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The Council

By: Falcon Guides

For a while, it looked like the council was not to be. In late July, camped to the south near the Platte River, Drouillard and Cruzatte went out in search of the Indians, only to learn the Otos had moved onto the plains for their annual buffalo hunt. Dejected, the explorers moved upriver. But just a few days later, Drouillard located a Missouri Indian who said that while most of the Otos were off on the buffalo hunt, a hundred or so Indians were camped nearby. On July 29, the captains sent one of the French boatmen, Liberte, with the Missouri Indian to locate the Indians and invite them to council.

The Corps of Discovery moved upriver, arriving at the bluff July 30. Captains Lewis and Clark walked up the bluff together and marveled at a landscape far different than any they’d yet seen. “This prairie is covered with grass of 10 or 12 inches in height, soil of good quality and at the distance of about a mile still farther back the country rises about 80 or 90 feet higher, and is one continued plain as far as can be seen,” Clark wrote. “From the bluff on the second rise immediately above our camp, the most beautiful prospect of the river up and down and the country opposed presented itself which I ever beheld.”

Back at camp, the men waited. The Indians finally arrived late on August 2, and the captains suggested they meet the next morning. Lewis, aided by Clark, stayed up late that night writing the first speech he would make to the Indians. It was an important occasion, the first instance in which the party would attempt to fulfill one of the principal orders set forth by President Jefferson. “In all your intercourse with the natives treat them in the most friendly and conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit,” Jefferson wrote. “Allay all jealousies as to the object of your journey, satisfy them of its innocence, make them acquainted with the position, extent, character, peaceable and commercial dispositions of the U.S., of our wish to be neighborly, friendly and useful to them, and of our dispositions to a commercial intercourse with them.”

The next day, Lewis told the Otos all that and more. In a long speech, he explained how the Missouri River was now controlled by the United States—the Great Father in Washington—and that, if the Indians honored that sovereignty, there would be good trading for all. The Indians followed with a speech of their own, “promising to pursue the advice and directions given them that they were happy to find that they had fathers which might be depended on,” Clark wrote. The speeches were accompanied by gifts to the Otos, and by a demonstration of the corps’ airgun, an example of new American technology that never failed to amaze the natives. It is true the captains were disappointed that they were unable to meet with the main chiefs of the Otos and Missouris. On the other hand, this first encounter with the Indians had gone smoothly. All in all, the council had to be considered a success.
Traveling the Lewis and Clark Trail