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Published: September 5th 2023
As we got in the car this morning, Meriwether was laughing quietly to himself. I asked him what was so funny.
"I remember that place we went yesterday, the place with the turtle you rescued. It was the place where we got caught in a sudden storm. Came up almost instantly. Caught the keelboat and almost flipped it over. That might have ended the expedition right there. Guys all jumped overboard and pulled out the anchor line and used it and another cable to pull the boat into deeper water. Otherwise, it would have been driven up on the shore and torn apart. Looking back on it, it looked pretty funny, all those guys out there pulling on lines and cussing. Wish we had had the ways of traveling you now have. Then where we stayed last night was about where we had that meeting with the Otoes."
We left the Omaha/Council Bluffs area and headed on north. While Omaha has its share of attractions, such as Boys Town ("he ain't heavy, Father, he's my brother") and the Omaha Henry Doorly Zoo, often cited as the best zoo in the world, and always ranked near the very top, we
did not have time to tarry. Our next stop was a state park named - wait for it - Lewis and Clark State Park, this time in Iowa. It is actually one of the better sites we visited. In an indoor exhibit area, it has a reduced scale model of the keelboat, maybe a bit more than half scale. But it also has near full scale replicas of the pirogues, the iron boat frame that Lewis designed, and a bull boat. A bull boat is a type of coracle, a lightweight craft made by constructing a lightweight wood frame and then stretching animal hide over it to form the bottom and sides. Keelless, it has a very shallow draft and is very maneuverable. These advantages are strong enough that identical or very similar designs have arisen, apparently independently, in such diverse places as Wales, Ireland, Viet Nam, India, Iraq, and Tibet, as well among the Native Americans of the midwest plains. More about the iron boat frame later.
Meriwether said, "I guess we have passed the spot where we found poor George Shannon.That boy almost died from being a bad hunter. We sent him and Drouillard out to find
our horses, and they got separated. Drouillard came back but knew not where Shannon had gone and had not found the horses. We sent Private (John) Colter out to find him, but Colter discovered that Shannon must have gotten so scared of losing us that he had hurried ahead and was actually ahead of us by some three days. We finally found him after 19 days, waiting on the shore and hoping for a trader boat to pass. During that whole time he had had nothing but wild berries and a single rabbit, which he had killed using a piece of stick as shot after using all his own shot in missing game. That boy was our youngest, and maybe too young. I had correspondence from William (Clark) some years later saying that Shannon had been delegated to accompany one of the Indian chiefs back to his homeland from Washington and that he had lost a leg after being shot. William said they were already calling him Peg-Leg Shannon."
I told him that Shannon had gone on to attend Transylvania University in Louisville. TU was the first university in Kentucky, and later alumni included SCOTUS justices Harlan and Miller,
Jefferson Davis, Stephen F. Austin, Hugh Toland (founder of UCSF), Albert Sidney Johnson (Confederate general), John McCoy (founder of Kansas City MO), Cassius Clay (the abolitionist, not the boxer), US VP's Richard Johnson and John Breckinridge, and actors Ned Beatty ("Squeal like a pig") and Gil Rogers (All My Children, Guiding Light). Shannon got his law degree and served in both houses of the Kentucky legislature. Meriwether wryly observed, "You notice none of those things require even a scant ability in hunting."
While at this state park, we could probably see, but were unable to distinguish, Blackbird Hill. At that site are buried the remains of Chief Blackbird and 400 other Omaha Indians. They all died of smallpox. Meriwether recalled walking to the top of the hill to pay his respects. He told me that he thought they got smallpox from Indians of other tribes, but I told him that modern thinking is that they contracted the disease from white men passing that way. All of the well-known epidemic diseases were traded among Europeans over centuries, and therefore many Europeans had at least partial immunity, but none of that existed for the Native Americans, and those diseases wiped out
thousands. Smallpox was perhaps the most deadly, and it is estimated that it killed 25-50% of the Indian population in Mexico and Central America, and probably about 30% of the US Native American population.
Our next stop reminded Meriwether of one of the lowest days of the journey. They had just lost two men to desertion, and on August 19 Sgt. Floyd, a stalwart of the Corps, was stricken suddenly ill with abdominal pain and nausea and fever. He died later that day, probably from a burst appendix. Meriwether fold us "we kept the journey but slowed our pace. We thought he would recover. I fixed a bath for him for comfort, but before we could get him into it, he said that he must go away and died." He was buried on a bluff at the edge of the river. In 1857 that bluff was being eroded, so his remains were dug up and moved to near Sioux City, where the remains were re-buried and later a monument was erected. It looks something like the Washington Monument in miniature, and overlooks the distant river from a different bluff.
