A Day Lewis and Clark Confronted the Lakota Sioux, 1804
Time Surfing: Graphic History
Time Surfing: Experience History.
Historical Backdrop
In the late summer of 1804, the Corps of Discovery — the Lewis and Clark expedition — pushed up the Missouri River carrying President Jefferson’s orders: find a route west, and tell every tribe they met that they now had a new “great father” in Washington. By late September the expedition reached the mouth of the Teton, or Bad, River — today’s Pierre, South Dakota — and ran straight into the Teton Sioux, the Lakota, who controlled river traffic and taxed every trader who came upstream.
Our subject is Private Pierre Cruzatte, a wiry, one-eyed French-Omaha waterman from St. Louis. Blind in the left eye and near-sighted in the right, he was still the best boatman on the river and was the expedition’s only interpreter that day, working a broken Omaha tongue and his hands against a language he barely knew.
Date/time and location: September 25, 1804 — 5:20 a.m., aboard the keelboat, anchored off a sandbar at the mouth of the Teton (Bad) River, present-day Pierre, South Dakota
You wake in the dark under a damp blanket on the starboard locker, hip bones aching against oak. River fog sits on the water so thick you can taste the mud in it. Below you the bilge stinks of stagnant water, rancid bear grease, wet rope, and the sour breath of thirty men who have not washed in a week. Somebody coughs. Somebody scratches lice. You swing your legs down, feel with your feet for the deck, and run your hands along the anchor cable the way you do every morning — checking the lay, checking the current, because your right eye can’t see fifty feet and your left eye sees nothing at all. The Missouri pulls hard and cold. Upriver, past the fog, dogs are barking in a Lakota camp you cannot see.
Date/time and location: September 25, 1804 — 6:40 a.m., the sandbar at the mouth of the Bad River
The fog burns off into a fair morning, wind out of the southeast. You take the red pirogue in, six strokes, and ground her bow in wet sand. The men haul the spare sail ashore and rig it on poles into an awning — a shade tent for the council. You drive the flagstaff butt into the sandbar with the flat of an axe and the flag goes up, limp, then filling. Sand gets into everything: your moccasins, your shirt, your teeth. Across the water on the far bank you can just make out movement — riders, small as flies to your one bad eye. You don’t need to see them clearly. You’ve heard from three Sioux boys who swam out to the boat two days ago that eighty lodges are camped just up this river.
Date/time and location: September 25, 1804 — 8:00 a.m., cook fire on the sandbar
Breakfast is hominy and salt pork boiled in river water, and the water is more sand than water. You eat standing, out of a tin cup, grease on your fingers, and wipe them on your leggings. The men talk low. Colter’s horse was stolen off the prairie yesterday by five Sioux and the captains told them plainly it was a bad way to begin. Two men have boils. One has the bloody flux and squats behind a driftwood pile with his blanket over his shoulders. Sergeant Ordway checks flints and tells the men their arms had best be clean today. You look at your own trade musket, its lock worn silver, and you think about how few of you there are.
Date/time and location: September 25, 1804 — 10:00 a.m., under the awning on the sandbar
Captain Lewis calls you over and asks, again, how much Sioux you have. You tell him the truth: almost none. Omaha, some. Your mother’s tongue, and the Sioux and the Omaha are enemies. Drouillard stands beside you and runs through hand signs — trade, friend, river, white man, chief — and you watch his fingers with your good eye and repeat them. Dorion, the man who could actually talk to these people, is three hundred miles behind you with the Yanktons. Lewis’s jaw sets. He says the words must be got across regardless. You nod. Inside, you know that half of what is said today will land wrong.
Date/time and location: September 25, 1804 — 11:00 a.m., the sandbar and the near shore
They come down off the grass in ones and twos and then in dozens. Men on foot with bows and short guns, boys running, women hanging back on the bank with children on their hips, all of them looking at the boat like it’s a floating house. You count what you can. Sixty warriors. Then a hundred. Behind them the smoke of eighty lodges up the Bad River. The captains put the men in dress uniform and march them in a line on the sand — a small, loud show of nothing much. You stand off to the side with your musket and count again, and the arithmetic doesn’t get better.
Date/time and location: September 25, 1804 — 12:00 noon, under the council awning
Three chiefs sit down under the canvas: Black Buffalo, big and calm; the Partisan, thick and sullen with black paint on half his face; and Buffalo Medicine, gray at the temples. The pipe goes around. The tobacco is harsh and the smoke stings your one good eye. Then Captain Lewis begins the speech — a new great father, peace among nations, trade coming up this river — and it comes to you. You give it in Omaha and in signs, hands moving, and you watch the chiefs’ faces and know you are handing them fragments. Black Buffalo’s eyes flick to the boat. The Partisan says something short and the young men behind him laugh. Nobody translates that for you.
Date/time and location: September 25, 1804 — 1:30 p.m., the council awning
