Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • S U M M E R 2 0 2 2 40 T HE CORPS OF DISCOVERY led by Meriwether Lew- is and William Clark was assigned a task unlike any other. Between 1804 and 1806, eight thousand miles of terra incognito passed beneath the travelers' keelboat, ca- noes, pirogues and "mockersons" (Clark's spelling of "moc- casins") as they sought an overland route from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean. Hauling bales of navigational equipment, armaments, clothing, tools, cooking utensils, gifts and medicine made the two-year journey arduous indeed. Members of the Corps would surely have understood and agreed with the origi- nal meaning of TRAVEL, a word related to travail, meaning "painful effort, hard work." Both travel and travail trace their source to the Medieval Latin trepalium, a term for an instrument of torture made of three sharp stakes. The trio of words reflects the notion that for most of human history, travel was not pleasant. The Corps of Discovery's journey, like most pre-modern travel, was dif- ficult, dangerous work—etymologically akin to travail and torture. The Corps' diary accounts indicate that the company cov- ered 10-20 miles per day, depending on the amount of travail involved. The word JOURNEY would be particularly appro- priate to apply to the Corps' progress. Embedded in the word journey is jour, the French term for "day." Originally, jornee or journey meant "a day's travel," a measurement of great importance to the company. TREK is a term for a long expedition involving complex or- ganization. It might have been a suitable name for the Corps' enterprise in 1804, but there was a reason it was never used: English speakers didn't know the word at the time. Trek's etymology lies in the Afrikaans language, spoken by descendents of Dutch settlers in South Africa. A trek in Af- rikaans refers to a long overland journey by ox-cart, derived from the Dutch verb trekken, meaning "march, draw, pull." English speakers took possession of trek as a term for an ar- duous, complicated journey, but not until several decades af- ter the completion of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. W I L D W E S T W I L D W E S T W O R D S W O R D S At the height of the grizzly's feeding season, he wrote that "[t]he White bear have become so troublesome to us that I do not think it prudent to send one man alone on an errand of any kind... they come close around our camp every night but have never ventured to attack us and our dog gives us timely notice of their visits... I have made the men sleep with their arms by them as usual for fear of accedents." Grizzly sightings dropped off precipitously for the Corps after they emerged west of the Rockies. The next year, after waiting out the winter, they arrived at the west side of the Bitterroots and once again encountered grizzly bears. These Lewis found to be less dangerous than their Missouri River counterparts, possibly, he mused, "from the circumstance of their being compelled from the scarcity of game in this quar- ter to live more on roots and of course not so much in the habit of seizing and devouring living animals." They killed at least seven bears while at camp, taking ad- vantage of their comparative docility. There were to be two more significant grizzly encounters before they returned to St. Louis. The first was on July 15th, when Lewis sent Private Mac- Neal to find out whether their cached perogue had survived the winter. MacNeal returned to camp late that evening sporting a broken musket. His horse had passed very close to a grizzly and started, throwing the man under the surprised bear. While the creature reared to its feet, MacNeal had used his rifle as a club, breaking it across the bear's head. While the bear scratched at where he had been hit, MacNeil ran for a nearby willow tree and climbed it. The bear waited until dusk before tiring and walking off, after which MacNeil had collected his horse and went back to camp. The other was near what is now Glendive. On August 3rd, Clark shot "a Bear of the large vicious Species" after it had "plunged into the water and Swam towards us, either from a disposition to attack't or from the Cent of the meat which was in the Canoe." This particular bear retreated to nurse its wounds, but later that same day, Clark shot another through the head. The second, he noted, "proved to be an old Shee which was so old that her tusks had worn Smooth, and Much the largest female bear I ever saw." After years of hunting, fighting, and running from Ursus Horribilis, Lewis had to have come to a greater appreciation of the skills of Native hunters who had, with bows and arrows and "indifferent guns," hunted and killed this king of the Rockies. All told, Lewis and Clark killed an estimated 43 grizzly bears and witnessed countless more, keeping remarkably detailed and largely accurate scientific records all the while. Most of those bears encountered were in Montana, still the domain of the grizzled gentlemen. with CHRYSTI THE WORDSMITH

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