Frazer’s Razor

While on a special journey^[2]The journey was for seven days and involved a round trip of 100 miles. Privates Robert Frazer and Peter Wiser were Sergeant John Ordway‘s companions for this side-adventure. See Ordway’s … Continue reading from the Expedition’s “Camp Chopunnish” [Long Camp] to their “Lewis’s Rivers” (present-day Snake and Salmon Rivers, north-central Idaho) for the purpose of procuring salmon to bolster the party’s food supply, Sergeant John Ordway recorded the following incident in his journal:

rained the greater part of last night. a rainy morning. we took a light breakfast Frazer got 2 Spanish mill dollars from a squaw for an old razer we expect they got them from the Snake Indians who live near the Spanish country to the South. we proceed.^[3]29 May 1806. Moulton Journals, 9:316. This quotation and its date has been updated to reflect Moulton’s edition of the journals which had not yet been published when the original article was … Continue reading

In the February 1981 issue of We Proceeded On (Vol. 7, No. 1, p. 15), Editor Robert E. Lange recounted the charming story of a trade bargain struck between the Lewis and Clark expedition’s Private Robert Frazer and an unnamed Nez Perce woman. As recorded in the journals of Sergeants John Ordway and Patrick Gass, the exchange took place near the junction of the Salmon and Snake Rivers at the end of May 1806. Frazer offered the Indian woman “an old razor” in return for two Spanish dollars.^[4]Quaife, 361; Patrick Gass, A Journal of the Voyages and Travels of a Corps of Discovery (Pittsburgh, 1807; reprint, Minneapolis, 1958), 267. While we may never know the ultimate fate of either the razor or the coins, this small incident and the comments made about it by Ordway and Gass can tell us much about Lewis and Clark as ethnographers and the native peoples of the Plateau.

Indian Trade Systems

The presence of Spanish coins among the Nez Perce and their Shoshone neighbors is a reminder of the complex trade networks that existed in Indian America even before European contact. Once whites arrived, they and their goods simply became part of those trade routes. During the long period that the Lewis and Clark Expedition was in the field, the Captains and their men encountered both major western trade complexes. As they pressed their way up the Missouri River towards the Knife River Villages, the explorers recorded the trade network that modern anthropologists have called “the Middle Missouri System.” That far-flung network involved agricultural staples produced by Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara farmers, goods from Canadian traders; and merchandise handled by Sioux middlemen obtained at the James River Dakota Rendezvous. Western peoples like the Cheyenne; Arapaho, and Kiowa purchased Upper Missouri village corn in return for fried meat, robes, and the highly prized Mountain Sheep bows.^[5]The trade networks are discussed in John C. Ewers, “The Indian Trade of the Upper Missouri before Lewis and Clark: An Interpretation,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, 10 (1954), … Continue reading That this system reached all the way to the Southwest was made clear when Jacques d’Eglise noted the presence of “saddles and bridles in Mexican style” among the Mandans.^[6]Zenon Trudeau to Carondelet, St. Louis, 20 October 1792, in A. P. Nasatir, ed., Before Lewis and Clark Documents Illustrating the History of the Missouri 1785-1804, 2 vols. (St. Louis, 1952), 161. Just as the Captains learned much about the Missouri trade system, they also came to understand something about the second great western trade network. Focused at The Dalles on the Columbia River, the “Pacific-Plateau System” involved an annual fall trade fair when people from the coast traded with Wasco and Wishram middlemen for goods from the Plateau and even the Plains.^[7]Wood, 156-158. The fullest discussion is in Luther S. Cressman and others, “Cultural Sequences at The Dalles, Oregon,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 50, pt. 10 … Continue reading Lewis and Clark described the trade at The Dalles in considerable detail, noting the many tons of dried salmon prepared for exchange in October 1805.^[8]Thwaites, 3:148. William Clark noted the “great numbers of Stacks of pounded Salmon.” Each stack held twelve baskets of fish and a full stack contained about 1200 lbs. of dried salmon. … Continue reading

But these two vast economic systems, as important as they were, probably do not account for Private Frazer finding those Spanish dollars in what is now western Idaho. Sandwiched between the two major exchange networks was a third that ethnologist John Ewers has called “the Shoshoni Rendezvous.” Located in southwestern Wyoming, this spring trade fair connected the two larger systems and reached into the Spanish Southwest. The fair brought together Crow, Flathead, Nez Perce, Shoshone, and Ute peoples to exchange all sorts of objects, both of native and European manufacture. This trading place was so important that it served in later years as the basis for the fur rendezvous system developed by General William H. Ashley. Of special interest for our Spanish coins was the role of Ute merchants who brought Spanish goods to the rendezvous from the New Mexico settlements. At the same time, it is known that Shoshonean-speaking people did carry on a direct trade with the Spanish.^[9]Ewers, 431; Wood, 159-160. As Sergeant Ordway noted, “we expect they [the Nez Perce] got them [the coins] from the Snake Indians who live near the Spanish country to the South.”^[10]Quaife, 361. Sergeant Gass added to the information on the operation of the trade by reporting that Shoshone horses came from Spanish herds.^[11]Gass, 267. Those Spanish coins were just one small part of the tidal wave of Spanish goods flooding the West by the time of Lewis and Clark. More important, they are a visible reminder of those intricate exchange networks that laced the West even before Lewis and Clark.

