Ignorance of the American People regarding the Territory called New France and that called Louisiana.—Civilization's Cruel March into Louisiana.—Lewis and Clark, Leaders of the Expedition to the Far West, already Trained Soldiers.—Its Aim not Conquest, but the Advancement of Knowledge and Trade.—Some Previous Explorers.—The Make-up of Lewis and Clark's Party.—Fitness of the Leaders for the Work.—The Winter of 1804-1805 spent at Fort Mandan.—First Encounter with the Grizzly Bear.—Portage from the Missouri to the Columbia, 340 Miles.—Down the Columbia to the Coast near Point Adams.—The Return Journey begun, March, 1806.—British Traders blamed for the Indians' Hatred of Americans.—The Americans thus driven to Deeds which made them despised by the British.—Arrival of the Explorers at St. Louis.—News of this Exploration starts the Rush of Emigrants to the West.—Zebulon M. Pike's Ascent of the Mississippi, 1805.—He explores the Leech Lake Region.—Ordered to the Far West, he reaches the Republican and Arkansas Rivers.—Sufferings of his Party travelling toward the Rio Grande.—He sets up the American Flag on Spanish Territory and is sent away.—The West regarded as the Home of Patriotism.

LEWIS AND CLARK: EXPLORERS OF LOUISIANA

When the vast region known as Louisiana was purchased by President Jefferson, a century ago, the American people knew as little about it as the American colonies knew about the great territory called New France which came under English sovereignty at the end of the French War, fifty years earlier. But however great Louisiana was, and whatever its splendid stretch of gleaming waterway or rugged mountain range, it was sure that the race which now became its master would not shirk from solving the tremendous problems of its destiny. In 1763 the same race had taken quiet possession of New France, including the whole empire of the Great Lakes and all the eastern tributaries of the Mississippi River; in the half-century since that day this race had proved its vital powers of successful exploitation of new countries. In those fifty years a Tennessee, a Kentucky, an Ohio, and an Indiana and Illinois had sprung up out of an unknown wilderness as if a magician's wand had touched, one by one, the falling petals of its buckeye blossoms. Thus, New France had been acquired by a great kingdom, but the power of assimilation lay in the genius of the common people of England's seaboard colonies for home-building and land-clearing. Soon the era of brutal individualism passed from the Middle West and the old Northwest; weak as it was, the young American Republic, in the person of such men as Richard Henderson and Rufus Putnam, threw an arm about the wilderness, while George Rogers Clark, "Mad Anthony" Wayne, and William Henry Harrison settled the question of sovereignty with the red-skinned inhabitants of the land.

Civilization often marched rough-shod into the American Middle West, bringing, however, better days and ideals than those which it harshly crushed. After Anthony Wayne's conquest of Northwestern Indiana at Fallen Timber (near Toledo, Ohio) in 1794 the burst of population westward from Pittsburg and Kentucky to the valley of the Mississippi was marvellous; by the time of the purchase of Louisiana in 1803 the rough vanguard of the race which had so swiftly opened Kentucky and Ohio and Tennessee to the world was crowding the banks of the Mississippi, ready to leap forward to even greater conquests. What these irrepressible pioneers had done they could do again. Those who affirmed that the purchase of Louisiana must prove a failure had counted without their host.

Nothing is of more interest in the great Government expedition of exploration which President Jefferson now sent into the unknown territory beyond the Mississippi than this very fact of vital connection between the leaders of the former movement into the eastern half of the Mississippi Basin and this present movement into its tremendous western half. In a previous story we have shown that the founders of the old Northwest were largely heroes of the French and Indian and the Revolutionary wars; it is now interesting indeed to note that these leaders in Far Western exploration—Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—were in turn heroes of the British and Indian wars, both of them survivors of bloody Fallen Timber, where, on the cyclone's path, Anthony Wayne's hard-trained soldiers made sure that Indian hostility was never again to be a national menace on the American continent.

