Up the Missouri

The Osage were experienced traders, exchanging horses and Indian slaves for French guns, knives, axes, kettles, and other metal objects. After the 1760s, the Osage adopted a new economic system of planting gardens in permanent villages, summer hunts in the plains, and fur-trapping in the winter.

Perhaps more than any North American people, the Kickapoo exemplify the transitory nature of the native nations encountered during the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In 1803, there was at least one village near Ste. Genevieve on the Mississippi River.

At the time of the expedition, the nation from which the Missouri River derived its name were so reduced by smallpox and attacks that they had abandoned their villages and merged with other tribes—Kansas, Osages, but primarily, the Otoes.

To outsiders in 1803, the Sauk and Fox people living on the Mississippi River in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin were seen as one people. Both peoples spoke the Sauk-Fox-Kickapoo dialect of Algonquian and had similar cultures and economies.

Although Clark referred to the Pawnee often and included them in the Estimate of the Eastern Indians, the journals do not document any face-to-face encounters.

The captains appeared eager to meet with the Omaha. They tried to find them at their two biggest villages and planted a flag at the gravesite of the chief who for many years had controlled trade in the region, the infamous Blackbird.

Known in the journals as Kanzas, Kansas, Kansias, Kansies, Kar sea, and Kah they are popularly called the ‘People of the South Wind’. At the mouth of the Kansas River, the captains ordered a defensive wall built, but no Kansa warriors appeared.

In the afternoon of 4 June 1804, William Clark decided to investigate the purported occurrence of lead in the vicinity of a rather unique prominence he named “Mine Hill,” but which is known today as Sugar Loaf Rock. The search was unsuccessful, but Lewis’s previous inquiries while in St. Louis resulted in 11 specimens sent to Thomas Jefferson.

“So far, we have experienced more difficulty from the navigation of the Missouri, than danger from the Savages. The difficulties which oppose themselves to the navigation of this immence river, arise from the rapidity of it’s current, it’s falling banks, sandbars, and timber”

The Corps of Discovery, as it would be called, or the “corps of volunteers for North Western Discovery,” as Lewis put it, epitomized the rising glory of the United States—its sense of limitless possibilities and unparalleled opportunities.

Meriwether Lewis listed a “Keeled Boat” in his pre-expedition shopping list, but after he finally got it, he and the other journalists of the Corps of Discovery simply called it “the boat” (190 times) or, less often, “the barge” (32 times).

In 1804 and in the presence of the Lewis and Clark expedition the little village, built and designed to be an outpost of the fur trade, shed its ambiguous Spanish-French parentage and took on full American citizenship.

The Missouri River still contributes its tint a few miles north of St. Louis. It is difficult to determine exactly how much, and how often, the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi Rivers changed during the nine decades after the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

With Captain Clark in sole command, the Corps of Volunteers for North Western Discovery left the mouth of Wood River on 14 May 1804. The flotilla was comprised of the barge and two pirogues. Clark and the men “proceeded on under a jentle brease,” bound for St. Charles.

On the first Sunday after leaving Camp River Dubois, Joseph Whitehouse wrote that some of the party “went to church, which the french call Mass, and Saw their way of performing &c.”

On 25 May 1804, about forty river-miles above St. Charles, the expedition camped near a small village at the mouth of a creek called Charrette. Its seven French families had arrived only a few years before. The family of Daniel Boone moved there sometime after 1804.

On 1 June 1804, the expedition arrived at the mouth of the Osage River, one of the major Indian trail intersections on the lower Missouri. From the height on the point, Clark wrote: “I had a delightfull prospect of the Missouries up & down, also the Osage R. up.”

On Sunday, 3 June 1804, the expedition left its camp at the mouth of the Osage River and proceeded five miles upstream to the mouth of the Moreau River. There, Clark wrote, he and George Drouillard, “Saw much sign of war parties of Inds. having Crossed from the mouth of this Creek.”

It was a hard and dangerous day’s work getting past the wooded bluff called Arrow Rock on 9 June 1804. It was a “disagreeable and Dangerous situation,” wrote Clark.

The Missouri spawned countless hazards such as a drift or raft of logs—an embarras, or “obstacle,” as the French engagés called it.

On 16 June 1804, Clark took a long walk through a “butifull extensive Prarie” to look for an old fort on Evans’s map, built by the French thereabouts more than eighty years earlier. The party spent three days here making new oars and ropes, and hunting.

Clark was informed by one of the engagés who had traded along the Kansas that the river took its name from the Indians known as the Kanzes, or Kaw, nation which at that time dwelt on its banks.

Celestial observations at the Kansas and Missouri river confluence began shortly after 8 a.m. on 27 June 1804. The first observation would provide the data necessary to calculate the magnetic declination.

Pvt. Robert Frazer came close to being the expedition’s first fatality, for he was “verry Sick, struck with the Sun.” Probably his affliction would be diagnosed today as either heat exhaustion or sunstroke.