her notes werebased was unsuccessful.11 Linda Campbell Franklin, 300 Years of Kitchen Collectibles(Florence, Ala.: Books Americana, 1991), p. 457.12 Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedi-tion with Related Documents, 1783-1854, 2 volumes (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1978), Vol. 1, pp. 70, 73, 85, 95.13 Moulton, Vol. 11, p. 193.14 Leandra Zim Holland, Feasting and Fasting with Lewis andClark, a Food and Social History of the Early 1800s (Emigrant,Mont.: Old Yellowstone Publishing, 2003), pp. 51-52.15 Moulton, Vol. 7, p. 56. Entry for April 2, 1806.16 Ibid., pp. 64-65. Entry for April 3, 1806.17 The Klickitats and Wishrams shared some of this territory.18 His daughter Mary Tibbetts died at the Multnomah CountyPoor Farm in 1913, according to the Multnomah County PoorFarm, Admittance Records #1878. Her daughter Minnie alsoidentified herself as Klickitat in the 1910 U.S. census for MarionCounty (Enumeration District #206, Sheet 14A). The main ter-ritory of the Klickitat was upriver, near The Dalles, but it wouldnot be unusual for a Klickitat group to live in Wapato Valley. Itwas so rich in resources that several different groups had vil-lages there, and they swelled with friends and relatives duringharvest times.19 Moulton, Vol. 5, p. 352. Entry for October 29, 1805.20 Ibid., Vol. 1 (Atlas), Map 102. The caption accompanying themap hypothesizes that it was drawn “about late May 1806,” butthis is debatable. A close examination of the map strongly sug-gests that it is a rough draft of a map of the same region appear-ing in the back of the notebook Clark was using for one of hisjournals at the time, the so-called Voorhis No. 3; the Voorhismap, which appears on page 150 of Moulton, Vol. 7, is verysimilar to Map 96, found in Vol. 1. Inscriptions by Clark onboth the Voorhis map and Map 96 explicitly state that they arebased on information gleaned from Indians at the Great Nar-rows on April 18, 1806—not April 17—but Clark’s journal en-tries for the 18th do not mention any discussion of geography.His entries for April 17, however, make clear that the informa-tion he obtained on that day was the same as that reflected inthe Voorhis map and Maps 96 and 102.21 The party traded a kettle on April 18 and two more on April19. Moulton, Vol. 7, pp. 141, 144.22 Ibid., p. 177.


FISHING IN AN ANGLER’S

PARADISE, 1805The Corps of Discovery caught fish by the score as the expeditionmade its way through Montana. A close look at the L&C journals

suggests that later writers may have misidentified several ofthe species described by Lewis

BY KENNETH C. WALCHECK

On June 13, 1805, at a Corps of Discovery camp-site immediately below the Great Falls of theMissouri, Private Silas Goodrich went fishing.

Leaving the rest of the party after assisting with the butch-ering of several buffalo, he collected his rifle and a metalcontainer of assorted hooks, split shot, cork bobbers, andline and headed for a willow patch bordering the Mis-souri, where he cut a stem for a fishing pole. Following agame trail, he dropped down a steep sandstone bank tothe river.

After rigging his pole with hook, line, and sinker, heunfolded a small oilskin packet. Inside was a deer’s spleen(called melt); he cut a strip of the spleen and impaled it onthe hook. In front of him was a long, slick pool with amassive boulder at the lower end. He cast his baited hookinto the dark flow. Almost immediately a large fish rosein the current and sucked it in. Goodrich fought the fishuntil it tired, then worked it into the shallowsand up onto the bank.

In a dozen more casts he caught another fivefish. Like the first, all of them were robust

trout between 16 and 23 inches long, with a slash of redunder their gill plates. Dinner that evening, as recordedby Meriwether Lewis in his journal, consisted of buffalohump, tongue, and marrowbone supplemented with “finetrout” seasoned with parched meal, pepper and salt, and“a good appetite.”1

CUTTHROAT TROUT

The fish caught by Goodrich were cutthroat trout, a spe-cies new to science and later designated Salmo clarki, af-ter Lewis’s co-commander, William Clark. Taxonomistshave since renamed the genus, and the cutthroat now goesby the scientific name Oncorhynchus clarki. The subspe-cies found at the Great Falls was the westslope cutthroat,Oncorhynchus clarki lewisi [picture, opposite page].2

The above scenario is speculative—this may or may nothave been how Goodrich actually fished on the Missouri.The Lewis and Clark journals provide almost no infor-

mation on angling methods other than the useof deer spleen (and grasshoppers) as bait. Wedo know that Lewis’s lists of items purchased

ILLUSTRATIONS BY

JOSEPH R. TOMELLERI


in Philadelphia while outfitting for the expedition includedhooks, fishing lines, and eight “stave reels” for storing line.3

There is no mention of fishing poles, but as suggested,these easily could have been made on the spot; it is alsopossible that Goodrich and other expedition anglers fishedwithout poles, using hand lines.4 Goodrich, about whosepre-expedition life almost nothing is known other thanhis home state (he came from Massachusetts), was clearlyan experienced and enthusiastic angler who may well havecarried his own tackle on the expedition. Lewis called him“our principal fisherman” and a man “remarkably fondof fishing.”5 Here and elsewhere on the trip, his and oth-ers’ catches—of trout, goldeye, catfish, and other fare—provided what must have been a welcome change in theexplorers’ overwhelming diet of meat.6

Goodrich’s cutthroat angling occurred in Montana, thenas now one of the best places on earth to fish for trout,although today the westslope cutthroat has been displacedthroughout much of its presettlement range by relatedspecies introduced in the late 19th and early 20th century—rainbow trout from California, brown trout from Europe,

and brook trout from the eastern United States. Trout arecoldwater fish associated with mountain rivers, and theGreat Falls of the Missouri was near the eastern limit ofthe cutthroat’s range.

CHANNEL CATFISH

The expedition’s first Montana fish was a channel catfish,Ictalurus punctatus, hauled in on a stretch below the Mis-souri Breaks on May 22, 1805 [picture, page 24]. Anglinghad been lean since the explorers’ departure from FortMandan six weeks before—“we have caught but few fish... they do not bite freely,” Lewis observed.7 He called thisspecies the “white cat,” and the several caught weighedbetween two and five pounds. (Actually who did the catch-ing isn’t recorded.)8 The expedition landed its first chan-nel catfish while ascending the Missouri the previous sum-mer, above the mouth of the Platte River on July 24, 1804,in what is now Iowa-Nebraska.9

STONECAT

Two years later, on the return journey, the party led by

Westslope cutthroat trout, caught by SilasGoodrich at the Great Falls of the Missouri inJune of 1805 and later given the subspeciesname Oncorhynchus clarki lewisi. The exampleshown here is a male in spawning colors.

Mountain whitefish, described by Lewis as“a kind of mullet,” probably caught on theupper Beaverhead River in August 1805. JOSEPH R. TOMELLERI / AMERICANFISHES.COM


Clark camped on the north bank of the Yellowstone Riverbelow its junction with the Tongue River, in eastern Mon-tana. Clark’s journal entry for July 29, 1806, notes the tak-ing of “3 cat fish,” which he described as “small and fat.”He provided no more details, but their diminutive sizeraises the possibility that they were stonecats, Noturusflavus [picture, above]. With recorded lengths up to teninches, the stonecat is one of the smaller species in thebullhead catfish family. Stonecats are common in the lowerreaches of the Yellowstone.

