By Tim Deatrick and Jaime Babbitt
1781, a tooth sent to Thomas Jefferson by General George Rogers Clark from Big Bone Lick, Kentucky was the beginning of what has been described as “the greatest camping trip of all time,” the manifest destiny of a fledgling nation; but to the Native Americans who lived along the rivers, plains and mountains of the Lewis and Clark “Corps of Discovery” trail, it was an unprovoked invasion. It was a mammoth hunt that forever changed the native way of life.
To the Navajo, the mammoth figured prominently in their story of creation. Changing Woman (Asdzaa nádleehé) married the Sun and bore two sons, twins, and heroes to the Navajo people. They were known as "Monster Slayer" and "Child-Born-of-Water". The twins traveled to their father the Sun who gave them weapons of lighting bolts to fight the dreaded “monsters.”
Native Americans have a specific way of revealing their historical knowledge. Their oral stories are often embellished with interactions between historical events and supernatural beings. In 1762, the Shawnee told John Wright about the big stone skeletons found along the Ohio River. They said the bones belonged to an immense animal, the "father of all buffalo," which had been hunted by "great and strong men" of the distant past. But the Great Spirit destroyed the huge animals with lightning. The Delaware elders told Thomas Jefferson a similar story; only they claimed that the gigantic animals were driving away smaller game, like deer and bear. This angered their god, who blasted the great beasts with lightning. Only their petrified bones were left, although some thought that the huge animals escaped to the far north.
The origins of the Lewis and Clark expedition took root in Jefferson’s childhood fascinations with Native Americans and their legends. After the war of Independence, General Clark’s mammoth tooth set in motion Jefferson’s quest to find a living mammoth and confirm his belief of a westward migration. His opportunity to seek the mammoth came during his first term as President in 1803 with the launch of the Corps of Discovery. Jefferson’s motive was twofold: Lewis and Clark would discover living specimens of the fossils; and “to extinguish the native right of soil within our limits, to extend those limits.” –Jefferson’s Inaugural Address, 1801.
In a secret letter to Congress dated January 18, 1803, Jefferson sought Congressional funding for the expedition without mention of the scientific purposes for the mission and stated that commerce and converting the Indians to agriculture would “prepare them ultimately to participate in the benefits of our governments.” He knew diplomacy with the increased goal of commerce could be sold to Congress and scientific discovery could not.
The Congress approved the Corps of Discovery funding in February 1803 and in April, Jefferson sent Lewis to Lancaster and Philadelphia to be tutored in the natural sciences, particularly paleontology. On his way to meet Clark for the expedition, Jefferson ordered Lewis to investigate the skeletal remains of a mammoth uncovered by Cincinnati physician Dr. William Goforth at Big Bone Lick and to send bones to the White House in his instructions to Lewis for the Corps of Discovery, Jefferson asked Lewis to note, “animals of the country generally not known in the U.S. and the remains and accounting of any which may be deemed rare or extinct.”
The Corps of Discovery was not a benevolent mission. Welcomed notions quickly turned to unexpected surprise of betrayal. Upon meeting a tribe for the first time, captains of the expedition informed tribal leaders their land now belonged to the United States government and their “new great father” was President Thomas Jefferson. The Lewis and Clark Expedition was the trickle that started the flood of subjugation.
The Native Americans lost on several fronts: land, resources, culture, language, and sovereignty. According to Gerard Baker, a full-blooded Mandan-Hidatsa from Mandaree, North Dakota, the Lewis and Clark Expedition was the beginning of the end. “In a nutshell, what happened to our people in the years after Lewis and Clark is that we went downhill, we lost.”
Perhaps Ronald McNeil, great-great-great grandson of chief Sitting Bull said it best, “Americans have never been taught proper history, we need to use this opportunity to tell the story of how the land was taken from us, how our culture was taken, our language-why we are in the condition we are in today.”
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