Lewis & Clark's Historic Trail
Meriwether
Lewis was born on August 18, 1774, in Albemarle County, Virginia. As a
member of the state militia, Lewis helped to stop the Whiskey Rebellion,
a Pennsylvania uprising led by farmers against taxes, in 1794. Lewis
joined the regular army and achieved the rank of captain.
U.S. soldier and explorer William Clark was born on
August 1, 1770, in Caroline County, Virginia. A younger brother to
Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark, William Clark entered the
military at the age of 19. First he served in the militia and then
entered the U.S. Army. The next year he resigned from the army to become
the manager of his family’s estate.
Lewis first met Clark after being court-martialed by
the Army. While serving as a frontier army officer in 1795, Meriwether
Lewis was court-martialed for allegedly challenging a lieutenant to a
duel during a drunken dispute. The 21-year-old was found not guilty of
the charges, but his superiors decided to transfer him to a different
rifle company to avoid any future incidents. His new commander turned
out to be William Clark.
In 1801, Lewis left the army and accepted an
invitation to serve as Thomas Jefferson’s presidential secretary. When
Jefferson conceived of his grand expedition to the West in 1802, he
immediately named the rugged, intellectually gifted Lewis as its
commander. The President authorized Lewis to select a co-commander, and
in June of 1803 Lewis offered the position to William Clark. Clark was
an experienced soldier and outdoorsman. He was also an excellent
mapmaker and helped to figure what routes the expedition should take.
Although Jefferson requested an equivalent captaincy
for Clark, the promotion was denied by the War Department, and Clark was
appointed Lieutenant in the Corps of Artillerists. Nevertheless, Lewis
had promised Clark that they would share the responsibilities of command
equally, and he kept his word, though actually Lewis was in charge,
which was what Jefferson had in mind to begin with.
It
was important for Lewis to gain certain scientific skills and to buy
equipment that would be needed on the journey. In the spring of 1803,
Lewis traveled to Philadelphia to study with the leading scientists of
the day. Andrew Ellicott taught Lewis map making and surveying. Benjamin
Smith Barton tutored Lewis in botany, Robert Patterson in mathematics,
Caspar Wistar in anatomy and fossils, and Benjamin Rush in medicine.
During this time, Lewis made two trips to the arsenal at Harpers Ferry
to obtain rifles and other supplies that he had shipped to Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, where he was to recruit men and make last-minute purchases
before setting off on the Ohio River to meet Clark.
Since this was a U.S. Army expedition, it was being
paid for by American taxpayers. Congress allocated $2,500 for the
expedition. Most of the members were enlisted in the army, and some
civilians were hired as interpreters. York, Clark’s slave, made the
entire trip for no pay.
Before Lewis and Clark started their great expedition
across North America, Captain Meriwether Lewis purchased a Newfoundland
dog for $20. It is not known why he chose that breed of dog, but some
believe Lewis was influenced by the breed’s reputation of size,
strength and swimming abilities. The dog was named Seaman. On the long
and difficult journey Seaman was of great help to the men during their
adventure. He retrieved game, including fat squirrels that Lewis thought
was pleasant food when fried, and he guarded their camps against animal
intruders, particularly grizzly bears and buffalo. According to one
journal, Seaman was credited with saving several lives from a buffalo
bull. The great beast charged through the camp one night and the dog was
able to steer him away from the men. The Native American Indians were
fascinated by Seaman, having never seen a dog like him before. One
Indian offered three beaver skins for the dog, which Lewis refused. A
landmark, Seaman’s Creek, at the site of today’s Monture Creek in
Montana, was named after the dog.
During July and August, 1803, Lewis went to
Pittsburgh to oversee construction of a 55-foot keelboat. He and 11 men
headed down the Ohio River on August 31. Lewis arrived at Clarksville,
Indiana Territory, across the Ohio River from present-day Louisville,
Kentucky, on October 14, 1803, where he met up with William Clark. Clark’s
slave York and nine men from Kentucky were added to the party.
