The Corps of Discovery’s stumbling progress towards the Pacific has, in many conflicting ways, become a defining image in the creation of America. The heroism, fortitude and sheer bloody-mindedness of the party are beyond dispute, as they paddled against the current of the Missouri for five months, saw out a blinding sub-Arctic winter on its banks, crossed the armour-plated spine of the Rocky Mountains, coped with rattlesnake bites, grizzly bear attacks, dysentery, malaria, starvation and more. Equally certain is that the western wilderness would have eaten them alive and spat out the bones without the help, sustenance and advice of the many Native peoples they encountered on the way, including the Mandan, Dakota, Oto and Shoshone, a fact Lewis and Clark often acknowledged in their famous travel journals. But the exchange of gifts with these peoples, the smoking of pipes, the borrowing of guides and horses, the cheerful demonstrations of such European innovations as the magnet and the magnifying glass, obscured the plain truth -Lewis and Clark were casing the joint.
By 1804 Jefferson had persuaded America’s leaders that the salvation of their new country would be space. A generous excess of land would be capable of dissipating the increasingly crowded and industrialized eastern seaboard into a simple, spread out and morally upstanding agrarian culture, preventing the decline into European-style fan-fluttering dilettantism with a national backbone of honest, hard-working farming families. ‘The small land holders are the most precious part of the state,’ he declared, and the greater the area these people could occupy, the greater their bracing influence on America’s character. The wealth of evidence that Lewis and Clark would secure, that the lands both within and beyond the new American territories were performing precisely that role already — but for someone else -was never going to act as a deterrent to expansion.
His outriders were themselves on the brink of death (not for the first time) when they reached the Nimiipuu. William Clark and six other men had gone ahead of the main expedition party to search for the Lolo Trail, an ancient route over the sprawling massif of the Bitterroot Mountains that would hopefully lead them onto the Columbia River and a downstream drift to the coast. The expedition’s previous babysitters, the Shoshone people, had warned them that the path was rough, obscured by tree fall and landslides, and sorely lacking in edible game, but Clark was undeterred. Eleven days later his men were eating their dogs, horses, even candles; they were ravaged by sickness, cold and exhaustion, and facing defeat at the hands of what one member described as ‘the most terrible mountains I ever beheld’. As they fell out of the forest and onto the camas grounds of the Wieppe Prairie, it is perhaps understandable that the Nimiipuu who found them and took them into camp concluded, from their unkempt beards, ravenous appetites and pungent lack of hygiene, that these visitors were half man, half dog.
This camp was under the guidance of Twisted Hair, an elderly leader who resisted suggestions of slaughtering the Corps of Discovery in their sleep, and instead fed them up, helped them dig out five canoes from felled trees, guided them to a safe put-in for the Columbia River and even offered to care for their horses while they glided towards the Pacific, and triumph. On their return journey, Lewis and Clark stayed several weeks with the Nimiipuu (who had cared for their horses well), tending to villagers’ ailments from their medicine bag, giving demonstrations of their magical technologies and conversing at length with Twisted Hair, explaining to him the number and power of the white man’s country, the significance of the Great Father (an explanatory title for the president which Jefferson, among others, enjoyed far too much) and the impending arrival of fur trappers and trading posts in the Nimiipuu’s lands.
When they parted, Lewis wrote, ‘I think we can justly say, to the honor of this people, that they are the most hospitable, honest and sincere that we have met with on our voyage.’ Twisted Hair, for his part, made a solemn promise that the Nimiipuu would never spill the white man’s blood. Lewis and Clark, for theirs, promised the Nimiipuu ‘peace and friendship’.
The first efforts by fur trappers and traders to follow in the Corps’ footsteps were underwhelming, at best. American mercantile adventurers, supposedly the next wave of the Jeffersonian expansion, failed to persuade the Nimiipuu and other Columbia Plateau tribes to abandon their crucial sustenance activities and stand in freezing rivers trapping beaver for them instead, while the Nimiipuu proved discouragingly astute in spotting a seller’s market for their healthy, well-fed horses, and set their prices accordingly. The Bostons, as the Indians came to call the Americans, soon skulked off.
British and French Canadian trappers were more resilient, though (in the early nineteenth century the Oregon Territory, the vast sweep of land that took in the north-west USA and Alaska, was still ‘up for grabs’ in the great geopolitical board game), finding villages which would accept dependence on the fur economy, establishing permanent trading posts in the Columbia region and gradually inveigling their way into local life. The Nimiipuu became involved in the trading culture, if not immersed in it: the tools and trinkets such as knives, kettles, fish-hooks and blankets were worth swapping the occasional fur for, and, in times of conflict with the Blackfoot and Shoshone tribes, bullets had become an absolute necessity. But geographical isolation and an impenetrable sense of superiority towards the white man’s antics kept the Nimiipuu at arm’s length. As one trader complained in 1824, the Plateau Indians were still ‘very independent of us, requiring but few of our supplies’.
One thing had changed, though — the Nimiipuu had accepted, from the outside world at least, a new name. French Canadian trappers, noting that some men of the tribe had adopted the coastal practice of piercing their noses (often with shells), had started calling the villagers Nez Percé, which was soon democratized to Nez Perce (rhyming with ‘fez verse’). As was often the case, the name proved much more resilient than the fashion, and ‘Nez Perce’ stuck.
Around 1824 the Bostons returned to the plateau with a vengeance, muscling in on the British market with all the vigour of an invasive coffee-shop chain. Introductory special offers of over-the-top payments for furs and horses lured away loyal customers, and the Americans’ more informal treatment of the Indians forged stronger friendships than the well-practised colonial disengagement of the British. A less honourable marketing device also began to flood the plateau — whiskey. While the British Empire could scarcely be described as a temperate endeavour, the New Republic was lubricated to a quite unprecedented degree: by one 1830 estimate, the average American adult was knocking back seven gallons of alcohol a year, and while the disastrous impact of this free-flowing intoxicant on Indian cultures was well known by the 1820s, the federal ban on trading whiskey with the tribes was of marginal significance several thousand miles from Washington. In 1831 the dominant American trader in the Oregon Territory, William Sublette, hauled 450 gallons of whiskey into his premises on the plateau, claiming every drop was needed to sustain his staff of boatmen. As he did not, in fact, employ a single boatman, the destiny of the drink is unarguable — the highly profitable degradation of people and communities that were socially and, many claim, physiologically, unprepared for the ravages of the wicked water. Once again, geographical protection and a natural aloofness allowed the Nez Perce to protect their culture better than many other tribes, a fact reflected, paradoxically, in the many observations by trappers of the time that the dignity and integrity of the Nez Perce marked them out as the least Indian of the Indians -but they were being drawn ever closer to the ever more numerous Americans. From 1827, many Nez Perce men became regular attendees at Rendezvous, the notorious annual trade conference of fur trappers which one historian, writing in 1918, recalled as a carnival of ‘carousal and dissipation’. The trappers, fiercely independent adventurers in mythology, overworked salarymen in reality, would come in from their travails in the forests and icy streams to spend a few days blowing a year’s wages in the luxury of human company: ‘Men with impassive faces gambled at cards; flat liquor-kegs and whiskey bottles were opened and emptied; and scenes of wildest revelry followed. The Indians, not to be outdone by the white men, joined in the gambling, horse-racing and drunken quarrels.’
And as the British retreated from this unfamiliar new colonialism with their usual good grace — adopting a scorched-earth policy of overhunting to ensure they weren’t followed north — it became increasingly likely that the Oregon Territory would, before long, become part of the ever-expanding ‘alcoholic republic’