Sept. 23, 1806They're back. The men of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, given up for dead by many Americans, round the bend of the Missouri River into the Mississippi and pull their canoes into the village of St. Louis at noon.
"They really have the appearance of Robinson Crusoe - dressed entirely in buckskins," a resident of St. Louis is said to say.
It's hard to imagine the joyous scene upon the arrival in a dugout catamaran, three canoes and 39-foot white pirogue of the 30 haggard men and, possibly, one dog. The last mention of Seaman, Capt. Meriwether Lewis' Newfoundland, had been at White Bear Island near Great Falls on July 15, when Lewis wrote "my dog even howls with the torture he experiences from (mosquitoes)."
"We fired three rounds as we approached the town and Landed oppocit the center of the Town, the people gathered on the Shore and Huzzared three cheers," reports Sgt. John Ordway.
The men store their gear in a room furnished by an old friend of Clark's who ran a tavern. Lewis wants to shoot a quick letter off to Thomas Jefferson, but finds he's just missed the outgoing post. He sends a note to the postmaster in Cahokia, across the river in Illinois, to delay the mail until noon the next day, then commences writing the president.
It's the end of a two-year, four-month journey of exploration and empire building, but it's not the only such enterprise going on in the world.
Prussia has declared war on France, and Napoleon Bonaparte's forces are responding. They'll capture Berlin in a month, then take on the Russians in Poland and beyond. British troops, attempting to chip away at France's colonial empire and allies, are regrouping after their dispellment in August from Buenos Aries, Argentina, following a seven-week siege.
The Napoleonic Wars will last another nine years, until that Waterloo thing in 1815.
Meanwhile in London, Ralph Wedgewood is preparing for the patent of his invention, carbon paper, in early October. Wedgewood needs the paper for his "stylographic writer," which helps blind people write.
Closer to home, Zebulon Pike is some 500 miles west of St. Louis in northwestern Kansas. He's on a paler version of Lewis and Clark's explorations of the American West, and a couple months from attempting to scale the Colorado peak that will come to bear his name.
Although Lewis and Clark are gone from what will become Montana since early August, it's far from vacant up here. Five to 10,000 people of various native tribes call it home, and at least three white men are probably within its borders.
John Colter left Lewis and Clark six weeks before at the Mandan villages in North Dakota to return to the mountains with Illinois trappers Joseph Dickson and Forrest Hancock. No detailed account exists of Colter's immediate adventures after that. The three men ascend the Yellowstone River that Colter had just descended with William Clark, and they'll spend at least part of the winter at the Three Forks of the Missouri. Colter and Hancock apparently have a falling out with Dickson, leaving him to fend for himself.
Colter will head back for civilization in 1807 but again get waylaid. This time, a week short of St. Louis, he agrees to return to the Yellowstone with a trapping company headed by Manuel Lisa. He'll help establish Fort Raymond at the mouth of the Bighorn River. In the next year he'll establish his mountain man legend, stumbling onto what's now Yellowstone National Park, then eluding Blackfeet warriors near Three Forks and walking naked 300 miles back to Fort Raymond.
Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
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