President Thomas Jefferson instructed Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to methodically collect anthropological information about the Indians they encountered.

Jefferson directed Lewis to learn "the names of the nations & their numbers, their relations with other tribes or nations, their language, traditions, monuments, their ordinary occupations in agriculture, fishing, hunting, war, arts, & the implements for these; their food, clothing and domestic accommodations; the diseases prevalent among them & the remedies they use."

Dr. Benjamin Rush also supplied Lewis with a set of questions. In addition to the obvious questions about "Physical history & Medicine," Rush included questions about "Morals" and "Religion" - considered at the time to be lines of inquiry for the "well-educated gentleman."

Lewis and Clark gathered information on Indians with the goal of amassing information that would be both useful (in establishing trade, for instance) and that would also further the general compendium of human knowledge. Below are the tribes Lewis and Clark encountered.
 

Missouri and Oto

These Indians were living together in villages on the Missouri River when Lewis and Clark met with them in July 1804. The Missouri nation had been nearly wiped out in a great smallpox epidemic a few years before. They were primarily agriculture tribes who ventured west to hunt buffalo. The captains' visit with them was their first venture in Indian diplomacy and, although they attempted to secure peace between these tribes and their neighbors, the Pawnee and Omaha, they were unsuccessful.
 

Yankton Sioux

The Yankton Sioux lived in villages near the mouth of the James River and like their neighbors down river, they hunted in the plains to the west. The Yanktons were acutely aware of the increasing importance of upriver tribes, including their cousin the Teton Sioux, in establishing a foothold in the Missouri River trade. Lewis and Clark enacted a trade agreement with them. The Yanktons cautioned the captains to beware of the upriver nations.
 

Teton Sioux

The American explorers would have done well to heed the words of the Yankton Sioux. When the expedition reached the Teton villages near the mouth of the Bad River in South Dakota in September 1804, a tense three-day confrontation occurred. The Teton, more traders than farmers or hunters and unwilling to give up favored middle-men position, were openly hostile to an American party they viewed as intruders into an already secure trading pattern. Only by the firmest of resolve did Lewis and Clark leave the Teton villages without the use of deadly force. Clark always referred to the Teton Sioux thereafter as "the vilest miscreants of a savage race."
 

Mandan and Hidatsa

These related tribes occupied several villages near the mouth of the Knife River in central North Dakota. They had long been the center of trade in the northern plains and were visited by Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Assiniboine on a regular basis exchanging agricultural goods for buffalo robes, hides and meat as well as other trade goods from further west including obsidian and even sea shells. Since the expedition wintered at Fort Mandan in 1804-1805, just down river from the first Mandan villages and were visited almost daily by Indians they came to know the Mandans and Hidatsas better than any other tribal nations they encountered. As a result of their favorable relationships they obtained critical geographical information from the Hidatsa regarding the country through which they had to pass to get to the fabled short portage and the Pacific Ocean. They secured the services of French interpreter Touissant Charbonneau and his Shoshone wife Sacagawea. They had also obtained considerable amounts of ethnographic data using Jefferson's instructions and Rush's questions as a guide. Most of all the expedition simply enjoyed a winter of neighborliness. The foremost authority on ethnography, James Ronda, has noted "the simple rituals of hunting, eating, trading, and sleeping together had bound the explorers and villages together during a Dakota winter."
 

Arikara

The first of the sedentary and predominantly agricultural Indians living near the Missouri's northern bend, the Arikara, like their upriver neighbors the Mandans and Hidatsa, lived in fortified villages of earth lodges surrounded by fields of maize, beans and squash. At the time of Lewis and Clark they were still a large tribe but their numbers had been severely reduced by smallpox in 1800-1801. The Teton Sioux exchanged agricultural products for firearms and other European trade goods and were enemies of the Mandans and Hidatsas father up the Missouri River. Lewis and Clark attempted to make peace between the Arikaras and the Mandans without success.
 

Blackfeet / Piegan

On their return, Lewis and Clark gladly met old friends they had made on the way west and renewed acquaintances with those Indians they had already encountered. They also came in contact with one new culture group, the Piegan Blackfeet, and thus ensued the only fatal Indian encounter of the entire expedition. The Piegan were members of the powerful Blackfeet confederacy whose proximity to Hudson's Bay Company and North West Company posts on the Saskatchewan River provided them access to firearms and other European trade goods. The trade goods, obtained in exchange for buffalo robes and animal pelts (particularly beaver), made the Blackfeet materially wealthy. The firearms obtained in the same trade allowed them to be territorially expansive, driving other Indians like Shoshone, Salish and Nez Perce out of the plains and into the mountains. The Blackfeet were typical northern plains horse Indians nomadic and hunting buffalo for their subsistence.
 

Shoshone (Snake)

The Shoshones met by Lewis and Clark lived in the valleys of the Lemhi and Salmon Rivers of eastern Idaho and were part of a much larger related group of Indians with similar languages and lifestyles that occupied the central and northern Rockies. They had been driven there from the plains by firearm-owning tribes such as the Blackfeet. Because they did not possess firearms and lived in game-scarce regions of the mountains, the Shoshones were poor people. The tribes lived on fish and plants in the mountains and periodically traveled to the plains to hunt larger game, particularly buffalo. The Shoshone raised good horses and it was their horse herds that provided the prime incentive for Lewis and Clark to contact them. Although the Indians drove a hard bargain Sacagawea's interpretation meant the captains secured the necessary horses to portage their gear over the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass.
 

