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the whipsawing braided channels of the Missouri River, they arrived at the villages of the Mandan tribe, in what has come to be North Dakota, in the early winter. When the ice broke in the spring, some of the party returned to St. Louis with the boat. The thirty-one others, accompanied by a Shoshone Indian girl named Sacajawea, who had been captured and enslaved by the Mandans, and her newborn baby, continued westward on horseback and on foot. Guided by Sacajawea—whose usefulness as an interpreter was only a small part of the Lewis and Clark expedition’s fabulous luck—they pressed across the plains to the beginning of the true Missouri at Three Forks, Montana. From there, they struggled over the Continental Divide and found the Salmon River, whose alternative name, the River of No Return, is an indication of the experiences they had trying to follow it. In despair, the party gave up and turned northward, finding the Clearwater River, which offered them an easier path westward. The Clearwater led them to the Snake, and the Snake led them to the Columbia—a huge anomaly of a river in the pale desert east of the Cascades. Entering the Columbia gorge, they made an almost instantaneous transition from arid grasslands to rain forest as the river sliced through the Cascade Range—a type of transition utterly fantastic to an easterner. From there, it was a short hop to the Pacific, where the party spent the winter, fattening on seafood. In August of 1806, they were back in St. Louis.
     
    The country Lewis and Clark saw amazed, appalled, and enchanted them. Above all, it bewildered them. They had seen the western plains at their wettest—in the springtime of an apparently wet year—but still there were few rivers, and full ones were fewer. The sky was so immense it swallowed the landscape, but the land swallowed up the provenance of the sky. There was game—at times a ludicrous abundance of it—but there were no trees. To an easterner, no trees meant no possibility of agriculture. If the potential wealth of the land could be judged by the layers of fat on its inhabitants, it was worthwhile to note that the only fat Indians seen by Lewis and Clark were those on the Pacific Coast, sating themselves on salmon and clams. Reading their journals, one gets the impression that Lewis and Clark simply didn’t know what to think. They had never seen a landscape like this, never guessed one could even exist. Each “fertile prairie” and “happy prospect” is counterweighted by a “forbidding plain.” Louisiana, though penetrated, remained an enigma.
     
    The explorers who followed Lewis and Clark were more certain of their impressions. In the same year the expedition returned, General Zebulon Montgomery Pike crossed the plains on a more southerly course, through what was to become Kansas and Colorado. There he saw “tracts of many leagues ... where not a speck of vegetable matter existed” and dismissed the whole country as an arid waste. “These vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time as celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa,” wrote Pike. Major Stephen Long, who followed Pike a decade later, had a similar impression. Long referred to the whole territory between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains as the Great American Desert—a phrase and an image that held for almost half a century. The desert might have sat there even longer in the public mind, ineradicable and fixed, had not a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition by the name of John Colter noticed, in the rivers and streams tumbling out of the Rocky Mountains, a plenitude of beaver.
     
     
     
     
    The settlement of the American West owed itself, as much as anything, to a hat. The hat was made of beaver felt, and, during the 1820s and 1830s, no dedicated follower of fashion would settle for anything less. Demand was great enough, and beavers east of the Mississippi were scarce enough, that a cured plew could fetch $6 to $10—at the time,