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American Cowboy magazine's Celebration of the
Bicentennial of
Lewis & Clark's Adventure West
By
Dale L. Walker
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Epilogue
of an Expedition
The
passings of the great explorers
are a tale all to themselves.
At
high
noon on Sept. 23, 1806, a convoy of canoes reached the waterfront of the outpost town of St.
Louis and 29 bearded, trail-weary men dressed in tattered buckskins
walked ashore, greeted by a throng of cheering Missourians.
Meriwether
Lewis, William Clark, and their party of young soldiers and French
boatmen—the “Corps of Discovery” as President Jefferson called them—had returned from their epic journey to the Pacific
Ocean. In two years and four months, traveling by keelboat, pirogue,
canoe, horseback, and on foot, they had covered more than 8,000 miles of
uncharted wilderness and had brought back maps and specimens and a vast
amount of data on the flora, fauna, geography, and people of the strange
new world west of the Mississippi. And they accomplished it all with the
loss of but one man (Sgt. Charles Floyd of Kentucky, who died on Aug. 20, 1804, from what was presumed to be a ruptured appendix) and a cost to the
federal government of less than $40,000.
“In
obedience to your orders,” Lewis wrote to the President, “we have
penetrated the Continent of North America to the Pacific Ocean and
sufficiently explored the interior of the country to affirm that we have
discovered the most practicable communication which does exist across
the continent...”
In
October the captains headed east, reaching Louisville in November, where
Clark departed from his partner and proceeded to Virginia, to visit
Julia Hancock, the young woman he would eventually marry. Lewis traveled
on to Charlottesville where a letter from the President awaited. Jefferson wrote of his “unspeakable joy” over their successes and
invited the co-captains to Monticello.
In
February 1807, Jefferson appointed Meriwether Lewis governor of Louisiana Territory, but
the explorer tarried in the East for more than a year before traveling
on to St. Louis to undertake his post. Some of the delay was necessary:
He had to settle expedition accounts, arrange for publication of a book
on the expedition based on his and Clark’s journals, and, of course,
write the narrative portion of the book. He also spent time as Jefferson’s representative at Aaron Burr’s treason trial in Richmond in
August 1807, posed for portraits, unsuccessfully courted several ladies,
visited relatives, and recovered from “a raging fever,” believed to
be malaria. Some who knew him said Lewis was consumed by what he
believed to be his failing health and that he dosed himself with various
medications, including laudanum, a dangerous, addictive opiate in liquid
form.
At
last, in March 1808, he reached St. Louis, where he was reunited with
Clark, now Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Louisiana Territory.
Lewis’
17 months as governor of the territory was a mixture of professional
successes and personal failures. He put the chaotic territorial papers
in order; wrote voluminous correspondence; dealt expertly with various
problems involving Indians, military garrisoning, and politics; and even
arranged to finance publication of the Missouri Gazette, the first
territorial newspaper.
Meantime,
however, his personal life and fortunes faltered. His temperament,
always mercurial, seemed to many to become melancholic and fatalistic.
He made poor land investments, borrowed money, and verged upon
bankruptcy. He drank too heavily and continued to nurse his
ailments—whatever they were—with opiates. A blow to his mental
health was the scolding letters he received from his mentor, now former
President Jefferson, on Lewis’ failure to write the book on the expedition. Indeed,
in this important work the explorer seems to have been held prisoner by
a strange inertia, as if he dreaded to act for fear of failure.
On
Sept. 4, 1809, he departed St. Louis by flatboat to Chickasaw Bluffs (modern-day
Memphis) to begin a horseback journey to Washington. There he intended
to explain the vouchers he had submitted for payments he had made—out
of his annual $2,000 salary—for official territorial business. The
federal government had refused to honor some of these bills (one for a
paltry $19), and it had become a matter of honor to defend them.
In
the afternoon of October 10, Lewis and his small entourage reached the
Natchez Trace, the old trade path running north out of Natchez through
the valley of Tennessee to Nashville. They rode on and at twilight
reached a remote inn called Grinder’s Stand, about 70 miles southwest
of Nashville. There, in the night or early morning hours of October 10
to 11, Meriwether Lewis, age 35, died.