The proposed exploration of Louisiana by Lewis and Clark is interesting also as the first scientific expedition ever promoted by the American Government. For it was a tour of exploration only; the party did not carry leaden plates such as CÉloron de Bienville brought fifty years back in those days of gold interwoven with purple, to bury along the tributaries of the Ohio as a claim to land for his royal master and the mistresses of France. There was here no question of possession; Lewis and Clark were, on the contrary, to report on the geography, physiography, and zoÖlogy of the land, designate proper sites for trading stations, and give an account of the Indian nations. It is remarkable that little was known of Louisiana on these heads. Of course the continent had been crossed, though not by way of the Missouri River route, which had become the great highway for the fur trade. Mackenzie had crossed the continent in the Far North, and Hearne had passed over the Barren Grounds just under the Arctic Circle. To the southward from the Missouri the Spaniards had run to and from the Pacific for two centuries. The commanding position of St. Louis showed that the Missouri route was of utmost importance; the portage to the half-known Columbia was of strategic value, and a knowledge of that river indispensable to sane plans, commercial and political, in the future.

In May, 1804, the explorers were ready to start from St. Louis. They numbered twenty-seven men and the two leading spirits, Lewis and Clark; fourteen of the number were regular soldiers from the United States army; there were nine adventurous volunteers from Kentucky; a half-breed interpreter; two French voyageurs and Clark's negro servant completed the roster. The party was increased by the addition of sixteen men, soldiers and traders, whose destination was the Mandan villages on the Missouri, where the explorers proposed to spend the first Winter.

There is something of the simplicity of real grandeur in the commonplace records of the leaders of this expedition. "They were men with no pretensions to scientific learning," writes Roosevelt, "but they were singularly close and accurate observers and truthful narrators. Very rarely have any similar explorers described so faithfully not only the physical features, but the animals and plants of a newly discovered land. ... Few explorers who did and saw so much that was absolutely new have written of their deeds with such quiet absence of boastfulness, and have drawn their descriptions with such complete freedom from exaggeration."

The very absence of incident in the story is significant to one who remembers the countless dangers that beset Lewis and Clark as they fared slowly on up the long, tiresome stretches of the Missouri; surprises, accidents, misunderstandings, miscalculations, and mutinies might have been the order of the day; a dozen instances could be cited of parties making journeys far less in extent than that now under consideration where the infelicities of a single week surpassed those known throughout those three years. These splendid qualities, which can hardly be emphasized save in a negative way, make this expedition as singular as it was auspicious in our national annals. Good discipline was kept without engendering hatred; the leaders worked faithfully with their men at the hardest and most menial tasks; in suffering, risking, laboring, they set examples to all of their party. In dealing with the Indians good judgment was used; even in the land of the fierce Dakotas they escaped harm because of great diplomacy, presenting a more bold and haughty front than could perhaps have been maintained if once it had been challenged. With all Indian nations conferences were held, at which the purchase of Louisiana from France was officially announced, and proper presents were distributed in sign of the friendship of the United States.

The Winter of 1804-1805 was spent at Fort Mandan, on the Missouri River, sixteen hundred miles from its junction with the Mississippi. In the Spring the party, now thirty-two strong, pressed on up the Missouri, which now turned in a decidedly westward direction. Between the Little Missouri and the upper waters of the Missouri proper, game was found in very great quantities, this region having been famous in that respect until the present generation. One game animal with which white men had not been acquainted was now encountered,—the grizzly bear. Bears in the Middle West were, under ordinary circumstances, of no danger; these grizzlies of the upper Missouri were very bold and dangerous. Few Indians were encountered on the upper Missouri. Fall had come ere the party had reached the difficult portage from the Missouri to the Columbia; the distance from the Mississippi to the Falls of the Missouri, at the mouth of the Portage River, the point near which the land journey began, was 2,575 miles. The Portage to the Columbia was 340 miles in length. Having obtained horses from the Shoshones, the Indians on the portage, the explorers accomplished the hard journey through the Bitter Root Mountains.

The strange white men were received not unkindly by the not less strange Indians of the great Columbia Valley, though it needed a bold demeanor, in some instances, to maintain the ground gained. Yet on the men went down the river and encamped for the Winter on the coast near Point Adams,—the end of a journey of over four thousand miles. Here the brave Captain Gray of Boston, thirteen years before, had discovered the mouth of the Columbia and given the river the name of his good ship. The Winter was spent hereabouts, the explorers suffering somewhat for lack of food until they learned to relish dog-flesh, the taste for which had to be acquired. By March, 1806, they were ready to pull up stakes and begin the long homeward journey.

