Archives de Tag: #West

Culture, Géographie, Histoire

Traversée 3, « East to West » (2019) introduction…

Tout a un début et la préparation d’une traversée de continent nécessite une ardente et précise attention à tous les détails. Au commencement, il y a un itinéraire …

Première option : une route « mythique » du passé, la Lincoln highway, 3400 miles de « côte à côte », imaginée par Carl Fisher (fondateur entre autres de l’Indianapolis Motor Speedway et de … Miami beach), elle relie New York à San Francisco de Times Square au Golden Gate… Il existe aussi une variante, la route 6 (Grand Army of the republic highway) qui relie Provincetown – Massachussets à Bishop – Californie). Inconvénient, elles passent toutes les deux un peu trop au centre-nord des USA et traverse nombre d’états et de régions que nous avons déjà parcourus (Illinois, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Californie).

Deuxième option : une route non moins « hystérique » racontée dans divers ‘roadtrip books’, celle du grand sud entre Miami et San Diego, via New Orleans, Houston, El Paso, Tucson… Itinéraire a priori sympathique pour la découverte d’états sudistes inconnus jusqu’ici (Alabama, Mississipi, Louisiane) avec pour « fil conducteur » l’Interstate 10 sur une large partie du trajet.

Troisième option : les grandes plaines du Midwest (référence faite au documentaire de Wiseman « Monrovia, Indiana » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsCy5dCHUiM ) et les étendues sauvages du nord Wyoming, Montana et Washington State… ? Par un itinéraire original concocté spécialement pour l’occasion… Après tirage et grattage, c’est cette dernière option qui recueille la majorité des avis ! Il ne reste donc qu’à ferrer les chevaux et à cercler les roues du chariot… Nous appellerons cette traversée « Lewis and Clark bis 2019 » !

Pour une vision différente, état par état :

Un aparté chronologique sur l’expédition originale démarrée en 1803 :