While
Lewis went ahead on horseback to St. Louis, Clark and the crew got the
keelboat up the Mississippi, and set up winter quarters on the Wood
River in Illinois, opposite the mouth of the Missouri. Meanwhile, Lewis
made friends, collected supplies, and gathered more information in the
city. At last, on May 14, 1804, forty-two soldiers and hired hands
embarked from Camp Dubois and proceeded up the Missouri in the big
keelboat and two smaller pirogues, long narrow canoes, toward the
Pacific Ocean.
The party passed La Charette on May 24, the
westernmost white settlement on the Missouri. The Expedition reached the
mouth of the Kansas River on June 16. On August 3, Lewis and Clark held
their first council with Indians. They met with a group of Oto and
Missouri chiefs near present day Council Bluffs, Iowa. Amid great pomp
and ceremony the Corps marched in their full uniform regalia,
demonstrating their weaponry and distributing gifts to those chiefs they
felt were of sufficient rank.
The Lewis and Clark expedition suffered its first
fatality in August 1804, when Sergeant Charles Floyd died near modern
day Sioux City, Iowa. Lewis diagnosed him as having "bilious
colic," but historians now believe he suffered from a burst
appendix.
In late October of 1804, the expedition settled down
for the winter at Fort Mandan in North Dakota. There they would find
plenty of time to consolidate the information they had already gathered,
pare down the troupe, and learn what they could about the west from
their new neighbors. They were part of a multicultural, multiethnic
community, for they were at the international crossroads of the Northern
Plains, the commercial center for Indian tribes from far and near, as
well as for Spanish, French, and British traders.
It was cold in North Dakota that winter, sometimes
more than 40 degrees below zero. Hunting expeditions were dangerous,
especially if they stayed out overnight. The Indians amazed Lewis and
Clark. They dressed lightly and carried only one buffalo skin for a
blanket. Members of the Expedition helped the natives hunt for food,
repaired tools, and treated frostbite and illnesses. They participated
in ceremonial dances and other activities.
Two members originally recruited for the Pacific
bound party, Privates Moses Reed and John Newman, were dismissed before
the explorers reached Fort Mandan. Reed was convicted for desertion, and
Newman for mutinous acts. Stiff sentences were imposed through trials by
court martial proceedings. Due to the remote, wilderness places of their
crimes, both remained with the party over the Fort Mandan winter, doing
hard labor. They were sent downriver aboard the keelboat in the spring
of 1806.
On
November 4, an independent trader named Toussaint Charbonneau, who had
lived among the Hidatsas for several years, offered the captains his
services as an interpreter. Charbonneau’s principal asset was the wife
he proposed to bring along, Sacagawea. (Her name is also sometimes
spelled, and pronounced, Sakakawea or Sacajawea.) She was a Lemhi
Shoshone girl, perhaps 12 years old, who had been abducted from her
tribe’s hunting camp by Hidatsa raiders near the Three Forks of the
Missouri about five years before. It is a common American legend that
she was the expedition’s indispensable guide, and as such she has been
the subject of more commemorative sculptures and paintings than any
other woman in American history, many of them showing her "pointing
the way."
When the Corps of Discovery, the name commonly used by historians to
describe this
expedition, approached her homeland, her recognition
of some key landmarks "cheered the spirits of the party." The
land that Lewis and Clark explored was anything but a virginal
wilderness. It was laced with Indian roads, as the captains termed them,
and there were several critical junctions where a wrong turn could have
led to considerable inconvenience, if not tragic consequences. Thus
Captain Clark readily acknowledged her great service as a pilot through
the Big Hole and Gallatin valleys in July of 1806, two widely separated
places that she happened to be familiar with. Occasionally she brought
the captains edible plants and natural medicaments to help resolve minor
problems. At more critical times, her mere presence was enough to
convince surprised strangers of the expedition’s peaceful motives, and
that was of enormous value.
At Fort Mandan on a sub-zero February day in 1805,
Sacagawea gave birth to a son., Jean Baptiste. The child was later
nicknamed Pompy, or Pomp by Clark. The fact that only one man died
during the hazard-filled voyage is no less remarkable than that little
Jean Baptiste Charbonneau survived, not two years old by the end of the
expedition.
