Blazing West, the Journal of Augustus Pelletier, the Lewis and Clark Expedition Read online

  June 2, 1804

  We reached the Osage River yesterday. The Captains have ordered men to cut down all the trees so Captain Lewis can make his special observations. He gets out there with some instrument but it ain’t a telescope. He peers through it at the sun and then at the moon, too, and then every few minutes he calls, “Mark” and Captain Clark looks at a very large watch. I think I heard them calling it a cro-no-meter. This all has something to do with mapping, but I am not sure what. This is the problem with being a shadow. There is only so much you can learn. Captain Clark is a much better boatman than Captain Lewis. So he is usually on the boat and Lewis just seems to love walking over the land looking at things and drawing.

  June 4, 1804

  Good hunting. Drouillard and his men are bringing in deer every day. But it doesn’t take long for them to be eaten up — not with about forty-five hungry men. Mosquitoes are the devil’s own round here. The men got themselves plenty of “voyageurs grease” made from tallow and buffalo fat. I could kick myself for forgetting to bring some of Mingo’s. I think I’m providing food for every dang mosquito west of the Mississippi. My ear healed up fine. I don’t know what it looks like now, as I haven’t a looking glass. Feels kind of nubbly, like it has been chewed on by some critter.

  June 6, 1804

  I been stretching well out ahead of the Corps and even of Drouillard. I think we’re well into Indian country. Found some of their paintings on a big hunk of limestone rock. Just as I’m squatting down studying the marks that they gouged out and painted in with some red and blue paint, I heard a low, fast hiss. By God if I hadn’t practically squatted into a nest of rattlesnakes. I ask you, does one Augustus Pelletier have hominy for brains? I should have known better and watched my step. I just about jumped twenty feet straight up into the air.

  June 9, 1804

  Prairie of Arrows

  We’re in a stretch of river all cut up with small channels. They call this piece of the country Prairie of Arrows. At one point around here the river narrowed to less than a thousand feet across. Hard navigating. They came close to stoving in the keelboat. Francis and Pierre are their best boatmen, so they watch for whirlpools, snags, and do a lot of the steering. One of them is always at the helm. They met up with some French trappers yesterday, but I met up with them a day earlier. I had two bits in my pocket and done bought me some voyageurs grease off them. It was risky. They might say something about me to the Corps. But I can’t stand these mosquitoes another minute. Lot of drifting timber and shoal water in this part of the river. They fetched up on a snag this afternoon, then crossed over to an island to camp tonight. I’m here on the north bank. Glad to be here and not smell their dang meat roasting.

  June 12, 1804

  More French trappers. Looks to me like they’re giving a ride to one of them up the river.

  June 13, 1804

  I was able to camp real close tonight. Being downwind of them it carried their voices and of course the juicy smells of deer roasting. But I could also hear them. This trapper who they picked up is old Dorion. He used to come through St. Charles all the time. They’re taking him back as far as the Sioux nation, the Yankton Sioux who live above the Platte River. His wife is a Yankton, and I guess he’s pretty thick with the chiefs. From what I could hear they hope that Dorion can persuade some chiefs to go to Washington to meet President Jefferson.

  June 14, 1804

  Dang if the ticks, gnats, and mosquitoes aren’t unbearable thick out here. They fly up your nose. Can’t put the voyageurs grease up my nose else I suffocate. Some choice. Suffocate to death or be bitten to death.

  June 17, 1804

  Well, this is one night when I am glad I am not a member of the Corps of Discovery. They are all as sick as dogs. Must have had some bad meat or water. They are all out in the bushes with the dysentery. Except for that, the country around here is beautiful. These men puking their guts out don’t add to the scenery. Lots of timber on the south side of the river. Lots of elk, deer, bear.

