Documentary tells Native American version of deadly Lewis and Clark encounter

By WALT WILLIAMS Chronicle Staff Writer

At first the Blackfeet Indians paid little attention to the Lewis and Clark expedition. In the economics of the time, the white men carried little of interest to the tribe.

"We knew they were coming and we knew they had nothing to trade," historian Curly Bear Wagner, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, said. "So we called them 'nothing people' because they had nothing to trade."

The indifference didn't last. In one of the darker episodes of the expedition, Meriwether Lewis and one of his party killed two Blackfeet youth in northern Montana, an incident that marked the beginning of hostile relations between the Blackfeet and fledging United States.

History books often tell Lewis's side of the story, but Wagner came to Bozeman Monday to tell his people's story as part of the Corps of Discovery II exhibit at the Gallatin County Fairgrounds.

Wagner is the co-producer of "Two Worlds at Two Medicine," a documentary about the incident told primarily from his tribe's point of view. The film was shown at the presentation.

The documentary explained the band of Blackfeet that Lewis encountered was actually a group of young boys, the average age was 12, who had just returned from a successful horse raid on the Crow Indians.

In the summer of 1806, Lewis and three other men had separated from the rest of the expedition to explore the area around the Marias River. When they first encountered the young Blackfeet, relations had been friendly and the Indians had shared a campfire with the explorers.

But Lewis then tried to explain how the land that the Blackfeet had lived on for thousands of years now belonged to the United States. The youth thought him crazy for suggesting such a thing.

Disaster struck the next morning when the Blackfeet tried to steal the explorers' horses. One of Lewis's men, Reuben Field, killed an Indian youth who had tried to take his gun, plunging a knife into his heart.

Lewis later killed another of the Blackfeet, shooting him in the stomach, but not before the young man fired a shot that passed so close to the explorer's head he felt the bullet whiz by.

The explorers then fled, while the surviving youth returned to their tribe and told them what had happened.

The documentary is the first of a planned series of programs telling the story of Lewis and Clark from the Native American point of view. Wagner said the Montana Office of Public Instruction has expressed interest in distributing it to schools across the state.

"It's always good to have our side of the story," he said.

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