This chapter comes from The Story of the World, Vol. III, by Susan Wise Bauer, ©2004 Peace Hill Press. Reproduction or distribution in any format is strictly prohibited.

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Chapter 32: The Opened West

Lewis and Clark Map the West

An American looking east might see slums around Boston and New York. But to the west lay a much more beautiful sight: vast fields, deep forests, and soaring mountains, just waiting for American settlers.

Directly west of the original thirteen states lay the midwestern territories. After the Revolution, Britain had given the United States all of the land east of the Mississippi. The thirteen colonies, now states, had agreed to divide this land into territories. When a territory had the same number of settlers as a state, it would be allowed to join the United States. So far, two states had been added: Tennessee and Kentucky. The rest of this land still lay in three territories: the Indiana Territory, the Northwest Territory, and the Mississippi Territory.

Then Thomas Jefferson, who had become President in 1801, bought the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon. Now, the United States had even more western land, stretching out far beyond the Mississippi! Jefferson wanted Americans to build towns and farms across all of this land. But before he could send settlers out into the West, he needed to know what was out there. No one was sure what the land on the other side of the Mississippi really looked like.

Jefferson hired two explorers to travel across the Louisiana Territory and map it out. Meriwether Lewis was an army captain who had become Jefferson’s personal secretary. William Clark was a friend of Lewis’s who had served with him in the army. Together, the two men built a boat and gathered together a group of about thirty other explorers. On May 14th, 1804, Lewis and Clark loaded their goods, their men, and Lewis’s big, shaggy dog Scannon onto the boat and set off to sail up the Mississippi River. They planned to travel up the Mississippi and then to head west, across the unknown land of the Louisiana Territory.

At first, the journey was all upstream. The men had to wade in the river, pulling their heavy boat with ropes against the swift Mississippi current. Mosquitoes and gnats bit their heads and shoulders; river snakes swam by their knees. They labored on, far into the land that is now North Dakota. They traveled through lands where friendly Native American tribes lived, into unknown places where the fierce, hostile Teton Sioux prowled through the woods. They had been traveling now for six whole months! The weather began to grow cold. In the morning, an ice film covered the edges of the river. It was November, and soon snow would halt their journey.

Lewis and Clark decided that the expedition would stop and build a winter camp in the land where the Mandan tribe lived. The Mandan were a friendly people; they were accustomed to white men, because Canadian traders often traveled down from the north to swap furs and other goods with them. Lewis and Clark directed their men to begin building a fort. On Christmas Day, the fort was finished. Lewis and Clark hoisted a United States flag over the roof. Now the fort had become the most distant western outpost of the United States of America.

As they waited for spring to come again, Lewis and Clark met a white Canadian trader named Charbonneau who had journeyed down to trade with the Mandan. He spoke little English, only French. But one of the explorers in the American expedition translated his words for the two leaders. Charbonneau could speak the language of several Native American tribes. His Native American wife, Sacagawea, could speak several more. Charbonneau offered to come along with the expedition in the spring. He and his wife could help to interpret the speech of the tribes Lewis and Clark would meet along the way.

Lewis and Clark agreed. By the time the expedition left again in April, though, Sacagawea was carrying a tiny baby: her first son, only two months old. His name was Jean-Baptiste, but the whole party had nicknamed him “Pompy”!

The whole party set off west. Soon they reached the junction, or joining, of the Missouri and the Yellowstone rivers. Lewis decided that the expedition should camp and hunt for meat. He took his gun and went off hunting. When he saw a bear, he aimed his gun and shot.

The bear, stung by the bullet, reared up and roared. But this wasn’t a timid black bear, like the bears Lewis was accustomed to seeing back east. This was a grizzly. Instead of running, it turned and chased Lewis. He had to run for his life, reloading his gun as he went, and then turn and shoot again while still sprinting for his life. Lewis killed the bear just in time. The Americans had never seen such enormous bears—nine feet tall from nose to toe!

It wasn’t the last time that the party would be in danger. Now they were drawing close to the Rocky Mountains. If they could cross the Rockies, they would finally be across the Continental Divide.

The Continental Divide is the ridge that runs down the middle of North America. Both sides of the continent slope up to the Divide. If a drop of rain falls on the east side of the Divide, it rolls down and down and down, heading east, until it finally reaches the Atlantic Ocean. But if a drop of rain falls just inches on the other side of the Divide, it rolls down anddown and down, heading west, until it reaches the Pacific Ocean! If the party could get across the Continental Divide, they could find a river and sail down it all the way to the coast.

The party climbed and climbed and climbed toward the Rocky Mountains. Finally, Lewis and a few men went ahead. They were hoping to find Shoshoni Indians who lived nearby. They had to buy horses from the Shoshoni to ride across the mountains. Without horses, the expedition might not be able to cross the Continental Divide.

When Lewis finally did find Shoshoni Indians, he managed to convince them to take him to their chief. The Shoshoni were suspicious of these strange white men. What were they doing so near the mountains? Did they intend to lead an attack against the Shoshoni people? Lewis was relieved to see Clark and the rest of the expedition finally catching up with him. Perhaps Sacagawea could help him assure the chief that they came in peace.

