A bunch of chauvinistic, dog-eating yahoos probably is not how most Americans view Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and their intrepid band of explorers who made an epic journey of discovery across the American West 200 years ago.
That was pretty much the impression, however, that the expedition left on some of the American Indians it encountered from 1804 to 1806 as the party traversed an unmapped frontier from St. Louis to the Pacific Northwest.
Pat Courtney Gold, a master basket weaver from the Wasco tribe in Oregon who helped shape a bicentennial Lewis and Clark exhibition at the Newberry Library in Chicago, pokes gentle fun at the explorers for learning less than they should have from those meetings.
“Suddenly these hairy, smelly people came down the river in their crummy dugout canoes,” Gold joked. “They didn’t make much of an impression.
“They were pretty beat up and hungry when they got to the Wasco. They didn’t realize that we are a matriarchal society, so they spent all the time speaking with our men. They missed out on a whole lot of knowledge because of that.”
The American Indian side of Lewis and Clark’s heroic undertaking got short shrift in past official histories, but that seems to have changed as scores of anniversary observances are mounted around the country. The Newberry’s exhibit, “Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country,” runs through Jan. 14.
40 tribes contributed
Robert Archibald, president of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commission, said the commission sought input from representatives of 40 tribes Lewis and Clark encountered. The elaborate traveling exhibit mounted by Archibald’s own museum, the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, includes 500 artifacts, “about half Indian, half non-Indian,” he said, and was based on input from more than a dozen Native American consultants.
For its exhibit, the Newberry enlisted the help of five Native American advisers, who talk about the Indian view of the expedition in video kiosks set up at the library, 60 W. Walton St.
“This exhibit really is about the Indian country,” said Riva Feshbach, the library’s exhibits manager. “The Native Americans the expedition encountered already had vast trade and diplomatic networks with other tribes and with other European trade entities, including Britain, through the Hudson’s Bay Co., and France, through the French fur traders.
“When Lewis and Clark came through, different tribes reacted in different ways. Some were less interested in the Americans because they already did thriving business with other traders. Those who didn’t have prior trade relationships in some cases were more eager to develop a relationship with the American explorers.”
Gold’s Wasco tribe, for example, was one of the richest because its territory is along the salmon-rich Columbia River. The tribe had been trading with the British, Spanish and Russians long before Lewis and Clark showed up.
Favored dog to salmon
Unfortunately, expedition members hated the taste of salmon, which was the staple of many of the Northwest tribes they met. So they fell back on eating dog meat–something the explorers first tasted when it was offered during an earlier feast with the Sioux along the Missouri River.
“Being again reduced to fish and roots, we made an experiment to vary our food by purchasing a few dogs, and … felt no disrelish to this new dish,” Patrick Gass wrote on Oct. 10, 1805. He and the expedition had stopped at the junction of the Clearwater and Snake Rivers in Idaho to trade for supplies.
The tribes they were trading with, however, thought eating dogs was appalling.
The Nez Perce “have great numbers of dogs, which they employ for domestic purposes, but never eat; and our using the flesh of that animal soon brought us into ridicule as dog-eaters,” Gass noted.
President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the 4,000-mile expedition on the heels of the Louisiana Purchase to begin to fill in the blanks on the unknown territories of the West. At the time, Western Indians still thrived with traditional lifestyles as farmers, hunters and fishers.
The Newberry exhibit uses many Lewis and Clark-related artifacts and documents owned by the Newberry and other institutions, displaying them against wall-size backdrops of stunning color landscapes, which were shot by Evanston photographer Richard Mack in the same seasons that Lewis and Clark camped there.
An 1802 British map of western North America shows mostly blank spaces west of the Mississippi River. Another map was drawn on paper by a British trader in winter 1801 as he copied lines traced in the snow by a Blackfoot chieftain of a 200,000-square-mile area, showing the then-uncharted Missouri River, its tributaries and the Rocky Mountains.
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The expedition was both scientific in nature, bringing home strange new plant and animal species, and commercial, seeking immediate opportunity for fur trade with Indians.
During their first winter, Lewis and Clark camped at friendly Mandan Indian villages near present-day Bismarck, N.D., as the Mandans were eager to make an alliance with the Americans as a possible hedge against warlike Sioux tribes south of them. While there, a French-Canadian man joined the expedition as an interpreter and brought his Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, spelled Sakakawea in the exhibit to mirror the tribal pronunciation.
As winter loomed again and the expedition faced the daunting, confusing eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, Sakakawea arranged for her brother to lead the group to another friendly tribal area, that of the Salish.
“The expedition was getting pretty beat up by the journey and low on supplies by that time,” Feshbach said. “The Salish, who also saw value in an alliance with the Americans, decided to help them out.”
Perhaps to curry favor, they accepted seven of the Americans’ worn-out horses in trade for 17 good horses, then directed them to another tribe, the Nez Perce. That tribe taught the explorers a quicker method of making dugout canoes so they could navigate through the mountains to the Pacific side before the 1805-06 winter settled in.
Begged Indians for supplies
Starting back to St. Louis in April 1806, the Americans sometimes had to beg supplies from Indians. Not all encounters were friendly. Making camp in July 1806 with a band of Blackfoot braves, Lewis and his men killed two braves they caught trying to steal horses and guns from the Americans.
Among the Indian artifacts in the exhibit is a beautifully decorated Blackfoot bow and steel-tipped arrows of the sort the Indians would have been carrying.
From the expedition side comes the buckskin-covered journal kept by Joseph Whitehouse, one of nine young Kentuckians recruited for the trip. In Clark’s own hand is a ledger book in which, in the 1820s, he neatly listed each person who went on the expedition, their status–dead or alive–and where they lived.
The exhibit includes a look at the impact on Indian culture from the immense wave of European settlers who followed the expedition, ending with reflections on Indian country today.
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