On a recent trip to Washington DC, my girlfriend and I stayed in Georgetown with her 1st cousin once removed and her cousin’s husband. They were a charming young couple who live in a beautiful apartment that is within walking distance of all the delights that make modern urban life so pleasant and enjoyable. Unlike many young people, this couple has a large collection of books, and the subject of favorite writers came up in conversation. This couple named Stephan Ambrose as their favorite, and moments later, gave me a copy of Undaunted Courage, which is a detailed account of the voyage of Lewis and Clark. I’ve been devouring the book ever since.
I knew the basics of the journey of Lewis and Clark, but a few details gleaned from the book stand out. First, it’s amazing how little the Americans knew about the Western United States, even though the colonies had been in place for nearly two hundred years. The men and women of the British colonies had lived and died, generation after generation, with no knowledge of what was on the same continent to the West. The British had sailed the Pacific Coast all the way to what is now British Columbia, and noted the mouth of the Columbia River in current-day Washington state, but what lay between St. Louis and the Pacific Ocean was mostly a big question mark.
Trappers had gone up the Missouri River hundreds of miles and made notes on the natives that lived there, but no one had gone through the region to the Pacific, and no one had taken longitude and latitude measurements, and no one had tried to catalog the flora and fauna of the region. It was these tasks that Meriwether Lewis was charged with by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson hoped there was a river that would cross the West and end at the Pacific Ocean.
At the time the expedition was conceived, the land was still disputed by the European powers, but the US bought most of the territory from France in the massive Louisiana Purchase and so by the time Lewis, and the man he named as his co-leader, William Clark, pointed their little boats west, they were entering uncharted, but American, territory.
The men set off with a small party of hired soldiers mid-1804 and spent the following three years making their way to the Pacific Coast. This took them through the lands of the natives living along the Missouri River, and they wintered in the area where the Mandan natives had villages. The natives had interacted with many white men since the area had long been penetrated by French and British fur trappers.
Furs were a particularly good example of a trade good that increased in value based strictly on transport. A beaver trapped in what is now North Dakota was relatively valueless and anyone could go out and get another. But in St. Louis, it was worth much more. In Philadelphia, it was worth even more and if it made its way to Paris, it was at least 1000X more valuable than when it was caught.
Knowing that the fur business was highly profitable, Thomas Jefferson gave Lewis the order to explain to the natives that the Louisiana Purchase was very good for them and that the ‘great father’ in the East was going to involve the natives in a trading network that would allow them to sell the furs they collected into the American trading system. This new system, in Jefferson’s plan, would exclude the French and British traders already working the area.
Lewis developed a standard stump speech he made to the natives as he worked his way up the Missouri, but every tribe he encountered was not interested in the proposed trading network, or at least Lewis made no note of their questions or enthusiasm. What he did was make note of the native request for ‘presents’ which they were already used to receiving. When Lewis passed out tobacco, some clothing, and tricornered hats, the natives were disappointed. What they wanted was guns, bullets, and whiskey, but Lewis didn’t have enough of those items to spare.
The natives here reveal a central problem faced by every native tribe that was in the path of the American expansion. They failed, in the most basic sense, to understand the flow of power in the coming economic system. In other economic systems of the time in Europe, in the Middle East, and in Asia, there was a strong understanding and desire to gain wealth through trading. The long Silk Road, out of Asia, brought goods, like silk, from Asia, where it was made, to Europe, where it was coveted. Same silk, different location, traders making money at every middle point. The Silk Road began in approximately 100BC, nearly 2000 years before Lewis and Clark entered the Mandan villages, and yet, the native didn’t understand at all what was being offered to them. They were being offered a ‘Fur Road’ from their homes to the markets of Europe but didn’t get it. They had been involved in warring with each other for as far back as any of them knew, and so they wanted to win, which the guns would allow. Since they didn’t have any sort of machine-based products, distilling a fermented beverage was also beyond their capacity. The white man had guns and whiskey, and it never occurred to the natives to learn how to make their own guns or brew their own booze, or get a bigger piece of the fur trade.
In addition to not really grasping what Jefferson and Lewis had in mind for a trading network, the natives made another gross error in judgement, one that would not be made in virtually any other society at the time. They thought that if the let the white men have sex with their wives, the power of the white man would somehow, through some logic they failed to convey, transfer to the natives. Convinced of this logic, they stood guard at the teepees while the white men were inside with their wives.
This of course, didn’t transfer power to the natives, but it did transfer syphilis, which was a kind of weakness they didn’t understand either.
The natives simply had not developed any economic cosmology that would let them look deeper into the world of men. Having nothing to inherit or pass down, they didn’t seem to worry much about the parentage of their children, and all of this adds up to a behavioral trait that is unique, perverse, destructive, and surely, in the eyes of the white men the encountered, which included Lewis and Clark but also including the French and British fur trappers and traders that had been in the area for generations, entirely discrediting. For men who came from a Christian society, the idea that a man would stand guard while you violated his wife because he thought this would make HIM more powerful… well, why not take what you can from such a fool. The natives had no notion of cuckoldry, and to the white men who poured into the area, the natives lacked all moral compassing.
It is well established that the natives of all the Americas were a tribe of the common stock of humanity that entered North America via the land that is now Alaska. Some unknown number of people crossed from Asia into North America and in time, were cut off from the bulk of humanity that was linked via the Silk Road and thousands of other trade routes. It was isolation from the ideas and traded goods (and viruses) that let the natives fall thousands of years behind in terms of civilization and learning as well as immunity. The natives weren’t stupid, and they had, like Lewis and Clark and all the frontiersmen who learned so much from the natives, a deep and detailed understanding of the natural world they inhabited. They certainly had courage, and they had their version of honor. What they lacked as the most basic understanding of how power flowed in the rest of the world, and over time, they simply fell, in a way that was unavoidable, into the trap of a people far behind the flow of human history and they had neither the ability or inclination to catch up.
Only after their complete collapse, at the other end of the 19th Century, did any natives with commercial skills begin to emerge. One of the first was Quanah Parker, the Comanche who was the child of a captured white girl, Cynthia Ann Parker. Quanah was skilled at using his native background to achieve fame in white society that even then had developed the native mythos far beyond what Lewis and Clark could have imagined. The country retained the native names for whole states, named thousands of sports teams after the natives, and now, have set up native American history museums in several places including right on the Capital Mall, in Washington DC. They may have failed to understand power, but they were a fascinating people who are mostly lost to us now, but who are still, like so many others long passed out of living memory, part of our extended human family.
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