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“A River of Promise” Historians Reconsider the Missouri River and Its Explorers

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“A River of Promise” Historians Reconsider the Missouri River and Its Explorers “A River of Promise” Historians Reconsider the Missouri River and Its Explorers JOSEPH C. PORTER Among “the central themes in the history of the American West,” according to historian James I! Ronda, is “the story of western riv- ers.” During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the river most crucial to that story was the Missouri-“a highway into the West,” in Ronda’s words, but also “a river of promise, of dreams, and of dreams denied.”’ In marking the two-hundredth anniversary of the most famous expedition up the length of the Missouri, several historians have recon- sidered the expedition of Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery. Some authors have looked for those who went before, in the earliest ex- plorations of the river; some have focused on the lesser-known characters of the well-known story; and some have found new ways to look at the narratives set forth in the diaries and journals. This essay examines five of these works. Joseph C.Porter is chief curator of the North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh, and author of Paper Medicine Man:John Gregory Bourke and His American West (1989). ’James P. Ronda, introduction to W. Raymond Wood, Prologue to Lewis and Clark: The Mackay and Evans Expedition, (Norman, Ok., 2003). xii. INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, 100 (December 2004). 0 2004, Trustees of Indiana University. “A RIVER OF PROMISE” 365 THE MISSISSIPPI, THE MISSOURI, AND THE WEST BEFORE 1800 The Mississippi River and its valleys were some of the earliest- explored regions of North America. In 1673 LouisJoliet and Jesuit Jacques Marquette reached the river and established a French presence in the in- terior of the continent. In 1682 Rene Robert Cavalier de La Salle claimed the Mississippi and its drainage for his king, Louis XIV of France, and named the territory “Louisiana.” From that time until the Louisiana Pur- chase in 1803, France, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States all made claims to the area, and explorers moved west beyond the Mississippi val- ley, attempting to follow the Missouri River to its conclusion. In 1763, the French, via the Treaty of Paris, transferred Louisiana to Spain to foil Brit- ish designs on the region. The Spanish made several attempts to explore and strengthen their claim to the territory, sending expeditions to find sites for trading posts and forts. The strategy of officials in St. Louis was for the Spanish flag to follow the Indian trade. “Theoretically, the trade was open to all Spanish subjects,” writes W. Raymond Wood, but officials limited the actual licenses “to a favored few whom the Spaniards used as quasi-governmental agents.” Wood‘s Prologue to Lewis and Clark: The Muckuy and Evans Expedition examines Spain’s most ambitious endeavor to explore and control its acquired lands.’ After two failed attempts by teams of explorers in 1794 and the spring of 1795, Spanish officials launched a third expedition to “discover a route west of the headwaters of the Missouri River across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast. They planned to reinforce and defend this route with a series of trading f~rts.”~They chose Scottish-born, veteran frontier trader James Mackay (1759-1822) as commander. A Spanish citizen living in the St. Louis region, Mackay spoke and wrote French fluently and had worked for British trading companies in Canada, eventually becoming a trader in the Mandan villages of present-day North Dakota. “A man with his experience would have been priceless to the St. Louis Spanish,” writes Wood, “for no one in that city could match his knowledge of the northern zWood, Prologue to Lewis and Clark, 8-16, and 27, quoting Nicolas de Finiels, An Account of Upper Louisiana, ed. by Carl J. Ekberg and William E. Foley, trans. by Carl J. Ekberg (Columbia, Mo., 1989), p. 86, n 151. 3W~~d,Prologue to Lewis and Clark, 30-34, quote p. 30. 366 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY limits of Spanish territ~ry.”~Welsh-born John Thomas Evans (1770-1799) was second-in-command. Evans was eager to journey up the Missouri because he believed that the Mandans were “Welsh Indians,” descendants of Welsh prince Madoc who, according to legend, discovered North America in 1170. The instructions given to Mackay and Evans were “astonishingly similar” to those that Thomas Jefferson later issued to Lewis and Clark. Indeed, the Mackay and Evans expedition, with its “exploratory and scientific” goals, could be compared to the mission of the Corps of Discov- ery “in almost every respect save one: the Americans were to open the area for trade, but unlike Mackay and Evans they did not engage in trade them- selves nor were they told to build trading forts anywhere along their route.”