In April of 1805, Lewis and Clark sent the keelboat
down the Missouri River with a shipment for President Jefferson. The
"permanent party", of the Expedition, consisting of Lewis,
Clark, 27 soldiers, York, Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and her infant son,
departed Fort Mandan. In May of that same year, Lewis sees the Rocky
Mountains for the first time.
In Late July, the expedition reached the Three Forks
of the Missouri and headed southwest, up a stream they named the
Jefferson River. Sacagawea recognized a land feature and told the
explorers they were close to the summer home of the Shoshone people.
During a run-in with a band of Shoshoni in the summer of 1805, she
famously discovered the tribe’s chief was none other than her long
lost brother, whom she had not seen since her abduction. The tearful
reunion helped facilitate peaceful relations between the explorers and
the Shoshone, allowing Lewis to purchase much needed horses for his trek
over the Rockies.
The
Shoshonis’ suggestion was to head north out of the Lemhi valley, over
the mountains and down the Bitterroot valley, and westward on an old,
arduous Indian trail over present-day Lolo Pass, toward another
headwater of the Columbia River. With twenty-nine horses and several
Shoshoni guides, that’s what they did. En route, at Ross Hole in the
upper Bitterroot valley, they bought eleven more horses from a large
band of friendly Salish Indians.
Pausing at a spot they called Travelers’ Rest, near
the mouth of Lolo Creek, Lewis sent a party of men to inspect its
juncture with today’s Clark Fork River, ten miles north, at the
outskirts of present-day Missoula. The rugged topography of western
Montana was coming into focus.
The expedition turned west, on what would
indisputably be the most exhausting and debilitating segment of the
entire journey, the eleven-day passage across the Bitterroot Mountains
to the Clearwater River to near present-day Orofino, Idaho. The portion
of the Lolo Trail east of the crest of the Bitterroots was relatively
easy going. Thereafter, the explorers faced virtually impenetrable
forested mountains, early snow and bitter cold, and an absence of wild
game that forced them to kill and eat three of their horses. Up until
then they had relied on as much as eight pounds of fresh meat per man
per day to maintain their stamina, but the mountains were barren of
game. The elk, deer, and bear that once shared the vast plains with the
bison herds had not yet been forced into the mountains where they live
today. By the eleventh day, the men were on the brink of starvation. But
they ultimately reached Weippe Prairie, at the edge of the timber a
thousand feet above the Clearwater River, where they came upon a band of
friendly Nez Perce Indians. The Nez Perce were graciously hospitable to
the helplessly weak and hungry men, though the Indians’ usual diet of
dried fish and camas roots didn’t sit well on their stomachs.
The men set up camp opposite the mouth of the North
Fork of the Clearwater River, and as the sick recovered they pitched in
to help the able bodied work on five new dugout canoes. Leaving their
horses in the care of Chief Twisted Hair, they set out on the seventh of
October, down the Clearwater to the Snake River. There were numerous
rapids to navigate. Nine days later they sailed into the mighty Columbia
River. In lieu of game, they fattened themselves on the meat of dogs
purchased from the Indians.
What
they discovered west of the Rockies was radically different from what
they had had any reason to expect. First, the high, arid and
inhospitable Columbia Plateau. Then the awesome Cascade Range, dominated
by lofty peaks such as Adams, Jefferson, St. Helens, and Hood, and
penetrated by the rugged Columbia Gorge, with its powerful thermal
winds. Finally, the damp and foggy climate of the coastal range.
They had looked forward to a relatively easy float
from the divide to the Pacific Ocean. On the contrary, of all the rough
water the journalists recorded, the roughest of all was the
fifty-five-mile stretch that began with the thirty-eight-foot Celilo
Falls, at the east end of the Columbia Gorge. Next came the Dalles, at
the modern Oregon city of the same name, consisting of the quarter-mile
long Short Narrows.