  June 20, 1804

  I have set myself to studying Captain Lewis. I’m going to learn him like you learn a book. Then one of these days when we’re so far out he can’t send me back, I’m going to go up and just tell him I want to join and he ain’t going to look at me like a little kid hardly no bigger than a feed bag. I began my studies this morning as I shadowed him along the north bank of the river. Within one hour he stopped fifteen times at various plants and opened up his notebook and wrote. He would then either yank up the whole plant or take a sample of several of its leaves, blossoms, or stems, and put them in a bag. He carries another bag for the small game he shoots. I know this game is not for eating — why would he shoot only one grouse that would hardly feed two men when he could have shot a dozen? Nothing escapes this man’s eyes. He picks up rocks! I even saw him grab a bug, I think. He had something fluttering between his thumb and first finger that was smaller than a butterfly but bigger than a ladybug.

  June 22, 1804

  I believe that we are almost four hundred miles up the Missouri River now. My study of Captain Lewis continues. I saw him in camp two nights ago bring out that grouse he’d shot and show it to Captain Clark. I could not hear what they were saying, but Captain Clark went and got paper and drawing materials and set up the bird to make a sketch. So now I know that Clark must draw better than Lewis. I am a pretty fair sketcher myself.

  June 23, 1804

  Captain Lewis killed two terns today and measured them before putting them in his bag. He has never done this before. I have seen him measure birds he has killed back at the camp. I wonder if he is thinking that something about the bird’s size changes a few hours after its death. Maybe it shrinks up or something?

  June 24, 1804

  Sometimes when I am shadowing Captain Lewis, he seems lost in deep, sad thoughts. Sometimes I think I hear him talking to himself. Captain Lewis does not smile much and he is much quieter than Captain Clark. You can always hear Captain Clark’s voice around camp. His laughter laces through the night and dodges the wind. I do not believe I have ever once heard Captain Meriwether Lewis laugh out loud.

  June 25, 1804

  I stretched on out ahead today. Made good time in spite of the wind. I just sliced across it. The keelboat and the canoes couldn’t do that. Anyhow, I done seen the mouth of a new river. I think it’s the one they been talking about. The Kansas.

  June 27, 1804

  At the juncture of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers

  Well, this beats all. You ever seen a man weigh water? I did this morning. First Captain Lewis dunked a bucket into the Missouri and weighed it on this scale they haul around. Then he sent someone to fetch a bucket from where the Kansas joins the Missouri and told him to go well downstream. It’s one of the privates. I think his name is Reuben, and he came back with it and they weighed it. The Missouri weighs more. I could have told them that. What with the freight of mud and stuff in that water it was bound to weigh more. Captain Clark then went over to the Kansas and measured its breadth. It stands 230 yards wide, compared with the Missouri’s 500 yards at this point.

  June 29, 1804

  It’s about two o’clock in the morning, and I don’t quite believe what I am seeing. I got a good vantage point from up here on a bluff. Two of the men on guard tonight, two privates, I think their names are John and Hugh, started tapping on the whiskey barrel. Every day the men are allowed one gill of whiskey. I have seen them get it now for the past month. Just one gill. Well, this fellow John comes over and says to Hugh, “Come on, Hugh. No one will notice. We deserve more. Just one!” Just one, my foot! Before you know it, they’ve gone tapped that barrel a dozen more times, each one. They are getting drunker by the minute.

  Later: Dang if they haven’t rousted the whole camp with their drunken, loutish talk. The sergeant-at-arms was just called and Captain Clark ordered them put under arrest. I heard him say there would be a trial. Meanwhile the
dawn is coming up all silver and pink. It’s a beauty because the sky is perfectly clear and there is a morning moon. I could have told you Captain Lewis wants no part of this trial stuff. He snatched up his notebook and his collecting bag and walked out of camp. I followed him. I just have this sense about things. This feeling. I think this might be my day to join the Corps of Discovery. I think it is time to maybe step out of the shadows and into the light of this morning moon, and show them that I can be a stand-up sort of fellow, a stand-up member of the Corps of Discovery.