  • Summer 1803: Lewis oversees construction of big keelboat in Pittsburgh, then takes it down Ohio River, picking up Clark and some recruits along the way. With Lewis is a Newfoundland dog, Seaman, he has purchased for 20 dollars. Clark brings along York, a slave he has owned since childhood.
  • Winter 1803 / 1804: Expedition establishes Camp Wood (also called Camp Dubois) on east bank of Mississippi, upstream from St. Louis. More men recruited and trained.
  • March 10: Lewis and Clark attend ceremonies in St. Louis formally transferring Louisiana Territory from France to United States.
  • May 14: Expedition sets off from Camp Dubois “under a gentle breeze,” Clark writes. (Lewis is in St. Louis and joins group a few days later). Nearly four dozen men involved (the precise number is unknown). Members hail from every corner of the young nation. Reuben and Joseph Field are brothers. George Drouillard, Pierre Cruzatte, François Labiche are sons of French-Canadian fathers and Indian mothers. Besides captains, other diarists are John Ordway, a young soldier from New Hampshire; Patrick Gass, a carpenter of Irish stock from Pennsylvania; Joseph Whitehouse, a tailor from Virginia; and Charles Floyd of Kentucky, a “young man of much merit,” Lewis writes. They travel in big keelboat (55 long, 8 feet wide, capable of carrying 10 tons of supplies) and two smaller boats called pirogues. Proceeding up Missouri River involves sailing, rowing, using setting poles, and sometimes wading along the bank to pull the boats with cords. 14 miles is a good day’s progress.
  • May 25: Expedition passes La Charette, a cluster of seven dwellings less than 60 miles up the Missouri, but, as Floyd notes in his journal, “the last settlement of whites on this river.”
  • July 4: Expedition marks first Fourth of July ever celebrated west of the Mississippi by firing keelboat’s cannon, drinking extra ration of whiskey, and naming a creek (near what is now Atchinson, Kansas) Independence Creek.
  • August 3: First official council between representatives of United States and western Indians occurs north of present-day Omaha, when Corps of Discovery meets with small delegation of Oto and Missouri Indians. Captains establish routine for subsequent Indian councils: hand out peace medals, 15-star flags, and gifts; parade men and show off technology (magnets, compasses, telescopes, Lewis’s air gun); give speech saying Indians have new “great father” far to the east and promising future of peace and prosperity if tribes don’t make war on whites or other tribes.
  • August 20: Near what is now Sioux City, Iowa, Sergeant Charles Floyd becomes the expedition’s first casualty from what was probably a burst appendix. (Also becomes first United States soldier to die west of Mississippi.) Captains name hilltop where he is buried Floyd’s Bluff and nearby stream Floyd’s River.
  • August 30: Expedition holds friendly council with Yankton Sioux (near what is now Yankton, South Dakota). According to Yankton oral tradition, when a baby is born, Lewis wraps him in a United States flag and declares him “an American.”
  • September 7: Moving into the Great Plains, the expedition begins seeing animals unknown in the East: coyotes, antelope, mule deer, and others. On this particular day, all the men are employed drowning a prairie dog out of its hole for shipment back to Jefferson. In all, the captains would describe in their journals 178 plants and 122 animals that previously had not been recorded for science.
  • September 25: Near what is now Pierre, South Dakota, the Teton Sioux (the Lakota) demand one of the boats as a toll for moving farther upriver. A fight nearly ensues, but is defused by the diplomacy of a chief named Black Buffalo. For three more anxious days, the expedition stays with the tribe.
  • October 24: North of what is now Bismarck, North Dakota, the Corps of Discovery reaches the earth-lodge villages of the Mandans and Hidatsas. Some 4,500 people live there – more than live in St. Louis or even Washington, D.C. at the time. The captains decide to build Fort Mandan across the river from the main village.
  • November 4: The captains hire Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian fur trader living among the Hidatsas, as an interpreter. His young Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, had been captured by the Hidatsas several years earlier and then sold to Charbonneau (along with another Shoshone girl). Having been told that the Shoshones live at the headwaters of the Missouri and have many horses, the captains believe the two will be helpful when the expedition reaches the mountains.
  • December 17: Clark notes a temperature of 45 degrees below zero – “colder,” John Ordway adds, “than I ever knew it be in the States.” A week later, on Christmas Eve, Fort Mandan was considered complete and the expedition had moved in for the winter.
  • January 1805: The Mandans perform their sacred “buffalo calling” ceremony and a few days later, a herd shows up. The Indians and explorers hunt buffalo together. Several expedition members get frostbite, as does an Indian boy whose toes Lewis has to amputate, without anesthesia or a surgical saw.
  • February 11: Sacagawea gives birth to a baby boy, Jean Baptiste. Lewis assists in speeding the delivery by giving her a potion made by crushing the rings of a rattlesnake’s rattle into powder.
