George Drouillard

He was hired as a translator of Indian languages, but George Drouillard also became useful as a French-language translator once the captains learned at Fort Mandan that they would need to trade with the Shoshones for horses. For that purpose, Drouillard could translate the captains’ English to Charbonneau, who spoke but little English, and could speak in Hidatsa to his wife Sacagawea, who could talk with her people in Shoshone.

But Drouillard—almost always a nearly phonetic “Drewyer” in the journals—was one of the captains’ three most valuable hands. He was also the highest paid member after the captains, he shared the Charbonneaus’ tent with the family and the captains, and Gary Moulton observed that he was the only man Clark seemed to call by first name in the journals.^[1]Moulton, Journals, 3:309n3.

When Meriwether Lewis asked Secretary of War Henry Dearborn to reward George Drouillard beyond the agreed $25 per month for the expedition, he summarized George’s service to the expedition: “It was his fate . . . to have encountered, on various occasions, with either Captain Clark or myself, all of the most dangerous and trying scenes of the voyage, in which he uniformly acquited himself with honor.”^[2]Donald Jackson, ed.,Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783-1854; 2nd ed.; 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 1:368. He wrote similar encomiums about only two others: Joseph and Reubin Field. For Drouillard, however, Lewis added, “he has been peculiarly usefull from his knowledge of the common language of gesticulation (see Plains Sign Language), and his uncommon skill as a hunter and woodsman.”

Pathfinder

Whenever Lewis separated from the main party, to hunt or explore, for example, he chose Drouillard to go with him. On several occasions he relied on Drouillard’s talent as a wilderness pathfinder for important information. Very early in the journey, for instance, he had occasion to observe Drouillard’s ability to “read” evidence of Indian traffic. And during Lewis’s exploration of the upper Marias River in July of 1806, he sent Drouillard ahead, alone, to follow the upper reaches of the source stream on which they finally camped.

Only once did he have reason to criticize Drouillard. In Shoshone Cove on 11 August 1805, while he, Drouillard, Shields and McNeal were spread apart in an effort to locate the Indian road they had missed, Lewis spied a lone man on horseback whom he believed was the first of the Shoshone Indians he had been seeking for so long. Giving McNeal his gun and pouch and ordering him to stop and wait, he signaled toward the wary Indian at a distance, then proceeded ahead slowly, hoping to get close enough to talk to him without frightening him. Apparently inattentive to the evolving situation, Shields and Drouillard continued to advance, “neither of them haveing segacity enough to recollect the impropriety of advancing when they saw me thus in parley.” Lewis signalled both men to stop, but only Drouillard saw, while Shields, to Lewis’s chagrin, continued forward. The Indian quickly turned and rode away. Understandably, Lewis “could not forbare abraiding them a little for their want of attention and imprudence on this occasion.”^[3]There was only one other incident that might be construed as a black mark on his reputation. Early in the expedition, on 3 August 1804, Clark noted cryptically that that night, with “all in … Continue reading

Diplomat

Lewis had faith in Drouillard’s ability to deal with Indians on an official basis, delegating him in the spring of 1806 to visit and smoke with the Nez Perce chief Twisted Hair, and find out the details of a disagreement that had arisen over the care of the Corps’ horses over the winter of 1805-06. Around the same time Lewis sent him with the Nez Perce chiefs Hohots Ilppilp and Cut Nose to retrieve two tomahawks the Corps had lost the previous autumn, one that Lewis had unintentionally left behind, the other being the deceased Charles Floyd‘s pipe tomahawk that an Indian had stolen from Clark, which Clark wished to return to Floyd’s friends at home. The latter turned into a sort of international incident. The thief had sold it to a dying man, whose family wanted to bury it with him.

His relations were unwilling to give up the tomehawk as they intended to bury it with the disceased owner, but were at length induced to do so for the consideration of a hadkerchief, two strands of beads, which Drewyer gave them and two horses given by the cheifs to be killed agreeably to their custom at the grave of the disceased.

Risk Taker

Despite Lewis’s confidence in Drouillard’s capacity to take care of himself in any situation, there were moments when he could scarcely avoid being deeply concerned for the man’s safety. Opposite White Bear Islands on the morning of 12 July 1806 it was discovered that overnight seventeen of their best horses had gone astray or been stolen, leaving only ten steeds for their immediate requirements—portaging around the falls, and exploring the upper Marias River. After two separate search teams had recovered only seven of them, at 3 p.m. Lewis dispatched Drouillard and Joe Field to try to locate the last ten. Field returned at dark, unsuccessful. Drouillard didn’t show up until 1 p.m. on the fifteenth, having followed the horses’ tracks down the Missouri to a recently vacated Indian camp below Dearborn’s River, thence westward to the road Lewis’s detachment had followed across the mountains from Travelers’ Rest. Obviously there was no point in continuing his quest, so he turned back. In the meantime, Lewis had fallen under a dire apprehension.