  June 30, 1804

  longitude 94.58 degrees west,

  latitude 39.55 degrees north,

  Missouri River, north bank

  I am a shadow no more. I stepped into the light of this day in front of Captain Meriwether Lewis, first captain of the United States Infantry and commanding captain of the Corps of Discovery, at 8:26 A.M. I know this exact time because, although I do not have a watch, Captain Lewis has three, including the cro-no-meter. Between 7:06 and the time I showed myself, Captain Lewis had measured the distance between the sun and that morning moon forty times. He measured it eight more times. I would hold the cro-no-meter for him, and when he said, “Mark” I would write down the times. He never even asked who I was until after the eighth time. When I first appeared before him, he did not seem surprised. He just said, “Hold this.” Those were the Captain’s first words to me. Then he said, “Can you write?” I said yes. He gave me his book and pencils and told me to write down the time as taken from the cro-no-meter when he called “Mark.” I now know what he is doing. The instrument he looks through is called a sextant. By fixing the height of a star or the sun or the moon above the horizon and measuring its angle and knowing the exact time, one can figure through mathematics something that is called the longitude and the latitude on earth, anywhere on earth. So through his calculations Captain Lewis, calm as a boiled egg, says we are at 94.58 degrees longitude west and 39.55 degrees latitude north. I think it is the most miraculous thing I have ever seen in my life. To think that numbers can do this! Captain Lewis and I then continued walking through the country, or “naturalizing,” as he calls it. I helped him lay out a bird he shot for measuring and wrote the numbers he called out for its wingspan and length in a book, the book he always carries. Then he took me back to camp. It was not perhaps the best of times to arrive, for they were just laying on lashes to the two privates who had been found guilty of drunkenness, fifty lashes to one, and one hundred to the other. But I’m here. You should have seen Francis Labiche and Pierre Cruzatte when I walked into camp. Would have thought they’d seen a ghost. “We’re more than two hundred miles from St. Charles!” Francis shouted. “How’d you get here?” “On my own blessed feet,” I said. But they both seemed genuinely glad to see me. So I’m here and I ain’t no ghost and I ain’t no shadow.

  July 1, 1804

  No ghost has an ear like mine either. That was about the second thing Francis asked me. “Whatcha done to your ear?” I said, “It’s more like what Mingo’s done. I guess I didn’t do the greatest job sewing it up.” Francis got hold of a reflecting mirror they use for signaling and I looked at my ear for the first time since I sewed it. It kind of looks like a little piece of dried apple, the kind Mama used to put up for winter sweets. It’s all crinkly and a little bit folded over. I decided right then to comb my hair to the other side. Now my hair covers the top, which is the worst part. I’m all right with it. I’m not going to worry about it. Too many good things to think about. Like roasted deer and bear for supper tonight. No more sitting on the edges of juiciness. I’m going to be in there slurping it all up!

  July 2, 1804

  York, Captain Clark’s Negro servant, took me and gave me a new pair of wool pants. I had to chop off the bottoms. They were too long. He let me pick out a blanket, too. Captain Lewis is impressed with my handwriting, and I shall be helping him transcribe information that he is collecting on his “naturalizing” trips, descriptions and measurements of plants and birds and other animals. I am also to take my share of camp chores — cooking, scrubbing. And they will probably set me to guard duty. Both Captains are pleased that I speak some Omaha and French. I know some sign language as well. I was honest with them — told them it is easier for me to understand the sign language than to actually sign. I intend to make myself very useful to both Captains.

  July 3, 1804

  Many raspberries along the way. I forgot to write that three, four days ago the river changed at a big bend and began heading more northerly than directly west. This eases the glare at the end of the day. But now we talk about the east and the west banks of the river instead of the north and south.

  Saw our first sign of beaver today. I told Captain Lewis how tasty beaver steaks are.

