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The president used the word "object" to mean "objective. Perhaps the most important of those objects is to tell a familiar western journey story in a new way. I wanted to give readers a different angle of vision, another way to appreciate a story that had grown too familiar and perhaps a bit stale. Simply put, Lewis and Clark among the Indians asks readers to get off the expedition's boats and get on the bank. What had always been seen through the eyes of Lewis and Clark needed to be experienced through the eyes of native people.

By shifting points of view and introducing new speakers I hoped to tell a richer and more compelling story, one that would reflect the diversity of the West itself. That was my intention. I soon found that the telling involved a research task of considerable size and complexity.

The task was more than thinking out a new research design. It involved enlarging the Lewis and Clark story in particular and the western exploration story in general. Writing history is always an act of the imagination. What I needed to do was reimagine the expedition and the western worlds through which it moved. Donald Jackson's magisterial Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition changed all that for those who were paying attention.

Jackson put it with characteristic bluntness: "It is no longer useful to think of the Lewis and Clark Expedition as the personal story of two men. Their journey. Challenged by Jackson's words and our correspondence, I went in search of an even larger cast, one that acted on a stage that stretched up the Missouri, across the mountains, down the Columbia, and on to the shores of the Pacific.

If this journey story was to have any cultural meanings within the larger American experience, it needed a telling that paid attention to native aims and minds. Enlarging the expedition story called for more actors on a wider stage; it also meant broadening the range of sources and methodologies from those typically used in writing history. Lewis and Clark among the Indians drew heavily on the available anthropological and archaeological literature, especially the site reports from digs along the Missouri and Columbia Rivers.

Here I had the good fortune to meet W. Raymond Wood, one of the foremost northern Great Plains archaeologists. He introduced me to unpublished materials, including specialized studies done for the National Park Service. From there the research spread out to formal, academic tribal histories and the invaluable oral traditions preserved in many different ways.

But in all of this I repeatedly came back to the expedition's journals. Don Jackson once called the expedition's journal keepers "the writingest explorers" in American history. The biases and prejudices are surely there; but so are the native voices. The journals name the names and mark out the places. And it is more than simply names and places. At a certain level writing history is an act of rescue.

Historians rescue and restore lost voices. The Lewis and Clark journals make that kind of rescue and restoration possible. Again and again Corps of Discovery journal keepers recorded what native people told them about everything from plants and animals to geography and relations with tribal neighbors. It is those voices that give depth and richness to the Lewis and Clark story. In the nearly twenty years since the publication of Lewis and Clark among the Indians interest has only grown in the expedition and its place in the history of the American West.

That fascination has been fueled by a tidal wave of books, television documentaries, guided tours, and museum exhibitions. The shared bicentennials of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Louisiana Purchase add that much more to a widespread enthusiasm for the Corps of Discovery and its journey. While many in the general public still cling to the notion of Jefferson's explorers as "captains courageous," historians have come to appreciate the expedition story as an emblematic moment in the larger history of the continent.

The central argument in Lewis and Clark among the Indians has gained considerable acceptance. Most who write about the expedition now acknowledge that native people were at the heart of the enterprise. Without those Indian voices and views the story is at best only half told. Some two decades later I would have said some things more forcefully. One of those would be the importance of Indians as explorers.

Just as Lewis and Clark explored the lives and cultures of native people, so too did Indians explore Jefferson's travelers and the things they carried with them. What happened from the Missouri to the Columbia was mutual discovery, shared moments of exploration encounter. Much of that discovery was done through the fog of confusion, misunderstanding, and ambiguity. But when Black Cat went to Fort Mandan inquiring about the expedition's "fashions," he was part of a Corps of Discovery far larger than Thomas Jefferson ever imagined.

Perhaps nothing has contributed more to Lewis and Clark scholarship over the past twenty years than the appearance of Gary E.

