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He couldn't bring himself to eat dog meat. But dogs would do if dogs were all that they could get. Their favorite foods were always elk, beaver tail, and buffalo, and when they were struggling up the Missouri the men ate prodigious amounts of it, up to nine pounds of meat per man per day. In the dry areas of what is now eastern Washington, in fact, where there was little if any game and the only other choice was dried salmon, usually impregnated with sand, the men came to prefer dog. Puppy chops haven't made it into any of the recent cookbooks offering recipes from the Lewis and Clark expedition, but the Indians ate dogs and so did the members of the expedition when nothing else was available. Did you know that the Corps of Discovery frequently ate dogs? In the 1870s a blue-eyed, blond-haired Nez Perce told the Western photographer William H. Old Indian traditions claim that the expedition left children behind as well. Previous encounters with French and British traders had infected many Indian women with syphilis, and Lewis and Clark had to treat some of their men for this disease, for which there was no cure then, only the dubious palliative of mercury pills. York made out like a bandit.īut sex with Indian women had a down side, too: venereal disease. The Indians Lewis and Clark encountered had never seen a black man.
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Clark's black slave, York, was even more magical to them. One young member of the Corps of Discovery was offered four Mandan women in a single night. Nobody seemed to have more power than a white man, with his guns, his ability to work metal, his technological prowess. By sharing their wives, they could appropriate the power of the other person.
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Plains Indians believed that spiritual power passed between people during the sex act. The tribes of the High Plains had very different attitudes from white men about these matters. In fact there was a lot of sex, and the offers had nothing to do with fellowship among men. There's nothing like a little sex to cement relationships among different cultures. Did you know that men of the native tribes that Lewis and Clark encountered frequently offered their wives and daughters to the whites? Did you know that men of the native tribes that Lewis and Clark encountered frequently offered their wives and daughters to the explorers? Or that the Corps of Discovery frequently ate dogs? That Lewis and Clark got lost? These are only a few of the little known oddities about the famous expedition of 200 years ago.īook editor Anthony Brandt highlights some of the oddities about one of the greatest adventures in history.