(This is the sixth in a series of blog posts from the 110-day, cross-country odyssey of Sonomans Bill and Lori Hutchinson. The Hutchinsons have returned but their columns continue.)
Where would we be without Thomas Jefferson? He foxed Napoleon out of what was then called Louisiana and thereby doubled the landmass of our young republic at a stroke, adding the entire watershed of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers all the way to the Continental Divide.
But what exactly had we purchased? Nobody exactly knew. So Thomas Jefferson turned to his secretary and mentee, a former Army captain whom he had known since adolescence.
“Meriwether, how would you like to round up some fellows and go check it out?”
Meriwether Lewis in turn wrote a letter to his former commanding officer, whom he had not seen in seven years, and solicited his co-captaincy of the Corps of Discovery. William Clark signed on by return post.
How I envy them, two robust frontiersmen the approximate ages of my children today, paddling up the Missouri River with their crew to see and record what only the Sioux and Crows and Mandans – and the odd French-Canadian trappers – had seen before them. Prairie dogs. Buffalo herds whose numbers they estimated in the hundreds of thousands. The grizzly bear.
They launched from the village of St. Louis in the spring of 1804, and by late fall reached a settlement of Mandan Indians in what is now North Dakota. There they erected a palisaded fort to winter over as the river turned to ice. They enjoyed friendly relations with the natives, whose population there exceeded that of Washington, D.C., and when the Indians learned that Lewis had rudimentary doctoring skills, they solicited his treatment for ills and wounds.
On one of those frozen winter nights, a runner came. A squaw was in labor and unable to deliver. Please come. Lewis went, assisted in the delivery and changed history. The squaw was not a Mandan woman but a Shoshone adolescent, kidnapped as a girl by a raiding party to the Rocky Mountains some years back and recently sold, or given or gambled away, to a French-Canadian trapper by the name of Toussaint Charbonneau whose child she struggled now to bear. Her name was Sacagawea. Charbonneau named her son Jean Baptiste.
When the river melted in the spring of 1805, Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau to accompany them westward, but it was not Charbonneau they needed, it was Sacagawea. During the dark winter months, the Mandans told them that they would need horses to cross the Rockies, and that the only tribe they would encounter at the headwaters of the Missouri would be the Shoshones. They needed a Shoshone horse-trading translator, and this teen-age girl with an infant at her breast was their sole candidate.
When the ice broke and they started paddling, Sacagawea was perhaps 15 and her infant perhaps six months. The two of them made it with the Corps of Discovery through the Rocky Mountains at Lemhi Pass, where starvation nearly ended them, and then down the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean, where they wintered for a second time into the spring of 1806.
On the way home, they made good time – they knew the way – and by July they were bending their paddles down the Yellowstone River near present-day Billings, Montana, when William Clark spotted a rocky mound on the right bank. He stopped there, climbed the promontory, and chiseled his name and the date on the face of the rock where his autograph remains to this day.
William Clark’s nickname for Sacagawea’s toddler was Pompey – the Roman consul who ruled all and especially Clark’s heart. Little Pomp. He named that rock Pompey’s Pillar and some years later, when Sacagawea asked him to adopt the boy, he did.
William Clark served as the expedition’s cartographer, and the map he created from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia, with sextant readings and dead reckoning, was accurate to within 40 miles. Upon his return to St. Louis, Jefferson asked him to sign on as Indian Agent for Louisiana; the upriver natives trusted this ruddy explorer as no other.
And, somehow, along the way, he formed a bond with the baby who traveled with him.
Pompey’s Pillar.
William Clark.
I wish I knew him.
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