When I wrote Lewis and Clark among the Indians in the early s, only the atlas volume of the Moulton edition was available. My research was in the Reuben Gold Thwaites edition, with its reasonably reliable text but woefully inadequate annotations.

Had I started a bit later, my book would have benefited substantially from the comprehensive ethnographic and linguistic scholarship that informs the entire Moulton edition. Examples abound.

I would have more precisely located important Nez Perce and Columbia River villages and fishing camps. I would have had much more to say about the native use of medicinal plants and medical practices. Perhaps most important, I could have made use of the superb linguistic scholarship present in every Moulton volume.

On May 13, —the day the Corps of Discovery left its camp at Wood River—William Clark wrote that the expedition's "road across the continent" would take it through a "multitude of Indians.

He recognized something fundamental about his own journey and the larger American journey. The expedition was a diverse human community moving through the lands and lives of other communities.

This was no "tour of discovery" through an empty West. Lewis and Clark among the Indians is an attempt to tell that story. What has so often been recounted in terms of high adventure, national triumph, and male courage needs to be told again as a complex human story. Lewis and Clark among the Indians aims at overturning the old narrative and replacing it with one more subtle, more nuanced, and, I hope, more compelling. I remain persuaded that this story and its many voices has much to offer as we struggle to understand our troubled past and often-uncertain present.

This larger Corps of Discovery is a reminder that we are all pilgrims on the way, making our way by the kindness of strangers. The Lewis and Clark expedition has long symbolized the westering impulse in American life. No other exploring party has so fully captured the imagination of ordinary citizens or the attention of scholars.

In ways that defy rational explanation, the picture of Lewis and Clark struggling up the Missouri and across the mountains to the great western sea continues to stir our national consciousness. Books, highway markers, museum displays, and a foundation dedicated to preserving the Lewis and Clark trail all bear witness to a fascination that time has only deepened.

Over the generations since the expedition returned from the Pacific, its achievement and significance for America heading west have undergone constant reappraisal.

From an early emphasis on the journey as an epic of physical endurance and courage, Lewis and Clark have emerged in this century as pioneer western naturalists, cartographers, and diplomats. Thomas Jefferson, the man William Clark once called "that great Chaructor the Main Spring" of the expedition, would have heartily endorsed an evaluation of the Corps of Discovery that included sharp minds as well as strong bodies.

And Jefferson would have reminded us that his explorers were part of that long encounter between Euro-Americans and native Americans. In its daily affairs and official actions, the expedition passed through, changed, and was in turn changed by countless native lives. In the simplest terms, this book is about what happens when people from different cultural persuasions meet and deal with each other.

The Lewis and Clark expedition was an integral and symbolic part of what James Axtell has aptly called "the American encounter. This book is not a retelling of the familiar Lewis and Clark adventure. But readers will find moments of high drama not previously well known or clearly understood. This book is not an attempt to dress up exploration history with feathers and paint to satisfy current political needs. Nor is it a stitching together of capsule tribal histories and ethnographies.

Finally, readers need not expect a catalog of every ethnographic observation recorded in the journals of the expedition. What this book does offer is something new for the history of exploration in general and Lewis and Clark literature in particular—a full-scale contact study of the official and personal relations between the explorers and the Indians.

In , Bernard De Voto wrote that "a dismaying amount of our history has been written without regard to the Indians. Lewis and Clark among the Indians is an effort to meet DeVoto's challenge by looking at the very explorers he wrote about with such passion and perception.

Lewis and Clark were indeed what William Goetzmann has labeled them, "diplomats in buckskin," but they and their party amounted to something more as well. The Corps of Discovery was a human community living in the midst of other human communities.

The word among in the title was chosen to suggest that sense of living together. The daily dealings of Indians and explorers touched the full range of action and emotion. What is treated in these pages runs the gamut from high policy to personal liaisons, from the careful collection of ethnographic data to the sharing of food and songs around a blazing fire.