FLATHEAD CHUB AND GOLDEYE

Lewis recorded two other new species while encampednear the mouth of the Marias River on June 11, 1805.Goodrich, he wrote,

caught several douzen fish of two different species—one about 9 inches long of white colour round andin form and fins resembles the white chub commonto the Potomac; this fish has a smaller head than theChubb and the mouth is beset both above and be-low with a rim of fine sharp teeth; the eye moder-ately large, the puple dark and the iris which is nar-row is of a yellowish brown color, they bite at meator grasshoppers. This is a soft fish, not very good,tho’ the flesh is of a fine white colour.

He described the second fish as having “precisely theform” and being “about the size of”

the well known fish called the Hickory Shad or oldwife, with the exception of the teeth, a rim of whichgarnish the outer edge of both the upper and lowerjaw; the tonge and pallet are also beset with longsharp teeth bending inwards, the eye of this fish isvery large, and the iris of a silvery colour and wide.

Lewis noted that they had caught several of the chub-like fish before reaching the mouth of the Marias, whichruns murky and discolors the Missouri downstream of it,but that all “shad” were caught in clean-running waterupstream of the Marias. “The latter,” he added, are “muchthe best” for eating because they “do not inhabit muddywater.”10

The chub-like fish was identified as a sauger, Stiz-ostedion canadense, by naturalist Elliot Coues in 1893, andsubsequent authors have taken this judgment on faith.11

In fact, there is a good possibility that the fish was actu-ally the flathead chub, Platygobio gracilis [picture, below].The sauger’s body color ranges from olive-gray to brownon the back, not white, and it has three or four large, darkblotches extending along its flanks. The front dorsal finof the adult sauger has stout, sharp spines and a polka-dotpattern of black spots. The sauger has two dorsal fins, whilea chub has one. The sauger also has large, smoky, silveryeyes. Lewis was a careful taxonomist and surely wouldhave noted such features. His comment that this fish’s fleshwas “soft” and”“not very good” is also at odds with whatwe know about sauger, whose flesh is firm and of supe-rior flavor.12

It seems likely, too, that a species resembling chub ofthe Potomac River (presumably fallfish) would be min-now-like, since chubs are in the minnow family. The flat-head chub is one of the most common minnows in theYellowstone and Missouri drainages and occurs above theGreat Falls as far as the Three Forks.13

Channel catfish

Stonecat

Flathead chub

Mountain sucker


The second fish described by Lewis in his June 11 en-try was the goldeye, Hiodon alosoides, a species resem-bling the hickory shad, alewife, and other eastern coastalmembers of the herring family [picture, below].

Lewis’s description of the goldeye is not completelyaccurate in reference to eye color and habitat preference.He was correct in stating that its eyes are large, but theiris is not silvery but gold, as the name suggests. His com-ment that goldeye “do not inhabit muddy waters” is alsoincorrect, as the species can tolerate highly turbid wa-ters. He was also wrong in describing it as “much thebest” in terms of eating quality. As one reference point-edly notes, “The taste of fresh goldeye is said to be in-sipid, muddy, and like that of salted brown paper, theflesh is soft and an unattractive grey color.”14 Goldeyessmoked over a hot fire, however, are considered a deli-cacy, and whether by accident or design maybe this ishow the explorers cooked them. Or perhaps Lewis wasreferring to the goldeye’s fighting quality relative to chub,rather than its flavor.15

MOUNTAIN WHITEFISH

Anyone who fishes for trout on Montana rivers is famil-iar with the mountain whitefish, Prosopium williamsoni[picture, page 23]. Whitefish share the trout’s preferencefor cold waters. They are frequently caught by fishermentargeting trout and are apt to be regarded as a nuisance. Itis true that whitefish are rather homely looking as wellas being lackluster fighters, but they still deserve respectas native fish. They have always been common in Mon-tana rivers, and it is puzzling that they haven’t appearedon anyone’s list of fish described by Lewis and Clark,who almost certainly caught them.16 This is probablydue to misinterpretation of journal entries. Take, forexample, what Lewis wrote for August 19, 1805, whenthe expedition was camped on the Beaverhead River.Some of the men used a seine made of willow brush to

catch “a large number of fine trout” as well as

a kind of mullet about 16 [inches] long which I hadnot seen before. The scales are small, the nose is longand obtusely pointed and exceedes the under jaw.the mouth is not large but opens with foalds at thesides, the colour of it’s back and sides is of a bluishbrown and belley white; it has the faggot bones, fromwhich I have supposed it to be of the mullet kind.The tongue and pallate are smooth and it has noteeth. it is by no means as good as the trout.17

Based on the reference to this fish as “a kind of mul-let,” Coues identified it as a northern sucker, and as in thecase of the “sauger,” writers have taken his word on thematter.18 But a close examination of Lewis’s descriptionsuggests that the species in question might have been themountain whitefish. In most of the particulars—smallscales, long nose overhanging the jaw, no teeth, smallmouth, blueish back and white belly—the description fitsthat of the whitefish. (The meaning of “faggot bones” isn’tclear.) Coues was probably unaware that the whitefish’sshort head is abruptly curved, with an overhanging andsomewhat pointed snout (features pronounced in breedingmales). In an earlier entry in Lewis’s journal (for August 3),written while the expedition was proceeding up the Jeffer-son River, he also seems to be describing whitefish: “Thefish of this part of the river” include, along with trout, “aspecies of scale fish of a while [white] color and a remark-able small long mouth which one of our men inform us arethe same with the species called in the Eastern states bottle-nose,” a type of sucker.19 The whitefish’s underslung mouthstill leads some anglers to mistake it for a sucker.

MOUNTAIN SUCKER

When Clark’s homeward-bound party was descending theYellowstone in the summer of 1806, he recorded that “oneof the men brought me a fish of a species I am unac-quainted.” The fish, caught on July 16, just downstreamfrom today’s Livingston, Montana, was eight inches long,

Goldeye

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with “a mouth like that of the Sturgeon” (i.e., relativelysmall and underslung, for feeding on the bottom), and witha red streak running the length of each flank from gills totail. Clark is clearly describing the mountain sucker,Catostomus platyrhynchus [picture, page 24], another fishspecies new to science.20 The particular specimen must havebeen a male in spawning colors.

ARCTIC GRAYLING

Yet another fish almost certainly misidentified by laterwriters—as a steelhead trout, a type of rainbow thatspawns in freshwater rivers but spends most of its adultlife in the ocean—was described by Lewis on August 22,1805, at Camp Fortunate, on the headwaters of the upperBeaverhead. With a brush drag, a type of crude net, someof the men seined 528 fish. The catch consisted mostly ofcutthroats, along with “ten or a douzen of a white speciesof trout.” These fish were”“of a silvery colour except onthe back and head, where they are of a bluish cast.”

