Trustees of Indiana University

Joseph N. Nicollet on the Plains and Prairies: The Expeditions of 1838-39 With Journals,Letters, and Notes on the Dakota Indians by Edmund C. Bray; Martha Coleman BrayReview by: Herbert T. HooverIndiana Magazine of History, Vol. 74, No. 1 (March 1978), pp. 77-78Published by: Trustees of Indiana UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27790270 .

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Book Reviews 11

mother, imminent financial ruin, and poor health throughout the family. The year 1811 was one of strange omens, from

heavy flights of passenger pigeons to Halley's Comet, and the troubled Lilburne began to show a strain of madness that led to

heavy drinking and frequent abuse of his slaves. He turned on a seventeen year old slave named George and, with the help of his ne'er do well younger brother Isham, tied him on the floor and attacked him with an ax while his horrified slaves were

forced to watch. The corpse was dismembered and the pieces thrown into the fire when suddenly the first shock of the great New Madrid earthquake brought down the chimney on the

terrible scene. The slave's remains were hidden in the rebuilt

chimney. Later shocks tumbled it again, however, and a neigh bor discovered the head.

Lilburne and Isham Lewis were indicted for murder, and Lilburne's new wife abandoned him. Faced with total ruin and utter disgrace, Lilburne talked Isham into a suicide pact. They went to the family graveyard, and Lilburne dropped his unwit

nessed will and some last words on the ground near the grave of his beloved first wife, describing himself as "a victim to my beloved but cruel Letitia. I die in the hope of being united to

my other wife in Heaven" (p. 295). The brothers prepared to

shoot one another, but Lilburne paused to show how a survivor

could dispatch himself in the event of a misfire. While demon

strating how to fire a rifle with a stick, Lilburne shot himself

through the heart, and Isham ran from the scene. He was

arrested and jailed, but he somehow made his escape and van

ished without a trace. The Lewis tragedy is a fascinating counterpoint to the

more familiar story of frontier success. Indeed, this contrast

between success and failure provides a subtle moral for this

gruesome tale, an essential reminder that frontier hardship did

not inevitably lead to the democratic prosperity imagined by uncritical readers of Frederick Jackson Turner and John D.

Barnhart.

Indiana University, South Bend Patrick J. Furlong

Joseph N. Nicollet on the Plains and Prairies: The Expeditions of 1838-39 With Journals, Letters, and Notes on the Dakota

Indians. Translated and edited by Edmund C. Bray and

Martha Coleman Bray. (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical So

ciety Press, 1976. Pp. 294. Maps, notes, illustrations, ap

pendixes, index. $14.50.)

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78 Indiana Magazine of History

In 1838 and 1839 Joseph N. Nicollet led small parties on

two exploratory expeditions for the United States government into the region between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. The expedition in 1838 began at Fort Snelling and penetrated the Coteau des Prairies in eastern South Dakota. The one of 1839 moved from St. Louis up the Missouri River to Fort

Pierre, crossed over to Devil's Lake in North Dakota, and moved down into the Minnesota River Valley. Federal officials

published Nicollet's map and report dealing with the geography of the region, but his personal papers remained unprinted and, after his death in 1843, scattered in many repositories. This volume contains notes and journals kept by Nicollet that sup plement the observations of Meriwether Lewis and William

Clark, Stephen H. Long, George Catlin, and other earlier trav elers about flora, fauna, geography, geology, and climatic con ditions in the same area, and about aboriginal Dakota Indian

politics, language, and sociology. Editors Edmund C. Bray and Martha Coleman Bray have

written a substantial introduction to describe circumstances

surrounding the initiation and completion of Nicollet's two ex

peditions. They have explained the contents of his journals with

chapter introductions and explanatory footnotes. They have in cluded three appendixes, which contain some of Nicollet's corre

spondence, expeditionary lists, and ethnographic writings on the Dakota Indians. And they have prepared an eleven page index, which makes their book valuable as a source for re searchers as well as for general readers with interest in the

problems of nineteenth century exploration, in historic places between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, in the work of missionaries along the Minnesota River Valley during the

1830s, and in other subjects. Prospective readers should be aware that Nicollet's ap

praisal of Sioux Indian culture is neither as accurate nor as

complete as those written by others later on?those published by James William Lynd, Stephen Return Riggs, John P. Wil

liamson, James Owen Dorsey, and Alice Cunningham Fletcher, to name a few. But that is not the fault of the editors. They have done an excellent job assembling and editing a valuable collection of material on topography, ecology, native American society, and exploration in the north central United States during the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

University of South Dakota, Vermillion Herbert T. Hoover.

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