Empire of Shadows Read online

  * * *

  With Doane invariably riding first, the explorers had found much to write about in the days since leaving Fort Ellis. They marveled at a singular formation of red rock that they mistook for cinnabar and named “the Devil’s Slide”; they picked their way across a bleak, boulder-strewn stretch of country that one member of the party called “the Valley of Desolation”; fighting vertigo, they peered down into three successive canyons, each more unfathomable than the last; and now they had stumbled upon this group of malodorous sulfur springs.

  Langford and Doane kept the most detailed diaries, although most of their companions made notes of their own. Some would publish newspaper and magazine accounts of the expedition, while the jottings of others are best described as perfunctory. Langford’s business partner, Samuel Hauser, though a successful Helena banker and a future governor of Montana after the territory acquired statehood, seemed scarcely literate. Each day he scrawled a few misspelled words in a dull pencil. Contemplating the snowcapped spectacle of the Absaroka mountains, where the two unfortunate prospectors had been killed, he managed just this: “cenery supurb.”

  The camp above the sulfur springs was at 6,500 feet, but the mountain they proposed to climb today towered more than 3,000 higher. They broke camp at eight o’clock, though not all of them joined the trip. Among the three who stayed behind was a bright and self-effacing young Helena lawyer named Cornelius Hedges, a close friend of Langford’s and another prominent mason. He was an improbable explorer, slightly built and something of a hypochondriac. Let the others make the ride up the mountain, Hedges said; his horse was tired, and he would climb instead to the top of a beetling cliff that overlooked the campsite, to savor the view of the Yellowstone and update his journal.

  At the foot of the mountain, the riders diverged from the Indian trail that Lieutenant Doane had been following for the past several days. The ascent from here was steep and rough, through stands of timber, across meadows of late-blooming wildflowers where grizzly bears began to forage at this time of year for berries and whitebark pine nuts, over bare rocks and ravines, past the tree line and the snow line. At the summit, they took measurements with an aneroid barometer, although the numbers varied widely. Perhaps not all the members of the party were familiar with the workings of the instrument. Hauser, a former civil engineer with a talent for triangulation, estimated their altitude at 10,700 feet. Less, Langford said; about 9,800. Doane fixed the figure at 9,966 feet. Yet while there was disagreement about the altitude, there was no dispute about the name. By common acclaim, they dedicated the mountain to their ailing general, who had surprised them all by riding alone to the summit on the previous day. It would be Mount Washburn.5

  “The view from the summit is beyond all description,” Doane wrote. His whole field of vision was rimmed by mountains: to the east, the dark, white-tipped mass of the Absarokas; to the west, the forested slopes and chiseled rock faces of the Madison and Gallatin ranges; straight ahead to the south, the sheer-sided silhouette of the distant Tetons. A pellucid lake, dotted with islands, occupied the middle ground.

  The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone cut a ragged line across the open landscape, and twenty miles beyond it, a column of smoke rose hundreds of feet above the trees. They took it for a forest fire, not an uncommon occurrence after summer lightning strikes, until someone remarked that the smoke seemed to be rising in regular puffs, as if it was being expelled from the earth with great force. As they concentrated on the sight, their senses sharpened in the cold, thin air, they convinced themselves that this smoke was also making a sound, a low roar—although at such a distance this might have been an aural illusion. The meaning of the curious sight began to dawn on them: a cheer went up; hats were thrown in the air. They had found a geyser.

  As Doane took in the view, he became aware of other plumes of white, more and more of them. Some appeared in a sudden spurt of steam; others formed lazy, drifting clouds. He was looking, astonished, at dozens of geysers and hot springs, scattered all across the great circular basin. The scene put him in mind of the Alleghenies, with the iron and coal furnaces going full blast. While the others took their measurements and raised their hurrahs, Doane alone seemed to understand the totality of what he was seeing. All this was the vast crater, the caldera, of an extinct volcano. And that meant that everything they had heard—the campfire yarns spun by Jim Bridger and the mountain men, the wild exaggerations of the gold prospectors, the tales told by the Jesuit fathers of their travels with the Blackfeet to a place they called the “land of many smokes”—all of it was true.