Except for its larger scales, the fish reminded Lewis ofthe eastern brook trout. The fish was “not generally quiteas large” as the eastern brookie but “equally well fla-vored.”21 Calvin M. Kaya, a fisheries biologist at Mon-tana State University, argues that the fish described wasthe immature form of the Arctic grayling, Thymallusarcticus [picture, above].22 The grayling’s most conspicu-ous feature—a large, sail-like dorsal fin—is lacking in sub-adults, which would explain its absence on the fish col-lected at Camp Fortunate. Although Lewis doesn’t givedimensions for the fish, he did note that it was smaller

than a brook trout—a telling detail, since it’s doubtful thatfew if any brook trout Lewis knew from Appalachianstreams would have exceeded 12 inches. Grayling also havenotably larger scales than trout, which in fact appear scale-less. Although the Arctic grayling had been described in1776 from specimens collected in Siberia, Lewis’s docu-mentation appears to be the first of the species in NorthAmerica. It would have been the fluvial or river form ofthe Arctic grayling. Fluvial grayling are now extinct inthe Lower 48 except for a remnant population in the up-per Big Hole River (Lewis and Clark’s Wisdom River),which joins with the Beaverhead to form the Jefferson.

In his book The Natural History of the Lewis and ClarkExpedition, Raymond Darwin Burroughs concludes thatthe fish described “may have been the steelhead trout,” asea-going rainbow trout that, like a salmon, returns to itsnatal river to spawn. Presumably he means the steelheadin its immature form, before it goes to sea, since adult steel-head can weigh between five and thirty pounds. The prob-lem is that steelhead (and rainbows generally) are nativeto the Pacific watershed, while the fish seined on August22, 1805, were taken on the Atlantic side of the Continen-tal Divide.23 Burroughs mistakenly states that at the time,Lewis was on the Lemhi River, on the Pacific side of thedivide; this is undoubtedly the source of his confusion.24

FISH OF THE PACIFIC WATERSHED

The explorers encountered the steelhead, which they calledthe salmon-trout, while descending the Columbia in thefall of 1805. Lewis described this fish in his journal entry

Arctic grayling. The immature form (which lacks theconspicuous sail-like dorsal fin) was probably caughton the upper Beaverhead River in August 1805.

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for March 16, 1806, written at Fort Clatsop, on the lowerestuary. His statement that they had previously seen it “onlyat the great falls of the Columbia” but that it had now “madeit’s appearance in the creeks near this place” suggests thathe understood it to be, like salmon, a fish that runs up-river from the ocean. His description is the first for thesteelhead, the sea-going version of the coastal rainbowtrout, Oncorhynchus mykiss [picture above and on thefollowing page]. (Although their spawning behaviors dif-fer, taxonomically scientists cannot readily distinguish be-tween the coastal rainbow and the steelhead, and they lumpthem together as the same species.)25 The expedition alsomentioned or described three of the five species of Pacificsalmon found in western waters—the Chinook or kingsalmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), coho or silver sal-mon (Oncorhynchus kisutch), and the sockeye salmon(Oncorhynchus nerka)—as well as the starry flounder(Platichthys stellatus) and the candlefish or eulachon(Thaleichthys pacificus), an anchovy-like fish relished bythe explorers: Lewis regarded it as “superior to any fish Iever tasted.”26

Most of the fish mentioned by Lewis and Clark duringtheir 28 months on the trail were unknown to science atthe time, meaning they had yet to be formally described,classified, and named in scientific journals. Unfortunately,even when Lewis, the Corps of Discovery’s resident natu-ralist, attempted to provide the kind of taxonomic infor-mation needed for the scientific record, he sometimes leftout important diagnostic details, and his use of common

names like chub and mullet can confuse as much as clarify.For all these reasons it is probably futile to attempt a de-finitive list of fish species “discovered” by Lewis and Clark,although that hasn’t stopped people from trying. PaulRussell Cutright, for example, in Lewis and Clark: Pioneer-ing Naturalists, lists 12.27 Cutright’s tally is based on iden-tifications made by Coues, however, and as noted, some ofthese can be challenged. For Montana fish, one can be con-fident in matching journal descriptions to known speciesin the case of the cutthroat trout, goldeye, and mountainsucker. Others—the flathead chub, mountain whitefish, andArctic grayling—are more conjectural. The same might besaid for the channel catfish and stonecat, which are men-tioned but not described in any detail.

Such matters, like so many related to the Lewis andClark Expedition, will be debated forever. We can be rea-sonably sure of one thing, though: Goodrich and his fel-low anglers caught a lot of fish, and they surely had fundoing so.

Foundation member Ken Walcheck, a retired wildlife biolo-gist, lives in Bozeman, Montana. He wrote about meat con-sumption in the August WPO.

NOTES

1 Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis andClark Expedition, 13 volumes (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1983-2001), Vol. 4, pp. 286-287. All quo-tations or references to journal entries in the ensuing textare from Moulton by date, unless otherwise indicated.2 Robert J. Behnke, Trout and Salmon of North America

Steelhead, the sea-run version of thecoastal rainbow trout, was observed (andpresumably eaten) by the explorers at FortClatsop in the late winter of 1806.


(New York: The Free Press, 2002), p. 139. Unknown toLewis, of course, the cutthroat trout was the first black-spotted, or true trout, to reach the interior of North Americathrough the Columbia River system. Those fish occupyingthe upper Columbia River drainage developed into thewestslope cutthroat, a subspecies that eventually crossedinto the headwaters of the Missouri River, while those inthe upper Snake River developed into today’s Yellowstonecutthroat, Oncorhynchus clarki bouvieri, occupying theYellowstone River drainage. Cutthroats were caught byhook and line and were also seined, gigged, or otherwiseobserved by expedition members on the following dates in1805 (parenthetical references are to Moulton, by volumeand page): Missouri River: June 15 (4:296-297), 16 (11:199),25 (4:332), and July 21 (4:414). Jefferson River: August 3(5:37). Beaverhead River: August 13 (11:267), 14 (10:125),15 (11:269), 19 (11:277), 20 (5:126), 22 (5:144).3 Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Ex-pedition with Related Documents, 1783-1854, 2 volumes(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), Vol. 1, pp.79, 83, 95; Robert R. Hunt, “Fish Feast or Famine: Incom-pleat Anglers on the Lewis & Clark Trail,” from RobertA. Saindon, Explorations into the World of Lewis & Clark,3 volumes (Great Falls, Mont.: Lewis and Clark Trail Heri-tage Foundation, 2003), Vol. 2, pp. 670-679. Hunt’s article,which originally appeared in the February 1997 WPO, refersto an “8 Stave Reel” purchased by Lewis, but it’s clear fromthe list of items received from tackle dealer George R.Lawton (Jackson, p. 79) that “8” refers to the number ofstave reels sold. Lawton also supplied Lewis with a varietyof hooks and lines, while other hooks and lines were pur-chased from the firm of Harvey and Worth (Jackson, p.83). Lewis’s summary of purchases (Jackson, pp. 93-99)included 2,800 fish hooks for Indian presents. There is nomention of split shot or cork bobbers in any of theexpedition’s equipment inventories, but these could havebeen readily fashioned from available materials.4 Some members of the Washburn Expedition of 1870,which explored the region that would become YellowstoneNational Park, appear to have cut poles from streamsidevegetation. Paul Schullery, Cowboy Trout: Western FlyFishing as If It Mattered (Missoula: University of Mon-tana Press, 2006), p. 64.5 Moulton, Vol. 5, p. 159, and Vol. 4. p. 278.6 On several occasions during the trip up the Missouri inthe summer of 1804 the explorers caught hundreds of fish.On August 16, Clark took some men fishing and returnedto camp with a barrel full, and on August 25, five of nine

catfish caught weighed in the neighborhood of a hundredpounds each. These were blue catfish (Ictalurus furcatis),which are common to the lower Missouri and the Missis-sippi and can easily reach such weights. (Moulton, Vol. 9,p. 40; Vol. 8, p. 61.)7 This stretch of the Missouri currently has about 49 spe-cies of fish (native and introduced species), including fishas primitive as the paddlefish, as rare as the pallid stur-geon, and as unusual as the blue sucker.8 The catfish were caught near Beauchamp Creek inPhillips County, Montana. (Moulton, Vol. 4, pp. 180,182n.) Montana fisheries biologist Bill Wiedenheft (per-sonal communication) estimates there were 37 native fishesin the Beauchamp Creek area of the Missouri in Lewisand Clark’s day.9 The journals record other catches of channel catfish inMontana on June 11 and 18 and July 10, 1805. In his jour-

Lewis’s drawing and description of the “white salmon trout”(steelhead) in his journal entry for March 16, 1806.

