Lewis and Clark in North Dakota, October 1804-April 1805, August
1806
The images represented on this site pick up the expedition in winter of 1804-1805 and Spring-Summer 1805, 1806.
The Lewis and Clark expedition arrived at the villages of the Mandans and Hidatsa in the fall of their first year out. The villages had been visited by trappers and traders for several years as evidenced by men like Touissant Charboneau whom they found living among them when they arrived. There were also other traders representing various British and French interests that spent time among the indians. Lewis informed them in short order that they were operating on American turf and should adjust their operations accordingly. Relations were cool but not strained.
The tribes were eager to trade with the newcomers and welcomed them as they had those who had come before. They were anxious for trade goods and an ally in ongoing conflicts with their neighbors the Sioux. The tribes had already been decimated by European disease. In the coming years nearly the whole population would succumb to the Pox.
The expedition erected Fort Mandan near today's Washburn, North Dakota. They would spend the winter in relative comfort fending off the bitter cold of the plains winter. They were also frequent visitors and guests in the indian villages. During the winter months they enlisted Charbonneau and his indian wife, Sacagawea. They were part of delivering Sacagawea's son Babtiste, whom Clark would christen as "Pomp". Sacagawea was enlisted as interpreter and as liaison to her people, the Lemhi Shoshone, whom she had been captured from during a raid near the headwaters of the Missouri. The expedition hoped to obtain horses from the Shoshone to cross the mountains.
By early spring, after the Missouri had flushed itself of ice the expedition was ready to move. The keelboat and crew would return down river with all the plant and animals collected thus far along with volumes of further information on the land, inhabitants and a myriad of other things of interest to president Thomas Jefferson. The detachment that would continue west would do so in new dugout canoes and the pirogues. The country they were heading into was largely unexplored by Europeans although evidence does exist that there had been some undocumented trips possibly as far as the upper Yellowstone. The indians of course were familiar with the area if not directly at least by their contact with travelers who visited them from those regions.
Lewis and Clark would be the first to document and map the country they now entered, inhabited only by the natives, flora and fauna, and in its most pristine state. There would be no communication backward or forward between here and the coast. It was possible that they might encounter a ship on the coast and they were prepared for that, however it never happened. Essentially, until they returned to the Mandans their fate would be a mystery and any hope of communication with their world ended here.
The Return Trip, August 1806
As soon as the expedition was reunited above the villages on the return trip, the parties focus was on returning home. They had accomplished what they had set out to do, the river was now their friend, doubling the speed of the return. Little time was spent with long goodbyes. The Charbonneau family stayed behind along with one member, John Colter who returned upstream with a pair of trappers in what would become an exciting, colorful, but not very profitable career as one of the first "mountain men". Home was downstream, the sooner the better!