expedition stopped at a Mandan village in what is now North Dakota. The Mandans were agriculturalists and traders. In the spring of 1805 they left the Mandan villages. With Sacajawea, the wife of a French Canadian fur trapper, Toussaint Charbonneau, they journeyed up the Missouri in six canoes and two pirogues. Stephen E. Ambrose writes in Undaunted Courage, his book about the Lewis and Clark expedition, that eight days into the trip “the expedition passed the farthest point upstream on the Missouri known by Lewis to have been reached by white men.” Lewis and Clark then passed above the badlands of present-day Garfield County with little incident. North of the river lay the territory of the Blackfeet, whom they did not see. Of the land to the south Lewis wrote on May seventeenth, just a few days before the party reached the Musselshell River, “the great number of large beds of streams perfectly dry which we daily pass indicate a country but badly watered, which I fear is the case with the country through which we have been passing for the last fifteen or twenty days.”
In the same entry he notes that Clark was almost bitten by a rattlesnake, thus picking out one of the salient characteristics of the land. Two days later Clark noted in his journal one of many encounters with a grizzly bear—they killed it, as they usually did—and a violent confrontation with a less predictable adversary. “Capt. Lewis’s dog was badly bitten by a wounded beaver and was near bleeding to death.” This incident has been little commented on by historians, but it speaks to the determination of beavers.
The expedition did not linger in this area or the Missouri Breaks farther west. They continued on to the headwaters of the Missouri, across the Rocky Mountains and to the Pacific. On the way back in 1806, Clark and Lewis split up, and Clark and his party passed to the south of the Hell Creek area, traveling the Yellowstone River.
Lewis and Clark marked another major step in the advance of European Americans. Although their passage itself caused little damage, they were the tip of the spear, and behind them came the advance guard of white expansion—mountain men and traders. Jim Bridger, a mountain man celebrated for his wild and woolly ways, after whom the Bridger Wilderness in Montana is named, did not strike out into completely unknown territory in the pure entrepreneurial spirit that Americans prize so much. He first saw the land as a member of Lewis and Clark’s government-sponsored expedition. During the ensuing decades, few people, Indian or white, would have spent much time in the badlands of eastern Montana, except to hunt buffalo. And buffalo hunting would not reach the level of wholesale slaughter until the coming of the railroads, after the Civil War.
The government took a hand in bringing the West under the heel of civilization during the Indian Wars. The most famous battle of this campaign against the aboriginal inhabitants of the West was probably the fight at the Little Big Horn on June 26, 1876, eight days before the centennial Independence Day celebration. As every schoolchild knows, or used to know, the battle was won by the Indians, who had no chance at all in the larger war.
The Little Big Horn is southwest of Garfield County. In a recent book, Hell Creek, Montana: America’s Key to the Prehistoric Past, Lowell Dingus, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, recounts the pursuit of Sitting Bull and four hundred Indians after the battle by Colonel Nelson A. Miles. The colonel followed Sitting Bull, through the Hell Creek badlands in the fall of 1876, struggling with rough terrain and impending winter. In November temperatures were already dropping to twelve below zero.
Sitting Bull was apparently attracted to the Hell Creek area because the hunting was good. The buffalo were still there, feeding on the short grass of the western prairie. Neither Sitting Bull nor the buffalo fared well in
In the same entry he notes that Clark was almost bitten by a rattlesnake, thus picking out one of the salient characteristics of the land. Two days later Clark noted in his journal one of many encounters with a grizzly bear—they killed it, as they usually did—and a violent confrontation with a less predictable adversary. “Capt. Lewis’s dog was badly bitten by a wounded beaver and was near bleeding to death.” This incident has been little commented on by historians, but it speaks to the determination of beavers.
The expedition did not linger in this area or the Missouri Breaks farther west. They continued on to the headwaters of the Missouri, across the Rocky Mountains and to the Pacific. On the way back in 1806, Clark and Lewis split up, and Clark and his party passed to the south of the Hell Creek area, traveling the Yellowstone River.
Lewis and Clark marked another major step in the advance of European Americans. Although their passage itself caused little damage, they were the tip of the spear, and behind them came the advance guard of white expansion—mountain men and traders. Jim Bridger, a mountain man celebrated for his wild and woolly ways, after whom the Bridger Wilderness in Montana is named, did not strike out into completely unknown territory in the pure entrepreneurial spirit that Americans prize so much. He first saw the land as a member of Lewis and Clark’s government-sponsored expedition. During the ensuing decades, few people, Indian or white, would have spent much time in the badlands of eastern Montana, except to hunt buffalo. And buffalo hunting would not reach the level of wholesale slaughter until the coming of the railroads, after the Civil War.
The government took a hand in bringing the West under the heel of civilization during the Indian Wars. The most famous battle of this campaign against the aboriginal inhabitants of the West was probably the fight at the Little Big Horn on June 26, 1876, eight days before the centennial Independence Day celebration. As every schoolchild knows, or used to know, the battle was won by the Indians, who had no chance at all in the larger war.
The Little Big Horn is southwest of Garfield County. In a recent book, Hell Creek, Montana: America’s Key to the Prehistoric Past, Lowell Dingus, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, recounts the pursuit of Sitting Bull and four hundred Indians after the battle by Colonel Nelson A. Miles. The colonel followed Sitting Bull, through the Hell Creek badlands in the fall of 1876, struggling with rough terrain and impending winter. In November temperatures were already dropping to twelve below zero.
Sitting Bull was apparently attracted to the Hell Creek area because the hunting was good. The buffalo were still there, feeding on the short grass of the western prairie. Neither Sitting Bull nor the buffalo fared well in
Similar Books