His
death was violent—gunshot wounds in his chest and head—and while
there were rumors of murder from the outset, Jefferson and Clark were satisfied that he had killed himself out of despair
over his health and perceived failures in his personal and professional
life. Most historians have agreed with this verdict.
After
Lewis’ death Clark worked with an editor to put the expedition
journals into shape for publication. (The books appeared in 1814 but had
disappointing sales.) In 1813 he was appointed governor of Missouri
Territory and in 1821, when Missouri became a state, lost his bid for
the governorship but continued for many years in St. Louis as
Superintendent of Indian Affairs. His beloved wife Julia died in 1820
after 12 years of marriage in which she bore four sons and a daughter.
Clark died in St. Louis in 1838 at age 68.
York,
Clark’s black slave who accompanied him in the Corps of Discovery, was
freed by his master in about 1815 and died in Tennessee, apparently of
cholera, in the early 1830s.
The
Shoshoni girl Sacajawea, so important to the expedition as translator
and intermediary among the many Indian people the Corps encountered, was
reported to have died of a fever in December 1812, at Fort Manuel on the
Upper Missouri River. Shoshoni tribal history, however, has her living
on until April 1884, dying at Fort Washakie near modern-day Lander, Wyo.
Toussaint
Charbonneau, Sacajawea’s husband and expedition interpreter,
disappeared into the Rockies in about 1840. He was at least 80 years old
and described as “tottering from his infirmities.”
Jean
Baptiste, the son of Sacajawea and Charbonneau who was born in February
1805, at the expedition’s winter quarters with the Mandan people, was
carried by Sacajawea on a cradleboard to the Pacific and back. The boy
was much beloved by the Corps members, especially by William Clark, who
nicknamed him “Pomp” and sponsored his education in St. Louis. He
led an eventful life as guide, interpreter, trapper, and miner in the
California gold rush, and died in Oregon in 1866.
At
least three expedition members were killed in fights with Blackfeet:
John Potts in 1808, George Drouillard in 1809, and Pierre Cruzatte in
the mid-1820s. Virginian John Colter, a hunter with the Corps of
Discovery, survived a harrowing experience with the Blackfeet in 1808
when he was captured, stripped, and forced to run for his life. He
escaped his pursuers, hid under driftwood in the Madison River, and made
a harrowing 250-mile journey on foot to Lisa’s fort at the mouth of
the Bighorn River. He subsequently wrote a page in Western history as
the discoverer of the geysers and hot springs in what became Yellowstone
National Park. Colter died of jaundice in Missouri in 1813.
Most
of the soldiers and vagabond French-Canadian boatmen of the expedition
simply faded into obscurity.
Sgt.
Patrick Gass of Pennsylvania was the last surviving member of the 29 men
who returned from the great journey. He died in West Virginia in April
1870, at age 99.
Editor’s
note: Thus ends our yearlong series on Lewis and Clark, but in our
Backward Glance column for 2004 we will begin a new series, written by
Dale Walker, on great mysteries of the Old West, and the first two will
explore in greater depth the tales of Sacajawea and her son, Jean
Baptiste Charbonneau.
Dale
L. Walker is past president of Western Writers of America and author of
18 books, the latest being Eldorado: The California Gold Rush (2003).
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RECOMMENDED
RESOURCES
Books
Undaunted
Courage
by Stephen E.Ambrose
Lewis and Clark Among the Indians, by
James P. Ronda
The
Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery
edited by Gary Moulton
In
Search of York : The Slave Who Went to the Pacific With Lewis and Clark
by Robert Betts and James Holmberg
Lewis
& Clark: Voyage of Discovery
by Stephen E. Ambrose
Traveling
the Lewis and Clark Trail...
by Julie Fanselow
Lewis
& Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery
by Dayton Duncan
Journal
We Proceeded On, the journal of the national Lewis and Clark Trail
Heritage Foundation, Inc.: www.lewisandclark.org
Websites
Archive of Lewis and Clark web pages: www.lcarchive.org
Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage
Foundation, Inc.: www.lewisandclark.org
Discovering Lewis and Clark: www.lewis-clark.org
Lewis and Clark Bicentennial: www.lewisandclark200.org
Visit Cowboy.com
for more
Lewis & Clark
Trail and Historical
Websites
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