  • April 7: Lewis and Clark dispatch the big keelboat and roughly a dozen men back downriver, along with maps, reports, Indian artifacts, and boxes of scientific specimens for Jefferson (Indian corn, animal skins and skeletons, mineral samples, and five live animals including the prairie dog). The same day, the “permanent party” heads west, traveling in the two pirogues and six smaller dugout canoes. The expedition totals 33 now, including Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and her baby boy. “We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden,” Lewis wrote, adding that “I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life.”
  • April 29: Proceeding into what is now Montana – farther west than any white men had ever gone on the Missouri – they are astounded by the wildlife: herds of buffalo numbering up to 10,000, and other game “so plenty and tame,” John Ordway writes, “that some of the party clubbed them out of their way.” (The men are eating 9 pounds of buffalo meat a day). This day, past the mouth of the Yellowstone River, Lewis and another hunter kill an enormous bear – a grizzly, never before described for science. At first, Lewis believes that Indian accounts of the bears’ ferocity were exaggerated, but in the days to come, as grizzly after grizzly chases the men across the Plains and prove nearly impossible to kill, he writes that the “curiosity of our party is pretty well satisfied with respect to this animal.”
  • May 20: The captains name a river “Sah-ca-gah-we-a or bird woman’s River, after our interpreter the Snake [Shoshone] woman.” As they map new territory, the captains eventually give the names of every expedition member to some landmark.
  • May 29: Clark comes across a stream he considers particularly clear and pretty, and names it the Judith River, in honor of a young girl back in Virginia he hopes will one day marry him.
  • May 31: The Corps of Discovery enters what are now called the White Cliffs of the Missouri – remarkable sandstone formations that the men compare to the ruins of an ancient city. (This section of the river is now protected by Congress and remains the most unspoiled section of the entire Lewis and Clark route.) “As we passed on,” Lewis writes, “it seemed as if those scenes of visionary enchantment would never have an end.”
  • June 2: The expedition comes to a stop at a fork in the river. All the men believe the northern fork is the true Missouri; Lewis and Clark think it’s the south fork. After several days of scouting, the captains are still convinced they’re right and name the other fork the Marias (after a cousin of Lewis in Virginia). The men still think otherwise but tell the captains “they were ready to follow us any where we thought proper to direct,” according to Lewis. Based on information gleaned from the Hidatsas, they know that if they find a big waterfall, they’re on the right track.
  • June 13: Scouting ahead of the rest of the expedition, Lewis comes across “the grandest sight I ever beheld” – the Great Falls of the Missouri, proof the captains had been correct. But then he discovers four more waterfalls immediately upriver. They will have to portage eighteen and a half miles to get around them all. When the rest of the expedition arrives, they make crude carts from cottonwoods, bury some of their cargo, and begin hauling the canoes and remaining supplies over the broken terrain. Broiling heat, hail storms, prickly pear cactus, and other obstacles mark the difficult portage, which instead of the half day the captains had planned the previous winter, takes nearly a month.
  • July 4: The party celebrates its second Independence Day on the trail (as well as the completion of the portage) by dancing late into the night and drinking the last of their supply of whiskey.
  • End of July: The expedition reaches the Three Forks of the Missouri, which the captains name the Gallatin (after the Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin), the Madison (after Secretary of State James Madison), and the Jefferson, “in honor of that illustrious personage Thomas Jefferson, the author of our enterprise ». Sacagawea begins recognizing familiar landmarks (up until now, the route has been as unknown to her as to the explorers) and points out the place where the Hidatsas had captured her five years earlier. The expedition heads southwest, up the Jefferson. The river is shallow and swift and difficult for the men to drag their canoes upstream.
  • August 8: Sacagawea recognizes another landmark – Beaverhead Rock, north of present-day Dillon, Montana – and says they are nearing the river’s headwaters and home of her people, the Shoshones. Desperate to find the Indians and their horses, Lewis decides to scout ahead with three men.
  • August 11: Lewis comes across a single, mounted Indian – the first the expedition had seen since leaving Fort Mandan – and tries to signal his friendly intentions, but the Indian rides off.
  • August 12: The shipment sent from Fort Mandan finally arrives in the East. Jefferson will plant the Indian corn in his Monticello garden, hang elk antlers in his foyer, and send the surviving animals – a magpie and the prairie dog – to a natural science museum located in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. Reading Lewis’s confident letter, he would imagine the expedition having already reached the Pacific. That same day, Lewis ascends the final ridge toward the Continental Divide and “the most distant fountain of the waters of the Mighty Missouri, in search of which we have spent so many toilsome days and restless nights” and joyously drinks from an ice-cold spring. Climbing the rest of the ridge – Lemhi Pass, on the present-day border between Montana and Idaho – he expects to see from the summit a vast plain to the west, with a large river flowing to the Pacific: the Northwest Passage that had been the goal of explorers since the time of Columbus. Instead, all he sees are more mountains.