Every historian must first come to terms with his sources. Because the thoughts and actions of men like Weuche, Yelleppit, and Coboway are as central to the story of the expedition as the plans and designs of the explorers themselves, it is important to note the evidence and method used in this study. Donald Jackson once described Lewis and Clark as "the writingest explorers of their time.

Despite the kinds of obvious cultural biases that scholars have long since learned to deal with in documentary analysis, the Lewis and Clark records provide a store of information about Indians unequaled in the literature of exploration. When joined to other contemporary evidence produced by the likes of David Thompson, Alexander Henry the Younger, Pierre-Antoine Tabeau, and Prince Maxmilian of Wied, the historical record is rich indeed.

But by itself that written documentary record cannot fully explain the intricate patterns of encounter that bound Indians and explorers together. To that evidence this study brings the findings of anthropology and archaeology. Site reports and culture element distributions are used here not as fashionable window dressing but as a vital means to give depth and meaning to the behavior of native people.

Tribal history is here meant to suggest context in human action. Ethnohistory has been usefully defined by Mildred Wedel and Raymond DeMallie as the critical examination of written evidence in the light of anthropological perspectives. This book is exploration ethnohistory, a deliberate effort to probe the complexity of Indian-white encounters in North America by examining a memorable venture that has come to represent the westward movement.

The Lewis and Clark drama had actors drawn from both sides of the cultural divide. If the expedition was what the western photographer Ingvard Eide called it, "the American odyssey," then all the argonauts—those who ventured to the sea and those who watched in wonder—must have their voices heard.

The Lewis and Clark expedition has come to mean something special if indefinable in our national history. All the participants in that odyssey require their measure so that the story of the expedition and the nation not be half-told.

This book is about that measure and those voices. Meriwether Lewis once called the expedition "a darling project of mine. Thanking friends, colleagues, and companions for support, encouragement, and criticism is the most pleasant task any writer can undertake. This book began when I read John Allen's brilliant Passage through the Garden and wondered if anyone had made a study of the Corps of Discovery and native peoples.

My earliest research on explorers and Indians was aided and abetted by two institutions—the Youngstown State University Research Council and Mike Faklis, gifted bookman and supplier of endlessly delightful volumes.

As that research progressed I steadily incurred debts that demand at least interest paid here. Five minutes with John Ewers cleared up a whole knot of Blackfeet questions.

I owe a special debt to Ray Wood for anthropological services rendered. Gary Moulton, editor of the new Lewis and Clark Journals project, has been both friend and long-distance colleague. Anyone pursuing Lewis and Clark must eventually encounter the wonderful people who make up the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation. Among those in the foundation who gave me support and encouragement were Irving Anderson, E.

Margaret Carl took drafts filled with strange names and distant places and made sense of them all. If this book did not already have a dedication promised long ago, it would be sent with affection and thanks to three extraordinary people.

From the beginning of this venture, Donald Jackson has read each chapter with the kind of critical eye for both style and substance that only he has. Don's enthusiasm prodded me on when several chapters got stalled on the wrong side of the Great Divide. Jim Axtell was part of my life long before it was invaded by Lewis and Clark.

His patient, perceptive reading of the chapters has meant more than I can tell. That both of us appear in each other's acknowledgments, books, and articles only hints at what more than ten years of conversations and letters have yielded. But no one has lived more with this enterprise than my wife, Jeanne. She braved five weeks of demanding dirt camping in the summer of as we retraced the Lewis and Clark route. Her faith never wavered; my gratitude is equally unwavering.

All of these friends share in what is good between these covers, but not in the shortcomings, which are mine. The Indian relations of the Lewis and Clark expedition began long before the explorers nosed their boats into the Missouri current and headed upriver. Thomas Jefferson knew that as his explorers moved over the visible world of rivers, mountains, and plains, they would also pass through a more important world—a sometimes invisible universe of Indian politics and European rivalries.

