Indigenous Continent, page 38
The creation of a tighter Lakota alliance—within the larger Sioux Confederacy—was a sign of weakness rather than strength. Lakotas had been shunned by the Missouri Valley’s Native farmers, who saw them as unwelcome rivals. They competed for prime hunting grounds, trade with Europeans, and strategic sites on the Missouri’s protective riverside bluffs, and their horses and tipi settlements consumed too much grass and cottonwood. But the end of Pontiac’s War in 1766 made possible a revival of the fur trade in the Trans-Mississippi West. The pent-up demand for guns, powder, lead, and metal tools now fueled intense rivalries for trading privileges in the upper Missouri Valley, where several Indigenous nations had suffered for years with unreliable access to European technology and goods. The greatest need was for gunpowder and lead: when they ran out, the Indigenous West shifted back to the Stone Age.
In the early 1770s, the Oglala Lakotas and their Yanktonai relatives attacked a town of Mandan Indian farmers and traders two hundred miles north of the regular Oglala camping grounds. “They burnt the Mandans out,” an Oglala winter account recorded. The sacking of the Mandan town was a turning point, marking the beginning of a long Lakota ascendancy along the Missouri. Having found spiritual and material fulfillment in the Black Hills, the Lakotas entrenched themselves in the Missouri Valley.
The outbreak of a virulent smallpox epidemic in 1781—the same epidemic that devastated Cornwallis’s army in Yorktown—was key to Lakota expansion in the upper Missouri Valley. The epidemic shocked the Lakotas, who may not have been exposed to smallpox before, but it nearly destroyed the more sedentary agricultural nations in the region. More than seventy-five percent of the Arikaras may have perished, reducing the ancient Missourian civilization to a mere shadow of its former self: the Arikara world shrank from thirty-two towns to three—“sad debris,” in the words of Antoine Tabeau, an employee of the Saint Louis–based, Franco-Spanish fur-trading outfit Clamorgan, Loisel and Company. The once populous Mandans to the north of the Arikaras could now fill only three towns. The Hidatsas lost half of their people. Before the epidemic, the upper Missouri Valley had been home to tens of thousands of agrarian Indians; afterward, only eight thousand remained. The once-extensive domains of farms and towns dissolved into isolated and exposed nodes. A 1781–82 Lakota winter count reads, “Came and attacked on horseback the last time winter.” It was the last successful attack by the farming Indians. The Lakotas would eventually eliminate the weakened agrarian nations as a threat.11
In 1793, capitalizing on the epidemic that had dramatically weakened the Mandans, Lakotas attacked a Mandan town of fifty-eight lodges and killed almost everyone in it. The surviving Mandans fled north, desperate to put distance between themselves and the Lakotas. A two-hundred-mile stretch of the Missouri River was suddenly open before the Lakotas. They moved in, extending their Missouri domain far to the north. Their timing was auspicious.12
The fur trade was starting to boom like never before in the midcontinent. Commerce in the Arkansas and lower Missouri Valleys had been dominated for decades by the now nearly twenty-thousand-strong Osage Nation, which sold Spanish guns and manufactured goods westward to the Plains Indians in exchange for pelts and bison robes. Backed by the Chouteau family, the leading Saint Louis merchants who employed savvy French traders, the Osages furnished roughly fifty percent of the town’s trade and reaped massive profits. The Chouteaus married into elite Osage families, embedding their partnership in kinship ties, which enabled them to facilitate commercial transactions across the midcontinent. By the early 1790s, the lower Missouri Valley was becoming overcrowded with traders. Spanish governors in Louisiana forbade trade with the Osages, but the Chouteaus persisted, siding with the Osages against the Spanish Empire. Led by Pawhuska, the Osages kept White hunters out of the Arkansas Valley, which had been the seat of Osage power for half a century. The Chouteaus, for their part, continued to send traders upriver to locate untapped fur domains. The Lakota villages stretching out along the banks of the Missouri were inevitably the traders’ first stop.13
These commercial impulses clashed with the geopolitical ambitions of Spanish officials in Saint Louis, who agonized over imperial challenges from the north. Canadian traders had established themselves among the Mandans, diverting the upper Missouri fur trade to the north. The profit margins of Saint Louis merchants plummeted from nearly three hundred percent to twenty-five. Desperate to keep the trade alive, Spanish officials issued licenses to trade with the Indians in the upper Missouri Valley, hoping to keep the Canadian traders at bay. The stakes were enormous. If they succeeded, many believed, Spanish North America could be saved. It was an article of faith that somewhere in the upper reaches of the Missouri Valley was an all-water route to the Pacific coast—the key to a lasting Spanish Empire in the heart of the continent. But the Spanish never had a chance to find out. Franco-Spanish traders were about to crash into a Lakota barrier that they did not know existed. Like the Ohio Valley earlier, the Missouri Valley was becoming a hot spot in Native-colonial struggles.
