L and C at Calumet Bluff

In terms of sheer grandiosity, nothing like it had ever lit up the banks of the Missouri River, St. Louis to the great falls. Today, you might guess the stage for the entire circus to be buried somewhere beneath the sparkling waters of the lake named after Meriweather Lewis and William Clark, just west of Yankton. About that, you would be wrong.

When the long-anticipated first meeting of the Corps with a sizeable band of Native Americans--the Yanktons--finally materialized, it was quite a show, or so some say. Seventy Yanktons dressed to the nines in their own, finest go-to meetin' attire led the parade, singing and dancing in a processional to meet the Corps, who were--each of them -- decked out and spit-shined in brass-buttoned parade uniforms. A little fireworks, and it could have been one heckuva cross-cultural Fourth of July.

But where, you ask?--where did this first great confab take place? Beneath a towering oak people say, a monster that could well still stand today somewhere in the trees at the foot of Calumet Bluff. And Calumet Bluff, you ask--"where is that again?" Just hunt for the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center, way up high above Gavins Point Dam. You're there.

Sort of. The great to-do of August 30, 1804, was a two-day affair that went on beneath an oak tree, not high up on a bluff but somewhere far down below, and some distance from the river's edge. 

By the time the Yanktons came across, Meriweather Lewis wasn't scared. The day before, he and Clark had sent two men over to the other side--Pierre Dorian, a trapper who'd spent years with the Yanktons, and Nathaniel Pryor, who hadn't. When they'd returned, they claimed the extravagance of their greeting seemed almost goofy. The Yanktons wanted to tote Pryer into camp on a buffalo robe, like a superstar. He'd politely declined the offer. 

That afternoon Mr. Clark had been writing and rehearsing a speech he was about to give for the very first time, something to explain why these strange, uniformed white men were here, to tell them of their new Great Father, who wanted to trade with them, and to ask them to make peace with their neighbors so that all those rifle-toting uniforms could be their friends too. 

Introduce yourselves as children of the Great Father in Washington, Jefferson had told them, urge them to make peace in the land, and shore up some business ties. That was the whole program. Then show off a little. Leave them some SWAG--some mirrors and jack knives and maybe a snort or two of whiskey. 

But Mr. Clark had never, ever spoken to a gathering of Indigenous, never tried to communicate where no English was spoken, explain a program to a frontier people who might be able to say the word "Nantucket," but had no way of imagining the place. How do you write a speech without knowing how to speak to a hundred souls only by relying on the translation of an old trapper like Pierre Dorian? Stem to stern, the Lewis and Clark Expedition was one great action movie, but I can't help thinking the day Lewis spent preparing his first speech had to be among the most harrowing. There he sat, trying to make his words say something translatable, with no way to be sure all of it got to where it needed to be understood. 

How could he tell them the Great Father wants them to come to Washington for a visit? How does he make that clear? What's Washington to them?

The next day, those seventy warriors and all those Yanktons seemed most appreciative. They stood and sat politely, broad smiles plastered across their faces as if they weren't missing a beat, when, just quite possibly, nothing at all got through. 

Just west of Yankton, Lewis and Clark, deep in a woods of oak and pine--attempted, for the very first time, to pass along an agenda from the President of the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson, and get those feather-bedecked partiers to sign on to the dotted line. And they were Sioux, too, the greatly-feared Sioux! His job was to make them a deal that would promise them riches, to make 'em an offer they couldn't refuse.

It's almost November right now. I can't help thinking that what happened there at Calumet Bluff was the first American political rally west of the Mississippi. No caps or t-shirts maybe, no signs and posters, but really, pretty much the same song-and-dance.