He grasped what so often escaped others, that the American West was a crowded wilderness. Although nudged by reading Alexander Mackenzie, Jefferson did not need the dour Scot to tell him that lands from St. Louis to the great western sea were neither empty nor unclaimed. The political and economic face of the land had already been transformed by a generation of intense competition between tribal peoples and agents of Spain, France, and Great Britain.

The president understood at least the outlines and implications of that struggle and the place of a latecoming American republic in it. If the Lewis and Clark expedition was to be successful, whether for science, commerce, or statecraft, it would need to navigate through troubled Indian waters.

From the beginning, Jefferson sought to fashion an expedition capable of gathering valuable information about western Indians while living at peace with them.

That search became plain as he drafted instructions for his young secretary, Meriwether Lewis. The president loved questionnaires. He used them to explore new areas of knowledge and then to organize what he had learned. The ethnographic queries covered nearly every aspect of Indian life, including languages, customs, occupations, diseases, and morals.

Where did those very precise questions come from? The traditional answer has been that the Indian objectives pursued by Lewis and Clark reflected Jefferson's lifelong fascination with native American cultures. But there was more than one mind and one set of motives behind the expedition's Indian questions and its general policy toward native people.

Early in Jefferson began to write friends both in and out of government asking their aid and advice for his western enterprise. Benjamin Smith Barton, and Dr.

Benjamin Rush, asking each to prepare some thoughts "in the lines of botany, zoology, or of Indian history which you think most worthy of inquiry and observation. Even before his consultants submitted their questions, Jefferson began to prepare a preliminary draft of the instructions. By mid-April he was ready to circulate it among certain cabinet members for their responses.

The remarks of Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin focused on western geography and the future expansion of the United States. Later in his career Gallatin made a major contribution in collecting and systematizing Indian material in his "Synopsis of the Indian Tribes.

This important member of Jefferson's official family has not received much attention from students of western exploration. Lincoln, an able New England lawyer and a skillful Republican politician, understood that the expedition served many purposes.

Lincoln's April 17 letter to Jefferson suggests that the early draft of instructions he saw contained very little about Indians. To remedy this deficiency, Lincoln urged Jefferson to include questions about tribal religions, native legal practice, concepts of property ownership, and Indian medical procedures. Although Jefferson was acquainted with smallpox inoculation, it appears that Lincoln was the first to suggest that Lewis take some cowpox matter along to administer to the Indians.

If they were to have extensive contact with whites, they needed to be protected against smallpox. Dead Indians could not participate in an American trade network and dying natives could only blame the explorers for spreading disease. The attorney general's suggestions were of major importance, although he made them more out of political expediency than scientific curiosity. Lincoln was very sensitive to Federalist opposition to the journey, and indeed to any American westward expansion.

He realized that the administration would need to justify the expedition on the high ground of science if it failed. Levi Lincoln's helpful comments sharpened Jefferson's focus on Indians. That focus was further enlarged and refined in May when Benjamin Rush gave Lewis a detailed list of ethnographic queries. That document was divided into three sections, with medical concerns predictably taking first place. He asked the explorers to record Indian eating, sleeping, and bathing habits as well as native diseases and remedies.

The Philadelphia savant wanted to know when Indians married, how long children were breast fed, and how long they lived. Rush even urged Lewis to find time to check Indian pulse rates morning, noon, and night both before and after they ate. Rush's interests went well beyond medicine, encompassing Indian customs and values as well. The second part of Rush's list included four questions touching on crime, suicide, and intoxication.

His third section probed native American worship practices, sacred objects, and burial rituals. Like so many other European and American scientists, Rush was fascinated by Indian religions. Moreover, he believed, as did many of his contemporaries, that studies of Indian languages and religious ceremonies might prove or disprove a very old and persistent notion about the origin of native people.

A widespread academic theory held that Indians might constitute one of the lost tribes of the children of Israel. If the Mandans were misplaced Welshmen, as so many thought, why not see if there were any Jewish Indians in the West? By June Jefferson had before him all the suggestions from fellow scientists and government officials. He also had delivered in January the confidential message to Congress that justified the expedition on grounds of extending the Indian trade.

