Essential Lewis and Clark, The by Clark William

Author:Clark, William [Clark, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9781426217173
Amazon: 142621717X
Goodreads: 35754801
Publisher: National Geographic
Published: 1806-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

SUMMARY

JULY 3 TO JULY 31, 1805

The exhausting 18-mile portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri had delayed the corps for weeks. Now they were faced with still further delay as the elk- and buffalo-hide skin of the iron-frame boat, what the men called the Experiment, slowly dried out. It was not enough to cover the boat with hides; the hides had to be made watertight, particularly at the seams, where they were sewn together. As they dried, the hides shrank, pulling at the holes the needles had made and stretching them open.

In the East, Lewis would have used pitch from pitch pines to coat the seams and make them watertight. No pitch pines grew within hundreds of miles of the Great Falls. Lewis had to find some other means of coating the boat. He had the men pound powdered charcoal into a mixture of beeswax and buffalo tallow. They built small fires under the boat to dry it out. It took days. Everybody was anxious to get going. Clark must have looked skeptically on; at least one scholar has suggested that he never believed the Experiment would work in the first place, and he had already scouted out a grove of cottonwood some miles upstream where he thought the trees were large enough to make canoes.

Meanwhile the men passed the time either working on the boat or hunting. The few men who had not yet seen the Great Falls themselves went back downriver to see them. On July 4, Lewis and Clark passed out the last of the liquor to celebrate the nation’s birthday, and they all ate well, with Lewis remarking that they “had no just cause to covet the sumptuous feasts of our countrymen on this day.”

The next day the boat was still not dry; on July 6 it rained, keeping the boat wet. The men made clothing for themselves. Clark went back downriver and measured the falls precisely with his instruments; Lewis wrote a description of a kit fox, otherwise known as the swift fox. Not until July 8, at noon, could Lewis begin to coat the boat with his mixture of grease and charcoal. On July 9 they put it in the water. “She lay like a perfect cork,” said Lewis hopefully. And if it had worked it would have saved the day.

So light five men could “carry her with the greatest ease,” the Experiment was 36 feet long and had a carrying capacity of 8,000 pounds. Despite all they had cached, they still had a great deal of food and equipment to take with them. They needed something more than the six canoes they had. That evening they discovered that the wax and tallow composition they had applied to the boat was separating from the skin “and she leaked in such manner that she would not answer. I need not add,” says Lewis, “that this circumstance mortified me not a little.” Indeed. They had waited a full week while the boat dried out and the composition was applied.

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