Ready for Anything, Part 4: Peopling

Over the past three weeks, we have examined some of the reasons that Lewis and Clark were "Ready for Anything" — from packing knowledge to possessing a core of resilience to maintaining composure.  This week, we consider their impressive and valuable peopling skills.  By the way, if you missed last week's Zoom presentation on the Lewis & Clark expedition, you can find the recording on our YouTube channel.

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Do you remember your last road trip with friends?

It started out as a blast, right?  The four of you piled into a car that was too small, and you started out with a taste for adventure. 

Then Jake spilled his soda on you when he got carried away playing air guitar to Aerosmith.  Rick's endless replaying of Star Trek scenes got on everyone's nerves, and Mike, well, he was just being Mike.  Two hours in, you were ready to ditch them all at the first stop for gas.

Now imagine traveling with more than 30 people, including a baby . . .

• on boats and even sometimes on foot

• in uncharted wilderness

• through rain, hail, and snow

• over nearly 8,000 miles.

How long would you last?

The Ultimate Test of People Skills

Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and many of their fellow explorers lasted more than 860 days — that is, some two years and four months.  As far as we know, neither Lewis nor Clark ever tried to ditch the others or break Cruzatte's fiddle over his head (although there were a few tense moments, as I explained in last week's column).

What does it take to keep a ragtag crew of young men, a teenage girl, and her baby on task for months on end through the trials of fatigue, hunger, cold, and, most probably, the usual assortment of complaints and annoying wisecracks?

As we saw last week, Lewis and Clark needed a certain degree of composure — or, as Kipling put it in his poem "If —," the ability to "keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you."  There's more to leadership, though.  Let's just say that Lewis and Clark must have been really good at "peopling." That's the term I will use here for what I have found myself doing in my years of leading as a chair, dean, provost, and chancellor.  No, I didn't have to lead any of my colleagues 200 miles over snow-covered mountains, but then Lewis and Clark didn't have to work though committees, bureaucracies, and year-long approval processes.  Trials come in a variety of forms.

The Right People on the Boats

One of the secrets of peopling is selecting the people you will have to people.  Jim Collins, author of the leadership book Good to Great, calls it getting the right people on the bus.  For Lewis and Clark, it was a matter of getting the right people on the boats — the keelboat, pirogues, and eventually dugout canoes — that they used to travel up the Missouri River.

Clark, whom historian James P. Ronda has called "an astute judge of character," chose several of the expedition's members, and he did well, despite a challenge that is lost on most of us familiar with the premier fighting forces the United States has today.  In the early 1800s, some of the young men serving as soldiers were not exactly ship-shape or tip-top — more like riff-raff.  (By the way, you can learn more about these words, which are called reduplicatives, in a post we published on August 23, 2024.)  Let's remember these were young men, and men at that age, well, we all know young men, and about half of us have been young men. 

To make matters worse, some officers were eager to jettison the jetsam from their units, so it would have behooved Lewis and Clark to be especially vigilant when screening potential crew members.  The evidence suggests that they were fairly successful.

Take, for example, the three men they selected to serve as sergeants.  Sgt. John Ordway, author Barbara Fifer writes, "seems to have been the most solid hand among the enlisted men."  Fifer explains that Ordway documented every day of the long expedition, the only explorer to do so.  If you keep a diary, you probably appreciate the amount of discipline such a feat requires.  I suspect that many diarists cannot claim entries for more than 860 consecutive days.  Can you?  OK, now try recording every day while also traveling thousands of miles through rugged terrain, storms, snow, frigid cold, and starvation.

In the entry for the final day, September 23, when the Corps of Discovery finally arrived in St. Louis, Ordway wrote that "we entend to return to our native homes to See our parents once more as we have been So long from them."  As a parent myself, I am going to give Ordway extra points for this remark.  He does indeed seem to have been a good man (and a good son).

Sgt. Nathaniel Pryor so impressed William Clark that, decades after the expedition, Clark, then the U.S. Superintendent of Indian Affairs, remarked on "his capacity to act and be serviceable" and made him a sub agent to the Osage people. 

Finally, like Sgt. Ordway, Sgt. Charles Floyd was a disciplined diarist, penning entry after entry until, on August 18, he became "dangerously ill," as Clark put it in his own journal.  Two days later, Sgt. Floyd was dead, probably as a result of a burst appendix.  He was the only crew member to die on the expedition.  Clark wrote that the young man "expired, with a great deel of composure."

Accountability and Leniency

We might like to say that all of the men were equally admirable, but, let's face it, there's one (or more) in every crowd, and Lewis and Clark did wind up with a few men who occasionally fell short.

What is a captain to do in such situations? 

Leaders need to know when to hold people accountable and when to let things slide.  Striking this balance is much harder than it might seem.  Fail to enforce rules or penalize offenders, and you risk letting things get out of hand, incurring destructive behavior and even disaster.  On the other hand, clamping down too hard or too long can harm morale and damage your credibility as a leader.

On the first leg of the journey, as the crew was heading up the Missouri River, some of the young men were doing the things that young men sometimes do, some of which could have threatened the success of the expedition or even the lives of fellow crew members.  Just three days in, for example, a court martial was formed to consider the cases of three of the men.  The orderly book reads:

A sergeant and four men of the party destined for the Missouri Expedition will convene at 11 o'clock today on the quarterdeck of the boat and form themselves into a court-martial, to hear and determine (in behalf of the captain), the evidences adduced against William Warner & Hugh Hall, for being absent last night without leave, contrary to orders; and John Collins, first for being absent without leave; second, for behaving in an unbecoming manner at the ball last night; third, for speaking in a language last night after his return tending to bring into disrespect the orders of the commanding officer.