He could draw on instructions written for the abortive Michaux expedition a decade before. Those questions covered everything from language and law to trade and technology. The explorers were to record what Indians wore, what they ate, how they made a living, and what they believed in. Jefferson's reasons for converting two army officers and at least some of their companions into ethnographers were central to the many purposes of the journey. One of those aims linked exploration and business enterprise to national expansion.

Finding the passage to the Pacific was supposed to yield financial rewards. But he was intent on expanding American commercial influence.

Jefferson knew that fur traders and other eager entrepreneurs needed to know about future markets and sources of supply. He envisioned western America as a vast trade empire to rival a similar system already being forged by agents of the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company.

If the United States was to compete in the great western space race, Indians needed to be wooed away from John Bull's Canadian traders and written into the ledger books of Uncle Sam's St.

Louis merchants. But there was something else behind Jefferson's requirement that the Lewis and Clark expedition be an ethnographic enterprise—something beyond sea otters and beaver pelts. Lewis and Clark were to gather material for another empire—the empire of the mind, the kingdom of knowledge.

Like his friends at the American Philosophical Society, Jefferson wanted the expedition to make a lasting contribution toward the scientific understanding of North America. That was what he meant when he described the venture as a "literary expedition.

Finally, and not to be overlooked, there was Jefferson's vision of the future of the American republic. He believed that accurate information about Indians was essential in order to shape a peaceful environment for both peoples. The desire for fact to replace speculation about native Americans was nothing new in Jefferson's mind. From boyhood he had had a passionate interest in things Indian. Ethnography could make federal policy better informed and hence more humane.

With an optimism based more on Enlightenment faith than American reality, Jefferson assumed that a benevolent government would use such information to civilize and Christianize Indians. Whether or not native people would welcome the spiritual and cultural blessings of European civilization was, of course, the unasked question.

Ethnographical research was neither the prime nor the sole duty of the expedition. Jefferson wanted his explorers to take their scientific tasks seriously as they collected information and artifacts, but he had much more in mind.

As representatives of the United States, Lewis and Clark were expected to pursue the Indian policy goals of the republic. By those goals for the tribes east of the Mississippi were quite clear. Reflecting long colonial experience, federal Indian policy sought to acquire native lands at low cost while urging tribal people to shuck off hunting and breechcloths for plows and trousers.

Couched in the language of Christian philanthropy, Jeffersonian Indian policy pursued national expansion with single-minded zeal.

But in the West of the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson was less certain of both policy and strategy. Those new lands were for traders, not white settlers. They might even provide refuge for native people dispossessed by the farming frontier. Jefferson's different approaches to tribes east and west of the Mississippi are plain in the language he used in addressing delegations from the various regions. In speaking to eastern delegations the president always coupled his program for civilization with land acquisition.

To western delegations, including those organized by Lewis and Clar, trade was the prime focus. When Jefferson drafted instructions for Lewis in , negotiations with France were underway but the outcome was yet unclear. For that reason the diplomatic objectives enumerated in the directions for Lewis focused on trade while tactfully ignoring questions of power and sovereignty.

The expedition was ordered to acquaint Indians with "the position, extent, character, peaceable and commercial disposition of the United States, and of our dispositions to a commercial intercourse with them. Jefferson knew that attractive goods and suitable post locations were essential in the face of powerful British competition. For that reason Lewis was told to confer with Indians on "the points most convenient as mutual emporiums" as well as "the articles of most desirable interchange for them and us.

Jefferson expected that Lewis and Clark would hold frequent conferences with Indians. But he also knew that the rigorous demands of travel made extensive talks impossible. Therefore Lewis was instructed to organize delegations of chiefs and elders to be sent to Washington. Just as colonial Indian agents once sent Mohawks and Cherokees to London, Jefferson assumed that Omahas and Sioux in the Federal City would be properly impressed with the wealth and power of the new nation.