Below that came three miles of the equally dangerous
Long Narrows. After a three-day rest at Fort Rock Camp they tackled the
final obstacle, the Cascades, Grand Rapids, of the Columbia, four
continuous miles of chutes and falls that required two days to descend.
Most remarkable of all was the dense population of
Indians strung out along the riverbanks, or concentrated in trading
centers reeking with the smell of drying salmon and resounding with the
rattle of unfamiliar languages: the Yakamas, Wanapams, Walulas,
Umatillas, Wishrams, Teninos, Watlalas, Multnomahs, Kathlamets, and
Wahkiakums. Some of them were congenial enough toward the American
tourists, but most, especially in the narrows of the gorge, were tough,
scrappy traders accustomed for centuries to exacting tolls from all
travelers. Within the past few years their exchanges with coastal
Indians had brought them Euro-American goods, wool clothing and
blankets, brass and copper kettles, and a few guns.
Emerging from the Columbia Gorge on November second,
they found themselves in tidewater at Beacon Rock. On the seventh, their
eagerness to reach their long-sought goal duped them into mistaking the
broad upper estuary of the Columbia for the ocean itself. But the closer
they got to the Pacific, the worse the picture got. Storms pinned them
against rugged northern shorelines for two wet and hungry weeks. They
worked their way back upstream to the relative shelter of some islands
and crossed to the south side.
Lewis
went on ahead in the small dugout to try to locate a suitable winter
campsite, finding one at last on a piece of high ground amid the bogs
and bays a few miles west of modern Astoria, Oregon. The party buckled
down to build a fort, and set up a salt works over on the beach at the
modern resort town of Seaside, Oregon. Meanwhile, they gathered meat,
tanned hides, and carved out arms-length relationships with the nearby
Clatsop and Chinook villagers.
They finally settled into their Fort Clatsop quarters
at Christmas time. By candlelight the captains caught up on a backlog of
journalizing, botanical note-taking, and mapmaking. Clark calculated
they had traveled 4,132 miles in 554 days, from Wood River to the mouth
of the Columbia.
Winter at Fort Clatsop was dull, dreary and wet, but it provided time
for the captains to think about what they had learned and to organize
the return trip. From the time Lewis reached the Great Falls of the
Missouri on June 13, 1805, until the party emerged from the Rockies at
Weippe Prairie on September 22, the
expedition had spent 101 days and traveled nearly a
thousand circuitous miles, on rivers that were not practicably
navigable, and across the mountains. The captains decided that when they
had recrossed the unavoidable Bitterroot Mountains, they would divide
the Expedition at Travelers’ Rest.
Lewis would take a more direct overland route to the
Great Falls, then explore the Marias and descend the Missouri. Clark
would retrace the expedition’s steps to Three Forks, ascend the
Gallatin River, cross over Bozeman Pass into the Yellowstone River
valley, and head downriver. The Corps would reunite at the junction of
the Missouri and the Yellowstone on or about August 5.
On March 23, 1806, once again battling the rising
spring runoff, as it had each of the two previous years on the Missouri,
the Corps of Discovery started up the Columbia. They traveled in six
boats, three dugouts made the previous September, two native canoes they
had purchased, and one stolen from the Clatsops. The rapids, beginning
east of today’s Portland, were higher and more formidable than before,
and correspondingly more dangerous. Portages were grueling, and the
Indians were determined to collectt their tolls. By the end of April the
company was again on horseback, headed for Nez Perce country.
Once again Lewis and Clark benefited from Indian
advice, taking a well-traveled overland trail that led them more or less
straight to the mouth of the Clearwater. They retrieved their Shoshoni
horses from the Nez Perce, traded themselves into bankruptcy, and
prepared to tackle the Rockies again. Exceptional snow in the Bitterroot
Mountains held them at bay for almost a month. With two Nez Perce guides
to keep them on the ancient Indian trail, they set out again on June 24.
Light-footed and determined, though again short of food, they raced
along the ridges over the eight-foot drifts. Averaging about twenty-six
miles per day, they covered in six days what had taken eleven days
westbound.