* In late summer of 1795 Mackay, Evans, and their men left St. Louis. The crew probably comprised French immigrants and metis of French and American Indian ancestry. Although Spain had controlled St. Louis since 1763, French-speaking settlers and their culture dominated the area. Wood has difficulty identifymg many of the crew members, but comments that “[ilt would be interesting to know if anyone from the crew later served on the Lewis and Clark expedition; if not, they undoubtedly knew some of the men who did serve the American Corps of Discovery.”6 In November 1795 Mackay and Evans arrived at an Omaha Indian village in northeastern Nebraska and constructed Fort Carlos as a winter camp.’ In June of the next year, the leaders split so that the expedition could cover more territory. Evans arrived at the Mandan villages in North Dakota in September and learned quickly that the inhabitants were not long-lost Welsh. Despite his personal disappointment, Evans vigorously pursued the goals of the Spanish government, seizing a British trading post and foiling British plots against his life. In May 1797 he left the Man- dans, arriving back in St. Louis sixty-eight days later. Mackay remained among the Omaha for the rest of 1796 and part of 1797, exploring eastern Nebraska and accompanying the tribe on a buffalo hunt into central Ne- braska. In the spring, out of touch with Evans and probably under orders to return, Mackay also made the journey back to St. Louis.E Mackay and Evans and their expedition, well known for decades af- ter their explorations, have languished in undeserved obscurity in the +Ibid.,41. IIbid., 65. 61bid.,66. ’lbid., 84. 81bid.,115-16, 128-33. “A RIVER OF PROMISE” 367 A Mandan Rain Dance, by George Catlin. The Mackay-Evans expedition explored the length of the Missouri River as far north as the Mandan villages in present-day North Dakota. George Catlin, The Manners, Customs, and Condition ofthe North American Indians (London, 1841) twentieth century, but Wood restores them to their rightful place in the history of western American exploration and cartography. The maps they drew were “the most precise made before the Corps of Discovery traversed the area”-so much so that while Lewis and Clark planned their journey and during their early travels up the Missouri, they “consulted the jour- nals and maps generated by the Scot and Welsh leaders.” Those maps “laid out in detail the entire first year of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The captains carried copies of the Mackay and Evans charts with them and regularly inspected them during their ~oyage.”~ THE MISSOURI RIVER TO THE PACIFIC OCEAN: THE CORPS OF DISCOVERY On January 10,1803,the past and soon-to-be expeditions had a brief meeting of the ways. Lewis had already received copies of some of the MackayEvans maps, and now Mackay himself arrived at the Corps’ camp 91bid.,134. 368 INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY outside St. Louis to visit William Clark and to give the captains a personal account of the Missouri River as far upstream as the Mandan villages. Lewis and Clark began their journey northward in May 1804, and after 1,510 river miles the expedition arrived at the Mandan and Hidatsa villages on October 25. They spent five months interviewing the Mandans, Hidatsas, and white traders about the country to the west, and after their departure depended upon Indian information and their own skills to guide them.1° On June 13, 1805, the expedition reached the Great Falls of the Missouri, in present-day Montana, a sight that Lewis described as “truly magnifficent [sic] and sublimely grand.” At the confluence of the three rivers that form the Missouri the expedition members reached the outer limits of their geographic knowledge. Gary Moulton, the editor of the Corps’ journals, writes: “All the way from Fort Mandan they had jour- neyed through country known only to the native inhabitants, until they neared the mouth of the Columbia and reentered the world of known geography”l’ In November 1805 the expedition reached its goal, the Pacific Ocean. Patrick Gass recorded in his journal entry for November 16: “We are now at the end of our voyage, which has been completely accom- plished according to the intention of the expedition . notwithstanding the difficulties, privations and dangers, which we had to encounter, en- dure and surmount.” The expedition spent a miserably uncomfortable winter at Fort Clatsop on the Columbia River and then set off on the return trip on March 23,1806, reaching St. Louis on September 23. Three days later, William Clark noted in his final journal entry that the explor- ers were beginning the process of writing a formal report of all of their discoveries: “a fine morning we commenced wrighting Q c.”l* “Wrighting” preserved the expedition’s hard-won information that would enable the American government to control and exploit the re- sources of the Louisiana Purchase.
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