Shoshone Travel Advice

Lewis was still at Camp Fortunate at the Forks of the Jefferson on 20 August 1805, directing the digging of a cache and the making of packs and pack-saddles for the portage across the divide. Meanwhile, Clark and his contingent of eleven men including Toussaint Charbonneau, plus Sacagawea, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, and a few Lemhi Shoshones, left their camp on Pattee Creek, crossed the Lemhi River and headed toward the Salmon River, to see whether it was as bad as Cameahwait had said.

Sergeant Gass was among the eleven men in Clark’s contingent who had spent the night of the 19th on Pattee Creek. He was stunned by his first impression of the upper Shoshone village near today’s settlement of Tendoy, Idaho.

A fine cool frosty morning. We set out early and travelled about 4 miles, to a village of the Indians on the bank of a branch of the Columbia river, about ten yards and very rapid.^[1]Missionaries of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, who settled in the valley in 1855, symbolically named the the river after King Limhi, “the son of Noah,” and his people, whose history … Continue reading At this place there are about 25 lodges made of willow bushes. they are the poorest and most miserable nation I ever beheld; having scarcely any thing to subsist on, except berries and a few fish, which they contrive by some means, to take. They have a great many fine horses, and nothing more; and on account of these they are much harassed by other nations.

Clark’s slant on the Shoshones’ plight was less emotional than Gass’s, and his discussions with them focused on more businesslike matters.

I was introduced to the only Lodge they had which was pitched in the Center for my party all the other Lodges made of bushes, after a fiew Indian Seremonies I informed the Indians the object of our journey our good intentions towards them my consern for their distressed Situation, what we had done for them in makeing a piece with the Minitarras [Hidatsas] Mandans Rickara [Arikara] &c. for them —. and requested them all to take over their horses & assist Capt Leiwis across &c. also informeing them the o[b]ject of my journey down the river and requested a guide to accompany me, all of which was repeited by the Chief to the whole village.

Those pore people Could only raise a Sammon & a little dried Choke Cherris for us

They asked the Indians for travel advice, wrote Gass, and were given “very unfavourable accounts with respect to the rivers,” so it seemed they would most likely have to thread their way through the mountains by land. But Clark preferred to see for himself, so he hired a guide, a man known to history only as Toby and mistakenly as “Old Toby.”^[2]The single reference to him by name in the journals was on 12 May 1806, when Lewis recalled, “our old guide Toby and his son each took a horse of ours when they returned last fall.” One … Continue reading

After giving them “a fiew Small articles as presents” he and his men went on down the river, crossed back to the east side of the valley, and “encamped on a small run”—possibly today’s Withington Creek.