Chapter 5
Lost in a Land of Plenty
The Great Plains, present-day Nebraska and South Dakota
On the Great Plains in late summer 1804 the Corps saw huge herds of buffalo and animals new to science, such as the pronghorn and the prairie dog, while the youngest soldier, George Shannon, was lost for sixteen days and nearly starved.
23 August 1804
Above Floyd’s Bluff the trees thin out and the land opens into rolling grassland that runs to the edge of the sky. These are the Great Plains, and the men from Kentucky and Virginia have never seen anything like them.
On 23 August Joseph Field comes back to the boats with news: he has killed a buffalo. Lewis takes twelve men to carry the meat in. It is the first of many hundreds of buffalo they will eat. From now on the hunters bring in buffalo, elk and deer almost every day, and the men eat as much meat as they can hold.
25 August 1804
The nations of this country have told the captains about a strange hill. Clark calls it “the Mountain of little people or Spirits.” The people say tiny spirits with big heads live there and shoot arrows at anyone who comes near, and that “many Indians have suffered by those little people.”
The captains decide to see for themselves. They set off on foot in blazing heat with a few men and Seaman, Lewis’s dog. Clark writes that “our dog was so heeted and fatigued we was obliged [to] send him back to the creek.” At the top of the hill they find no spirits, only a wide view of the plains, huge flocks of birds, and clouds of insects blown there by the wind.
26 August 1804
Floyd’s death has left a gap in the command, and the captains fill it in an unusual way: they let the men vote. On 26 August the privates choose Patrick Gass, a carpenter from Pennsylvania, as their new sergeant. It may be the first election held by United States citizens west of the Mississippi.
Gass turns out to be one of the most useful men on the journey. He builds forts, boats and wagon wheels. He also keeps a journal, and in 1807 it becomes the very first account of the expedition to be printed, years before the captains’ own.
The same day, George Shannon, at nineteen the youngest soldier in the Corps, rides off to look for two horses that have strayed. He does not come back that night, or the next.
7 September 1804
On a hillside the men find a whole town of small, fat animals that sit up on their back legs, whistle a warning, and dive into their holes. French traders call them little dogs. The captains call them barking squirrels. Today we call them prairie dogs.
Nobody back East has ever seen one, so the captains want to catch one alive. The whole Corps spends most of the day digging and hauling water. Clark writes that they “por’d into one of the holes 5 barrels of Water without filling it.” In the end they catch one. It will travel all the way to the President.
11 September 1804
Shannon found the horses. Then he could not find the boats. Thinking they had gone on ahead, he hurried upstream as fast as he could, while all the time the boats were behind him.
For sixteen days he pushed on alone. His bullets ran out. On 11 September the boats finally catch up with him, sitting on the riverbank, weak and starving, waiting for a trading boat to rescue him. Clark writes that he “had been 12 days without any thing to eate but Grapes & one Rabit, which he Killed by shooting a piece of hard Stick in place of a ball.”
Then Clark adds a line that sums it up: “thus a man had like to have Starved to death in a land of Plenty for the want of Bullitts or Something to kill his meat.”
14–17 September 1804
On 14 September Clark spends the whole day walking on shore, looking for a volcano he has heard about. He finds no volcano, but he shoots an animal he has never seen before, a slim, tan and white creature with forked horns. He calls it a “buck Goat.” It is a pronghorn.
Three days later Lewis climbs a ridge and looks out over the plains. He writes: “I do not think I exagerate when I estimate the number of Buffaloe which could be comprehended at one view to amount to 3000.” He tries to creep up on a herd of pronghorns, but they see him and flee so fast that he says it looked more like “the rappid flight of birds than the motion of quadrupeds.”