Think of the Corps of Discover as the Secret Service, or a couple dozen first-team, All-American linebackers, gifted at reading with the next snap up river, or a 19th century burly gang of ex-Eagle Scouts.
William Lewis gave Meriweather Clark the job of recruiting the Corps, and Clark did most of the drafting at St. Louis during the winter of 1803. He didn't pick up just anybody from the applicants. Guys he wanted had to know their way around-and-through a wilderness. They had to be single--no hitched-up husbands need apply. Good health was required of course, and if you wanted a job going where few white men ever had, you had to handle firearms as if they were appendages.
Those St. Louis recruits were the heart of the Corps of Discovery, but once in a while Lewis and Clark picked up a ringer out from the transfer portal--men like Pierre Cruzatte, a one-eyed trapper, big and rangy, and blessedly multi-lingual. The man knew more languages than today’s average CEO--fluent in English, French, and Omaha, as well as the lingua franca of the whole Louisiana Purchase, sign language.
Pierre Cruzatte's father was a Frenchman. Cruzatte’s mother was an original Omaha.
Maybe the best way to imagine the 1804 Missouri River is to head out to Springfield, South Dakota sometime--it's not that far. Once you get to town, go south to the river, where you'll find a little city park. Sometimes people, yet today, call the river "braided," right there, because it is. All you have to do is stand there to realize how tough it must have been to determine which braid you wanted, or needed, to follow, upstream or down.
Pierre Cruzatte, knew his way around and through the Missouri. He'd been up river often, knew the currents, knew the landmarks, knew the way to get where Lewis and Clark wanted to go. And when he got there, Cruzatte knew how the heck to talk to the people who'd long ago been there. He could read the river the way an apt woodsman reads trees. And, it goes without saying that he knew how to get off a boat, head out into the trees or grassland and come back with a fat deer slung over his back--or whatever else the whole bunch of them could eat that night.
Cruzatte was a free agent Lewis and Clark picked up for a song. Didn't take long and they named him a private, drafted him, right then and there into "The Army of the Missouri."
Oh, yes, there's this too. Pierre Cruzatte, the beefy, half-breed linguist, a water man par excellance, with only one good eye—and that one may not have been all that good--came with a fiddle too. Lewis and Clark got him for a song, and you know what else?--he gave them one or two songs himself. That's right. On top of everything else, Cruzatte was a musician, after a fashion any way. Don't know exactly how he'd have done with Vivaldi in Venice .
But there were times on the river, moments when the whole bunch of them--all those rangy secret service guys, tanned and hot and beating off mosquitoes, got up on their feet and danced--yes, danced--to what Cruzatte fiddled up for them. I'm not making this up. There were times when the Native people all around, absolutely loved seeing all those paleface, uniformed linebackers shake a tail feather.
They were all interesting guys, the whole bunch; but you got to love the multi-lingual, one-eyed, river veteran who knew how to get what needed to be got out of a musket and a third-rate fiddle.