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nal entry for June 28, Clark reported, “Cat fish no higher,”meaning that no catfish were caught above the Great Falls.10 Moulton, Vol. 4, pp. 278-279.11 Elliott Coues, ed., The History of the Lewis and ClarkExpedition by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, 3volumes (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1965; re-print of 1893 edition), Vol. 2, p. 362; Paul Russell Cutright,Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists (Lincoln: Uni-versity of Nebraska Press, 1969), p. 427; Raymond Dar-win Burroughs, The Natural History of the Lewis andClark Expedition (West Lansing: Michigan State Univer-sity Press, 1995), pp. 260-261, 265-266. Burroughs con-fuses the issue by mixing up Coues’s identifications; thusthe reader is left thinking (incorrectly) that the chub-likefish is a goldeye (called by Burroughs a mooneye, anothercommon name) and that the shad-like fish is a sauger.12 The sauger is closely related to the walleye, another fishknown for its succulence. A.J. McClane, McClane’s NewStandard Fishing Encyclopedia and International AnglingGuide (New York: Holt Rinehart Wilson, 1974), p. 845.Lewis mentions that the jaws of both fish were rimmedwith teeth. Members of the minnow family, which includesthe flathead chub, have toothless jaws. I am inclined to be-lieve that Lewis erred in his description of the chub-likefish as having teeth. It is possible that, relying on faultymemory (journal entries were not always written on theday of the events recorded), he mistakenly confused the“chub” with the other catch of the day, goldeye, which doespossess a rim of teeth on the upper and lower jaws. (Thesauger also has teeth on both its upper and lower jaws.)13 The same species was evidently caught on July 10, 1805,above the Great Falls. Wrote Lewis, “having nothing fur-ther to do I amused myself in fishing and caught a fewsmall fish; they were of the species of white chub men-tioned below the falls, tho’ they are small and few in num-ber.” Moulton, Vol. 4, p. 371. According to Montana fish-eries biologists, it is questionable if sauger were everpresent in the Missouri above the Great Falls.14 W.B. Scott and E.J. Crossman, Freshwater Fishes of Canada,Bulletin 184, Fisheries Research Board of Canada, 1985.“Hot-smoked” goldeye was a popular, commercially avail-able fish in the early 20th century and was a favorite ofWoodrow Wilson and the Prince of Wales. McClane, p. 432.15 Lewis’s statement reads in full, “The latter kind are muchthe best, and do not inhabit muddy water.” Although hedoes not specify that “best” refers to eating, it seemsstrongly implied.16 Members of the 1870 Washburn Expedition into the fu-

ture Yellowstone National Park caught many whitefishin addition to trout. Schullery, p. 65-67.17 Moulton, Vol. 5, p. 119.18 Coues, Vol. 2, p. 519n. Coues identified the fish asCatostomus catostomus, commonly known as the north-ern sucker and also longnose sucker.19 Moulton, Vol. 5, p. 37; Burroughs, p. 264. As Burroughsimplies, “bottlenose” is a common name for sucker.20 Burroughs, p. 264. Coues, Vol. 3, p. 1138. The mountainsucker wasn’t fully described until 1892, based on speci-mens taken from the Red Rock and Beaverhead rivers.C.J.D. Brown, Fishes of Montana (Endowment and Re-search Foundation, Montana State University, 1971), p. 127.21 Moulton, Vol. 5, p. 144. The passage reads in full, “theyare of a silvery colour except on the back and head, wherethey are of a bluish cast. the scales are much larger thanthe speckled trout, but in their form [and] position of theirfins teeth mouth &c they are precisely like them[.] theyare not generally quite as large but equally well flavored.”Brook trout are conspicuously colored—dark blue-greenon top, with red and yellow spots—but Lewis didn’t notethe difference in coloration.22 C.M. Kaya, “Discovery of the Arctic Grayling by the Lewisand Clark Expedition,” Fisheries 21 (Sept. 1996), p. 39.23 Burroughs, p. 262. Moulton (Vol. 5, p. 147n) suggeststhe fish might be a steelhead. Coues (p. 545) raises thepossibility that the fish is some species of Pacific salmonbut then dismisses the notion by observing that Pacificsalmon are “not represented” in streams of the Atlanticwatershed. Behnke (p. 329) gets it right: “Lewis and Clarkdid not encounter grayling until they got to the Beaver-head River. They called the grayling ‘white trout.’ ”24 For details of the complex and often separate itinerariesof Lewis and Clark during August 1805 (a confusing topic)see J.I. Merritt, “Cameahwait’s geography lesson,” WPO,November 2003, pp. 36-37.25 Behnke, pp. 70-73.26 Burroughs, pp. 261-263, 266-267. Lewis and Clark alsomentioned in passing skate, sturgeon, and other fish ofthe Pacific Northwest, but without making any effort todescribe them taxonomically. For a full discussion, seeDennis D. Dauble, “Adventures in Ichthyology: PacificNorthwest Fish of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,”Columbia (the magazine of the Washington State Histori-cal Society), Fall 2005. Available on the Web atwww.wshs.org/wshs/columbia/articles/0305-a2.htm.27 Cutright, pp. 425-427.


Reviews

Essays take multidisciplinary approach to Corps of Discovery’s many legacies

The old adage in real estate is “loca-tion, location, location.” The same

can similarly be said about history; it’s“perspective, perspective, perspective.”History is complexity, and this fine col-lection of essays provides some yet un-told facts and fleshes out ever-expand-ing facets of the Lewis and Clark legacy.The cover image [right], a watercolor-and-ink painting by a modern-day Pa-kistani artist, symbolizes the volume’seclecticism. Clearly an East Asian de-piction, it recreates cowboy-artistCharles M. Russell’s inaccurate, butnevertheless spectacular, painting of theCorps of Discovery meeting ChinookIndians (Lewis and Clark on the LowerColumbia, 1905).

This volume’s eclectic nature, how-ever, is its great strength, presenting ev-erything from critical modern decon-struction to the solid, traditional typeof scholarly work that has character-ized Lewis and Clark literature formore than a century. The 14 authorswear many hats—lawyer, editor, au-thor, film maker, educator, historian,novelist, literary expert, Native-Ameri-can museum director, doctor, and tourguide. These camps represent and illu-minate a wide gamut of modern Ameri-can perspectives on the corps’ story andits ramifications. Readers may not agreewith some of the essayists, but it is goodto understand their viewpoints.