This was almost as barren of adventure as the outward passage, though a savage attack by a handful of Blackfeet,—henceforward to be the bitter foes of Rocky Mountain traders and pioneers,—and the accidental wounding of Lewis by one of his party, were unpleasant interruptions in the monotony of the steady marching, paddling, and hunting. It is remarkable that, throughout the western expansion of the United States after the Revolution, our northern pioneers from Pennsylvania to Oregon should have felt—in many cases bitterly—the tricky, insulting hatred of British traders and their Indian allies. As Washington in 1790 laid at the door of British instigators the cause of the long war ended by Wayne at Fallen Timber, so, all the way across the continent our pioneers had to contend with the same despicable influence, and were driven by it to deeds which made them, in turn, equally despised by their northern rivals. "I was in hopes," wrote an early pioneer, "that the British Indian traders had some bounds to their rapacity ... that they were completely saturated with our blood. But it appears not to have been the case. Like a greedy wolf, not satisfied with the flesh, they quarrelled over the bones.... Alarmed at the individual enterprise of our people ... they furnished [the Indians] with ... the instruments of death and a passport [horses] to our bosom." Even at the very beginning these first Americans on the Columbia and the Bitter Root range had a taste of Indian hatred from both the Blackfeet and the Crows.

On the way back to the Mandan villages the explorers had an experience which was by no means insignificant. As they were dropping down the upper Missouri, one day two men came into view; they proved to be American hunters, Dickson and Hancock by name, from Illinois. They had been plundered by the fierce Sioux, and one of them had been wounded; it can be imagined how glad they were to fall in with a party large enough to ward off the insults of the Sioux. The hunters did remain with Lewis and Clark until the Mandan villages were reached, but no longer. Obtaining a fresh start, the two turned back toward the Rockies, and one of Lewis and Clark's own soldiers, Colter (later the Yellowstone pioneer), went back with them. These three led the van of all the pioneer host under whose feet the western half of the continent was soon to tremble.

Holding the Sioux safely at bay during the passage down the Missouri, Lewis and Clark in September were once again on the straggling streets of the little village of St. Louis, then numbering perhaps a thousand inhabitants.

From any standpoint this expedition must rank high among the tours of the world's greatest explorers; a way to the Pacific through Louisiana, which had just been purchased, was now assured. Knowing as we do so well to-day of Russia's determined effort to secure an outlet for her Asiatic pioneers and commerce on the Pacific Ocean, we can realize better the national import of Lewis's message to President Jefferson giving assurance that there was a practicable route from the Mississippi Basin to the Pacific by way of the tumbling Columbia. Without guides, save what could be picked up on the way, these men had crossed the continent; and as the story told by returning Kentucky hunters to wondering pioneers in their Alleghany cabins set on foot the first great burst of immigration across the Alleghanies into the Ohio Basin, so in turn the story of Lewis and Clark and Gass and the others set on foot the movement which resulted in the entire conquest of the Rockies and the Great West.

But as the stories of others besides Kentuckians played a part in the vaulting of the first great America "divide," so, too, others besides Lewis and Clark influenced the early movement into the Farthest West. One of these, who stands closest to the heroes of the Missouri and Columbia, was Zebulon M. Pike, a son of a Revolutionary officer from New Jersey, the State from which the pioneers of Cincinnati and southwestern Ohio had come. During Lewis and Clark's adventure this hardy explorer ascended the Mississippi, August, 1805, in a keel-boat, with twenty regular soldiers. The Indians of the Minnesota country were not openly hostile, but their conduct was anything but friendly. The Winter was spent at the beautiful Falls of St. Anthony, at Minneapolis. Pike explored the Leech Lake region but did not reach Lake Itasca. He found the British flag floating over certain small forts built by British traders, which he in every case ordered down. An American flag was raised in each instance, and the news of the Louisiana purchase was noised abroad. The British traders treated Pike's band with all the kindness and respect that their well-armed condition demanded. The expedition came down the Mississippi in April, 1806, to St. Louis.