An enterprising trader, Jacques d’Eglise, embarked upriver in 1793, aiming for Mandan country. The Lakotas stopped him three hundred miles shy of his target and confiscated most of his goods. From there on, Lakotas and Yanktons made it their policy to control the northbound trade from Saint Louis. Realizing that outright pillage risked suppressing the upriver trade altogether, the Lakotas collected tolls, forcing traders to pay for upriver access with guns, powder, lead, and other goods, turning the Missouri Valley into a tribute-yielding machine. In 1794, Jean-Baptiste Truteau, an employee of the Missouri Fur Company, embarked on a trading expedition to Mandan country far in the north, where he planned to build a fort. He was stopped by Yankton soldiers, who boarded his merchandise-laden pirogue and took him into a Lakota village upriver. There, Lakotas condemned Truteau’s expedition, branding the traders who aimed to push farther upriver toward the Arikaras and Mandans as “bad men, always talking evil against them and urging that nation [Arikaras] to kill them.” The gunpowder that reached Arikara and Mandan hands, the Lakotas told Truteau, “would only be used to kill Sioux.” They asked Truteau to “open up the bad roads by means of large presents of merchandize,” a thinly veiled demand for tribute. “This was genuine plunder,” the humiliated trader carped to his journal. His list of lost merchandise anticipated the windfall that the Lakota-Yankton river policy would generate: cloth, tobacco, knives, axes, blankets, vermillion, flints, gun worms, powder, and “a proportionate number of balls.” The Lakotas also wanted Truteau’s help in forging a proper relationship with the governor of Spanish Louisiana and its traders. Truteau obliged. His report portrayed the Lakotas as the “greatest beaver hunters” in Spanish Louisiana.14
By the mid-1790s, Lakota ascendancy in the upper Missouri Valley was a recognized fact. While systematically exploiting the Franco-Spanish river traffic, the Lakotas also dominated the Native farmers in the region—Missouri Valley farmers. The Lakotas combined plundering and extortion with diplomacy and trade into a flexible economy of violence that rendered the local Whites, Arikaras, and Hidatsas fearful, deprived, and compliant. The mobile, horse-mounted Lakotas created artificial demand for their own exports by keeping the bison away from Arikara territory, reaping great profits. Tabeau noted how Lakota soldiers enclosed an Arikara town with their tipis, “forming a barrier which prevents the buffalo from coming near.” Turning hunger into a weapon, the Lakotas could “fix, as they wish, the price of that which belongs to them and obtain, in exchange, a quantity of corn, tobacco, beans, and pumpkins that they demand.” Although the Arikaras provided the Lakotas with the three sisters—squash, beans, and maize—for free, the Lakotas forced the Arikaras to buy bows and arrows from them, even though the Arikaras were “surrounded by woods suitable for supplying them.” This “ruinous commerce” turned the surviving three thousand Arikaras into Lakota vassals. As Tabeau explained, the Lakotas saw in the Arikaras “a certain kind of serf, who cultivates for them and who, as they say, takes, for them, the place of women.” The Arikara towns at the confluence of the Missouri and Grand Rivers now belonged to the Lakotas. Tabeau, sidelined, complained bitterly that the Lakotas “make the Ricaras [Arikaras] understand that I treat them [the Arikaras] as slaves.”15
Confident of their place in the world, the Lakotas shifted shape, adjusting to the contours of the life-giving river. They entrenched themselves in strategically critical sites along the Missouri’s banks, tightening their bonds. Gradually, they solidified their loose alliance into a nation, coalescing around the liquid spine of their world. They frequented the Black Hills for spiritual rejuvenation and political assemblies. Slow Buffalo, a prominent ithˇáŋčhaŋ announced, “We are seven bands and from now on we will scatter over the world, so we will appoint one chief for each band. . . . The Mysterious One has given us this place, and now it is up to us to expand ourselves. We will name every person and everything.” By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Lakotas had adopted their sacred form as seven oyátes: Hunkpapas, Minneconjous, Oglalas, Sans Arcs, Sicangus, Sihasapas, and Two Kettles. They were now “allies against all others of mankind.” Slow Buffalo dispatched other ithˇáŋčhaŋs to the east, west, and north, but not to the south. “Other people would come from that direction,” he said.16
