2005-02-08 - 8:38 a.m.
The Corps of Discovery needed horses in order to get beyond the Rocky Mountains, and contact with the Shoshone was necessary in order to secure them. And though confidence in his abilities was the spur that drove Lewis and—by extension—the expedition, at this critical moment his confidence became a detriment. “With regard to the Indians he was seeking, he neglected to think through his situation. He just blundered ahead on the unshakable and unacknowledged assumption that he was such an expert in handling Indians that when he met a Shoshone he would know instinctively what to do.”
That Captain Lewis did not think it was necessary to bring Sacagawea along to help make contact with her people is baffling. Up to that point she had proved a resourceful and even indispensable guide. She knew the area and remembered details of her earlier life. In fact, she had informed Clark “that the expedition’s camp was precisely on the spot where the Shoshones had been camped five years ago when a raiding party of Hidatsas discovered them. The Shoshones had retreated three miles upriver and hidden in a wood. But the Hidatsas had found and routed them, killing four men, four women, and a number of boys, and making prisoners of four boys and all the remaining women, including Sacagawea.” Lewis notes in his journal that Sacagawea seems unmoved by the experience: “I cannot discover that she shews any immotion of sorrow in recollecting this event… or of joy in being again restored to her native country; if she has enough to eat and a few trinkets to wear I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere.”
It is remarkable that Sacagawea—a girl still, after all, at the age of sixteen—should have been possessed of such rigid self-control. But no doubt she had acquired it as a matter of survival. Just as remarkable, though in a less complimentary way, is the fact that Lewis, “who could be so observant about so many things, including the feelings and point of view of his men, could be so unobservant about Sacagawea’s situation. A slave, one of only two in the party, [the other being Clark’s slave, York,] she was also the only Indian, the only mother, the only woman, the only teen-aged person. Small wonder she kept such a tight grip on her emotions.”
In any event, Lewis set off with a small party without her. “If he ever interviewed Sacagawea about her people, he didn’t consider it important enough to put into his journal. If he ever asked her what the country beyond the Divide was like, he didn’t write about it. Clark’s asking her how to say ‘white man’ in Shoshone was the full extent of the captains’ interrogation of the most valuable intelligence source they had available to them. That Lewis did not bring her along on the most important mission of his life is inexplicable.”
First contact occurred the morning of August 11, 1805. Lewis, squinting through his telescope, related later that he saw “an Indian on horse back about two miles distant coming down the plain toward us.” When they were about a mile apart, the Indian stopped. “Lewis pulled his blanket from his pack, threw it into the air, and spread it on the ground, which he understood to be a signal of friendship. Unfortunately, ‘this signal had not the desired effect, he still kept his position.’ He was glancing from side to side. It seemed to Lewis that he was viewing [them] ‘with an air of suspicion.’
"Of course he was. The Indian was, probably, a teen-ager out on a scout, curious… but cautious, brought up to fear all strangers… Coming at him were four armed men. How could he not be suspicious? Especially since the Shoshones had just suffered a serious loss of people and horses from a Blackfoot raid.”
Undeterred, Lewis spread out the supply of trade goods he had brought along and, leaving behind his rifle, advanced. “The Indian [sat] upon his horse, and watched, until Lewis was within two hundred yards. At that point, he turned his horse and began to move off slowly. Desperate, Lewis called in as loud a voice as he could command, ‘tab-ba-bone,’ repeatedly.” But the Indian was having none of it. At 150 yards, Lewis repeated ‘tab-ba-bone,’ held up some trinkets and peeled back his shirt sleeve to show his white skin. But as he recounts, these efforts had not the desired effect, for at one hundred yards, the Indian “suddenly turned his hose about, gave him the whip, leaped the creek and disappeared in the willow brush in an instant and with him vanished all my hopes of obtaining horses for the present.”
What Captain Lewis could not know, even if he had been of a disposition to suspect it, is that he had just initiated a chain of events that might well have doomed the entire expedition.
(Quoted excerpts taken from “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West” by Stephen E. Ambrose)