And in an afterthought whose origins looked back to the earliest days of Indian-European encounter, the president hoped the expedition might find some young Indians willing to be "brought up with us, and taught such arts as may be useful to them. The creation of Indian delegations and a search for good trade sites were as close as Jefferson got in June to giving his explorers explicitly imperial and political directives. Although his commitment to an expanding nation was already plain, Jefferson was not about to give Lewis and Clark instructions that violated territorial bounds as they existed before the Louisiana Purchase.

The spread of American commercial influence would be quite sufficient. But once the purchase was diplomatic reality, announcing American sovereignty to native people became a vital part of the expedition's Indian policy. Parts of Jefferson's January 22, , letter to Lewis can be seen as an appendix to the original instructions. Lewis and Clark were now formally to extend American power up the Missouri and toward the mountains. Jefferson's own words indicate how much the diplomatic role of the expedition had expanded since the summer of Being now become sovereigns of the country, without however any diminution of the Indian rights of occupancy we are authorized to propose to them in direct terms the institution of commerce with them.

It will now be proper you should inform those through whose country you will pass, or whom you may meet, that their late fathers the Spaniards have agreed to withdraw all their troops from all the waters and country of the Mississippi and Missouri, that they have surrendered to us all their subjects Spanish and French settled there, and all their posts and lands: that henceforward we become their fathers and friends, and that we shall endeavor that they shall have no cause to lament the change.

The expedition's success ultimately depended on friendly relations with the Indians. Jefferson was not about to unleash undisciplined adventurers to ride roughshod over them.

Hostility between explorers and Indians could only endanger lives and weaken American influence. Jefferson knew firsthand what historian Charles Royster has written about American army officers in the late eighteenth century.

Those men "saw threats and slights everywhere and reacted with fury. Lewis," wrote Lincoln, "he will be much more likely, in case of difficulty, to push too far, than to recede too soon" Jefferson saw the wisdom in Lincoln's comments and changed the sentence in the instructions that once contained the phrase "certain destruction" to read instead "we value too much the lives of our citizens to offer them to probable destruction.

But he did not want the bumps and bruises of wilderness travel and encounters with strangers to provoke fatal overreaction. Jefferson understood the hazards. What he feared was that after months of hardship and frustration, some small incident might touch off a sudden burst of violence. Lewis and Clark were not to court self-destruction nor were they to wreak destruction on others. Survival would mean at least partial success; a glorious but futile death whether by accident or at the hands of an unknown foe would spell real failure.

Colonial experience taught that fruitful diplomacy and peaceful relations with native people required the exchange of gifts at each meeting. French and English forest diplomats learned that lesson early and did their best to offer goods of substance and quality. While some Europeans may have perceived those gifts as bribes to ensure compliance with treaty terms, heaps of blankets, pots, and guns meant something else to the Indians.

In the act of reciprocal gift giving, different peoples symbolized their concern for each other. Neglecting to give gifts meant failure to "brighten the chain of friendship" that bound Europeans and Indians together. Giving and receiving soothed hurt feelings and reestablished broken relations. By the time Jefferson created the Corps of Discovery, gifts were a recognized part of the protocol of Indian diplomacy. To venture up the Missouri without a carefully selected store of goods was to challenge foolishly the river gods.

Lewis knew the gift-giving tradition and early in made note of funds to be set aside for presents for the Indians. In notes made on what might be obtained as trade items, Lewis demonstrated a sure grasp of frontier economics.

Blue glass beads headed his list of most sought-after objects. It is probable that Lewis learned from sources in the Pacific Northwest fur trade that those beads were "far more valued than the white beads of the same manufacture and answer[ed] all the purposes of money. Axes, tomahawks, moccasin awls, and camp kettles rounded out Lewis's catalog of high priorities. In addition to those items, Lewis planned to purchase substantial quantities of wampum, tobacco, and textiles.

