July 4, 1803

 

Stephen A. Ambrose says, in Undaunted Courage, that the Fourth of July on the Missouri River began with shooting off "the canon." Comes as a shock almost. Lewis and Clark, et al, packed that kind of heat?--an actual canon on board? Sheesh.

Yes and no. Simply making headway through the wily Missouri River' sandbars was enough trouble. With three or four ways of moving upstream, against the flow, the men had their choice; but none were particularly easy. Two of them--using lodge poles to pole the beast up, or else pulling the boat and pirogues upriver with ropes—were truly back-breaking. Pulling that thing against the current while marching along the river's edge had to be enough to make some of the men consider alternate professions. And then, on top all of that, they lugged along a canon?

John Ordway, as others, calls it a "Bow piece." That's a mite better than "canon" methinks. What ornamented (and that's not far from the truth) the front of "the boat," as the men described the biggest vessel of their armada, was anywhere from 18 inches to 36 inches long--not that humongous.

Still, the canon was meant as a weapon of war, should war break out. It sounds a little vainglorious to say it this way, but it's true: war was not the intention; peace was. Lewis and Clark--unless they lied their way through their own journals--were embarked on a business venture. First and foremost, they were explorers in the best 19th century definition of that word; Jefferson wanted to know everything about this unmapped chunk of land he'd bought from the French.

But L and C were also out there on business. The fur trade was big money, and the French were in it, as were the English, both big-time. They were all making money on beaver and an occasional buffalo hide, and Jefferson wanted to secure control of the business already going on out west in his new country. That might be best accomplished, he thought and thusly directed L and C, by meeting with the Indigenous and letting them know that there was a new Great Father in town, and that Great Father wanted to work with them, not against them. And by telling them that the near-constant warfare between some of the tribes wasn't good for anybody's pocketbook.

Amazing as it may seem, no matter what you call it, that cannon on the keelboat never took aim at any human being, not up or back, not for two long years. Still, even though nobody shot at anybody, lugging that "bow piece" along turned out to be immensely useful. Hunting and scouting parties went out frequently, looking for game, looking for Native people. After a day or two absences, the men couldn't help but wonder where the others might be. Voila! the canon. Boom! --a welcome call home.

It's been American military policy almost ever since: we avoid war by arming ourselves to the teeth. Sounds like idiocy, but it's worked, often.

Besides that, that "Bow piece" went off for celebration too. On July 4, "we fired our Bow piece this morning & one in the evening for Independance of the U. S." says John Ordway, and then, same sentence, no end punctuation, "we saw a nomber of Goslins half grown today." Wasn't much of a celebration, but it got a half sentence in Ordway's journal."

You can keep this information to yourself, but the men were given a double shot of whiskey that night on the occasion of the birthday of the United States of America. Prost.

I'm not at all sure if Ordway wrote this last sentence before or after that extra gill of whiskey (about four ounces), but the what he says about what he saw is sweet, whether he was a little holiday happy or not: "One of the most beautiful places I ever Saw in my life, open and beautifully Diversified with hills & vallies all presenting themselves to the River."

That extra gill of whiskey and a couple of rounds from an 24-inch cannon constituted the very first Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi. By all accounts, it was a good day.

Grandma's Blue Dress

 

"When you get to the visitor's center, check out the blue dress--it belonged to Judy's great-grandma," she told me, referring to a friend, yet another maintenance worker at St. Lebre Mission. "Both our great-grandmas were there."

With that send-off from the two women who had given me a tour of the place, I drove west for an hour to the immense swath of prairie all around the battlefields at Little Big Horn. 

The Fourth of July should be big this year—it’s a birthday, our 250^th as a nation. Less heralded certainly but no less memorable is another: the 150^th anniversary of  “Custer’s Last Stand,” the most celebrated battle of the Indian wars, a huge win that, ironically, secured their eventual defeat.  

Just exactly why Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his men all died on a hill above the Little Big Horn may never be known. His flamboyant personality long ago gave rise to the theory that, in taking the 7th Calvary where he did, when he did, he was looking for headlines. Then again, maybe he simply made a disastrous military blunder.

What resulted was a last disastrous stand on a little hill where his whole 7^th Cavalry were killed by warriors from a collection of different tribes united by the anger created by losing their world.

Capts. Marcus Reno and Frederick Benteen, distinguished Civil War vets, somehow failed to come to Custer's aid. Neither were afraid of a fight. Reno and his men were battle weary. They'd already lost forty or more troops, a catastrophic number if it hadn't been for the 210 men who went to their deaths with Custer. 

Reno chose not to help Custer, even though once the guns were silenced in his own venue of the battle, he knew something was happening to the north because all that smoke and dust meant something was going on. 

But Reno didn't go. Why not? Good question. His uniform was blood-spattered from the death of a Crow scout who took a bullet to the head right beside him. Maybe he'd simply had enough killing.

Some say Reno didn't go to Custer's aid because he simply couldn't imagine his famous battlefield boss could possibly lose a fight with a bunch of wild savages; the great white general losing to hostiles was far beyond his imagination. Reno didn't go, some say, because it never dawned on him that half-naked hostiles could defeat a famous general--they were just Indians.

It was January, not June, when I stopped at Little Big Horn battlefield. I’d been there before, but this time it felt different because I’d met a woman whose great-grandma was actually there, a Cheyenne woman in a blue dress that, I was told, was still on display in the visitor’s center. They were there, across the river with thousands of others.

I couldn't get in to the Visitor’s Center see that blue dress that January morning. No one could. Covid shut the place down. I looked in the windows, but I couldn't see Judy’s great-grandma’s blue dress. I would have loved to.

But I felt a strange species of pride that great-grandma in the blue dress helped me feel. Even though I was out there on the battlefield alone, my having met the great-granddaughter of a Cheyenne woman in a blue dress who was there 150 years ago made this visit bigger, wider even than the spacious forever plains all around the battlefield.