Lewis & Clark: Journey to Another America

Topic 3: "A Multitude of Indians": Indian Country on the Eve of Lewis and Clark
By James P. Ronda, University of Tulsa

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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 dispositions to a commercial intercourse with them.
---Thomas Jefferson, instructions to Meriwether Lewis

[A] Cold morning Some wind the Black Cat, Chief of the Mandans Came to See us, he made Great inquiries respecting our fashions. he also Stated the Situation of their nation, he mentioned that a Council had been held the day before and it was thought advisable to put up with the recent insults of the Ossiniboins [Assiniboines] & Christonoes [Crees] until they were Convinced that what had been told thim by us Mr. Evins [the St. Louis trader John Thomas Evans] had deceived them & we might also, he promised to return & furnish them with guns & ammunition, we advised them to remain at peace & that they might depend upon Getting Supplies through the Channel of the Missouri, but it required time to put the trade in operation. The Assiniboins etc. have the trade of those nations in their power and treat them badly as the Soux does the Ricarees and they cannot resent for fear of loseing their trade.
---William Clark, journal entry, November 18, 1804

William Clark did not have to be told twice. No matter what some maps said about the West as an empty place--a place with neither homes nor homelands--he knew better. Years of experience on more eastern frontiers had prepared the future explorer to encounter a West that was more like a crowded neighborhood than an uninhabited wilderness. Heading up the Missouri River, Clark was ready to find Indian Country-a landscape filled with prosperous villages, extensive hunting territories, and well-traveled trading paths. Even before leaving Camp Wood outside St. Louis, Clark recognized that his community--the Corps of Discovery--would be moving through the lands and lives of other older and more established communities. He said as much the day before the expedition pointed itself up the Missouri. Clark predicted that the Corps of Discovery's "road across the continent" would take the explorers through "a multitude of Indians." What those natives and newcomers thought about each other is at the very heart of the Lewis and Clark story.

When the Lewis and Clark Expedition pushed upriver in May 1804, the Corps of Discovery was not entering a country outside of time and beyond the reach of change. This was not a virgin land, an Eden untouched by human hands. Enchanted by the paintings of Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, and Paul Kane, it is easy for us to conjure up a Native American West in 1803 as paradise in a fallen world. But Mandans, Shoshones, and Clatsops were not remote and isolated from the rest of humankind. Trade, disease, and personal relationships made Indians neighbors to peoples in the farthest parts of that world. From the distance of two centuries we lose track of the profound changes that swept the American West in the last half of the eighteenth century. The Lewis and Clark Expedition both witnessed those changes and advanced them.

Photo credit: Portrait of Black Moccasin, a Hidatsa chief. Portrait painted by George Catlin in 1833. From Catlin's Letters and Notes. 1866 ed., Missouri Historical Society Library.

About the Author

1. The Lewis and Clark Expedition came into a West filled with change. What sorts of forces, technologies, biological agents, and individuals powered those changes in the Native American West? What are the forces for change in the West today?

2. How did previous experience with either neighbors or Euro-American outsiders condition the ways native people responded to the presence of the Lewis and Clark Expedition?

3. Native people were not passive spectators in the Lewis and Clark story. In what ways did they shape the story by their very presence and active participation?

4. Black Cat, Cameahwait, and Coboway all understood the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the goods it carried as a way to cope with change. What were the survival strategies that each leader pursued?

5. The expedition meetings with Black Cat, Cameahwait, and Coboway were for the most part moments of welcome and friendship. The violent clash with the Piegan Blackfeet charted a very different course for Indian-White relations. Why were there fewer and fewer moments of welcome and friendship after 1806, and why were those moments so hard to sustain? Consider the course of events between 1806 and 1890, the short span of years from the fight on the Two Medicine to the events at Wounded Knee. Was there ever any common ground in the West between natives and newcomers? Why did the Lewis and Clark common ground so quickly become contested and contentious terrain?

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Ewers, John C. The Blackfeet: Raiders of the Northwestern Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958.

Hunt, David C., et. al. Karl Bodmer's America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Madsen, Brigham D. The Northern Shoshoni. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1980.

Meyer, Roy W. The Village Indians of the Upper Missouri: The Mandans, Hidatsas, and Arikaras. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977.

Ronda, James P. Lewis and Clark Among the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Ruby, Robert H. and John A. Brown. The Chinook Indians: Traders of the Lower Columbia River. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976.

Truettner, William H. The Natural Man Observed: A Study of Catlin's Indian Gallery. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979.