About 80 miles further north, after crossing over into
South Dakota, we came to Spirit Mound. This small hill, eroded but not flattened by invading glaciers in the last ice age, was long held in Native American tradition to be a dangerous place inhabited by "Little People" with large heads who could shoot arrows a great distance, and would kill anyone who came near the hill. There was even an old Lakota Sioux story about a band of 350 of their people who came too near the mound and most were killed, with all the survivors crippled. This was irresistible to Lewis and Clark, so they kept back one of the pirogues and 11 men and walked to the top of the hill. Meriwether: "We looked out on great grasslands which we knew were in the area but which we had not yet seen. There were multiple herds of buffalo, and the tall grass stretched as far as the eye could see. This was also the first time we had seen buffalo, and they were numerous beyond counting. The top of the hill was swarmed with swallows catching the plentiful insects, and they let us approach very near before flying away. It was a most fertile plain we observed.
Pretty peaceful - no sign of the devils we were warned about. I never could figure out how those big boulders got scattered around the grassy areas." From the top today you can see some surrounding tall grass prairie, which is being restored, while the most distant views are of farmland and pastures. Because of the changes in the river and other geologic forces, this is one of the few sites where you can stand and know that you are standing upon the exact place where Lewis and Clark stood so long ago. Those explorers had a miserable time of it walking the nine miles up the Vermilion River and then up the hill, but we were able to park and only had to walk about a mile total there and back. On the trail, we delighted in the abundant wildflowers and the feeling of being alone in a sea of grass. The scattered boulders are called glacial erratics, and were deposited by the rivers of ice in the last ice age.
Our next stop was at Niobrara State Park, back in Nebraska.This park is mostly a recreational area. L&C camped here on September 5 1804 but recorded no
special events other than making a new mast a few miles upstream and killing elk and using their hides to make some new tow ropes. It was worth a visit today because as you drive its short roads along the bluffs you get good views of the Missouri. In this area, the river is well upstream of the impoundment of Lewis and Clark Lake, and therefore flows probably much as it would have 219 years ago. There areas of multiple channels, cut off segments, small islands, and numerous sandbars. It is easy to see here the difficulties navigation of the river would have encountered.
Since it was along our route, we stopped in Mitchell SD to see the Corn Palace. It is one of those places that is so touristy that you almost feel like you have to see it. Thoroughly uninteresting.
We then proceeded on the longish drive through not beautiful SD countryside to Murdo, our home away from home for the night. Murdo is not much of a town, simply a central place for the surrounding rand lands, with a couple of motel, some fast food, and a couple of restaurants. We went to the recommended
steak house. It was the sort of place where you don't cuss, don't request cocktails with umbrellas in them, and don't say anything bad about apple pie, God, or Donald Trump. The meal was pretty good. On the way back, we saw that there was a ranch rodeo that night, and I determined to go. Lucie decided to go with me, but Chuck stayed behind to rest. Bad mistake in my estimation. We did not stay the entire evening, but what we saw was saddle bronc riding. A guy gets on a horse trained to buck, cinches his hand down, and tries to stay on board for 8 seconds once the animal is released from the loading pen The rider must "mark the horse", meaning getting his boot heels up in contact with the horse above the point of the horse's shoulders before the front legs first hit the ground, and also must not touch the horse with his free hand during the ride. Although they are not always used, in this particular competition they were using flank straps, also known as bucking straps. I thought that these somehow irritated the animal into bucking harder, but apparently they don't. Horses
that have anything irritating them will not buck as high. These straps encourage the horse to kick the hind legs out higher and straighter. I have no idea why.
There were several points about this rodeo that I found particularly interesting. First, prior to each rider, they held a Calcutta auction. Each cowboy contestant was auctioned off to the highest bidder. All the winning bidders had to put their money into the pool, and at the end the "owners" of the top rider (or maybe top two) split the pot from ALL the bids. Bids ranged from about $1500 up to several thousand. So the ranch owners bet, the cowboys ride and put themselves at risk, and the ranch owners take all the money, with none going to the riders. The second thing I found very interesting was the two men on horses who rode nearby the bucking horse to assist the rider if needed. But more important, once the rider was off the horse, they had to retrieve the bronco. The first rider was ride alongside a nearly top speed and release the bucking strap, while the second horseman would catch the reins of the bronco. I thought
these guys were more skilled than the younger bronc riders.
As we were leaving the rodeo, Lucie and I remarked that we had not seen at the restaurant or at the rodeo a single women who looked 18 or older who was not married. We assumed that they all either left town or got married right out of high school. All in all, for me the rodeo was one of the highlights of the trip.
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2023 Lewis and Clark trip 166 Lewis and Clark State Park IA 071423
Megan
non-member comment
Transylvania is in Lexington
Transylvania University is in Lexington, Kentucky, not Louisville.