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.

lewis--clark-expedition-map-jennifer-thermes.jpg (258732 bytes)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.

corps of discovery.jpg (110919 bytes)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.

meeting the indians.jpg (104624 bytes)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.

Lewis_and_clark-expedition (1).jpg (2273211 bytes)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.

sacajawea.jpg (87799 bytes)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.

LewisandClark-My-Charlottesville-Agent.jpg (56225 bytes)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.

Detail_Lewis__Clark_at_Three_Forks (1).jpg (751546 bytes)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.

york-in-louisville.jpg (400361 bytes)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.

lewis anc clark and seaman.jpg (691751 bytes)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.

seaman-dog.jpg (153106 bytes)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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