Vermilion face paint, one hundred cheap rings with glass stones, and a number of pairs of scissors completed his stock of essentials. Using the services of Israel Whelan, purveyor of public supplies, and General William Irvine, superintendent of the Schuylkill Arsenel, Lewis was able to amass a substantial outfit of Indian goods.

From merchants in and around Philadelphia came everything from 4, sewing needles and brooches to 8 brass kettles and 2, fishhooks. There were stocks of hawks bells, thimbles, ruffled shirts, and eleven dozen of those red-handled knives. Lewis was to discover only later that there were not nearly enough blue beads or brass buttons, an oversight that cost the expedition dearly among the Nez Perce and Chinookan Indians.

And at Jefferson's direct command there were two corn grinders. They were there, one might guess, for use in teaching native farmers how to make pone and grits. All of the gifts stowed in the expedition's luggage for transport to St. Louis had a purpose beyond diplomatic protocol. Those items, everything from ivory combs to calico shirts, represented what the United States offered to potential trading partners.

As Jefferson repeated to every delegation of western Indians, Americans sought commerce, not land. Lewis and Clark were on the road to show American wares. The expedition was the mercantile and hardware display case for a trade empire on the move. Moccasin awls and brass kettles were as much symbols of American power as the medals and flags destined for headmen and warriors. Few of those manufactured products were new to Indians, but the promise of regular supplies and fair prices was bound to have some result.

The Industrial Revolution had come to the Missouri Valley half a century before and it was equally well established on the Northwest coast. But Lewis and Clark, surrounded by bright mirrors and yards of red flannel, offered more than goods. They proposed membership in a system with well-established posts and dependable delivery schedules.

And always in the background, visible but rarely mentioned, were guns and ammunition. Lewis and Clark did not carry a special supply of weapons to offer for trade or as gifts, but they were not reluctant to promise firearms to potential customers and allies.

Although Jefferson and his explorers honestly pursued intertribal peace as a requisite to trade, arming friends seemed equally reasonable. What all those gifts represented was, in fact, the fundamental element in Jefferson's western Indian policy.

Trade and diplomacy, commerce and sovereignty were all parts of the engine that drove American expansion and guided the Lewis and Clark expedition. On a snowy day at the end of December , William Clark moved into his hut at what has come to be known as Camp Dubois.

Situated on Wood River across the Mississippi from St. Louis in present-day Illinois, the camp provided the Corps of Discovery with a convenient place to prepare for the first season of exploration.

The winter of — at Camp Dubois was more than a time to fit an odd lot of soldiers and frontiersmen to the discipline Lewis and Clark believed essential for the expedition's success. The Wood River interlude allowed explorers time to gather and evaluate a large amount of information about the Missouri River Indians.

That material, coming from St. Louis sources and from Jefferson himself constituted a crash course in Middle and Upper Missouri tribes: their numbers, locations, and possible reactions to the expedition. No other city could have provided Jefferson's explorers with such a range and quality of information about the Indians. The currents of the Mississippi and Missouri brought to St.

Louis not only pelts and skins but a vast store of knowledge and lore about the natives. The explorers needed to enter quickly that St. Louis world and tap its resources. Louis and were anxious to expand their influence under the new American regime. The Chouteaus and their circle of friends and relatives quickly sought out the explorers.

Social calls at Pierre's house combined good food, friendly company, and valuable information. Clark went so far as to boast that the Chouteau house became a virtual Corps of Discovery outpost during the winter. The Chouteau connection brought Lewis and Clark into contact with the city's best-informed merchants. There was so much information available that Lewis found it necessary to draft a form letter to give the data some structure.

As he explained to Jefferson, "I have proposed many quiries under sundry heads to the best informed persons I have met with at St. Louis and within the vicinity of that place; these gentlemen have promised me answers in due time. While most of the questions referred to white settlers and their current economic and political situation, there was room to comment on Indians and trade matters.

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