  Over the days that followed, Doane recorded the explorers’ progress conscientiously in his journal, covering page after page in his bold, sloping hand. It was the first coherent record of the sights that tens of millions would flock to see—the canyons and falls of the Yellowstone, the shimmering lake, the mud pots and geyser basins. Doane’s report was a masterpiece of crisp, clear observation. Before the next year was out, it would be favorably compared to the journals of Lewis and Clark; within two, it would be instrumental in the creation of one of the nation’s greatest icons.

  On March 1, 1872, as President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill establishing the world’s first national park, the army was at work on its official history of the Second Cavalry. It traced each proud episode, from the hunting down of the Seminoles in the Everglades in the late 1830s, through the heroic fights against the Confederacy at Bull Run and Manassas, to the Piegan affair of 1870, in which the central role of Lieutenant Doane in destroying the hostile village on the Marias was singled out for special praise.

  The history was written by an elite group of colonels and generals, but remarkably they asked Doane, a mere lieutenant, to contribute a chapter of his own in which he would recount his memories of the Yellowstone expedition.6 Violence, exploration, and civilization were to be woven together in the army’s salute to this young officer, as they were in the history of the West.

  Doane wrote with pride:

  It is something to break down the barriers of the unknown; to behold the mists of darkness fade; to marshal the videttes of the vanguard of progress; to form the crest of that wave of civilization which sweeps onward, invincible and without ceasing, through the breadth of a great continent, until it meets the reflux tide from the broad Pacific slopes.

  As for Yellowstone:

  When the park shall have been made accessible to the pleasure-seekers of the world, it will be a satisfaction not to be derived from wealth nor honors to have been in some degree concerned in the discovery and development of a new source of pleasure and instruction for the human race.

  This was an official history, and as such it called for decorum. But in the normal run of things, this kind of modesty was not a quality that marked the lieutenant’s character. In his own mind, Doane was not “in some degree concerned” in the creation of Yellowstone; he would always be “the man who invented Wonderland.”

  Part One

  PATHFINDERS

  1

  “A KNOLEDGE OF THESE PEOPLE”

  1805–1806

  They had soldiered together, and they were nominally co-captains of the Corps of Discovery, but Meriwether Lewis and William Clark could hardly have been more contrasting personalities. The redheaded Clark was the elder by four years. He was an experienced frontiersman and Indian fighter, with a talent for mapmaking and navigation, a natural command of men, and an open, genial character. Lewis was a child of privilege, scion of one of the first families of Virginia, and personal secretary to the president, whom he regarded as a virtual father figure. But there was an awkward formality about Lewis, and he had a “martial temper.” Above all he was a manic depressive, veering wildly from limitless excitement to dark feelings of impotence and failure that would eventually lead him to suicide. The episodes of euphoria sometimes made him reckless, and on the homeward leg of the journey, in the summer of 1806, he made a critical misjudgment, ignoring the warnings of people to whom he should h
ave paid close attention.

  In the matter of their contact with Indians, Jefferson’s instructions to Lewis and Clark1 had been detailed and explicit. The president wrote, “The commerce which may be carried on with the people inhabiting the line you will pursue, renders a knoledge of these people important.” What that meant in practice was that Lewis and Clark were to acquaint themselves with the names and numbers of the tribes they encountered; their languages, occupations, and peculiarities of law and custom; their characteristic diseases and remedies; how they dressed and what they ate; the extent of each tribe’s territory; and the state of intertribal relations. Jefferson continued, “Considering the interest which every nation has in extending & strengthening the authority of reason & justice among the people around them, it will be useful to acquire what knowledge you can of the state of morality, religion & information among them, as it may better enable those who endeavor to civilize & instruct them.”

  The president was clear that violence was to be avoided wherever possible: “In all your intercourse with the natives treat them in the most friendly & conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit.” If the explorers ran into an overwhelming display of hostile force, they should retreat. This was a matter of simple pragmatism. Engagement would risk, at the very least, loss of the data collected by the expedition, while turning back to give a full reporting of the number and disposition of hostiles would allow future explorers to return with the proper amount of hardware.

