Part IV · The Mountains
Chapter 15
The Divide
Lemhi Pass, on the Montana–Idaho border
No. On 12 August 1805 Lewis reached the source of the Missouri and crossed the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass, hoping to see a river running down to the Pacific. Instead he saw range after range of snow-topped mountains. There was no easy water route across the continent.
11 August 1805
Lewis has gone ahead on foot with three men, Drouillard, John Shields and Hugh McNeal, to find the Shoshone before summer ends. On 11 August he sees a man on horseback in the distance, riding towards them. He is Shoshone.
Lewis walks slowly towards him, holding up a blanket as a sign of friendship, and calls out a word Sacagawea has taught him. “I called to him in as loud a voice as I could command,” he writes, “repeating the word tab-ba-bone which in their language signifyes white-man.”
But Drouillard and Shields keep walking forward on either side. The rider gets nervous, wheels his horse and gallops away into the willows. Lewis is furious with himself and his men. He may have just lost their only chance.
12 August 1805
The next day they follow an Indian road up a narrowing valley. The creek beside them grows smaller and smaller until McNeal can stand with a foot on each side of it. Lewis writes that McNeal “had exultingly stood with a foot on each side of this little rivulet and thanked his god that he had lived to bestride the mighty & heretofore deemed endless Missouri.”
A little higher they find a spring. Lewis is sure it is “the most distant fountain of the waters of the Mighty Missouri in surch of which we have spent so many toilsome days and wristless nights.” They drink from it.
Then Lewis climbs the last slope to the top of the ridge and looks west. He is expecting to see a gentle slope down to a big river, the easy road to the Pacific that Jefferson dreamed of. Instead he sees “immence ranges of high mountains still to the West of us with their tops partially covered with snow.”
On the far side he walks down to “a handsome bold runing Creek of cold Clear water, here I first tasted the water of the great Columbia river.” He has crossed the Continental Divide. Every drop of water from here on flows to the Pacific. But the dream of a short, easy passage across the continent is over.
13 August 1805
The next morning they come upon three Shoshone women. One runs away. The other two, an old woman and a girl, cannot escape, so they sit down on the ground and bow their heads, expecting to be killed.
Lewis walks up, takes the old woman by the hand, and gives them beads, a mirror and paint. “I now painted their tawny cheeks with some vermillion,” he writes, “which with this nation is emblematic of peace.” The women lead them towards their camp.
Soon about sixty warriors come galloping towards them, armed and ready to fight. The old woman runs ahead and shows them her gifts. The chief, a man named Cameahwait, jumps down and embraces Lewis. Then everyone does. Lewis writes that “we wer all carresed and besmeared with their grease and paint till I was heartily tired of the national hug.”
That evening, in Cameahwait’s camp on the Lemhi River, someone gives Lewis a piece of roasted salmon. “This was the first salmon I had seen,” he writes, “and perfectly convinced me that we were on the waters of the Pacific Ocean.”
14–16 August 1805
The Shoshone are friendly, but they are hungry, frightened and poor. Every year raiders with guns come from the plains and steal their horses, kill their people and carry off women and children, as the Hidatsa did to Sacagawea. The Shoshone have almost no guns of their own, so they hide in the mountains and live on roots, berries and salmon.
Cameahwait tells Lewis that if his people had guns, “we could then live in the country of buffaloe and eat as our enimies do and not be compelled to hide ourselves in these mountains and live on roots and berries as the bear do.” Lewis promises that American traders will come, bringing guns.
Now he needs Cameahwait to come back over the pass with him, with horses, to meet Clark and the canoes. Some of the Shoshone fear a trap: maybe these strangers are working with their enemies. Lewis hands Cameahwait his own rifle, to show that he trusts him.