Lewis & Clark: Journey to Another America

Topic 6: A Journey's Beginning: The Corps of Discovery and the Diplomacy of Western Indian Affairs
By J. Wendel Cox, University of Minnesota-Morris

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The following text is excerpted from the essay in Lewis & Clark: Journey to Another America

In all your intercourse with the natives, treat them in the most friendly & conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit; allay all jealousies as to the object of your journey, satisfy them of it's innocence, make them acquainted with the position, extent, character, peaceable & commercial dispositions of the U.S.[,] of our wish to be neighborly, friendly & useful to them, & of our disposition to a commercial intercourse with them; confer with them on the points most convenient as mutual emporiums, and the articles of most desireable interchange for them & us.
---Thomas Jefferson, instructions to Meriwether Lewis

[Several Arikara leaders] promised to attend Strictly to what had been Said to them, and observed that they must trade with the Sieoux one more time to get guns and powder; that they had no guns or powder and had more horses than they had use for, after they got guns and powder that they would never again have anything to do with them &c.
---William Clark, journal entry, August 22, 1806

The expedition of the Corps of Discovery was a physical journey, a mission for empire, commerce, and knowledge. It was also the beginning of another journey, one involving relationships between the United States and western Indian peoples begun with the meetings between Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the leaders and representatives of the peoples visited on the expedition's course. From its inception, the expedition had made diplomatic relationships with western Indians central to its objectives. As the United States acquired Louisiana from France, it also sought to bring the region's Indian peoples within its dominion and to describe the basis for their subsequent relationships. President Thomas Jefferson's instructions reflected the core elements of the relationship between the United States and Indian peoples from the expedition's travels to the present. He recognized the region's inhabitants, acknowledged their separate but circumscribed sovereignty, and admitted their prior claim to the land. And to this he added an obligation for the federal government to act as friend and protector to the peoples encompassed by the republic's newly enlarged boundaries.

During the latter half of the nineteenth century, when conquest, migration, and the relentless development of mining, ranching, and market-oriented agriculture transformed the West, these same principles were employed to secure tribal lands, erode tribal sovereignty, and subject Indian peoples to forced assimilation. Twentieth-century Indian peoples, building on the efforts of previous generations, responded by finding in the history of particular treaties, agreements, and executive orders, and in the persistence of their families and communities, the basis for contemporary tribal nations.

Photo credit: Chon-mon-i-case, an Ottoe half chief who traveled to Washington, D.C. in 1821 from the upper Missouri. He is wearing a Jefferson Peace Medal. History of the Indian Tribes of North America…. By Thomas L. McKenney and James Hall. Publisher: Philadelphia, J.T. Bowen, 1848-50.

1. What was the object of the Corps of Discovery's diplomatic mission to western Indians? Did the mission succeed? Or did it fail?

2. How was the diplomatic mission to Indian nations connected to relationships between the United States and other powers?

3. What was the basis of the American claim to sovereignty over the territory encompassed by the Louisiana Purchase? What was the basis of the American claim to sovereignty over Indian peoples?

4. Indians are often described as one of a number of 'minorities' within American society. Are the experiences of Indians comparable to those of other minorities? Or do Indian people have a unique position as a consequence of their historical experiences?

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