Part III · Into the Unknown
Chapter 10
White Bears
The upper Missouri, present-day eastern Montana
Yes. On the upper Missouri in the spring of 1805 the Corps met grizzly bears for the first time. Some took ten bullets to kill and chased men into the river, and Lewis admitted he would rather fight two Indians than one bear.
26 April 1805
Nearly three weeks above Fort Mandan, the Corps reaches the mouth of the Yellowstone River, where it pours into the Missouri from the south. The captains have heard about it all winter, and they celebrate. Lewis writes that “we ordered a dram to be issued to each person; this soon produced the fiddle, and they spent the evening with much hilarity, singing & dancing.”
Game is everywhere: buffalo, elk, deer, pronghorn and beaver. But the men are keen to meet one animal in particular. The Mandan and Hidatsa have warned them about a huge bear. Lewis writes that “the Indians give a very formidable account of the strength and ferocity of this anamal, which they never dare to attack but in parties of six eight or ten persons.” The soldiers, with their rifles, are not worried.
29 April 1805
On 29 April Lewis and another hunter meet two of the bears and wound both. One runs away. The other chases Lewis for about eighty yards before they manage to kill it. It is a young one.
Lewis is not impressed. The Indians may well fear this animal, he writes, “equiped as they generally are with their bows and arrows or indifferent fuzees, but in the hands of skillfull riflemen they are by no means as formidable or dangerous as they have been represented.”
He is about to change his mind.
5 May 1805
A week later Clark and Drouillard shoot a much bigger bear. Lewis writes that “it was a most tremendious looking anamal, and extreemly hard to kill notwithstanding he had five balls through his lungs and five others in various parts he swam more than half the distance acoss the river to a sandbar” before he died.
It is the biggest animal they have seen on the trip, apart from buffalo. The men measure it from nose to hind feet, argue about how much it weighs, and start telling each other bear stories around the fire.
11 May 1805
On 11 May, William Bratton comes running and shouting towards the boats. He has shot a bear through the lungs, and it has turned and chased him. Several men go back, follow its trail of blood, and find it hiding in thick brush, still alive. They finish it off.
That night Lewis writes something very different from before: “I must confess that I do not like the gentlemen and had reather fight two Indians than one bear.” He adds that “the curiossity of our party is pretty well satisfyed with rispect to this anamal.”
14 May 1805
On 14 May the men in the rear canoes spot a big bear lying on open ground about three hundred paces from the river, and “six of them went out to attack him, all good hunters.” Four fire at once and hit him. Then “this monster ran at them with open mouth.”
The six scatter. The bear chases two of them so closely that they throw away their guns and jump into the river, “altho’ the bank was nearly twenty feet perpendicular.” The bear jumps in after them. At last a man on shore shoots it through the head. When they cut it up, they find “eight balls had passed through him in different directions.”
That same evening, a gust of wind will nearly finish the expedition in a very different way.