Chapter 9
Gifts for the President
Fort Mandan, near present-day Washburn, North Dakota
On 7 April 1805 the keelboat went back down the Missouri with reports, maps, plants, animal skins and bones, and live animals for President Jefferson, including four magpies and a prairie dog. The prairie dog reached him alive.
March 1805
As the days lengthen, the fort fills with the sound of axes. The keelboat is too big for the shallow upper Missouri, so the men cut down cottonwood trees and hollow them out into six canoes.
Charbonneau causes trouble. He announces that he will not do guard duty or any other work, and that he wants to be free to leave whenever he likes. The captains tell him that in that case he is not coming. A few days later he sends a message to say that he is “sorry for the foolish part he had acted.” He is taken back, and so is Sacagawea.
At the end of March the ice on the river breaks up, and great slabs of it grind past the fort for days.
7 April 1805
On 7 April the expedition splits in two. A small crew under Corporal Richard Warfington will take the keelboat back down the river to St. Louis, carrying everything the captains have gathered for Jefferson.
The list is extraordinary. There are boxes of pressed plants, soils and minerals; skins and skeletons of animals nobody in the East has seen; “4 horns of the mountain ram, or big horn”; “13 red fox skins”; and a buffalo robe “painted by a Mandan man representing a battle.” There are letters, reports and Clark’s new map of the West.
And there are cages. Cage number 6 holds “a liveing burrowing Squirel of the praries.” Cage number 7 holds “4 liveing magpies.” Cage number 9 holds “a liveing hen of the Prairie.”
Heading west
The same afternoon, the rest of the Corps heads the other way. There are thirty-three of them now, the permanent party: the two captains, three sergeants, twenty-three privates, the interpreters Drouillard and Charbonneau, York, Sacagawea and her baby, and Seaman the dog, travelling in six canoes and the two pirogues.
That evening Lewis writes one of the most famous passages in the journals:
“This little fleet altho’ not quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook, were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs … we were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden.”