  This is not to say that Lewis and Clark went ill-equipped. On the contrary, they carried the largest arsenal that had ever been seen west of the Missouri. The threat of violence was implicit in the act of exploration, and certainly in Jefferson’s intent to civilize. The Corps of Discovery was a military expedition, under military discipline. The explorers were uninvited guests in an unknown land, and any tribe they encountered was assumed to be hostile until proven otherwise. To a belligerent tribe seeking dominance over its neighbors, what greater temptation than the rifles, powder horns, bullet molds, gunsmith’s tools, knives, and tomahawks that Lewis had commissioned from the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry? The basic truth about weaponry is that it is an enticement to violence as well as a safeguard against it. Or put another way, Lewis and Clark, and many subsequent explorations of the West, proved Chekhov’s first iron law of theater: Hang a pistol on the wall in the first act, and it is sure to be fired before the final curtain.

  Miraculously, however, it took more than two years for the point to be proved. In the meantime, there were incidents and near-incidents. As the expedition labored upstream on the Missouri in September 1804, a group of Teton Sioux chiefs, after downing a glass or two, or three, of whiskey on the explorers’ keelboat, expressed their dissatisfaction with Lewis’s gifts of peace medals, coats, and hats, and refused to be put ashore without more, while warriors milled around on the bank with their bows strung. Lewis ordered the boat’s swivel gun loaded with musket balls and held a lighted taper over the fuse until they dispersed. Three days later, there was a second, similar episode, this time because a gift of tobacco was considered insultingly meager. But on both occasions the offended chiefs backed down, the warriors put away their arrows, and the fuse of the swivel gun remained unlit.2

  Lewis’s temper almost got the better of him nineteen months later, as the party headed back up the Columbia from the Pacific and spent several days in the country of the Chinooks. The captain had mixed feelings about these people. On one hand he was disdainful of their general demeanor (“low and ill-shaped … badly clad and illy made”). On the other, he had to acknowledge that they were peaceable sorts (“the greatest harmoney appears to exist among them”). But the Chinooks were inveterate petty thieves, and that drove Lewis to distraction. They stole an ax; they stole a lump of lead; they tried to steal a tomahawk from Private John Colter, who was not a man to trifle with; they stole Lewis’s black dog, Seaman, which almost pushed him over the edge. It was not clear whether the thieves intended to eat the dog, as many tribes did.

  One of the Chinook chiefs apologized. He tried to explain the problem of tribal authority; there were limits to the discipline a chief could impose, and there was not much he could do if a few hotheaded young men yielded to temptation. Lewis had to understand that the village as a whole wanted peace. But Lewis didn’t really understand, and few whites would. Friendly and/or powerless chiefs, and young warriors who saw theft and violence as a display of valor and a source of prestige: This would be a running theme for the rest of the century and the root of one violent confrontation after another.

  As if to underline the chief’s point, the thieving continued. Tomahawks and knives went missing in the night. Lewis threatened beatings. A saddle disappeared, and a buffalo robe. Then he caught a man red-handed, as he tried to liberate an iron socket from a discarded canoe pole. He flew into a rage and told the village that “I would shoot the first of them that attempted to steal an article from us.” He went beyond this to the threat of collective punishment, informing the Chinooks “that I had it in my power at that moment to kill them all and set fire to their houses.” But then he summoned all his self-control, no doubt contemplating the political consequences of acting out his threat, and the Corps of Discovery moved on toward the territory of a tribe about whom Lewis felt differently.3

  Lewis and his companions got on well with many of the tribes, to be fair. As Clark noted in his journal, “A cuirous custom … is to give handsome squars to those whom they wish to show more acknowledgments to.” The men of the corps, he reported in March 1805, were “generally healthy except Venerials Complaints which is verry Common amongst the natives and the men Catch it from them.”4

  The explorers had a mutual love affair with the Mandans, whose amiable welcome made their villages a favored stopover for generations of European and American adventurers on the upper Missouri. Lewis liked the Arikara, too, and the Clatsops. He found the Wallawallas “the most hospitable, honest, and sincere people that we have met with in our voyage.”5 The Flatheads were friendly. The Shoshone were “frank, communicative, fair in dealing, generous with the little they possess, extreemly honest, and by no means beggarly.”6 And of course there was Sacagawea, herself a Shoshone, freed from slavery among the Hidatsa.