His safe return has releived me from great anxiety. I had already settled it in my mind that a whitebear had killed him and should have set out tomorrow in surch of him. . . . I knew that if he met with a bear . . . he [i.e., the bear] would attack him.    and that if any accedent should haven to seperate him from his horse in that situation the chances in favour of his being killed would be as 9 to 10.^[4]His anxiety was not entirely wasted, however. McNeal, whom Lewis had sent downriver to check on the condition of the white pirogue and the cache at the lower portage camp, returned with a harrowing … Continue reading

Early Years

On 27 September 1775, Pierre Drouillard and his wife Asoundechris Flat Head had their infant son, also named Pierre, baptized at Church of the Assumption^[5]Larry E. Morris, The Fate of the Corps: What Became of the Lewis and Clark Explorers After the Expedition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 191. Originally a Jesuit mission for the Huron … Continue reading in Sandwich (now Windsor) Ontario, across the Detroit River from Detroit, Michigan. The little boy, whom they called George,^[6]In European tradition, it was usual to provide a given, baptismal name, in this case Pierre (for St. Peter), as well as a “call-name,” in the infant Drouillard’s case, George. was about twenty-one months old. His mother was a Shawnee Indian, his father French Canadian.

The Shawnee people had lived in the Tennessee River Valley, about 3,000 strong, until white settlers pushed them out, some Shawnees moving to Alabama and Georgia and others to Pennsylvania. The northern Shawnees fought on the French side against Britain in the French and Indian War. After Britain won that war in 1763, many Shawnees moved to Quebec. Others settled in Illinois, west of white settlement, but left there to cross the Mississippi and settle around Cape Girardeau, Missouri.^[7]Barbara Fifer, Meeting Natives with Lewis and Clark (Helena, MT: Farcountry Press, 2004), 11.

When George was young, he and his mother moved with Shawnee relatives to the Cape Girardeau area, where he grew up. His father, in 1776, married Angelique Descamps in Detroit, and George later was close to his step-siblings in the Detroit area.^[8]M.O. Skarsten, George Drouillard: Hunter and Interpreter for Lewis and Clark and Fur Trader, 1807-1810; 2nd ed. (1964; Spokane: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 2003), 18. Growing up around Cape Girardeau, George learned to speak Shawnee, French, English, and Plains Indian Sign, and to hunt and live off the land.

On 11 November 1803, Meriwether Lewis met 27-year-old Drouillard at Fort Massac, Illinois, where he may have been working as an army translator, and hired him on the spot. Drouillard’s first assignment was to go to South West Point, Tennessee, and escort soldiers who had volunteered for the Corps of Discovery—to wherever the Corps would decide to set up camp around St. Louis. He located their Camp Dubois and brought in the eight potential recruits on 22 December 1803.

After the Expedition

At the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s end, George Drouillard received his payment of $833.33-1/3—twenty-five dollars per month for his services, plus $197.71 for “subsistence”— and two quarter-sections (half a square mile) of land. He shortly bought the land warrants of John Collins and Joseph Whitehouse, and so had the right to claim a section and a half of public land, or 960 acres (1½ square miles).

But Drouillard, now thirty-two years old, could not settle down to a farmer’s life. In 1807, a fur trading company organized by Manuel Lisa, Pierre Menard and William Morrison, sent men to build a trading post on the upper Missouri River. Lisa, a Spaniard born in the colony of Cuba, led the expedition. Drouillard joined, “in the capacity of proxy” for Menard and Morrison, who stayed in Kaskaskia.^[9]M.O. Skarsten, George Drouillard: Hunter and Interpreter for Lewis and Clark and Fur Trader, 1807-1810; 2nd ed. (1964; Spokane: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 2003), 271-79.

Drouillard’s fellow Corps members among the Lisa, Menard and Morrison Fur Company party’s forty-two men were Jean-Baptiste Lepage, John Potts, Peter Weiser, and Richard Windsor.^[10]Larry E. Morris, The Fate of the Corps: What Became of the Lewis and Clark Explorers After the Expedition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 39. When they reached the Platte River, they met another former Corps member, John Colter, traveling downstream alone; he joined Lisa’s party and turned back up the Missouri.

Meanwhile, employee Antoine Bissonnette deserted, and Drouillard was sent after him with orders to capture the deserter, or shoot him if necessary.^[11]Skarsten, 252-53. Unfortunately, the fugitive tried to run for it, and Drouillard reacted as he was ordered. Lisa sent the seriously wounded Bissonnette back to St. Louis in a canoe, but he died en route, and Drouillard was later compelled to face the consequences.

