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CHAPTER ONE The Meeting
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5 The Meeting CHAPTER ONE The sound of axes and saws was in the air when the talkative French-speaking stranger rode into the well-wooded site on the east bank of the Missouri River. William Clark had chosen the site as a winter camp for President Thomas Jefferson’s expedition to find “the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent.”1 Sunday, November 4, 1804, was a fine, clear day, but there was no Sabbath break for Clark, Meriwether Lewis, or their forty-three men. Under the leadership of Sergeant Patrick Gass, a burly darkhued Irishman who had been a carpenter in Pennsylvania before joining theArmy, they had been at work all weekend cutting down cottonwood trees and building cabins, stuffing the cracks with rags, grass, and mortar.2 It had been a hard five-and-one-half months of paddling, poling , and pulling their boats up the river from a camp near St. Louis to the one they were building on the east bank of the river close to the Mandan Indian villages. They had made the trip in a keelboat, Chapter One 6 a flat-bottomed covered vessel used to carry freight on a river, and two pirogues, or canoes made from hollowed tree trunks, one of them red and one white. Now they needed to hurry. There had been frost on the ground that morning. At midweek, a fierce northwest wind had given them warning that the brutal winter of the Knife River country was on its way.3 But the explorers took time to talk with their visitor. His name was Toussaint Charbonneau, and he had something they needed. He could speak the language of the Hidatsa Indians, a tongue much different from that of other Native Americans. It was so difficult that Charbonneau would admit years later he never did learn to pronounce it very well.4 It is no wonder the explorers were on the lookout for interpreters . When Lewis wrote four months earlier to enlist his old army companion Clark in his western venture, he said that a study of the “languages, traditions and monuments” of the tribes would be an important part of their task. He had obviously discussed this with Jefferson, as the president used precisely the same words in his instructions to Lewis, dated the day after Lewis’s letter to Clark. For years, Jefferson had been collecting vocabularies of Indian languages and dialects. Lewis knew no Indian languages. Jefferson was telling him that a good interpreter would be needed.5 Lewis’s first choice for an interpreter was as different as he could be from Charbonneau. Before he had gone further west than Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Jefferson’s hand-picked explorer accepted an offer from John Conner, a trader with the Shawnee and Delaware Indians at a post in present-day Indiana. Conner was twenty-eight, more than a dozen years younger than Charbonneau. He was literate, while Charbonneau signed his name with an “X.” Perhaps most importantly, Conner had spent his life east of the Mississippi. Charbonneau knew at least some of the country the explorers would traverse. The deal with Conner didn’t work out, and Clark, at least, thought that was just as well. [18.208.203.36] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:10 GMT) The Meeting 7 “I do not think the failure in getting him is very material,” he wrote.6 The explorers had found Charbonneau at one of the great crossroads of the North American fur trade. Since the middle of the seventeenth century, Mandan and Hidatsa people had lived in large villages along the Missouri. The villages became important centers for intertribal swapping of furs, robes, foodstuffs, horses, and ornaments, and soon attracted white traders.7 Charbonneau lived with the Hidatsas, in their cluster of substantial earthen lodges along the mouth of the Knife, and had just returned from a hunting trip with them when he met Lewis and Clark. He said he wanted to hear about the captains’ meeting a few days earlier with the chiefs of the five Mandan and Hidatsa villages. He also offered his services as an interpreter. Nothing was put in writing, but the offer was accepted. Charbonneau became a provisional member of the Corps of Volunteers of Northwest Discovery.8 The new interpreter was at least three years older than Clark, seven years older than Lewis and ten years older than most members of the Corps, and he had a pregnant wife. But the...