  But no tribe stood in quite such high regard as the Nez Perce. There is disagreement about how the tribe acquired its odd name. Some of them appear to have indeed pierced their noses and ornamented them with dentalium shells, which they acquired in trade with the tribes of the Pacific Coast. Other authorities say the name is a mistranslation of sign language. The Plains tribes indicated the Nez Perce by passing the index finger over the nose with a slashing motion; this was a sign of bravery, denoting people who did not flinch even if an arrow came that close.

  Lewis and Clark also attested to this bravery, but they spoke too of the gentleness of the Nez Perce men, as well as the intelligence and attractiveness of the women. The explorers found the Nez Perce to be proud, dignified, reserved, slow to anger, attentive to personal cleanliness. Their language contained no profanity. They were orators, who settled their disputes by a prolonged search for consensus. The tribe was famous for its horse breeding and its horsemanship.

  There were perhaps four thousand Nez Perce when the Corps of Discovery encountered them, divided into a number of small, autonomous bands. The men hunted and fished for salmon and cutthroat trout; the women gathered berries and dug camas roots, which they pounded into flour for bread that gave Lewis chronic gas and diarrhea. Buffalo were gone from the plateau country west of the Rockies by the time the expedition arrived, so the Nez Perce crossed the mountains each summer to hunt the great herds on the plains of what is now Montana. It is this knowledge of the high passes that explains the tribe’s warm relationship with Lewis and Clark. The Nez Perce knew the way across the Continental Divide, and they knew the dangers that lurked on the other side. Captain Lewis took their advice on the first count, and ignored it on the second.
>
  The most daunting moment of the outward journey occurred in September 1805 when the captains contemplated the sheer granite wall of the Bitterroots. “The most terrible mountains I ever beheld,” remarked Sergeant Patrick Gass.7 The Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean lay somewhere on the far side. They bought some fresh horses from a friendly band of Flatheads. With the help of the expedition’s translator, George Drouillard (Drewyer, for the most part, in Lewis’s journals, or sometimes Drulyard), son of a French-Canadian father and a Shawnee mother, Lewis constructed a summary Flathead vocabulary. The tribe spoke in a guttural fashion that led Lewis to think they might be the descendants of Prince Madoc and a wandering band of Welshmen. Jefferson subscribed to the theory that such a tribe was out there, somewhere in the Western wilds.

  The Corps of Discovery had better horses now, but the “emince Dificuelt Knobs” remained to be conquered. On Lolo Creek, at a campground they called Travelers’ Rest, a group of hunters went out to supplement the party’s dwindling rations as it prepared for the crossing. John Colter, the soldier who would later withhold his tomahawk from the larcenous Chinooks, brought back three Indians who said they lived on the other side of the mountains. They were Nez Perce, and they indicated a trail across the divide that would take the explorers to their villages in six days. It took eleven in reality, and they were the worst days of the whole trip, beset by snowdrifts, hailstorms, dysentery, fallen timber, the eating of a colt when the rest of the food ran out, and the loss of Clark’s writing desk when a packhorse fell forty feet down a precipice.

  The elderly chief of the Nez Perce villages was Twisted Hair, a “Chearfull man with apparent Siencerity.” He offered hospitality, traded food for trinkets, knives, and tobacco, and allowed the men to lie up for more than a week while Clark treated their intestinal troubles with salt pills and other emetics. Clark wrote that his modest doctoring abilities “raised my reputation and gives those nativs an exolted oppinion of my skill as a phisician.” Most important, the Nez Perce made no move to relieve the ailing and vulnerable explorers of their weapons, despite having no more than a couple of defective rifles with which to defend themselves against hostile tribes.