Read Online Lewis and Clark by Ralph K. Andrist - Free Book Online

peaceful intentions should any Indians return. Later, with McNeal carrying a United States flag on a stick, they took up after the Shoshone horseman.
    A moderate rise ahead led to a gap in the mountains which they followed to “a handsome bold running Creek of cold Clear water,” wrote Lewis. “[H]ere I first tasted the water of the great Columbia river.” Since the stream was flowing westward, Lewis realized they had crossed the Continental Divide. They had, in fact, come over Lemhi Pass, on the border between Montana and Idaho, and were quenching their thirst in the Lemhi River, whose waters eventually reach the Columbia River. Since the Divide was the western limit of the Louisiana Territory, this also meant they had left the United States and entered Oregon country.
    That same day, the shipment from Fort Mandan reached Jefferson, who sifted through the specimens and read Lewis’s letter. Jefferson would plant the Indian corn in his garden at Monticello, and hang the elk antlers on the wall of his home. Two animals – a magpie and a prairie dog – had survived the journey; Jefferson sent these to the natural science museum he had established at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
    On August 13, Lewis’s party saw Indians again, this time two women and a man. The women fled, but the man let them approach to within 100 yards before retreating. A mile farther on, however, they came upon three women in a ravine. One young woman hid among the rocks, but an elderly woman and a twelve-year-old girl, seeing no opportunity to escape, bowed their heads as if to receive a deathblow.
    Lewis took the woman’s hand and raised her to her feet, repeating “tab-ba-bone” and pulling up his sleeve to prove that he really was white. The explorers pulled gifts out of their packs - beads, mirrors, and face paint - which were eagerly accepted. The young woman who had fled was called back, and Lewis painted the women’s cheeks with vermilion, which Sacagawea had told him her people used as a symbol of peace. Then they made their way to the Shoshone camp.
    They were intercepted by sixty warriors, armed with bows and arrows and a few primitive muskets. Lewis laid down his gun and went forward with his flag, while the women explained what had happened and showed their presents. Lewis recorded the meeting: “These men then advanced and embraced me very affectionately in their way which is by puting their left arm over you[r] wright sholder clasping your back, while they apply their left cheek to yours and frequently vociforate the word âh-hí-e, âh-hí-e that is, I am much pleased, I am much rejoiced, bothe parties now advanced and we wer all carresed and besmeared with their grease and paint till I was heartily tired of the national hug.”
    In the Shoshone camp, Lewis sat down with Cameahwait, their chief, for the parley on which so much depended. The chief’s name meant “the One Who Never Walks.” Now Drouillard used his sign language skills to make the chief understand that Lewis’s party came as friends. Before smoking a peace pipe, the chief and his warriors took off their moccasins, and indicated that Lewis and his men should do the same. Cameahwait explained that this was to show how seriously they took this ceremony of friendship, since it implied that if they broke their obligation, they would go barefoot.
    As they smoked the pipe in turn, the women and children clustered around to stare at the first white men they had ever seen. Once the ceremonies were over, Lewis distributed the rest of his gifts among the onlookers. A Shoshone man the explorers called Faro later recalled: “They were unlike any people we had hitherto seen, fairer than ourselves, and clothed with skins unknown to us. . . . They gave us things like solid water, which were sometimes as brilliant as the sun, and which sometimes showed us our own faces. . . . We thought them the children of the Great Spirit. . . . [And] we soon discovered that they were