The incident
occurred on the return journey, just off the Missouri River in what is today
northwestern North Dakota. Lewis and the expedition’s other leader, William
Clark, had split up, each taking a part of their men on different paths so that
even more of the lands recently brought into the country through the Louisiana
Purchase could be explored. On August 11, 1806, as Lewis and his group traveled
down the Missouri, they stopped to go onshore and hunt for elk they had
seen. Lewis took one of his men, a
Private Cruzatte, for the effort. The men became separated, and as Lewis raised
his rifle to his shoulder for a shot, he himself was hit by a rifle bullet that
entered his left butt cheek “an inch
below his hip joint” and exited through his right butt cheek, “leaving a three-inch gash the width of the
ball,” wrote Stephen E. Ambrose in
his 1996 book Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West.
Lewis called
out to Cruzatte, but got no answer. Fearing an Indian attack, the severely
wounded Lewis somehow made his way back to his other men on the river. He tried
to lead them back to site of the shooting to save Cruzatte, but his injury
became too painful and debilitating, so he told his men to leave him behind.
Lewis struggled back to the boats on the river and armed himself, later writing
that he “determined to sell my life as
deerly as possible.” After about 20 minutes, the men returned with
Cruzatte, who seemed oblivious to what had happened, and said he had not heard
Lewis call out to him after he had been shot. Cruzatte denied being the
culprit. But the bullet, which had lodged in Lewis’s leather breeches, was from
the same type of late-model U.S. Army rifle carried by Cruzatte, which was not a
weapon likely to be in the hands of a hostile Indian.
Lewis himself
was the closest thing to a doctor on the expedition, although he had little
training in the field – only a two-week tutelage under one of America’s leading
medical experts, Dr. Benjamin Rush, as in preparation for the expedition. So
Lewis dressed his wound himself, placing roles of lint into the holes in his
butt. He was forced to lie on his stomach and the boats continued down the
river. The pain became so great that he couldn’t be moved, so he spent the
night, after the group made camp on the shore of the river, on his stomach in
one of the boats. He became feverish, but the application of a poultice of
Peruvian bark, seemed to control that, but not the pain.
Lewis’ group
rejoined Clark’s group the next day. Lewis was still on his belly, and fainted
with pain when Clark changed the dressings on the wounds. Over the next days,
the wounds appeared to be healing, but still Lewis couldn’t walk. Improvement was again noted on August 22, when
Clark wrote that Lewis “walked a little
to day for the first time. I have discontinued the [lint] in the hole the ball
came out.” And the next day, Clark
wrote that Lewis “is recovering fast the
hole in his thy where the Ball passed out is Closed and appears to be nearly
well. The one where the ball entered discharges very well.”
There were setbacks in Lewis’ recovery, though. Clark reported a few days later that Lewis“hurt himself very much by takeing a longer walk ... than he had Strength to undergo, which Caused him to remain very unwell all night.” The next morning, Clark wrote that Lewis“had a bad nights rest and is not very well this morning.” But by the time the expedition returned to St. Louis about a month later, in late September 1806, Lewis seems to have fully recovered.
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