Enlistment and Standing in the Corps
Pierre Cruzatte (variously spelled Crusat, Crusatte, Cruzat in the journals) entered the expedition’s record on May 26, 1804, when Lewis issued his Detatchment Orders organizing the messes of the keelboat. Cruzatte appears under Sergeant Pryor’s squad, marked with an “F” — a designation Lewis used for the French watermen — alongside his frequent partner Francois Labiche:
F 25 Peter Crusat &
F 26 Francis Labuche
Half-French and half-Omaha, fluent in the trade-French of the Missouri and reportedly conversant in Omaha and sign, Cruzatte was hired specifically for his river skills. Lewis acknowledged this on June 9, 1805, when the captains decided to cache the red pirogue and supplies at the mouth of the Marias:
on enquiry I found that Cruzatte was well acquainted this business and therefore left the management of it intirely to him.
That deference is striking. Throughout the journals, Cruzatte is one of the very few enlisted men whose specialized expertise the captains repeatedly defer to.
Boatman on the Missouri
Cruzatte’s value as a waterman shows up most dramatically in Clark’s entry of May 14, 1805, when a sudden squall on the Missouri capsized the white pirogue carrying the expedition’s papers, instruments, and medicines. Although the celebrated rescue is usually credited to Sacagawea (who saved articles floating astern), Cruzatte was at the helm, and it was he who, with Lewis’s pistol pointed at him, brought the boat under control. Clark’s account describes how the loss of “our papers, Instruments, books, medicine, a great proportion of our merchandize” was narrowly averted on a craft that “nearly filed with water.”
Cruzatte’s bowman skills were equally trusted in the rapids of the Columbia. On October 24, 1805, descending the Short Narrows of The Dalles, Clark recorded passing through water “agitated in a most Shocking manner boils Swell & whorl pools.” A week later, on October 31, 1805, Clark scouting the Great Falls of the Columbia took Cruzatte with him: “I took Jos. Fields & Peter Crusat and proceeded on down, Send Crusat back at 2 ms. to examine the rapid near the shore.” When portage routes had to be chosen, it was Cruzatte’s eye on the water that the captains wanted.
Hunter and Frontiersman
Cruzatte hunted regularly, though the journals record his encounters more often when they went badly. On October 20, 1804, Lewis recounted with some amusement:
Peter Crusat this day shot at a white bear he wounded him, but being alarmed at the formidable appearance of the bear he left his tomahalk and gun; but shortly after returned and found that the bear had taken the oposite rout. soon after he shot a buffaloe cow broke her thy, the cow pursued him he concealed himself in a small raviene.
His hunting partner was almost always Drouillard, Labiche, or Collins. On May 8, 1806, at Camp Chopunnish, “Drewyer and Cruzatte brought each a deer.” Throughout May and June 1806 — May 15, May 20, May 25, May 27, June 13, June 20 — Cruzatte appears repeatedly in the rotation of hunters working the Clearwater country, supplying the camp during the long wait for the snows to clear from the Bitterroots.
The Fiddler
Cruzatte’s violin became one of the social anchors of the expedition. Clark’s October 19, 1805 entry, written among the Walla Walla under Chief Yelleppit, captures the instrument’s diplomatic value:
P. Crusat played on the Violin which pleasd and astonished those reches who are badly Clad, 3/4 with robes not half large enough to cover them.
The fiddle was deployed at councils on the Missouri, in winter quarters at Fort Mandan and Fort Clatsop, and at innumerable evening dances among the men. Though many of these performances are noted by other narrators on dates not in the present sample, the October 19 entry stands as the clearest single record of the instrument’s effect on Native audiences.
Illness, Setbacks, and Small Losses
Cruzatte’s name surfaces in lesser incidents, too. On December 29, 1805, at Fort Clatsop, Clark wrote: “Pete Crusat Sick with a violent Cold.” On February 28, 1806, both captains noted a small humiliation: a Clatsop man named Kuskelar arrived at the fort bringing “a dog which Peter Crusat had purchased with his Capo which this fellow had on” — Cruzatte had traded away his coat for a dog, and the buyer turned around and resold the dog back to the fort. On June 21, 1806, recrossing toward Quawmash Flats, Lewis lamented: “an excellent horse of Cruzatte’s snagged himself so badly in the groin in jumping over a parsel of fallen timber that he will evidently be of no further service to us.”
The Shooting of Meriwether Lewis, August 11, 1806
The most consequential moment of Cruzatte’s expedition came on August 11, 1806, on the lower Missouri. Lewis and Cruzatte had gone ashore to hunt elk in thick willow brush. Cruzatte — blind in one eye and severely nearsighted in the other — fired at what he took for an elk and put a ball through the fleshy part of Lewis’s left buttock and thigh. As the editorial summary in entry #438 records:
I instantly supposed that Cruzatte had shot me in mistake for an Elk as I was dressed in brown leather.
Lewis at first feared a Blackfeet ambush. Cruzatte, when located, denied having fired the shot, but Lewis found a ball in his leggings consistent with Cruzatte’s short rifle. The wound forced Lewis to lie face-down in a pirogue for weeks and effectively ended his journal-keeping for the expedition. No record in the present sample shows Lewis pressing punishment; the journals indicate the matter was treated as the accident it almost certainly was, the inevitable consequence of putting a half-blind man behind a rifle in dense brush.
Character in the Journals
Across thirty entries Cruzatte emerges as one of the expedition’s most useful and most individuated enlisted men: trusted enough to manage the cache at the Marias, steady enough at the helm to be entrusted with the white pirogue, skilled enough to hunt and pilot rapids, social enough to soften councils with his fiddle, and human enough to lose his coat in a bad trade and to wound his commanding officer in a hunting accident. The journals never offer a portrait of his appearance beyond what tradition supplies (the missing eye is not described in the sample provided here), and his pre-expedition life on the Missouri trade is referenced only obliquely through Lewis’s confidence in his cache-digging and river knowledge. After the expedition the record falls silent in these pages.
A Note on Sources
The provided entries are drawn almost entirely from Lewis and Clark themselves; Cruzatte does not appear in the sample through Gass, Ordway, Whitehouse, or Floyd, although he certainly figures in those journals as well. The sample here is therefore a captains’-eye view of a man whose social and musical life among the enlisted men is necessarily underrepresented.