Nez Perce-Shoshone Relations

If the Spanish coins call attention to long distance economic relations, they also tell us something about the dealings between the Nez Perce and the Shoshone. Sergeant Gass found the simple trade deal important enough to write that the Nez Perce “got the dollars form about a Snake Indian’s neck they had killed some time ago.”^[12]Ibid. The Sergeant’s comments reveal much about the relations between Plateau peoples. During most of the year, with the exception of truce periods for trade, Nez Perce and Shoshone warriors engaged in small scale raids on each other. This reading produced only a few casualties and was more ritual in character. While most Nez Perce warfare was with their neighbors the Coeur d’Alenes and Spokanes, Nez Perce warriors did wage raiding forays against Shoshonean-speaking peoples. It is revealing that the Nez Perce word for the Western Shoshones was teewalka, “an enemy to be fought.”^[13]Alvin M. Josephy, The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest (New Haven, 1965), 20-21. It must have been on one such raid that the Spanish coins fell into Nez Perce hands.

Those coins, having passed through so many hands, can also symbolized the diverse ways Native Americans viewed European manufactured goods. While we cannot know with any certainty how that dead Shoshone warrior perceived the bright metal discs, what is know about Indian views of European objects can help us make some guesses. On one level there can be little doubt that Indians throughout the West were attracted to European luxury goods, whether blue beads on a Blackfeet woman’s dress or hair pipes decorating a Mandan dandy. The Spanish dollars must have made a stunning necklace. But we would miss much if we thought of those coins as merely decorative jewelry. Native people throughout North America often saw European goods as something more than just material objects. This was especially the case with guns, peace medals, Christian missionary relics, and coins. Those things were venerated as both symbols and transmitters of the strong medicine and special power the whites seemed to possess. Meriwether Lewis had some inkling of this when he wrote in 1807 that Indians believed the first white traders “were the most powerful persons in the nation.”^[14]Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents 1783-1854, 2 vols. (Urbana, 1978), 698. The power of the whites could be shared with others by wearing or using things associated with the Europeans. So much of Indian religious practice centered on the search for sacred power. Objects, whether medicine bundles or rings and crosses distributed by Jesuit missionaries, were seen as a means of linking the wearer to sources of vast spiritual energy. We might usefully see those coins as a sacred amulet giving the Shoshone warrior some of the white medicine. By wearing the coins, the Indian may have hoped to share in the strength of distant conquistadors.

Differing Cultural Values

Finally, the coins, the razor, and the observations recorded about their exchange give us a tantalizing glimpse into the differing cultural values of Private Frazer and the Nez Perce woman. Cultures value objects and goods depending on the needs and circumstances of that particular culture. What one group prizes as beautiful or useful may well be seen by another people as ugly or useless. A classic case is the use made by the Mandans of the corn mill left behind after the winter of 1804-5. The Mandans had no use for a corn grinder. On the other hand, metal was a valued and scarce commodity useful for arrow points and hide scrapers. The Mandans dismantled the mill to serve their own cultural needs. The largest piece was attached to a wooden handle and what emerged was a fine pounder to make grease from buffalo marrow bones. When Alexander Henry the Younger saw the skillful transformation of the corn mill he quickly labeled the Mandan mechanics “foolish fellows.”^[15]Elliott Coues, ed., New Light on the Early History of the Greater Northwest: The Manuscript Journals of Alexander Henry . . . and of David Thompson, 3 vols. (New York, 1897), 1:329. It is easy to imagine the same clash of perspectives when Private Frazer and his Nez Perce trade partner struck their bargain. The Indian woman probably left the exchange sure she had gotten the best of a gullible stranger. Those Spanish dollars were worthless to her in her daily round of domestic duties. On the other hand, a metal razor was a very valuable instrument. Without question she could have found dozens of uses for the sharp tool. It is equally easy to picture Private Frazer chuckling to himself after the encounter. He had exchanged an old and perhaps broken straight razor for two good Spanish dollars. While there are surely more spectacular cases of culture value differences recorded in the Lewis and Clark journals, few illustrate the point more simply and more directly.

The famous detective Sherlock Holmes once wrote: “From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.”^[16]Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York, 1936), 23. those Spanish dollars or that old razor may not quite be Holmes’s drop of water but they do give us a rare and humanizing look into the encounter of diverse cultures that was so much a part of the Lewis and Clark adventure. The prominent American archaeologist James Deetz has written that we can learn much about the past by scrutinizing common objects, the “small things forgotten.”^[17]James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten The Archaeology of Early American Life (Garden City, 1977), 156-161. So it is with the Spanish coins and the old razor.