There were other regions, however, in Louisiana where the United States flag ought to go now, and General Wilkinson, who had sent Pike to the North, now ordered him into the Far West. Pike's route was up the Osage and overland to the Pawnee Republic on Republican River. His party numbered twenty-three, and with him went fifty Osages, mostly women and children, who had been captured in savage war by the Pottawattomies. The diplomatic return of these forlorn captives of course determined the attitude of the Osage nation toward Pike's company and his claims of American sovereignty over the land. And it was time for America to extend her claim and make it good. Already a Spanish expedition had passed along the frontier distributing bright Spanish flags and warning the Indians that the Spanish boast of possession was still good and would be made better. Pike travelled in the wake of this band of interlopers, neutralizing the effect of its influence and raising the American flag everywhere in place of the Spanish.

Reaching the Arkansas, Pike ascended that river late in the Fall, and when Winter set in the brave band was half lost in the mountains near the towering peak which was forever to stand a dazzling monument to the hardihood and resolution of its leader. At the opening of the new year, near Canyon City, where deer were found wintering, a log fort was built in which a portion of the party remained with the pack animals, while Pike with twelve soldiers essayed the desperate journey to the Rio Grande.

"Their sufferings were terrible. They were almost starved, and so cold was the weather that at one time no less than nine of the men froze their feet.... In the Wet Mountain Valley, which they reached in mid-January, ... starvation stared them in the face. There had been a heavy snow-storm; no game was to be seen; and they had been two days without food. The men with frozen feet, exhausted by hunger, could no longer travel. Two of the soldiers went out to hunt but got nothing. At the same time Pike [and a comrade] ... started, determined not to return at all unless they could bring back meat. Pike wrote that they had resolved to stay out and die by themselves, rather than to go back to camp 'and behold the misery of our poor lads.' All day they tramped wearily through the heavy snow. Towards evening they came on a buffalo, and wounded it; but faint and weak from hunger, they shot badly, and the buffalo escaped; a disappointment literally as bitter as death. That night they sat up among some rocks, all night long, unable to sleep because of the intense cold, shivering in their thin rags; they had not eaten for three days. But ... they at last succeeded, after another heartbreaking failure, in killing a buffalo. At midnight they staggered into camp with the meat, and all the party broke their four days' fast." [4]

Pike at length succeeded in his design of reaching the Rio Grande, and here he built a fort and threw out to the breeze an American flag, though knowing well that he was on Spanish territory now. The Louisiana boundary was ill defined, but in a general way it ran up the Red River, passed a hundred miles northeast of Santa FÉ and just north of Salt Lake, thence it struck straight west to the Pacific. By any interpretation the Rio Grande was south of the line. The Spaniards, who came suddenly upon the scene, diplomatically assumed that the daring explorer had lost his way; he suffered nothing from their hands, and was sent home through Chihuahua and Texas.

All the hopes of the purchasers of Old Louisiana and of its flag-planters have come true, and, with them, dreams the most feverish brain of that day could not fashion. History has repeated itself significantly as our standard-bearers have gone westward. When the old Northwest was carved out of a wilderness, there was no fear in the hearts of our forefathers that was not felt when Louisiana was purchased. The great fear in each case was the same—the British at the north and the Spaniard at the south. And in each case the leaven of the East was potent to leaven the whole lump. Great responsibilities steady nations as well as men; the very fact of a spreading frontier and a widening sphere of influence—bringing alarm to some and fear to many—was of appealing force throughout a century to the conscience and honor of American statesmen. As, in the dark days of the Revolution, the wary Washington determined, in case of defeat, to lead the fragment of his armies across the Alleghanies and fight the battles over again in the Ohio Basin, where he knew the pioneers would forever keep pure the spirit of independence, so men in later years have looked confidently to the Greater West, to the Mississippi Basin and old Louisiana, for as pure a patriotism (though it might appear at times in a rough guise) as ever was breathed at Plymouth Rock.