The book begins by placing theLewis and Clark journals in the con-text of the landscape and travel litera-ture of Jefferson’s day. Next, EdwardC. Carter II, a former American Philo-sophical Society librarian, presents atwo-century overview of that organ-ization’s key role in encouraging earlywestern exploration and in the continu-

ing preservation of the Lewis and Clarkjournals for posterity. Following aretwo essays, one focused on MeriwetherLewis’s and William Clark’s literarybackgrounds and writing styles, theother on their training and skills as phy-sicians to the tribes and their men.

The volume then turns to legal is-sues, including far-reaching questionsregarding the constitutional legality ofthe Louisiana Purchase, plus its influ-ence on America’s expanding federal-ism. Raymond Cross tells how “water,disease, and words” have shaped twocenturies of Mandan, Hidatsa, andArikara tribal history. Charles Boewedescribes the accomplishments of C.S.Rafinesque, a linguist and scientist whoknew expedition member George Sh-annon well in the 1820s and who wasan extensive reader of Nicholas Biddle’sversion of the journals. Joanna Brooksinvestigates the multiple implications

between Sacagawea’s legacy and thenovel Cogewea (1927), written byMourning Dove (Christine Quin-tasket), a Salish speaker from northeast-ern Washington’s Colville Reservation.

The final two sections, more than athird of the essays, reflect on the 1904-06 centennial of the expedition and the2004-06 bicentennial—another realstrength of this volume. The authors,including John Spencer and RobertaConner, insightfully compare how theearlier commemoration focused on na-tional destiny and the fulfillment of Jef-ferson’s vision for an American eco-nomic empire in the Pacific, whereastoday’s bicentennial has been far morereflective and multicultural in scope. Inregard to the bicentennial and its manyevents, I might interject what JamesRonda said in a talk at Washington StateUniversity earlier this year: “We did itright.” Most of the essayists includedhere probably would agree, and theybeg us to wonder how Americansmight commemorate the expedition in2054 and 2104.

In a concluding essay, DaytonDuncan tells about the sub-zero win-ter night he spent wrapped in five buf-falo robes in a reconstructed Mandan-Hidatsa lodge. While stoically fightingoff the cold, he perceptively imaginesguiding the captains on a modern-dayretracing of their route.

Readers knowledgeable about Lewisand Clark history will note some fac-tual errors and omissions in a coupleof the chapters. Also, the frontispiecemap identifies the Pacific Northwest asthe “Oregon Country,” when in factthat designation really was not appliedto the region until some years later.These few criticisms aside, this essaycollection is one of the finest in the flushof Lewis and Clark books appearingduring the bicentennial. There is some-thing here for everyone.

—Glen Lindeman

The reviewer is editor-in-chief of Wash-ington State University Press

An eclectic volume looks at Lewis

and Clark through multiple lenses

and cultural perspectives.

Lewis & Clark: Legacies,Memories, and New PerspectivesKris Fresonke and Mark Spence, eds.University of California Press290 pages / $21.95 paper / $55 cloth


Skullduggery and intrigue stalk novel about Lewis’s fatal, final journey

For writers of historical fiction thetrick is to hew to historical truth

while filling history’s inevitable gapswith a good story. The post-expeditionyears of Lewis and Clark provide thegaps, but neither the scenery nor thecast of characters compares with thoseof the expedition.

The streets of St. Louis, whereFrances Hunter’s historical novel To theEnds of the Earth begins, are a foulpudding of garbage, mud, and manure.The opening scene finds MeriwetherLewis, the territorial governor, wakingup with a tart whose name he cannotrecall. His mind races to his first ap-pointment of the day, with the nefari-ous James Wilkinson, the commandinggeneral of the U.S. Army. Wilkinsonwas a key witness in Aaron Burr’s trialfor treason but probably was as guiltyof planning a western empire in con-travention of U.S. sovereignty as Burr.Unabashed, Wilkinson floats a compa-rable scheme before Lewis.

Lewis spurns the offer and threat-ens to expose Wilkinson. This is likekicking a rattlesnake, for Wilkinson’snext move is to promise his Spanishconspirators the priceless journals ofLewis and Clark, for a fee with a niceadvance. The schemer can deliver onlyby eliminating Lewis. Lewis, debt-wracked, puts himself in harm’s wayby embarking for Washington, D.C.,to document his expenditures, revealWilkinson’s plot, and present the jour-nals to ThomasJefferson.

Lewis travelsoverland up theNatchez Trace,a dangerous anduntamed route,accompaniedby his servant,Pernia, a disaf-fected man witha financial claimon him, and byCaptain James Neelly, an officer sub-verted by Wilkinson. Of Lewis’s com-panions, only his Newfoundland dog,Seaman, can be trusted.

Learning of Lewis’s danger, WilliamClark leaves his young family in St.Louis to follow him with only his slaveYork to ride shotgun. When Wilkin-

son’s skullduggery produces streetmobs prowling St. Louis and handbillsdenouncing both captains, Julia, Clark’swife, is frightened into a mind-bogglingdecision to pursue Clark with a lonearmy officer as her escort. Thus doesHunter set up a modestly entertainingchase-and-rescue scenario reminiscentof a Hollywood western.

Julia, only 17, soon recognizes thatshe is almost literally a babe in thewoods and debates the wisdom of hermission. Although no Sacagawea, shesoldiers on, enduring long hours in thesaddle, river fords and swamps, gamytrail food, the innuendoes of frontierlouts, and ravenous mosquitoes, all be-fore the final confrontation. In contrastto the innocent Julia, most of the novel’sother female characters are tavern slat-terns and pliers of the oldest profession.

The downward trajectory of Lewis’smental state is never pleasant to witness.Relief from the spectacle of his sub-stance abuse and miasmic hallucina-tions comes when he confronts an am-bush commissioned by Wilkinson andpumps a slug into a crude simpletonwho is one of his assailants. The pre-cious journals, for which hero and vil-lain alike risk their necks, are ironicallythe “MacGuffin” of this piece, a favor-ite Hitchcockian plot device that drives

A celebration of artists who followed in L&C’s wakeImagine if Lewis and Clark had taken an artist along on the expedition to document in

pencil and paint the Indians, animals, and astonishing vistas they encountered. Theydidn’t, of course, but many of the explorers and adventurers who followed in thesucceeding six decades did. Their artwork introduced Easterners and Europeans to thisremarkable land and its peoples.

Today, one of the primary venues for viewing early western art is the GilcreaseMuseum, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After Lewis and Clark: The Forces of Change, 1806-1871 (University of Oklahoma Press, $24.95, paper) showcases more than sixty ofthese Gilcrease holdings in a handsome large-format volume. The text, by seniorcurator Gary Allen Hood, places the images in historical and artistic context. Severalof the artists—Charles B.J.F. de Saint-Mémin, George Catlin, Karl Bodmer—weremore or less contemporaries of Lewis and Clark, and their renderings of people andplaces help us to visualize the West as the captains saw it. More than forty artistsare represented, from the self-taught to European-trained painters like ThomasMoran and Alfred Bierstadt.—J.I.M.

To the Ends of the Earth:The Last Journey ofLewis and ClarkFrances HunterBlind Rabbit Press386 pages / $20 paper


Reviews (cont.)

the action but whose importance, inthis case, is assumed rather than proven.

