Chapter 3
Council Bluff
Council Bluff, near present-day Fort Calhoun, Nebraska
On 3 August 1804, at a bluff in present-day Nebraska, Lewis and Clark held their first council with leaders of the Oto and Missouria nations, handed out peace medals and flags, and told them the United States now claimed their country.
21 July 1804
On 21 July the boats pass the mouth of the Platte River, about 630 miles up the Missouri. To river men, the Platte marks the end of the lower Missouri. Above it, the traders say, the nations are more powerful, and more likely to charge a toll for passing through their country.
The captains have been waiting for this. Jefferson wants every nation along the river to hear about its new “great father,” and to make peace with its neighbours so that trade can flow. The trouble is finding people to talk to. It is high summer, and many villages are empty: the people are out on the plains hunting buffalo.
2 August 1804
At sunset on 2 August, a party of Oto and Missouria people arrives at the camp with a French trader who lives among them and speaks their language. Six of them are chiefs, though not the most important ones, who are away hunting. The two nations live together now, weakened by war and disease.
The captains send over roast meat, pork, flour and meal. In return the visitors send watermelons, which the journal spells “Water millions.” Clark also notes that every man is “on his Guard & ready for any thing.”
3 August 1804
The next morning the captains make the most of it. They rig the keelboat’s mainsail as an awning for shade, raise the flag, and parade the men in their uniforms. Lewis makes a long speech. The French and the Spanish are gone, he says. The rivers now belong to a great father in Washington who wants peace and trade, and who will send traders with goods if the nations follow his advice.
The chiefs answer politely. Clark writes that they said “they wer happy to find that they had fathers which might be depended on.” Then the gifts are handed out: paint, cloth, a canister of gunpowder, a bottle of whiskey, and silver medals for the men the captains choose to treat as chiefs. The captains name the place Council Bluff.
Then Lewis brings out his air rifle. He fires it again and again without reloading gunpowder, with no smoke and little noise. Clark writes that the shots “astonished those nativs.”
It is a trick Lewis will repeat all the way to the Pacific. The captains are only a few dozen men in a huge country. They want the people they meet to think the United States is rich, powerful and full of wonders, even when its soldiers are hungry and far from home.
August 1804
Not everyone wants to go on. On 4 August Private Moses Reed says he has left his knife at the last camp and goes back for it. He does not come back. A French boatman, La Liberté, also slips away.
Drouillard and a few men track Reed down and bring him back. On 18 August he is tried for desertion, the most serious crime in the army. The court is lenient by the standards of the time: he is sentenced “to run the gantlet four times through the party,” while every man hits him with nine switches, and he is thrown out of the permanent party.
It is also Lewis’s thirtieth birthday. Clark writes that the evening “was closed with an extra gill of whiskey and a Dance untill 11 oClock.”