The Shoshoni and the Americans all sat down together. The conversation went slowly! Sacagawea did not speak enough English to translate the chief’s words into English. Instead, she translated the Shoshoni words into one of the Native American languages her husband knew, Minnetaree. Then Charbonneau, who also spoke very poor English, would translate the Minnetaree into French. Then the French-speaking explorer translated the French into English for Lewis and Clark. When the two captains answered in English, their words then had to be put back into French, then into Minnetaree, then back into Shoshoni. It took a very long time to say anything!

Suddenly, Sacagawea jumped to her feet, ran to the chief, and threw both of her arms around him. She had recognized him! Years before, Sacagawea had been kidnapped from this very Shoshoni tribe and taken away. Now she had found her family again. The chief was her brother!

When Sacagawea explained to her brother that Lewis and Clark needed horses, the chief agreed to exchange thirty Shoshoni horses for guns. The journey across the mountain could continue.

The crossing was the coldest, hardest part of the journey. Snow set in. The men were used to shooting deer or buffalo for their meals, and Sacagawea had taught them to eat wild vegetables like onions and prairie turnips. But now in the mountains, snow and ice covered bare rock or thin grass. Starvation loomed. “No fish,” Clark wrote in his journal, “and the grass entirely eaten out by the horses. The mountains… much worse than yesterday…. steep and stony, our men and horses much fatigued…..I have been as wet and as cold in every part as I ever was in my life…..Encamped on a bold running creek passing to the left which I called Hungry Creek, as at that place we had nothing to eate.” Finally, reluctantly, they decided to kill one of the horses. “A colt being the most useless part of our Stock,” Clark wrote grimly, “he fell a Prey to our appetites.”

The horsemeat kept them from starving. But if they killed too many horses, they wouldn’t be able to move fast enough to survive. So they ate some of the hunting dogs as well. Clark thought the meat was disgusting, but Lewis wrote that it tasted quite good! (Of course, his dog Scannon was spared.)

Finally, the party came through the mountains and found themselves at a river flowing west. They had crossed the Continental Divide! A Native American village nearby gave them food and fish and told them that this river, the Clearwater, flowed into the Columbia River. The Columbia then flowed into the ocean! The party hollowed canoes out of huge logs and paddled down the rivers. On November 7th, 1805, Clark wrote, “Great joy in camp! We are in view of the ocean, this great Pacific ocean which we been so long anxious to see.”

Once more, though, winter had come. They built another winter camp, waited until spring, and started back. Three years after leaving on their voyage, Lewis and Clark returned. In all that time, only one of the party had died—from appendicitis. Sacagawea had traveled the entire distance carrying little Pompy in a sling!

Lewis and Clark had met dozens of Native American tribes. They had discovered new plant and animals. They had written descriptions of everything they saw and had drawn detailed maps of their route west. Soon, settlers would begin to follow the path that Lewis and Clark had blazed into the distant lands of the West.

Tecumseh’s Resistance

Thanks to Lewis and Clark’s maps, white settlers were beginning to head west. Some were searching for a new home. Others hoped to trap rich mountain furs and sell them for money. Hardy trappers began to make homes on the rough sides of the Rocky Mountains. These “mountain men” lived on whatever game they could shoot. They set steel traps for beaver in high mountain streams, dried the furs, and traded them to Native American and Canadian traders. Many of these men married Native American women.

Other settlers began to push farther west, building houses and farms into the Ohio Valley and beyond. Some of the Native American tribes nearby welcomed the settlers. But others feared them—because these white explorers were claiming to own Native American land.

A Shawnee named Tecumseh had learned to fear the whites from his earliest days. His father had been killed by white settlers when Tecumseh was only six. The little boy had been adopted by the Shawnee chief Blackfish. Blackfish had also adopted several white boys who had been kidnapped from settler families. He taught all of the boys, white and Shawnee, to hate and fear the settlers.

When he was fifteen, Tecumseh went with Blackfish to attack settlers who were moving down the Ohio Valley. The Shawnees captured a white man, tied him to a stake, and burned him. Tecumseh was furious. “We do not torture our prisoners!” he shouted at the Shawnee warriors. “We do not use cruelty! We fight with honor!” Tecumseh was so angry that no prisoner was ever mistreated in front of him again.

But although Tecumseh did not want to see the whites tortured, he knew that his people were fighting a war against these invaders—and he was willing to attack and kill whites in battle. He led raids against white towns and forts all through the Northwest Territory. His brothers joined him. Two of them were killed in battle.

As time went on, Tecumseh saw that other tribes were willing to sign treaties with the whites, “selling” land in exchange for gifts. Again, Tecumseh grew angry. “We do not own the land!” he told his followers. “Land is like air and water. No one owns it. We all use it in common!” But Tecumseh saw that more and more Native Americans were beginning to think like white people—believing that they could own land and sell it to each other. He realized that although he could fight battles against the whites, he had a much bigger job: to keep the Native Americans from acting and thinking like the white people who were flooding into their land.