They warmed their bones in the waters of Lolo hot
springs. On July 3, at Travelers’ Rest, the captains split up as
planned, not to be united again for more than a month.
With
a party of twenty-three, including York, Charbonneau, and Sacagawea and
her little boy, Captain Clark returned to Ross Hole and, bypassing the
Shoshoni encampments in Idaho, took a shortcut across Gibbons Pass.
Then, following Sacagawea’s directions, he headed for Camp Fortunate
on the Beaverhead River, where the party had camped in August of 1805.
Perhaps the tobacco stashed there spurred the nicotine-deprived men
onward. Recovering the canoes, a party under Sergeant Ordway made better
time on the spring-filled Beaverhead and Jefferson than Clark did on
horseback, despite the meandering courses of the riverbeds. In contrast
to the laborious, twenty-one day ascent of the previous August, the
eastbound party floated ninety miles in one day and completed the entire
journey to the Three Forks in three and a half days.
Nor did Clark’s crew waste any time at Three Forks.
Ordway immediately departed with nine men down the Missouri, to join
forces with Sergeant Gass for the portage around the Great Falls. With
forty-nine horses and a colt, Clark took off up the beaver choked
Gallatin River. Sacagawea pointed out a large road through the Bridger
Mountains, and on July 15, 1806, the party struck the Yellowstone River
at the site of modern Livingston, Montana. Since there were no trees of
sufficient size to hollow out for canoes, Clark kept going for five days
and a hundred miles. His horses went lame on the stone and gravel, so he
had buffalo-skin moccasins made for them. Clark finally found two
cottonwoods that his men turned into twenty-eight-foot canoes, lashed
together for stability. While building the vessels he was not pleased to
discover that Indians, perhaps of the Crow tribe, had run off with half
his horses. Entrusting the rest to Sergeant Pryor for a quick overland
trip to Fort Mandan, Clark took to the river. On Pryor’s second day
out, he lost all of his mounts to the thieves, so his party of four
hastily built bullboats, animal hides stretched over round, willow
frames, and bobbed along some distance behind Clark.
Clark’s group descended the Yellowstone at
tremendous rates of speed. In ten days he covered, by his own generous
estimation, nearly six hundred fifty miles, although it’s only five
hundred of today’s miles. On July 25 Clark climbed a massive gray rock
twenty-five miles east of modern Billings, Montana, dubbed it "Pompy’s
Tower", little Jean Baptiste Charbonneau’s nickname, and carved
his own name on its side. The etching remains there today, the only
surviving physical evidence of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
The captain saw an abundance game on the river,
including buffalo, elk, antelope, and wolves. On August 3 he reached the
Missouri. His return through Montana from Travelers’ Rest, via the
Yellowstone, took thirty-two days. The trip upriver between the same two
points in 1805, via the Missouri River, had taken 134 days.
Meriwether Lewis, meanwhile, experienced a far more
eventful journey.
With
a party of nine men, and his dog, Seaman, Captain Lewis left Travelers’
Rest on July third. In the vicinity of modern Missoula his Nez Perce
guides turned back, fearful of following what they knew as the
"river of the road to buffalo" since it also led to the
fiercely guarded territory of the Blackfeet Indians. Knowing the risk he
was running, Lewis warily proceeded on, through Hellgate Canyon, up the
Big Blackfoot River, and across the Continental Divide north of today’s
Rogers Pass. He and his men celebrated their return to the fat plains of
the Missouri by feasting on fat buffalo meat. Reaching the Sun River, he
followed it down to the Missouri, arriving at the old camp at White Bear
Islands, above the Great Falls, on July 11. By this more direct route,
he had covered about 180 miles in nine days, a far cry from the 750
miles in fifty-seven days of 1805. The cache at the upper portage camp
had not fared well. Lewis lost the entire collection of plants he had
collected between Fort Mandan and the falls.
