On July 26, the party encountered eight Piegan Blackfeet with a sizeable group of horses. Worried about an attack, Lewis decided to invite the Indians to camp with them along Two Medicine Creek. Lewis engaged the Piegan in the same diplomacy he had employed throughout the Expedition. He learned that they traded with the Hudson’s Bay Company on the Saskatchewan River, well north of the Louisiana Territory.
In an attempt to gain their confidence, Lewis proclaimed American intentions to trade arms and goods with all willing tribes in the region who would make alliance with the United States. Further he boasted that he had already aided in quelling wars among other Indian groups in the region, declaring that he
had come in surch of them in order to prevail on them to be at peace with their neighbours particularly those on the West side of the mountains and to engage them to come and trade with me when the establishment is made at the entrance of this river to all which they readily gave their assent.
The Piegan must have received this information with some alarm, because they had held sway on the northern Plains through their steady supply of firearms in trade with the British. Arming their adversaries could not have been welcome. Whether this issue prompted their actions that night is unknown, but they took advantage and stole guns and horses before dawn. Suddenly awakened, Lewis and his men pursued the Piegan, resulting in two deaths, one by knife and another, Side Hill Calf, shot dead by Lewis. The men gathered their gear quickly, but before fleeing to meet Sergeant Ordway and other Corps members descending the Missouri, Lewis “left the medal about the neck of the dead man that they might be informed who we were.”
The firefight on the Marias produced the only Indian casualties and the only violent deaths on the whole Expedition. The message Lewis sent to the Piegan that Americans planned to arm their adversaries, much more than the violence on the Marias, set the Blackfeet against Americans on the upper Missouri. The Piegan defended their territory and connections with the British for decades, as Americans tried to expand fur trading into the region. In that larger sense, there is no other way to see the episode than a failure in diplomacy. Perhaps because of those events, when the Corps reunited and revisited the Mandan Villages, Clark took the lead in negotiations with Indian chiefs.
© William L. Lang, 2004
