Lewis on the Marias

They commonly called themselves saokí•tap•ksi meaning ‘prairie people.’ The meaning ‘people with black feet’ comes from exonymns—the names given by other, external tribes. Historically, several related groups comprise the Blackfoot or Blackfeet people.

Today, they are called the Atsina or Gros Ventre, but their names in the historical literature—Big Bellies, Gros Ventre and Minnetares—cause confusion even to this day. The expedition never met them, but their presence affected the expedition in several ways.

Why was it so important that Meriwether Lewis was willing to risk his life in a region occupied by the “Pahkees” or Minnetares, the Assiniboines, and other people whom he had been led—by their enemies, of course—to believe were “vicious and illy disposed”?

“I sliped at a narrow pass of about 30 yards in length and but for a quick and fortunate recovery by means of my espontoon I should have been precipitated into the river down a craggy pricipice of about ninety feet.”

Lewis’s two trips on the Marias River were in an area called by early Montana pioneers the golden triangle consisting of fur, oil, water, wheat, and dinosaur bones.

By his 5 June 1805 estimate, Meriwether Lewis was 38 miles up the Marias River from the expedition’s camp on the Missouri. To the northeast, he identified the Bears Paw Mountains and Sweet Grass Hills.

“The whole of my party to a man except myself were fully perswaided that this river was the Missouri, but being fully of opinion that it was neither . . . I determined to give it a name and in honour of Miss Maria W____d.”

On 23 March 1806, once again battling the rising spring runoff, as it had each of the two previous years on the Missouri, the Corps of Discovery started up the Columbia River towards home.

Dividing into as many as five separate details was part of a bold, diplomatic plan to achieve three of the objectives set by President Jefferson.

During his trips on the Marias in June 1805 and 1806, had he not been continually on the lookout for signs of those hostile Blackfeet Indians, Lewis just might have seen some fossils of marine shellfish.

In 1806, Lewis, Drouillard, Joe Field, and Reubin Field made a second excursion up the Marias, this time on horseback. The four men reached the northernmost point of the Expedition’s exploration on 22 July 1806, camping on the south side of today’s Cut Bank Creek.

The Indians invited the Americans to share a campsite that night. At daybreak, despite the soldiers’ watchfulness, the Indians tried to steal the Americans’ guns and horses. That immediately erupted into a skirmish.

After splitting up into five separate details over five weeks earlier, all the members of the Corps of Discovery were finally reunited 142 miles downriver from the mouth of the Yellowstone.

Traveling through the Marias River country with anthropologist George Bird Grinnell, Wheeler met Wolf Calf, one of the Indian survivors of Lewis’s encounter with the Blackfeet.