On July 17, 1805, with only three men, interpreter
George Drouillard and the Field brothers, Joseph and Reubin, and six
horses, and with a scattered force at his back, Lewis now deliberately
ventured deeper into Blackfeet country. His purpose was to explore the
Marias beyond the stretch he had traversed a year earlier, and learn
whether any branch of the river lay as far north as the fiftieth
parallel. Striking the Marias, he followed it and its tributary Cut Bank
Creek for a hundred miles, to a point about 20 miles below the foot of
the Rocky Mountains. It was the northernmost spot reached by the
expedition, about 25 miles south of the present boundary between the
United States and Canada, which is at forty-nine degrees north latitude.
His own name for the region, Camp Disappointment,
reflected Lewis’s attitude on realizing that the Marias did not reach
as far north as he had hoped. It also commemorated the four days he
spent unsuccessfully attempting under cloudy skies to establish
precisely where he was in terms of longitude and latitude. He had wasted
precious time. He was in no mood to dally when, on the return to the
Missouri, he had what he most hoped to avoid, a meeting with a band of
Piegan Blackfeet Indians.
Actually, the meeting was cordial enough. Yet with
the best of intentions, mainly self-preservation, Lewis said all the
wrong things to the Piegans. He said that the Nez Perces and Shoshonis
were now united in a peace-pact he had brokered, and that they would be
trading with Americans in the future. Those must have sounded like
veiled threats to the Blackfeet, who for twenty years had depended on
Canadian agents of the Hudson’s Bay and the North West fur companies
to supply guns and ammunition with which to keep people like the Nez
Perces and Shoshonis out of their territory. That night the eight
Piegans and four Americans camped together on the Two Medicine River.
The next morning Lewis awoke to sounds of a scuffle. In the melee that
followed, Reubin Field stabbed one of the Piegans to death. Trying to
stop another from stealing his horse, Lewis shot him in the belly. The
wounded man returned fire almost striking Lewis. Certain they would be
pursued, Lewis, Drouillard, and the Field brothers raced southeast
toward the Missouri River, covering at least a hundred miles before
camping again.
Early
on the 28th the four arrived at the Missouri River, where, to their
great good fortune, they encountered Ordway’s canoe detail, coming
down from the portage camp below the Great Falls. With Lewis and his
three companions aboard, they pushed on for the mouth of Maria’s
River, where they met up with Sergeant Patrick Gass and Private
Alexander Willard, who had ridden horses overland. After emptying the
caches they had dug in June of the previous year, all the men clambered
aboard the canoes and put fifteen more miles between the enlarged party
and its putative pursuers, before making camp.
Lewis and his party arrived at the Yellowstone on
August 7, having covered a record 83 miles on that day. Clark’s group,
tormented by mosquitoes, had already gone downstream. On August 12 the
Expedition, separated throughout Montana and divided at different times
into five smaller parties, was at last reunited for its triumphant
six-week voyage to St. Louis and civilization.
With seven canoes and the recovered white pirogue,
they pushed on hard. By August 14 they were back at the Mandan villages.
There they learned that the peace they had so carefully arranged among
the Mandans, Hidatsas and Arikaras was in shambles, and that the
Hidatsas had attacked a Shoshoni village. Furthermore, during their
winter residence on the Knife River, the captains had urged the Mandan
and Hidatsa chiefs to return to Washington with them, to get acquainted
with President Jefferson, but Sioux and Arikara soldiers had raided the
Mandans in the meantime, and now the chiefs were reluctant to trespass
in Sioux territory. The captains hired trader René Jessaume, a resident
of the area, to intercede. Jessaume succeeded in persuading the Mandan
chief, Big White, also called Sheheke, to make the trip with him.
The captains discharged Private John Colter, who
headed back up to the Yellowstone River with two passing trappers. They
also paid off interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau in the amount of five
hundred dollars and thirty-three and one-third cents. Sacagawea received
nothing. Clark offered to take over responsibility for raising Jean
Baptiste. Sacagawea initially turned down the offer, but she later
allowed Clark to provide for her son’s education in St. Louis.
Racing downstream at up to 60 miles a day, the
captains paused only long enough to consult with some Cheyennes,
Arikaras, and Yankton Sioux, and to exchange threats with the same band
of Teton Sioux that had tried to turn them back in the fall of 1804.