THE ARRIVAL OF THOSE “other people” had been in the works for years. President Jefferson was eager to secure American authority over the Louisiana Purchase, but he was vexed by the sheer size and the daunting ethnic plurality of the acquisition; he thought that the settling of Louisiana could take a thousand generations. He knew next to nothing about the loyalties of the region’s Indigenous nations and feared that they might well seek alliances with British Canada in the north or New Spain in the west and south.17
Desperate to secure the astounding acquisition, Jefferson first planned to enlist thirty thousand American volunteers who would each receive 160 acres in return for two years of military service. In the end, he chose a leaner strategy: a small exploratory expedition that would traverse the length of the immense territory, establish alliances with the local Indians, assert U.S. sovereignty in the region, and find the fabled all-water route across the western half of the continent. Jefferson started to groom his private secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to lead the Corps of Discovery, a new unit of the United States Army, and execute the critical first plunge into the enormous domain. Lewis would have to be a soldier, a diplomat, and a natural historian all at once. Lewis, in turn, recruited William Clark, a retired army officer, as his co-commander. They hoped to find scores of docile Indians, who would supply them with food and guide them to their destination, and they were in a hurry: Jefferson feared that some foreign power might be able to claim the Pacific coast before the United States could. The nervous Jefferson unrealistically wanted to remove most eastern Indians, pushing them west of the Mississippi, where a vast trading empire would be built to channel Indigenous products, mainly furs and skins, to eastern markets.18
The Lakotas would shape Lewis and Clark’s plans from the start. To Americans, Saint Louis was the gateway to the Trans-Mississippi West, and the Missouri River was the natural highway for colonists. That made the Lakotas, who now controlled the upper section of the river with an iron grip, the most important Native nation to win over. Jefferson had procured Truteau’s journal in the fall of 1803 and had shared it with Lewis and Clark. The journal described in detail Lakota power politics in the upper Missouri Valley. According to Truteau, the Lakotas numbered “from 30. to 60,000(?) men, and abound in fire-arms”—a gross exaggeration that overestimated the Lakota population by three to six times, but also captured how thoroughly the mobile Lakotas controlled the upper Missouri Valley. It was obvious that the Americans would not be able to assert authority in Louisiana until they had won over and subdued the Lakotas. “Although you will pass through no settlements of the Sioux, you will probably meet with parties of them,” Jefferson warned the co-captains. “On that nation,” he stressed, “we wish most particularly to make a friendly impression, because of their immense power.” Exactly what logic Jefferson and his advisors relied on when they determined that Lewis and Clark could establish American authority over the enormous acquisition with forty-some men remains unclear. But at least that figure was an improvement. Initially, Jefferson had planned to send in “twelve or fifteen men.”19
Lewis and Clark pushed into the unknown: most available maps of the Missouri River were mere sketches. Spanish and French traders knew the interior far better than any of the Americans did, and the British in Canada were more cognizant of the power dynamics in the region than were their American rivals. Since 1799, British officials had been approaching the Lakotas, “a nation unquestionably composing the Indian Warriors in America . . . all mounted and muster about 6,000 men.” Unlike the Americans, the British had learned that there was very little White people could do without accommodating the Indians.20
In the fall of 1803, a little over a year before Lewis and Clark’s departure, the Sicangu Lakotas welcomed an embassy from the Omaha and Ponca Nations to the south. The two semisedentary agrarian peoples “urgently entreated” Black Buffalo, a Sicangu ithˇáŋčhaŋ who had recently been “elevated to the first rank,” hoping to open trade relations with the mighty Lakotas. Instead, they became pawns in an internal Lakota power struggle. The Partisan, an ambitious rival ithˇáŋčhaŋ, sent six of his soldiers to abort Black Buffalo’s peace with the Omahas and Poncas. They failed, and the Poncas struck back but accidentally targeted Black Buffalo’s village. To save face, Black Buffalo retaliated. His soldiers killed more than half of the people in a Ponca town—perhaps as many as 150 men, women, and children—and 75 in an Omaha town. The “formerly very numerous” Poncas were now “very mild.” Soon after, the Poncas and Omahas moved into a single town, which posed no challenge to Lakota interests. Lewis and Clark had no knowledge of these dramatic changes. They were entering a fluid geopolitical dynamic that they could neither understand nor manipulate. The Lakotas were consolidating their dominance over the upper Missouri Valley just ahead of the arrival of the U.S. agents of empire.21