Clark’s unswerving devotion toLewis is predictable. However, it is dif-ficult to connect Hunter’s Clark with themethodical cocaptain of the expedition.Her version is more than a bit of a hot-head. He acts impetuously, jumps toconclusions, flies into action, and isquick to hurl a punch or an epithet.

Refreshingly, York has a meaning-ful role that avoids overt stereotypes.But, except for his complaints about hisbondage, there is little vernacularspeech or culture to connect him withhis identity. Still, the individuality ofHunter’s York is revealed in his chal-lenging an occasional ill-considereddecision by his master, such as refusingan order to help flog Pernia, a fellowblack (albeit a freedman).

It is said that you can judge a manby the caliber of his enemies. By thatstandard, Lewis and Clark fare poorlyhere. The amoral Wilkinson respects nointerests but his own. The ferret-likePernia has a gut instinct for any man’svulnerability. Captain Neelly, a weakreed, wavers constantly on the brink ofinaction. Frederick Bates, the territo-rial secretary and Lewis’s rival, is socholeric that when he rants the spittlenearly flies off the page. At Grinder’sStand, where Lewis ends his life, theproprietress rents herself out to guestswith her husband’s compliance.

Hunter surmounts her greatest cre-ative challenge by avoiding anticlimaxafter Lewis’s death. Indeed, the reac-tions of Clark, York, and Julia to thediscovery of the loss of their friend,their efforts to learn the truth of hisdemise, and to exact revenge in case ofhomicide, provide the novel’s mostemotionally riveting passages.

As we know, the journals did notperish or pass into the wrong hands.Clark and Julia continued to enjoy do-mestic bliss in St. Louis, and York’s lifeeventually took a favorable turn. In thistelling, the Spanish come up short. Norefund is forthcoming. Wilkinson, oneof the great survivors of American his-tory, has cashed the check and is off

with a chuckle to his next scam.(Frances Hunter, by the way, is a pen

name. Two women, sisters Liz Clareand Mary Clare, coauthored the novel.Blind Rabbit Press is their own imprint.Order from www.frances-hunter.com.)

—Dennis M. O’Connell

Trippin’ with L&C

The L&C Bicentennial is over, andwith crowds no longer an issue, now

may be the best time to take to the roadin the captains’ footsteps. If you go, besure to carry Lewis and Clark RoadTrips: Exploringthe Trail AcrossAmerica, by KiraGale (River Junc-tion Press, $29.95,paper).

This large-for-mat volume com-bines the best fea-tures of a highwayatlas and a conventional tour guide. Ithas easy-to-read maps, color illustra-tions, and concise descriptions of someeight hundred places to visit. Informa-tive sidebars address topics rangingfrom Prince Madoc and the Welsh In-dians to the Nine Young Men fromKentucky. Every part of the Lewis andClark Trail is covered, along with thecaptains’ travels in eastern states beforeand after the expedition. Gale dividesher guide into ten regions and intro-duces each section with a crisply writ-ten introduction placing Lewis andClark into a broader historical context.The author has also compiled a table ofknown expedition campsites cross-ref-erenced to maps elsewhere in the bookand to Gary Moulton’s 13-volume edi-tion of the Lewis and Clark journals.

Gale has done a masterful job com-piling so much information in such aneasily usable format. If I were limitedto one book for planning a Lewis andClark trip and finding my way alongthe trail, this would be it.

—J.I.M.

River JunctionPress

1/3rdV


Sparrow Media1/3 Sq.

CM Russell Museumauction

HeartlandBooks1/6 V


House Ad IIIpickup November 2005 issue,

p. 33(“Joining a Foundation Chapter”)


Wendy Raney is WPO’s new editor

L&C Roundup

Wendy Raney has been named edi-tor of the Lewis and Clark Trail

Heritage Foundation’s quarterly jour-nal, We Proceeded On. She succeeds JimMerritt and will begin her new role withthe February 2007 issue.

“I understand the value of We Pro-ceeded On to our membership and tothe advancement of our understandingof the Lewis and Clark Expedition,”Raney said. “I look forward to the chal-lenges ahead and am honored to havethis opportunity to work with nationalLewis and Clark scholars as well asthose looking to make their own markon history.”

Raney currently works as the foun-dation’s director of field operations andwill retain some of her existing respon-sibilities. She will continue to coordi-nate the foundation’s trail stewardshipand preservation projects and pro-grams, and will serve as the organ-ization’s Congressional and land-man-agement agency liaison. She will con-tinue to write, edit, and produce thefoundation’s quarterly membershipnewsletter, The Orderly Report.

She was born and raised along theYellowstone River in Livingston, Mon-tana, where her parents and sister con-

LCTHF staffer Wendy Raney takes over WPO’seditorship; the February issue will be her first.

tinue to live. Raney graduated fromVassar College, in Poughkeepsie, NewYork. Her undergraduate thesis stud-ied the ways modern society and his-torians have transformed and mytholo-gized the role Sacagawea played in theLewis and Clark Expedition. Raneyalso has a master’s degree in journal-ism from Northwestern University, inEvanston, Illinois, with an emphasis inreporting and editing.

She previously worked as a businessreporter for the Great Falls Tribune andwas the public information officer forMontana’s elected state auditor.

Raney and her husband, BrentMcCann, live on a ranch southwest ofGreat Falls.

PassageWilbur P. Werner, 94, a founding mem-ber of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heri-tage Foundation and its president in1975-76, died July 15 in Mesa, Arizona.

A long-timeresident of CutBank, Montana,where he prac-ticed law for sixdecades, Wernerwas passionatelydevoted to Lewisand Clark, andhe led countlesstours to nearbyCamp Disappointment and the site onTwo Medicine River where MeriwetherLewis had his deadly encounter withBlackfeet Indians in July 1806. Hewrote numerous articles about the ex-pedition for a wide variety of publica-tions, including WPO, and donated hismany books on Western Americana tothe Glacier County Library, in CutBank. He served three terms as countyattorney and was active in communityorganizations, including the Boy Scoutsand Chamber of Commerce.

Werner was born in 1911 in FallsCity, Nebraska, raised on a farm,earned a law degree at the Universityof Omaha, and moved to Cut Bank in

Wilbur Werner

1937. Through his legal and commu-nity work he befriended many Indianson the nearby Blackfeet Reservation. In1941 he was inducted into the tribe andgiven the name Weasel Head (Ah-Po-Tu-Can).

He was predeceased by his first wife,Mary, in 1980, and is survived by hissecond wife, Martha, and by five chil-dren, 17 grandchildren, 20 great grand-children, and two great-great grand-children.

LCSA history publishedThe Lewis and Clark Society of Amer-ica, based in Hartford, Illinois, andfounded in 1956 to educate the publicabout the Lewis and Clark Expedition’simportance to U.S. history and to com-memorate the Corps of Discovery’s en-campment at River Dubois during thewinter of 1803-04, has published its 50-year history.

Written by the late Merrill S. Rosen-thal, the 23-page booklet traces thesociety’s beginnings as the nation’s firstincorporated organization devoted toLewis and Clark. Founded during theexpedition’s 150th anniversary, the so-ciety led the effort to place a historicalmarker at Wood River, Illinois, on theMississippi River north of St. Louis.The site later became part of a state parkand eventually a National Historic Sitewith an interpretive center completedin 2003. The center includes a replicaof Camp River Dubois [below].

