On August 11th 1806, Captain Meriwether Lewis and Pierre Cruzatte, a fiddler blind in one eye and with poor sight in the other, went ashore to hunt elk. Lewis wrote in his journal that a ball struck his left thigh about an inch below his hip joint, missing the bone, passed through the left thigh, and cut across the back of the right thigh. He instantly supposed that Cruzatte had shot him by mistake for an elk because he was dressed in brown leather and Cruzatte could not see very well. Cruzatte pleaded innocence but conceded that he must have done so when he shot at an elk in the willows. Lewis held no grudge toward Cruzatte, but because of the wound he spent much of the return voyage on his stomach in the bottom of a perogue.