Salish

The Salish peoples (named "Flathead" from the sign language symbol for them which was make by holding the hands on either side of the head and pressing toward the center) inhabited the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana. Like other mountain tribes they occupied poorer land because they were not strong or numerous enough to resist the aggression of their plains neighbors who possessed firearms and made only periodic forays into the plains to hunt buffalo. Also like the Shoshones they raised horses and Lewis and Clark traded from the Salish. These people also provided the captains with the information they needed to find the trail across the Bitterroot Range to the west.
 

Nez Perce

Like the Salish and Shoshones, the Nez Perce were noted for their horse herds (they had within little more than half a century after acquiring horses, bred the Appaloosa). They lived west of the mountains, having been driven there by Blackfeet, and crossed the Bitterroots to the Bitterroot Mountains and then the Continental Divide to the Missouri River to hunt buffalo. After a long and extremely difficult crossing of the Bitterroot Range, the expedition encountered the Nez Perce in the prairies of western of Idaho. The Nez Perce gave them food and shelter and a secure place to heal from their mountain crossing. When the captains made know their intent to continue their travels to the Pacific Ocean by water the Nez Perce agreed to keep their horses until the expedition could return the following spring. They lived up to their agreement and lead the Corps westward across the mountains. (Click here to read the Nez Perce Story)
 

Walula (Walla Walla)

The Walula lived between the confluence of the Snake and Columbia and the Dalles and were like their upriver relatives the Yakima, dependent largely upon salmon. They engaged in some trade with nations farther toward the interior for products of the annual buffalo hunt if the Nez Perce or Salish ended up with a surplus. They occupied a cultural transition zone between the Indians of the Columbian plateau (like the Nez Perce) and those of the costal region (the Chinookan speakers). They welcomed Lewis and Clark primarily because they desired the trade items the expedition carried (but in increasingly short supply) and were the last Indians encountered by the captains with whom relations were generally cordial. The captains also received important geographical data from the Walula chief on the course and characteristics of the Columbia River from the Walula villages down to the Pacific.
 

Wishram and Wasco

The Wishram and Wasco peoples occupied the great trading center at the Dalles, a series of great cascades on the Columbia River just before the river enters the Columbia Gorge. These people lived almost entirely on salmon, supplemented with some plant materials from the surrounding arid country. They were also great traders and Lewis and Clark encountered for the first time, American and European trade goods in great quantities - sailors' clothing and brass buttons, copper ornaments and kettles, red blankets and other goods obtained in the sea otter trade between costal tribes and European and American traders. These goods then worked their way inland via the trading networks to the Dalles. The Dalles was a great divide in economics, cultural and environmental patterns. Here the expedition began to encounter Indians whose materialistic cultural led them to thievery and whose propensity to strike a hard bargain were enough like Yankees to cause the American explorers concern and eventually outright dislike.
 

Chinook and Clatsop

From the Dalles to Fort Clatsop, near present-day Astoria, Oregon, the expedition was in the heart of the material-rich culture of the Chinookan speakers of the Pacific Northwest. Native population density here was much higher than in any other portion of their journey - similar in fact, to the population density of southern New England - and the expedition was never out of sight of Indians. By the end of the long winter at Fort Clatsop both the environment and their neighbors - whom the captains viewed as avaricious thieves, of low morality and "illy-formed" - had begun to wear significantly on the American explorers. The incredibly rich resource base of the Pacific Northwest allowed the Indians to live in sedentary villages made from planks split from cedar and hemlock trees. This was one of the few places in the world where sedentary without agriculture was possible. Yet the Americans viewed the homeland of their neighbors - the Clatsops and Chinooks - as providing only the most meager of fares.

Scientific Contributions - Anthropology

Lewis and Clark were the first Americans to make significant contact with such important tribal groups as the Shoshone, Nez Perce and Salish. Querying the Indians with questions submitted by President Jefferson and Dr. Rush, the captains obtained ethnological data on topics ranging from disease to demography to daily lifestyles. They defined what we now consider to be the three great culture areas of the Northwest: the Great Plains, the Columbia Plateau and the Northwest Coast. They also were the first to record Indian "vocabularies" for at least six western linguistic families: Siouan, Caddoan, Shoshonean, Salishan, Sahaptian and Chinookan. Their interpretation of Indian trading patterns and material cultures provided an excellent baseline for later studies. Perhaps most important of all, they observed and wrote about western Indians before the smallpox epidemics of the 1803's so severely reduced Indian populations in many areas that they were no longer viable as tribal entities. In the current revival of Indian culture the Lewis and Clark journals provide important information on the lifeways of these nations.

Westward Expansion - Enclosing the Tribes

The steady movement of European-Americans across the west and the settlement of western Indian lands by whites is also a part of the Lewis and Clark legacy. The happy future of Indian- white relationships as conceived by Jefferson - a future in which Indians would adopt the practices of Jefferson's yeoman farmers and become a part of the republican agrarian "empire of liberty" - did not come to pass. By the 1830's Indians from east of the Mississippi River had been displaced, mostly by force, from their traditional lands and moved by the federal government to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Enclosure of some tribal nations on reservations began at the same time. During much of the 19th century the federal government was attempting to protect Indians from white settlers rather than the other way around. But during the last half of the 19th century, particularly after the Civil War, this picture changed as scattered conflicts erupted into the Indian Wars. The series of battles and massacres concluded in the early 1890's when U.S. troops eradicated the vestiges of Indian resistance to white encroachment and the federal government enclosed nearly all Indian peoples on reservations. Land acquisition by whites via public policies such as the Homestead Act and depletion of the buffalo herds dealt the final blow to the plains Indians' traditional way of life.