Tecumseh joined forces with his youngest brother, a strange and frightening preacher named Tenskwatawa. As a child, Tenskwatawa had stuck an arrow into his own eye by mistake. From then on, his right eye drooped and the right side of his face was pulled down. His twisted face made his message even more frightening. Tenskwatawa claimed that he had traveled to the Great Spirit’s dwelling place and returned with a message for all Native Americans. The Great Spirit, he declared, was angry that his children were behaving like whites. Unless the Native Americans changed their ways, they would lose their land forever. “Do not drink the white man’s alcohol!” he preached. “Don’t wear their wool and cotton clothes; wear the furs and skins of our people. Do not sign treaties with them, for none of us own the land. Do not marry them!” Because of his preaching, the Native Americans called Tenskwatawa the “Prophet.”

Tecumseh did not seem completely convinced that the Prophet had actually been to visit the Great Spirit. But his brother’s preaching fit with his own ideas. Tecumseh wanted all of the Native American tribes to join together in a confederacy, or union, against the white settlers.

Together, the brothers settled in the Indiana Territory. The Prophet preached about the old ways. Tecumseh traveled around, visiting tribes all over the Midwest, trying to convince them to unite together. Many Native Americans came to the settlement, nicknamed “Prophetstown,” to join them.

In 1809, the governor of the Indiana Territory, William Henry Harrison, invited tribal chiefs from all over the Northwest to his headquarters at Fort Wayne. He didn’t invite Tecumseh, though. He wanted to convince the chiefs to sign another land treaty. He told them that the United States wanted to buy their land and then pointed to the hundreds of soldiers camped nearby. “We could take your land by force,” he said. “But we’ll pay you generously instead. You’d better accept our offer before we change our minds.”

This was exactly the sort of offer that Tecumseh had warned his people about. But, frightened by the soldiers, the chiefs agreed to sell Harrison three million acres of land—for seven thousand dollars.

Angry Native Americans who heard about this deal began to flood to Prophetstown. When Harrison heard about the gathering of hostile warriors, he sent a message to the Prophet. “I will take you to Washington and show you the Great White Father!” the message said. Harrison hoped that if the Prophet saw the President, the White House, and all of Washington, he would be too frightened of the whites to resist them.

Instead, Tecumseh sent back word that he would come—not to Washington, but to the governor’s own head-quarters. He took four hundred armed warriors and eighty war canoes with him! He left his army camped nearby and stalked to the governor’s mansion with his bodyguards. An army officer who saw him wrote, “He was one of the finest looking men I ever saw….about six feet high, straight, with large fine features, and altogether a daring bold looking fellow.”

Tecumseh refused to go into the mansion, insisting that the governor meet with him in a group of trees nearby. Harrison agreed and ordered chairs brought for everyone. Tecumseh waved the chairs away. “The Great Spirit is my father,” he said. “The earth is my mother, and on her bosom I will lie.” With that, he sat on the grass.

Harrison and his officials sat on the chairs.

“You have stolen this land,” Tecumseh began. “No one can sell it to you. It belongs to no tribe or leader, but to us all. I speak now for all Indians, for I am the head of them all. We do not accept this treaty. It was made by those who were afraid, and greedy.”

“I cannot cancel the treaty,” Harrison said. “And all of the tribes speak a different language. They are all separate. You cannot speak for them all!”

“We are like your United States,” Tecumseh retorted. “Independent, but united together to defend ourselves. How can you object to this?”

Harrison was out-argued. But he still refused to cancel the treaty. When Tecumseh and his bodyguard stalked away, Harrison got ready for a fight. He sent a message to Washington, asking for more soldiers. Tecumseh also went searching for more warriors. He told his brother, the Prophet, to wait for his return and hurried down south, hoping that the Choctaw would join with him against the whites.

The Choctaws refused. And before Tecumseh could return, Harrison marched an army to Prophetstown and camped outside it, on the banks of the Tippecanoe River.

The Prophet didn’t wait for Tecumseh to come back. Instead, he told the Native Americans that his magic had made the white man’s bullets useless and that they could attack Harrison’s army without fear of death! The warriors believed him. They attacked the army camp—but without Tecumseh, they fought wildly and without a plan. Harrison ordered his men to fire. The bullets killed dozens of warriors. The Prophet’s magic had not worked!

The Prophet fled. Frightened, the Native Americans fled too. Harrison marched his army into Prophetstown and burned it to the ground. He even ordered his men to dig up the bodies in the Prophetstown graveyard and throw them on the ground, so that the settlement would be cursed!

When Tecumseh returned from the south, he found his town destroyed, his warriors scattered, and the word spreading to all of his allies that the Prophet was a fraud. Only a few loyal warriors remained. But they had captured the Prophet as he ran from the battlefield and tied him up. Tecumseh put his knife to his brother’s throat but then pulled it away and shoved the Prophet out of his sight. He would not kill Tenskwatawa.

For the next twenty years, the Prophet would slink from village to village, a dishonored beggar. But Tecumseh’s attempt to unite the Native Americans had failed. His confederation had been destroyed, along with Prophetstown.

Note to Parent: Historians sometimes disagree about the name of Clark’s dog because Clark’s handwriting is hard to read. Many books will say Scannon and others will say Seaman.