Below the Platte River the clouds of mosquitos tormented them only a
little less than before, but the weather grew extremely warm.
Two years, four months and ten days later, the Expedition arrived in
St. Louis on September 23, 1806. Lewis wrote to
Thomas Jefferson that the corps had "penetrated
the Continent of North America to the Pacific Ocean." Covering more
than 8,000 miles, the epic journey had reached its conclusion. The
return of the Corps of Discovery was marked by numerous celebrations.
Clark and Lewis were treated like national heroes. They were rewarded
for their trailblazing efforts with extra pay and land. Clark also
received an appointment as the agent for Indian affairs in the West and
became a brigadier general of the militia.
Before Lewis and Clark completed their expedition,
Americans could only speculate on what lurked in the uncharted
territories beyond the Rocky Mountains. Even Thomas Jefferson, who’d
amassed a small library of books on the frontier, was convinced the
explorers might have run-ins with mountains of salt, a race of
Welsh-speaking Indians and even herds of wooly mammoths and giant ground
sloths. The expedition failed to sight any of the long-extinct
creatures, but Lewis did describe 178 previously unknown species of
plants and 122 new animals including coyotes, mountain beavers and
grizzly bears.
Jefferson often described Lewis and Clark’s
expedition as a scientific mission to study the lands acquired in the
1803 Louisiana Purchase, but the explorers’ central goal was to find a
water route to the Pacific, which would increase trade opportunities and
help solidify an American claim on the far Northwest. That was
distressing news for the Spanish, who feared the expedition might lead
to the seizure of their gold-rich territories in the Southwest. On the
suggestions of U.S. Army General James Wilkinson, a Spanish spy, the
governor of New Mexico dispatched four different groups of Spanish
soldiers and Comanche Indians to intercept the explorers and bring them
back in chains. Luckily for Lewis and Clark, the hostile search parties
failed to locate them in the vastness of the frontier.
The
Corps of Discovery carried one of the largest arsenals ever taken west
of the Mississippi. It included an assortment of pikes, tomahawks and
knives as well as several rifles and muskets, 200 pounds of gunpowder
and over 400 pounds of lead for bullets. Despite being armed to the
teeth, most of the explorers never had to use their weapons in combat.
Over the next two years, the expedition endured
everything from dysentery and snakebites to dislocated shoulders and
even venereal disease, but amazingly, no one else perished before the
explorers returned to St. Louis in September 1806.
Clark married Julia Hancock in 1808. Following
Sacagawea’s death in 1812, Clark became the legal guardian of both
Jean Baptiste and her other child, a daughter named Lisette. Little is
known about what became of Lisette, but Jean-Baptiste later traveled to
Europe before returning to the American frontier to work as a trapper
and wilderness guide.
The next year, he served as governor of the Missouri
Territory, a position he held for seven years. Once the territory became
a state in 1820, Clark ran for governor but lost the election. He
continued his work in Indian affairs and was known for his fair
treatment of Native Americans.
Clark died on September 1, 1838, in St. Louis,
Missouri. He has been remembered as one of the country’s greatest
explorers. The maps he drew helped the U.S. government and the rest of
the nation understand the geography of the west. His journal also
provided insights into the lands, peoples and animal life of the region.
Lewis died on October 12, 1809, at an inn near
Nashville, Tennessee. He had been on his way to Washington, D.C., at the
time. Most historians believe he committed suicide while a few have
claimed that he was murdered. Despite his tragic end, Lewis helped
change the face of the United States by exploring uncharted territory.
His work inspired many others to follow in his footsteps and created
great interest in the region. Lewis also advanced scientific knowledge.
Through his careful work numerous discoveries of previously unknown
plants and animals were made.
The Lewis and Clark National and State Historical Parks, in the
vicinity of the mouth of the Columbia River, commemorate the Lewis and
Clark Expedition. Administration of the parks is a cooperative effort of
the United States National Park Service and the states of Oregon and
Washington, and was dedicated on November 12, 2004.
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