If you've ever seen the President, you've seen the Secret Service--they're the deadly serious guys with big shoulders, men and women whose eyes Hoover-up whatever scene the Pres is walking into. They look like Marines, and it's likely some of them are. Think of the Corps of Discover as the Secret Service, or a couple dozen first-team, All-American linebackers, gifted at reading what's going to happen with the next snap up river, a 19th century burly gang of Eagle Scouts.
William Lewis gave Meriweather Clark the recruiting job, and Clark did most of the drafting at St. Louis during the winter of 1803. He didn't pick up just anybody from the applicants. Guys he wanted had to know their way around-and-through a wilderness. They had to be single--no hitched-up husbands need apply. Good health was required of course, and if you wanted a job going where few white men ever had, you had to handle firearms as if they were appendages.
Those St. Louis recruits were the heart of the Corps of Discovery, but once in a while Lewis and Clark picked up a ringer out from the transfer portal--men like Pierre Cruzatte, a one-eyed trapper, big and rangy, and blessedly multi-lingual. The man knew more languages than you're average CEO today--fluent in English, French, and Omaha, as well as the lingua franca of the whole Louisiana Purchase, sign language.
It seems in poor taste to call Cruzatte a "half-breed," but let me just open up that designation. Pierre Cruzatte's father was a Frenchman. We may be talking about our world here, but before 1803 that world, for the most part, belonged the French. His mother was an original non-hyphenated. She was Omaha. Such couplings weren't at all rare among the fur traders, and to Lewis and Clark Cruzatte's mixed-blood lineage undoubtedly seemed an unforeseen blessing, as he turned out to be.
Maybe the best way to imagine the 1804 Missouri River is to head out to Springfield, South Dakota sometime--it's not that far. Go south too the river, where you'll find a little city park. Go on and get out of the car then and stand as close as you can to the wide Missouri. It's a long way to the west bank, and there's more than one path through the grasses in the shallows. Sometimes people, yet today, call the river "braided," right there, because it is. All you have to do is stand there to realize how tough it must have been to determine which braid you want to follow, upstream or down.
Pierre Cruzatte, the one-eyed, rangy half-breed, knew his way around and through the Missouri. He'd been up river often, knew the currents, knew the landmarks, knew the way to get where Lewis and Clark wanted to go. And when he got there, Cruzatte knew how the heck to talk to the people who'd long ago been there. He could read the river the way an apt woodsman reads trees. And, it goes without saying that he knew how to get off a boat, head out into the trees or grassland and come back with a fat deer slung over his back--or whatever else the whole bunch of them could eat that night.
Cruzatte was a free agent Lewis and Clark picked up for a song. Didn't take long and they named him a private, stuck him, right then and there, in "The Army of the Missouri."
Oh, yes, there's this too. Pierre Cruzatte, the beefy, half-breed linguist, a water man par excellance, came with a fiddle too. Lewis and Clark got him for a song, and you know what else--he gave them one or two himself. That's right. On top of everything else, Cruzatte was a musician, after a fashion any way. Don't know exactly how he'd have done with Vivaldi in Venice .
But there were times on the river, moments when the whole bunch of them--all those rangy secret service guys, tanned and hot and beating off mosquitoes, got up on their feet and danced--yes, danced--to what their man Cruzatte fiddled up for them. I'm not making this up. There were times when the Native people all around, absolutely loved seeing all those paleface, uniformed linebackers shake a tail feather.
They were all interesting guys, the whole bunch; but you got to love the multi-lingual, one-eyed, river man who knew how to get what needed to be got out of a musket and third-rate fiddle.
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