We live in a known world. Google maps can show us what every inch of the earth’s surface looks like right from the comfort of our own home. We can get on an airplane and fly from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific in a few hours time, all while watching a hallmark movie and eating roasted peanuts. But life wasn’t always known, for before the modern age a majority of things were unknown and new discoveries were happening all the time. This is the world that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark lived in.
The turn into the 1800’s saw the blossoming of the United States from a war-torn group of colonies into a stable and thriving nation of Americans. With their independence from England secured, the next obvious thing to do was expand the empire west. Nobody knew what lay in the lands west of the great Mississippi River, but there were plenty of men hungry to find out.
President Thomas Jefferson was one such man and it was he who made the Louisiana purchase with Napoleon of France, officially buying over 800,000 square miles of land stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains. It was land that had been inhabited by the indigenous Native American tribes for centuries before white people arrived on boats from Europe, but despite their prior claim, Jefferson and the American colonizers had their sights set on the west and nothing was going to stop them. Napoleon might have “sold” the land to Jefferson and the Americans, but France was on the other side of the known world and the sale was more for diplomatic theater than practical necessary. Regardless which government claimed they “owned” the land, white Europeans were coming to explore it.
Jefferson had a grand vision of the future of the United States: he envisioned that the Union might someday encompass all the land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It was also Jefferson who personally selected Meriwether Lewis to Captain a group of explorers to investigate the territory, a band of men that would become known as the Corps of Discovery. Lewis immediately chose William Clark as his co-Captain, and the team was formed.
Their primary goal was to find an all-water to the Pacific Ocean and link it to The Mississippi and Missouri Rivers (which connected to all the main eastern waterways). They were tasked with mapping the territory and studying and recording as much information as possible about the geography, plants, animals, weather, and longitude/latitude of major river junctions. In addition to basic fact-finding, they were ordered to establish positive relationships with the numerous indigenous tribes they encountered along the way so as to create trading partners. If Congress was going to approve funding for the expedition, they wanted to know what the States were going to get in return, and Jefferson’s promise was economic: Think of the fur trade we will gain with the Natives, he told them, and access to a port on the Pacific would grant American merchants the ability to trade with the Orient (Asia).
Lewis and Clark and their band of thirty or so hand-selected soldiers and frontiersmen left St. Louis in May of 1804 and didn’t return until September of 1806, a full two years and four months later. For the entirety of that time, they were on their own, out of contact from their known civilized world and destined to live off the land, same as the numerous Native American tribes they encountered. They traveled nearly 8,000 miles on their journey, mostly by river (their main route west via the Missouri River took them through what is now Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Montana) but also on horseback through the Lemhi Pass that leads through the Continental Divide at the Rocky Mountains and the Lolo Trail that leads through the Bitterroot Mountains (present day Idaho). Then they made canoes and took a few more twisting rivers through Idaho, Washington, and Oregon before reaching the Pacific at the mouth of the Colombia.
The men spent the winter of 1804-1805 with the Mandan tribe in what is now North Dakota and the winter of 1805-1806 with the Chinook and Clatsop tribes on what is now the Oregon coast. Luckily, these tribes were willing trade partners and generally amicable to the white visitors, similar to the friendly Shoshone natives they encountered near the Rocky Mountains who provided horses for their treacherous journey across the continental divide. The men of Lewis and Clark’s expedition almost certainly wouldn’t have found the success that they did without the help of these tribes; there were several times they found themselves close to starvation only to be saved by the generosity of the Native Americans. They also encountered antagonistic tribes, like the Sioux in what is now South Dakota, a tribe that demanded tolls for passing through their territory and were displeased with what was offered them, nearly leading to armed conflict. The Blackfeet natives also become hostile when they discovered that Lewis’ group was trading guns to rival tribes and a violent skirmish occurred where two Blackfeet Indians were killed and Lewis and his men were forced to flee the territory.
The men of the expedition saw herds of buffalo numbering in the thousands. They saw birds and reptiles and trees and flowers that no white Europeans had ever laid eyes on before. They made contact with tribes of Natives Americans that had never seen white people before, or black ones, as many were enamored with Clark’s slave York and his dark skin. They often struggled to communicate with the Natives, frequently needing multiple translators to convert even a simple idea from one native language to another to French and finally to English. They were fortunate enough to be accompanied by a young Native woman named Sacagawea for roughly half of their journey, a teenager at the time but a willing travel companion and interpreter for the group.
Considering the length and peril of their journey into the unknown, it is remarkable that only one member of the Corps of Discovery died during the journey, Sergeant Charles Floyd with what is believed to be appendicitis, although it’s impossible to truly know. He died only a couple of months into the excursion, exhibiting for the rest of the men how dangerous the mission was to be. Despite his early passing, every other member of the Corps survived the expedition and many wrote journals along the way and their stories were preserved and told to the world.
Sadly, Meriwether Lewis’ story took a dark turn, as he took his own life in 1809, only a few short years after his return. It was a combination of mental health struggles, substance abuse, financial debt, and personal and political stress that led him to turn a gun on himself. It was a tragic shock to Clark and Jefferson and it wasn’t until many years later that Lewis’ journal of his travels was published and circulated, although by the time it became available the public had somewhat moved on. His journals, and the scientific discoveries he made and recorded in its pages, gradually increased in relevance and importance as more Americans looked west for travel and trade opportunities, and now it is a treasured document kept safely at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.
All in all the trip was a resounding success, as Lewis and Clark’s expedition turned one of the last remaining unknown parts of the world into a known one. They were the first white ‘westerns’ to travel the width of the continent and return with their lives and their stories. They brought back invaluable information on the geography, plants, animals, and Native peoples, and set the stage for the American expansion into the final frontier: The Wild West.
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