Yellowstone Trader

Originally planning to build at the Three Forks of the Missouri, Lisa instead selected the mouth of the Bighorn River on the Yellowstone. M.O. Skartsen credits Colter with changing Lisa’s mind about where to build his fur trading post, by describing the Yellowstone River’s rich beaver population.^[12]Skarsten, p. 256, says that Colter was with Clark on the Yellowstone in 1806, which is not so; Colter was in Ordway’s canoe party, which separated from Clark at the Missouri’s headwaters, … Continue reading With Lewis and Clark’s permission to leave their expedition early, Colter had trapped on the Clarks Fork of the Yellowstone in the summer of 1806.

Lisa named his Bighorn post, constructed in November 1807, Fort Raymond after his son, although various first-person accounts referred to it instead as Fort Manuel or Fort Lisa.^[13]Skarsten, 257; Howard R. Lamar, ed., The Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1977), 391. (Adding to the confusion, Lisa himself later built another trading center on the Missouri River in north-central South Dakota, and named it “Fort Manuel.” It was there that Sacagawea most likely died.)

Lisa’s men took turns in 1807 making dangerous solo trips around the countryside to notify area Indians of the new post and inviting them in to trade furs. Drouillard made two such journeys, the first of 300 miles and the second of 200. The first took him south on the Bighorn River into Wyoming, and when he returned to Fort Raymond he described some amazing thermal phenomena. Colter also reported them when he appeared a few days later, and they became known as “Colter’s Hell.” The two men may have discovered part of what 65 years later was to become Yellowstone National Park.^[14]Skarsten, 264.

Murder Trial

Drouillard returned to St. Louis in August 1808, where he found himself and Lisa indicted for the murder of Antoine Bissonnette. On the 23rd, Drouillard was tried; the jury deliberated for only fifteen minutes before acquitting him. Coincidentally, one if the jury member was George Shannon, still depending upon a crutch to walk with his new peg-leg.^[15]Morris, 49. After Drouillard’s acquittal, Lisa’s indictment was dismissed. Drouillard then wrote, or dictated, a letter to his half-sister Marie Louise in Detroit: “The recollection of this unhappy affair throws me very often in the most profound reflections, and certainly I think it has caused a great deal of grief to my family for which I am very sorry and very much mortified. That I have not lost the affection of my old friends proves that they did not believe me capable of an action so terrible through malice and bad intent.”^[16]Skarsten, 272-79. He implied that he had allowed Lisa’s fury at Bissonnette to influence him overmuch.

By the following spring of 1809, Lisa had organized the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company, with plans to build a trading post at the Three Forks of the Missouri. He then contracted with the U.S. government to escort Mandan chief Sheheke and his family home to their village at the mouth of the Knife River on the Missouri. (This was the third attempt to return them to their home after their visit with President Jefferson). Lisa’s men left St. Louis in May or June, with partner Menard in command of the brigade.^[17]Morris, 234n5, notes that while James claimed thirty-two men, Richard E. Oglesby in Manuel Lisa and the Opening of the Missouri Fur Trade (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1963), estimated that … Continue reading

Demise at the Three Forks

In March of 1810, having spent the winter with the Mandans, Menard led the party of trappers on toward the Three Forks of the Missouri. They had not gone far when two of the trappers, who had gone ahead with a Shoshone chief, his two wives and his son, to hunt for meat, were attacked by a group of Gros Ventre warriors. One of the women and the boy were killed; the chief and the other wife escaped on horseback. The trappers were unharmed.

The continuing trip was hellacious. Some of the men suffered snow blindness, and all struggled over Bozeman Pass in snow that was head-high to the horses. A day’s travel west of the Three Forks they came upon skulls and bones from a “battle [that] had occurred in the late summer, or in the fall, of 1808,” which participant Colter now described as they walked the site. Menard’s men buried the remains of at least two bodies.

Beavers were numerous in the verdant valley where the Three Forks met, and the men trapped while throwing up their fortified trading post between the Jefferson and Madison rivers. But the Blackfeet were determined to rout these newcomers, and attacked some of the party on 12 April, killing two and capturing three.

That was enough for Colter, who left for St. Louis. But Drouillard continued trapping, alone and with small groups, often at considerable distances from the fort. According to James, he bragged he was “too much of an Indian to be caught by Indians.” But his luck ran out in May, when he went out with his traps, accompanied by two Lenape Delaware employees who were to hunt deer. All were killed by Blackfeet. Drouillard’s body was decapitated and disemboweled, then hacked apart. Menard quickly left the country, reaching St. Louis in July and reported Drouillard’s death. Lisa administered the estate that Drouillard had established with his earnings from the Lewis and Clark Expedition only four years previously.