  July 4, 1804

  This is the first Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi. The men fired a cannon at dawn today. Fired it west to let the world know we’re coming! It was pretty exciting to be part of this. I had it in my mind that beaver might taste good, this being a holiday and all. The men are pretty tired of deer meat. So the Captains said Reuben Field and his brother Joseph, who have been quite friendly to me and are very cheerful sorts, could go ahead on foot and scout for beaver along the banks. All of a sudden I heard a yelp from the direction that Joe Field had gone. Quick as a greased bolt I ran up a path and there he was, crumpled down in the dust holding his hand. He’d reached down to pick a blackberry and a rattler done picked him. I could see the two ugly little black dots just round and perfect as anything where the snake’s fangs punctured him. I made the x’s and sucked real hard. Reuben Field came up and immediately saw what had happened.

  It was near noon, and the keelboat and canoes had pulled ashore at the start of a creek. So we got him down there and Captain Lewis got out his medical kit that Dr. Rush from Philadelphia outfitted him with. I’d never heard of Dr. Rush, but I guess he is the most famous doctoring man in the Union. He makes these famous pills called Dr. Rush’s Thunderclappers that blast you out if your bowels get gummed up and stuck. But that ain’t what Captain Lewis used on Joe Field. He first mashed up shreds of some kind of tree bark and mixed it with a strong minty-smelling ointment. It seemed to work. His hand hardly swelled up at all.

  To me the most exciting part of the day was not the cannon, which they blasted twice, or poor Joe Field getting bit by the rattler, but the naming of the creek where we stopped at midday. The Captains named it Independence Creek. I never before thought about naming things like this. I know my mama and I named that island back near St. Charles, but it was just like our own private name. Here the Captains name things not just for private. They mark it down on the map Captain Clark is making for the expedition. Everybody in the whole country will know that the name of this creek is Independence and that the Corps of Discovery has named it. There is something mighty exciting about being part of a group that names things. We are truthfully naming America! That is a powerful notion.

  July 5, 1804

  Something special happened today. Captain Lewis showed me the letter from President Jefferson to him, giving the instructions for the expedition. I asked if I could copy a part of it down. Here it is:

  To Meriwether Lewis, esquire, Captain of the 1st regiment of infantry of the United States of America:

  The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.

  Jefferson

  Pr. U.S. of America

  I already knew that the purpose of the expedition was to explore beyond the Missouri and all this new land that came with the Louisiana Purchase, but I wasn’t clear on the fact that the real dream, the big hope, is an all-water route to the Pacific.

  The most exciting thing to me is that I have actually touched a paper touched by
President Jefferson, and here I am just a poor half-breed boy. But brother, am I glad my mama done sent me to Father Dumaine back when I was little to learn how to read and write. The paper wouldn’t have meant half so much if I hadn’t been able to read it.

  July 8, 1804

  Dang! If I wasn’t right. We saw Indian fires on the east bank of the river tonight. Nothing’s come of it so far. But we all stand guard in shorter shifts with more men. The Captains want us on the alert and not too tired.

  July 10, 1804

  I got us a beaver today. Then Drouillard got another two. So there was just about enough to go around. Captain Clark joked that now I’ve done spoiled the men’s taste for “portable soup.” All the men groaned. I haven’t had it yet. It’s not something that you want to eat. They only had it when they had a dry spell in hunting a month or so back. The soup is thick as frozen bear lard and is made from boiling beef jerky, eggs, and root vegetables. Captain Clark is a fair jokey fellow. He’s always smiling and you can even see it behind that big brush of a red beard. Captain Lewis never jokes. But I don’t mind his quiet. Sometimes I go into his tent to help with the journalizing — that’s what he calls this note keeping on the plants and animals. In the yellow light of the burning candle he casts a hunched shadow against the canvas sides of the tent. I can tell just by the hunchiness how he’s feeling. Sometimes he doesn’t say a word and just slides the field notes toward me to recopy. Tonight he said exactly three words to me. “Nice mud trout.” I had done a drawing of these speckled fish we call the mud trout, which we see a lot of. Some folks wouldn’t be satisfied with just three words, but I’m fine with it.