  • August 17: Having discovered a village of Shoshones, Lewis tries to negotiate for the horses he now knows are all-important to cross the daunting mountains. On this day, Clark and the rest of the expedition arrive and Sacagawea is brought in to help translate. Remarkably, the Shoshone chief, Cameahwait, turns out to be her brother. The captains name the spot Camp Fortunate.
  • August 18: Lewis’s 31s birthday. Though he has just become the first American citizen to reach the Continental Divide and has concluded successful negotiations for horses, in his journal entry he turns introspective, writing that “I had as yet done but little, very little indeed.” He vows “in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.”
  • August 31: With 29 horses, one mule, and a Shoshone guide called Old Toby, the expedition sets off overland. They head north, over a mountain pass and into the valley of a beautiful river, now called the Bitterroot.
  • September 9: They camp south of present-day Missoula, Montana, at a spot the captains call Travelers Rest, preparing for the mountain crossing. Indians tell them that by following the Missouri to its source, they missed a shortcut from the Great Falls which could have brought them here in 4 days. Instead, it has taken them 53.
  • September 11: The Corps of Discovery ascends into the Bitterroot Mountains, which Sergeant Patrick Gass calls “the most terrible mountains I ever beheld.” Old Toby loses the trail in the steep and heavily wooded mountains. They run short of provisions and butcher a horse for food; snows begin to fall; worst of all, John Ordway writes on September 18th, “the mountains continue as far as our eyes could extend. They extend much further than we expected.” Clark names a stream Hungry Creek to describe their condition. 11 days later, on the brink of starvation, the entire expedition staggers out of the Bitterroots near modern-day Weippe, Idaho.
  • End of September: After debating what to do about the strangers who have suddenly arrived in their homeland, the Nez Percé (on the advice of an old woman named Watkuweis) decide to befriend them. The men get sick from gorging themselves on salmon and camas roots. A chief named Twisted Hair shows them how to use fire to hollow out pine trees and make new canoes.
  • October 7: Near what is now Orofino, Idaho, the expedition pushes its five new canoes into the Clearwater River, and for the first time since leaving St. Louis has a river’s current at its back.
  • October 16: Having raced down the Clearwater, then the Snake rivers, they reach the Columbia. The river teems with salmon – Clark estimates 10,000 pounds of salmon drying in one village – but the men want meat to eat, so they buy dogs from the Indians.
  • October 18: Clark sees Mount Hood in the distance. Seen and named by a British sea captain in 1792, it is a fixed point on the expedition’s map, proof they are at last approaching the ocean. Soon they pass through the raging falls of the Columbia and into the Gorge, emerging from the arid semi-deserts of eastern Washington and Oregon into the dense rainforests of the Pacific Northwest.
  • November 7: Thinking he sees the end of land in the distance, Clark writes his most famous journal entry: “Ocean in view! O! the joy.” But they’re actually only at the eastern end of Gray’s Bay, still 20 miles from sea. Fierce Pacific storms, rolling waters, and high winds pin them down for nearly three weeks, “the most disagreeable time I have experienced,” according to Clark. Later, Clark estimates they have traveled 4,162 miles from the mouth of the Missouri to the Pacific. His estimate, based on dead reckoning, will turn out to be within 40 miles of the actual distance.
  • November 24: To make the crucial decision of where to spend the winter, the captains decide to put the matter to a vote. Significantly, in addition to the others, Clark’s slave, York, is allowed to vote – nearly 60 years before slaves in the U. S. would be emancipated and enfranchised. Sacagawea, the Indian woman, votes too – more than a century before either women or Indians are granted the full rights of citizenship. The majority decides to cross to the south side of the Columbia, near modern-day Astoria, Oregon, to build winter quarters.
  • December 25: An entire continent between them and home, the expedition celebrates Christmas in its new quarters, Fort Clatsop, named for a neighboring Indian tribe. The captains hand out handkerchiefs and the last of the expedition’s tobacco supply as presents.
  • January 1, 1806: In his journal entry, Lewis exhibits the homesickness that seems to afflict everyone during the rainy winter, during which there are only 12 days in which it doesn’t rain. “Nothing worthy of notice” soon replaces “we proceeded on” as the most common phrase used by the diarists.
  • January 4: In the East, President Jefferson welcomes a delegation of Missouri, Oto, Arikara, and Yankton Sioux chiefs who had met Lewis and Clark more than a year earlier. Jefferson thanks them for helping the expedition and tells them of his hope “that we may all live together as one household.” The chiefs respond with praise for the explorers, but doubts about whether Jefferson’s other “white children” will keep his word. (Source http://www.pbs.org – Public Broadcasting Services)
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