While maintaining its separate iden-tity, the L.C.S.A. is also the Camp RiverDubois Chapter of the LCTHF.

Copies of the booklet are availablefrom Donald Hastings at L.C.S.A.,P.O. Box 33, Hartford, IL 62048-0033;[email protected].

Drawingof the Camp RiverDubois replica.


House Ad IVpickup

August 2006 issue,p. 7

(“The Trail needsyou now”)


St. Louis annual meeting and signature event close out L&C Bicentennial

September 17-23 in St. Louis andvicinity was a week to remember as

the LCTHF held its 38th annual meetingfollowed by a four-day celebrationmarking the end of the three-year L&CBicentennial. Some 230 foundationmembers attended the meeting, whichfeatured guest speakers, panel discus-sions, and a fancy-dress ball at thedowntown Adam’s Mark Hotel. High-lights of the bicentennial’s final signa-ture event included tours of L&C-relatedsites, reenactments of the Corps ofDiscovery’s return to the area, and thededication of a monumental statue ofthe captains and Seaman.

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On Thursday, September 21, members of the Discovery Expedition of St. Charles, Missouri, re-enact the Corps of Discovery’s return to St. Charles exactly 200 years before.

Saturday, September 23: well-wishers ashore and afloat greet the whitepirogue’s arrival in St. Louis at the foot of the Gateway Arch.

St. Louis mayor Francis Slay speaks at the dedication of The Captains Re-turn, artist Harry Weber’s 23-foot statue of Lewis and Clark and Seaman.

At the Gala Ball: Bryant Boswell as Meriwether Lewis, LuAnnHunter, Bud Clark as William Clark (his great-great-greatgrandfather), Beverly Leer, and Hal Stearns.

Gerard Baker (left),superintendent of the L&CNational Historic Trail,and tribal delegates.


The L&C Bicentennial is over, but the work goes on

Trail Notes

I have been asked more timesthan I can count over the past

year, “What will you do when it’sover?” My inquisitive acquaintances arereferring, of course, to the Lewis andClark Bicentennial commemoration. Ihave done my best to assure each per-son I encounter that there is no end tohistory or to the foundation’s work askeepers of the story and stewards ofthe trail.

In fact, I would say our work hasjust begun. With the release of thefoundation’s 2006-10 strategic plan,there are many objectives to accom-plish. The first goal of the new plan isto “Provide national leadership forstewardship of the Lewis and ClarkNational Historic Trail.” Among theobjectives we will focus on to achievethat goal are: taking an active role inmonitoring and protecting historic,cultural, and natural resources along thetrail; identifying trail needs and oppor-tunities for chapter and member in-volvement; and developing stewardshipeducation programs for youth.

A major priority in the comingmonths will be advocacy efforts to pro-mote extension of the Lewis and ClarkNational Historic Trail east to Mont-icello. Legislation to extend the trail hasbeen introduced in the U.S. Senate andHouse of Representatives and referredto their respective natural-resourcescommittees. It is imperative that foun-dation members contact their Congres-sional delegations to urge them notonly to support these bills but to signon as cosponsors.

Additionally, the foundation willwork with federal land-managementagencies to get an accounting of theircosts to properly manage the trail, andwill advocate for appropriate fundinglevels in Congress. Agency budgets arebeing drastically reduced, but the foun-dation will encourage Congress and theagencies to provide adequate fundingand staff resources to manage the re-sources of the trail.

The foundation will continue to

monitor projects and activities alongthe trail to protect the integrity of thehistoric trail corridor. Currently, thereis a proposal to build a coal-fired powergeneration plant in the Great Falls Por-tage National Historic Landmark. Thisproposal raises a variety of concernswith regard to the integrity of the his-toric trail and will be monitored closelyby the foundationand its PortageRoute Chapter inGreat Falls, bothof whom plan totake action asappropriate andnecessary.

Federal agencies continually updatea variety of management plans that im-pact the Lewis and Clark National His-toric Trail. Over the past year, the foun-dation has provided comments on vari-ous plans, including the National ParkService’s Draft Management Policies,management plans for the Bitterrootand Lolo National Forests, and theBureau of Land Management’s UpperMissouri River Breaks National Monu-ment Draft Resource ManagementPlan. Those efforts will continue un-der the new strategic plan.

Inventoring trail resourcesFoundation chapters in many stateshave contributed to development of aninventory of sites, signs, interpretivecenters, gravesites, artifacts, monu-ments, and other resources along thetrail. Efforts will continue to expandthat inventory so there is a completerecord of what exists along the trail andwhat was built during the bicentennial.This inventory will help the founda-tion, private landowners, tribes, andfederal, state, and local agencies in man-aging the historic, cultural, and naturalresources along the trail and in preserv-ing existing educational and interpre-tive information.

Volunteers have contributed hun-dreds of thousands of hours to the trailand to sharing the stories of the expe-

dition throughout the bicentennial. Thefoundation has developed a database ofvolunteer opportunities and plans toexpand it over the winter to includeopportunities from Fort Clatsop toMonticello, with projects hosted bychapters, state and federal agencies, or-ganizations with similar missions, andother partners. We encourage membersto participate in these activities to helpshare stories of the expedition and as-sure their historical accuracy while pre-serving and protecting the historic, cul-tural, and natural resources along thetrail for future generations.

Keeping members informedThe foundation is developing an e-mailsystem so we can alert members to ac-tivities along the trail, including volun-teer opportunities, meetings and festi-vals, and potentially harmful develop-ments. We have found that once vol-unteers dedicate time and energy to asite or a segment of trail, they want tobe aware of what’s happening there.

“What will you do when it’s over?”My answer is simple: We will continueto do what we’ve always done in ourhistoric role as Keepers of the Story,Stewards of the Trail.

—Wendy RaneyDirector of Field Operations

A new Web site devoted to Lewis andClark in Kentucky (www.lewisandclarkinkentucky.org) has been up andrunning since earlier this year. Spon-sored by the state’s bicentennial com-mittee, it explores people and places as-sociated with the expedition and in-cludes links to other L&C-related Websites. As the “Cradle of the Corps ofDiscovery,” according to the site, Ken-tucky supplied 17 of the 33 membersof the corps’ permanent party, includ-ing Clark and his slave York, GeorgeDrouillard, the Nine Young Men fromKentucky, and five others. ■

Kentucky Web site


No. The ocean was too darn far, atleast for someone to see from a canoe.It’s possible that Clark viewed it fromthe higher vantage of the embankmentbehind the corps’ campsite. (See lettersin the February 2005 issue.)

On the return journey, did Lewis andhis party, after digging up the iron frameof the collapsible boat, take it with them,perhaps for bartering the iron at theMandan and Hidatsa villages?

They reburied the frame. If they’dtaken it with them, Lewis would havesaid so in his journal. What happenedto it later is anybody’s guess. Maybe,as Jim Holmberg suggested at thisyear’s annual meeting, in St. Louis, theBlackfeet dug it up and used the ironto make arrowheads.

Who were those Indians Lewis en-countered on Two Medicine River, andhow many were killed in the ensuingfight?

I agree with John C. Jackson (see hisarticle in the February 2006 issue) thatthey were Piegan (Pikani) Blackfeet,and just one died.