It was early in the expedition, and the crew was still in the vicinity of civilization, so, yes, it was possible for someone to attend a ball.  (Life soon would become far more rugged.  For the next two years, out on the Great Plains, in the Rocky Mountains, and on the rainy Pacific coast, the men would encounter buffalo, bucks, and Blackfeet, but not a single ballroom.) 

It's probably safe to bet that "behaving in an unbecoming manner" did not endanger the expedition, but some of the other behavior certainly could.  Out in the wilderness, surrounded by potentially hostile inhabitants and other threats, someone needs to be in charge; calling orders into question could result in chaos, death, and failure of the entire expedition.  Collins was found guilty and was sentenced to "fifty lashes."

A couple of months later, another man, Alexander Willard, was sentenced to "One hundred lashes on his bear back" for "lying down and Sleeping on his post whilst a Sentinal."  The logic for punishing this infraction, which may seem fairly innocuous to some, is clear in the official record, which calls it "a breach of the rules and articles of War (as well as tending to the probable destruction . . . of the party)."

One hundred lashes probably seems harsh to most of us, but corporal punishment was a common form of military discipline in the early 1800s — and it was less harsh than the penalty of death, which was one permissible punishment according to the military code of the era.

It was not the only instance of leniency on the expedition.  In August 1805, Patrick Gass managed to lose a tomahawk belonging to a certain Meriwether Lewis.  As James Ronda explains, Gass's gaffe "might have prompted an angry word or a cold glare.  But instead, the captain put the following lines in his journal: 'Accedents will happen in the best families.'"

Lewis seems to have recognized that every mishap did not merit a lashing — whether by whip or tongue.  Sometimes, to quote Paul McCartney, you just have to "Let it be."  Coming down too hard sometimes can put people on edge or even build resentment.  (If you have ever gotten chewed out for something minor, you know what I mean.)

Besides, when things are going well, one has to be careful about not spoiling a good thing.  Quoting another line from Lewis's journal, Ronda notes that a few months earlier, when the crew left Fort Mandan, the captain had written that the men were experiencing "a most perfect harmony."

Respect Your Team

Respect can — and should — flow in two directions.  Yes, the sergeants and privates in the Corps of Discovery needed to show respect for their co-commanders; otherwise, the group could fragment.  If Lewis and Clark had not respected the rest of the crew, however, their ability to lead could have been in danger, and the harmony that Lewis had described was likely to dissipate.  It can be hard to follow someone who doesn't show you respect.  That's just human nature. 

In June 1805, while traveling up the Missouri River in what is now Montana, the crew came to a fork in the river.  Here was a problem.  Which one was the Mighty Missouri?  David Lavender, author of The Way to the Western Sea, describes the situation in this way:

It was essential they learn immediately. For if they chose wrong and ended up stranded far from the Columbia headwaters, there would not be time to come back and try again, even if the discouraged soldiers were willing to make a second effort. Choose now. Choose right. Or the Corps of Discovery was finished.

Virtually to a person, the travelers agreed that the northern fork was the Missouri, since it looked like the muddy river they had been following for thousands of miles, whereas the south fork was clear.

Two men thought differently.  Those men's names were Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.  Lavender explains:

This was a military expedition and the captains could have ordered, without explanation, the contingent to go where the officers chose. But to start the men along a route they clearly believed might be disastrous would destroy the high morale that had been a major element in the expedition's success so far. Consequently, Lewis and Clark replied patiently to the demurrers, pointing out that streams recently emerged from the mountains—and that description certainly seemed to fit the south fork—retained their clear, dancing appearance for several miles. By contrast, the north fork, which by measurement had turned out to be smaller than the south, was so laden with silt that it must have flowed a long distance through the plains. Perhaps it did not reach as far west as the mountains at all. If that were true, how could the expedition reach the Columbia by following it? 

This effort to make a case for their opinion — instead of insisting that the crew simply follow orders — says something about the leaders' peopling skills.  They were showing respect for their followers — but, alas, it wasn't enough.  The others still weren't convinced. 

What happened next says even more about Lewis and Clark and the respect they showed for the people they were leading.  They now separated into small parties and set out to explore the two forks, Lewis going with a half-dozen men up the north fork while Clark traveled with a half-dozen others along the south fork.  Even after they regrouped with additional evidence, there was not universal agreement among the group, so Lewis went even further, literally, by traveling with some others along the south fork to see if the waterfalls they were expecting were ahead.  The presence of these falls would help confirm that the south fork was the one they were supposed to be following.

In the end, Lewis and Clark were right, but sometimes being right is not enough.  Even when you feel you're right, it pays to be respectful, as well.

Success!

Eventually, Lewis and Clark successfully led their crew not only all the way to the end of the continent, but also all the way back, thanks in part to their peopling skills.  Choosing the right people to serve on the team, balancing accountability and leniency, and showing respect helped them complete their epic journey.

Peopling skills can take us a long way — across a continent, to the top of our profession, or home to our parents.