Lewis and Clark

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, June 15, 2003

AMERICAN VOYAGE | LEWIS AND CLARK PLUS 200 YEARS
2 Centuries Later, a Moment for Indians to Retell the Past
By TIMOTHY EGAN

NEW TOWN, N.D. ? Indian Country is a place where people gather in late June 
to celebrate the day Custer was whipped at Little Big Horn, where cars 
sometimes run only in reverse and casinos run all night, and where a Nez 
Percé guide who led Lewis and Clark over the Bitterroot Mountains is 
remembered by his native name, which means "Furnishes White Men With Brains."

But on the map ? be it the road atlas handed out by the state or the 
statistical one issued by the Census Bureau ? the homelands of the first 
Americans seem to possess little life or magic. Across vast stretches of 
the northern plains, Indian lands are blank patches, nations within a 
nation, landlocked islands foreign to most other Americans.

Certainly, the scars of memory are layered as thick as the dam water that 
buries so many old Indian villages and sacred sites here. Generations after 
the scourges of smallpox, war and forced resettlement, much of what a 
traveler finds in Indian Country is emptiness.

Still, those looking to find some link across 200 years, to the people 
whose nations Lewis and Clark passed through, need only peek into daily 
life on the reservations along the trail from St. Louis to the Pacific.

(clip)

President Thomas Jefferson knew he was sending an expedition through lands 
populated by people who did not care a whit for lines drawn on maps in 
Paris or Virginia. But Jefferson, an Enlightenment-age man, had conflicted 
views of the native people. He thought some Indians could be "civilized" 
back East, while others had to be removed to the far Western plains, the 
continental equivalent of Mars.

"Jefferson appears both as the scholarly admirer of Indian character, 
archaeology and language, and the planner of cultural genocide, the 
architect of the removal policy, the surveyor of the Trail of Tears," wrote 
the historian Anthony F. C. Wallace, in his book, "Jefferson and the 
Indians: the Tragic Fate of the First Americans.

Lewis and Clark had trouble finding Indians at first. The swift plague of 
smallpox had come before them, and in some places it left a deathly resonance.

On Aug. 12, 1804, the corps passed the empty village of Tonwantonga, where 
the once powerful Omahas had lived. Today Nebraska's largest city is named 
for this tribe, which has a tiny toehold in the state.

Further north lived the Otoe, who joined the Missouri Tribe about 200 years 
ago. They were the first Indians to have a council with Lewis and Clark.

Today the Otoe and the Missouri have vanished from the trail. They can 
found in distant Oklahoma, where about 1,300 members live near Red Rock. 
They feel forgotten by history, some members said, left out of the 
bicentennial.

But in rummaging through the belongings of a well-traveled tribe, the Otoe 
found something recently that has electrified historians ? two documents 
written by Meriwether Lewis, which are not in his journal, describing 
Indians on the middle Missouri.

"My grandmother kept these in her trunk," said Rhoda Dent, treasurer of the 
tribe. "After she died, my cousin found them. It was just phenomenal for us 
to read them, even though Lewis refers to native people as children."

The documents are now in the Oklahoma Museum of History, and curators there 
say they believe they are authentic.

The Otoe would like to reconnect to their old homeland. "We were the first 
to greet Lewis and Clark, and look what happened to us," Ms. Dent said.

Upriver, the expedition met different reactions among the large nations 
that roamed the Dakota prairie. Among the Yankton Sioux, the men dined at a 
tidy village on a meal of stewed dog meat ? "good & well-flavored," as one 
expedition member described it.

William Clark described the Yankton Sioux this way: "Stout bold looking 
people (the young men hand Sum) and well made. The Warriors are Very much 
deckerated with porcupin quils & feathers, large legins & mockersons, all 
with Buffalow roabes of Different colours."

The late historian Stephen Ambrose called such descriptions "pathbreaking 
ethnology." But the next encounter, with the Teton Sioux, appears to have 
been a textbook case of diplomatic blundering.

The corps showed off its air gun and a magnifying glass, while offering 
medals and tobacco. The Teton Sioux, unimpressed, wanted something in 
return for letting these people pass through their lands. At one point guns 
were drawn, arrows aimed, and the small cannon mounted to the corps' 
keelboat ready to fire. The standoff ended peacefully after three days, but 
with both sides steamed.

Clark never forgot nor forgave. "They are the vilest miscreants of the 
savage race and must ever remain the pirates of the Missouri," he wrote of 
the Teton Sioux.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/national/15LEWI.html


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org