Are there missing Lewis journals?I doubt it. Lewis kept up his journal

whenever he was traveling withoutClark. His journal lapses occur duringstretches when he and Clark were to-gether. Clark was a meticulous journal-ist—I don’t believe he missed a singleday during the entire expedition (al-though many of his entries were cop-ied from Lewis). Lewis must have fig-ured that, between Clark and the vari-ous enlisted men who kept journals, theexpedition was covered.

Was the “short rifle” made for Lewisat Harpers Ferry a cut-down version ofthe Model 1792 or some sort of proto-type of the Model 1803?

I side with Richard Keller and ErnestCowan (WPO, May 2006)—the 15 rifleswere early versions of the Model 1803.

Now for the mother of all Lewis andClark questions: At Grinder’s Stand inthe early hours of October 11, 1809, didMeriwether Lewis die by his own handor someone else’s?

He took his own life. The evidence,albeit circumstantial, is convincing—

especially his extremely erratic behav-ior in the preceding weeks and the re-actions of Clark and Thomas Jeffersonto news of their friend’s death.

Failure or success?One question raised from time to timeduring the bicentennial concerns theexpedition’s accomplishments. At apanel discussion during the 2003 annualmeeting, in Philadelphia, one partici-pant (a professor at the University ofPennsylvania) provoked the ire ofmany in the audience by pronouncingthe expedition a “failure.” He did so forall the usual reasons cited by academicskeptics, whose arguments boil down tothe assertion that Lewis and Clark “dis-covered” nothing that hadn’t beenknown to generations of Native Ameri-cans. Some critics have gone so far as tostate that the captains knew they werefailures and that this knowledge was acontributing factor in Lewis’s suicide.Conversely, there are also those whopoint to their purported “success” inopening the West, thereby paving theway for the destruction of the environ-ment and tribal cultures. Poor Lewis,poor Clark! They are damned for fail-ing and equally damned for succeeding.

Soundings (continued from p. 40)

Of course, in one sense Lewis andClark did fail. They failed to find aNorthwest Passage, because none ex-isted, and except for their die-harddevotees few have followed the routethey traveled, which is about the worstway imaginable to reach the Pacific.Nor do I believe that they materiallyaffected the history of westward expan-sion. American fur traders were alreadyplying the Missouri and didn’t needLewis and Clark to tell them about thebonanza of pelts awaiting them in theRocky Mountains. As L&C scholarJohn Logan Allen noted at this year’sannual meeting, the Louisiana Purchasewas vastly more important than theexpedition, even though its bicenten-nial went virtually unnoticed.

All that said, Lewis and Clark cer-tainly succeeded in carrying out Tho-mas Jefferson’s instructions, and in theentire history of exploration it is hardto imagine an expedition better led ordocumented.

Not too long ago the Corps of Dis-covery was hailed as the spearhead ofempire. Today it is more likely to be cel-ebrated for its cultural diversity, a no-tion that would have utterly baffled themanor-born captains. (In 2003, WilliamClark’s home town of Louisville dedi-cated a heroic statue of York, his slavewho accompanied him to the Pacific; ithas yet to erect a statue honoring York’smaster.) This shift in perspective under-scores an observation by Stephen Am-brose: the expedition’s greatest legacy isthe story itself, and every generation hasto interpret that story on its own terms.

• • •To the foundation’s leadership, past

and present—thanks for your supportand the independence you’ve given meto shape the magazine as I’ve seen fit.

To my able successor, WendyRaney—best wishes. You’ll be happyindeed if you enjoy the job half as muchas I have.

And last but not least, to WPO’s manydevoted readers—I am grateful for yourengagement in this timeless and com-pelling story, and I hope to see you onthe trail.

Sculptor Ed Hamilton’s eight-foot-tall statueof York, dedicated in 2003 in Louisville.

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After seven years at the job, thisis my last issue as editor of

WPO, so I suppose it’s incumbenton me to say a few words. It’sbeen a terrific run in every way.I’ve dealt with wonderful folksand absorbed more knowledgeabout Lewis and Clark than I’dever thought possible. I’m re-minded of this whenever peopleask me about the subject and I goon about it until their eyes glazeover. Here in New Jersey, whereI live, and in the East in general,curiosity about Lewis and Clarkis finite.

That’s not the case, of course, for most members of theLewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, as I realize when-ever I attend one of our annual meetings and am astonishedonce again by the seemingly boundless interest in the Corpsof Discovery. In many ways this has made my job easy. WeProceeded On is what’s known in the trade as a writer-driven,rather than editor-driven, magazine. Almost all the articlesI’ve published have come to me “over the transom,” unso-licited, and written by members who have waded up to theirnecks (sometimes literally) in one tributary or another of thegreat Lewis and Clark watershed.

Readers of WPO doubtless know that old line about the PlatteRiver being “a mile wide and an inch deep,” which is how Idescribe my knowledge of Lewis and Clark. When I men-tioned this once to Larry Epstein, a past president of the foun-dation, he observed that for many of our members, knowl-edge of Lewis and Clark is an inch wide and a mile deep.

That was certainly so in 1981, when I joined the founda-tion and in August of that year took part in a “rolling” an-nual meeting, a bus tour of southwestern Montana retracingthe route of the Great Captains (as some in our hardy bandactually called them) from Helena to Dillon, across Lemhiand Lost Trail passes, and down the Bitterroot Valley toMissoula. There were 101 of us aboard our two busses, in-cluding a pair of youngish scholars—Gary Moulton (recentlyhired to edit the L&C journals) and Jim Ronda (still in theresearch phase of his seminal work, Lewis and Clark amongthe Indians)—as well as most of the “Portland mafia” and

other charter members of thefoundation, which at the time wasjust 12 years old.

Membership as a whole num-bered only five hundred and rep-resented the hardest of hardcorelewisandclarkers. Now the foun-dation boasts more than threethousand members, and a typicalannual meeting draws at least fourhundred. In the last decade ourranks have been swelled bypeople drawn to Lewis and Clarkby Undaunted Courage, StephenAmbrose’s 1996 biography ofLewis; Ken Burns’s 1997 PBS

documentary about the expedition; and the three-year bi-centennial, which has at last come to a close. Many of thesenew members are curious about Lewis and Clark but havelimited knowledge of the subject, and I have tried to edit themagazine with them in mind. I think of WPO as a special-interest magazine edited for a general reader.

Points of contentionAs editor I’ve also tried to elevate WPO’s role as a forum fordebate about contentious issues swirling in the captains’ wake.I have avoided taking sides in those controversies and haveseen my job as that of a facilitator, helping a writer to make acase as clearly and convincingly as possible, whether or not Iagree with it. Now that I’m leaving the editorship I can saywhere I stand on some of these questions:

At Chinook Point in November of 1805, did members ofthe Corps of Discovery “vote” on where to spend their win-ter on the Pacific?

No. Call it a poll, a straw vote, or a nonbinding referen-dum, but it was certainly not a vote in the conventional sense.Whatever you call it, I do agree with Steven Ambrose andDayton Duncan about the importance of this “vote” for whatit says about the captains’ leadership and the corps’ hard-earned sense of unity.

That same November, did William Clark actually see thePacific at Pillar Rock, as he claimed in his famous exclama-tion, “Ocian in view!”?

Soundings

Soundings continues on page 39

So long, it’s been good to know youA few reflections from WPO’s retiring editor

BY JIM MERRITT

A stop at the Three Forks of the Missouri during the foundation’sAugust 1981 “rolling” annual meeting (the editor’s first).

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