The Standoff at the Bad River

On September twenty-fourth, eighteen oh four, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark anchored their keelboat at the mouth of the Bad River, almost exactly where it empties into the Missouri at present-day Fort Pierre. They had been warned before leaving Saint Louis that the Lakota, whom Americans called the Teton Sioux, controlled this stretch of river and would demand tribute from any traders who tried to pass. Lewis and Clark had no interest in paying tribute. What followed was the closest the entire Corps of Discovery came to a premature and violent end.

On the twenty-fifth, the corps held a council with three Lakota chiefs: Black Buffalo, The Partisan, and Buffalo Medicine. Lewis delivered a prepared speech about the new American government, gave out medals and gifts, and invited the chiefs onto the keelboat. When Clark tried to ferry them back to shore by pirogue, several Lakota warriors grabbed the vessel's bow rope and refused to let go. The Partisan declared the boat and everything in it was now his. Clark drew his sword. Lewis ordered the swivel gun loaded. Warriors on the riverbank strung their bows and took out arrows.

The standoff held for tense minutes. Then Black Buffalo intervened, took hold of the rope himself, and released the boat. Clark shook hands with the chief, and the crisis passed. The expedition moved on the next morning. In his journal, Lewis described the Lakota as the vilest miscreants of the savage race, which told historians more about American attitudes than about the Lakota, who by any reading of the encounter had simply been asserting the same toll rights that the Arikara and Mandan exercised along their own stretches of river. The site of that standoff, marked today in Fischer's Lily Park, sits just downstream from where you are driving.