Read Online Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey by William Least Heat-Moon - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: William Least Heat-Moon
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The Osage — people who usually got along better with whites than with any of their native brethren, even those of close consanguinity such as the Quapaw of Arkansas — gave indications that while Jefferson may have purchased from France a huge territory, it wasn’t wise to assume he’d thereby also bought Indian lands.
Pawhuska, a leader of another group of Osage, alerted the President to a rogue band roaming around the western end of the Ouachita Mountains, and exerting its presence and demonstrating slight interest in a parley with a couple of Scottish immigrants carrying more astronomical instruments than firearms. Jefferson postponed the excursion until the following spring, and so began a run of poor fortune that dogged the endeavor even right to its conclusion. The remarkable good luck of Lewis and Clark wouldn’t be repeated for the great rivers of the southern part of the Louisiana Purchase.
After Dunbar received Jefferson’s letter deferring the Grand Excursion, he proposed to the President a far smaller reconnoitering, one able to serve as a shakedown cruise and hold the assembled outfit together until spring. Using boats Hunter had brought from the East, Dunbar recommended a retinue of the two scientists and thirteen soldiers put forth from a creek near his plantation, cross the Mississippi, and ascend a few leagues of the Red River to the Black River (as the lower forty-some miles of the Ouachita are called), and proceed to the “hot springs of the Washita,” a place Americans then knew mostly by rumor, although Indians and French trappers and traders had long used the water route leading toward the springs.
Unlike Lewis and Clark, Dunbar and Hunter were not military men but entrepreneurial gentlemen of science: the former an astronomer and mathematician skilled in surveying; the latter a chemist-apothecary and mineralogist. Indeed, of the four Jeffersonian explorations of the Louisiana Purchase, only the Ouachita expedition was led by scientists, a model of leadership that proved unsuited to the adversities and mishaps of exploration, as you can see in these words from George Hunter:
The greater part of this day [we] were embarrassed by rapids & shoals, very often getting aground, & then delayed till a person would wade forward & cross the river, ahead of the boat in all probable directions in order to find the deepest water, before we could venture to proceed again. The men, or rather some of them, often grumbling & uttering execrations against me in particular for urging them on, in which they had the example of the sergeant who on many occasions of trifling difficulties frequently gave me very rude answers, & in several instances both now & formerly seemed to forget that it was his duty in such cases to urge on the men under his command to surmount them rather than to show a spirit of contradiction & backwardness.
For such insolence, William Clark would have pulled out the lash.
Gathering natural history, the two Scot scientists performed well enough, given limitations the season imposed on fieldwork. But their Ouachita journals, unlike those of Lewis and Clark, are almost barren of what we’d now call ethnology, partly because over their three-and-a-half-month trip, they encountered few people except whites attached to the fort near present-day Monroe, Louisiana. Further, humanity seemed to interest those two men of technical mind less than an unknown algae or a bit of odd rock (particularly novaculite, so-called Arkansas stone Indians used for tools of many kinds). Even the ancient aboriginal mounds along the lower Ouachita, of which I’ll say more later, failed to rouse them beyond idle curiosity. Their exploration had the usual excitements, that is, difficulties of ascending a river — rocks, rapids, mud, opposing currents, cold water — but progress proceeded almost as planned, if we discount, as they never would, numerous intestinal infelicities and Dr. Hunter shooting himself
Pawhuska, a leader of another group of Osage, alerted the President to a rogue band roaming around the western end of the Ouachita Mountains, and exerting its presence and demonstrating slight interest in a parley with a couple of Scottish immigrants carrying more astronomical instruments than firearms. Jefferson postponed the excursion until the following spring, and so began a run of poor fortune that dogged the endeavor even right to its conclusion. The remarkable good luck of Lewis and Clark wouldn’t be repeated for the great rivers of the southern part of the Louisiana Purchase.
After Dunbar received Jefferson’s letter deferring the Grand Excursion, he proposed to the President a far smaller reconnoitering, one able to serve as a shakedown cruise and hold the assembled outfit together until spring. Using boats Hunter had brought from the East, Dunbar recommended a retinue of the two scientists and thirteen soldiers put forth from a creek near his plantation, cross the Mississippi, and ascend a few leagues of the Red River to the Black River (as the lower forty-some miles of the Ouachita are called), and proceed to the “hot springs of the Washita,” a place Americans then knew mostly by rumor, although Indians and French trappers and traders had long used the water route leading toward the springs.
Unlike Lewis and Clark, Dunbar and Hunter were not military men but entrepreneurial gentlemen of science: the former an astronomer and mathematician skilled in surveying; the latter a chemist-apothecary and mineralogist. Indeed, of the four Jeffersonian explorations of the Louisiana Purchase, only the Ouachita expedition was led by scientists, a model of leadership that proved unsuited to the adversities and mishaps of exploration, as you can see in these words from George Hunter:
The greater part of this day [we] were embarrassed by rapids & shoals, very often getting aground, & then delayed till a person would wade forward & cross the river, ahead of the boat in all probable directions in order to find the deepest water, before we could venture to proceed again. The men, or rather some of them, often grumbling & uttering execrations against me in particular for urging them on, in which they had the example of the sergeant who on many occasions of trifling difficulties frequently gave me very rude answers, & in several instances both now & formerly seemed to forget that it was his duty in such cases to urge on the men under his command to surmount them rather than to show a spirit of contradiction & backwardness.
For such insolence, William Clark would have pulled out the lash.
Gathering natural history, the two Scot scientists performed well enough, given limitations the season imposed on fieldwork. But their Ouachita journals, unlike those of Lewis and Clark, are almost barren of what we’d now call ethnology, partly because over their three-and-a-half-month trip, they encountered few people except whites attached to the fort near present-day Monroe, Louisiana. Further, humanity seemed to interest those two men of technical mind less than an unknown algae or a bit of odd rock (particularly novaculite, so-called Arkansas stone Indians used for tools of many kinds). Even the ancient aboriginal mounds along the lower Ouachita, of which I’ll say more later, failed to rouse them beyond idle curiosity. Their exploration had the usual excitements, that is, difficulties of ascending a river — rocks, rapids, mud, opposing currents, cold water — but progress proceeded almost as planned, if we discount, as they never would, numerous intestinal infelicities and Dr. Hunter shooting himself
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