The Corps of Discovery left Saint Louis on May 14, 1804. It pushed upriver in two pirogues and a fifty-five-foot keelboat armed with a bronze swivel cannon. There was no rush: the corps wanted to showcase its power and generosity to the Indians, which would take time. Lewis and Clark had brought with them 4,600 sewing needles, more than 1,500 moccasin awls, 2,800 fishhooks, 18,000 pairs of scissors, 180 polished-pewter mirrors, and 130 rolls of tobacco—all to appease and win over the Indigenous nations they were about to encounter. At Monticello, Jefferson grew increasingly anxious from the moment the expedition set off. A month after the Corps of Discovery’s departure, he wrote that Lewis and Clark “must stand well” when facing the Osages and Lakotas “because in their quarter we are miserably weak.” He thought the Osages were “the finest men we have ever seen” and “a great nation.” Alongside the earlier idea of a massive Indian removal, Jefferson now nurtured an improbable vision of the Louisiana territory as a natural laboratory where truly enlightened men—including assimilated Indians—could become models for the rest of the world.22
As the Corps of Discovery pushed upriver, the first thing the Indians on their route were likely to notice was the keelboat’s high mast and large sail. When the vessel inched closer, the Indians would notice a heavy, menacing-looking weapon mounted on its bow—a swivel cannon. The two pirogues followed behind. The problem for Lewis and Clark was that their appearance sent mixed messages to Indians. It was unclear whether they were soldiers or diplomats, or whether they meant to command or trade with the Native population. Lewis and Clark had extraordinary technologies and belongings, but they were obviously not like the French or Spanish traders, who were generous with their wares without demanding obedience and submission.
The Corps of Discovery faced its first real test in August, when it arrived in an Otoe-Missouria town above the Missouri-Platte confluence. Lewis and Clark were to follow an elaborate procedure authored by Jefferson: they would parade for the Indians, deliver standard speeches to explain their intentions—translated by Pierre Dorion, the corps’s talented interpreter—and hand out medals to “make” chiefs. A loud shot from an air gun was to be the standard introduction. Such imperial theatrics did little to impress the Otoes. After a long break in the talks, their leader, Big Horse, made demands to the Americans. “I came here naked and I must go home naked,” he complained. He had expected gifts that he could share with his followers. “A Spoon ful of your milk will qui[e]t all,” he instructed the newcomers. Milk, embodying generosity, could also turn the American strangers into allies and perhaps relatives.23
Ten weeks later, the Corps of Discovery approached the Yanktons at the James River junction, knowing that it was crossing into the territory of the powerful Sioux Confederacy. Clark was “much engaged” in writing a speech: the last thing the captains wanted was to provoke the Yanktons with an underwhelming address. They sent the Indians a canoe laden with tobacco, corn, and iron kettles. The next morning the Yanktons paraded for the strangers in full regalia; Lewis and Clark, donning their dress uniforms, raised a flag and ordered a gun salute. Lewis delivered his standard speech about commerce, cooperation, and the Great Father in Washington, D.C., who now claimed to own the land they stood on. He then distributed gifts to prominent Yanktons, hoping to create more authoritative leaders through whom the Americans could control the Sioux Confederacy. The Yankton ithˇáŋčhaŋ Shake Hand saw through the tactic. “Listen to what I say,” he commanded. “I had an English medal when I went to See them, I went to the Spaniards they gave me medal and Some goods, I wish you would do the Same for my people.” Half Man, another Yankton ithˇáŋčhaŋ, warned the Americans that the “nations above will not open their ears, and you cannot I fear open them.” He was referring to the increasingly powerful Lakotas. The Arikara Nation, “wearied by its losses,” had tried to enter into an alliance with the Mandans and Hidatsas, but the Lakotas would not allow it. Now unsettled, Lewis and Clark decided to leave Pierre Dorion among the Yanktons as a gesture of goodwill.24
