The Lewis and Clark Expedition

Tim McNeese

Description

In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Corps of Discovery as a scientific expedition to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase. The goal was to learn more about the Northwest's natural resources, inhabitants, and possibilities for settlement. The Lewis and Clark expedition was the second recorded transcontinental crossing of North America north of Mexico by white Americans. Their journey was significant in that the first accurate maps of the area were produced, there was a better understanding of the Northwest's natural resources, and they established friendly relations with American Indians. Although they were unable to locate the fabled, elusive Northwest Passage, Lewis and Clark's achievements sparked American interest in the West and strengthened the nation's claim to the area.

 

Sujets

• 19th Century
• Histoire
• América
• Expedition
• History of the United States
• Lewis and Clark Expedition
• American
• United States
• History
• American History
• Exploration
• Discovery

Informations

• Publié par: Infobase Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438198767
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Lewis and Clark Expedition
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Contents Chapters Introduction: Sudden Death Jefferson Looks Westward Up the Missouri River Preparing for the Unknown Over the Mountains To the Pacific Coast The Final Leg The Legacy Support Materials Chronology Further Reading Bibliography About the Author
Chapters
Introduction: Sudden Death
The day began with a clear, bright morning, the weather pleasant and fair—a good day to begin an adventure. The date was May 20, 1804. The previous day, rain had marred much of the morning and a violent storm struck the encampment of four dozen men as they made their final preparations for that adventure. They were almost ready to go, and they were anxious. Many of the men had been serving under a pair of U.S. Army officers, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, for several months, encamped 30 miles north of St. Louis, Missouri, which was until recently a Spanish colonial outpost in the vast territory of Louisiana. The previous year, the United States government had purchased the entire territory, an expansive West comprising more than 800 square miles of land, representing one of the greatest international land deals in American history. Although administered by the Spanish, the territory had fallen into the hands of the French leader Napoleon Bonaparte, who had agreed to sell the great landmass to the Americans, having failed to establish his own French empire in North America. Even before the purchase had been completed, President Thomas Jefferson had organized the expedition. So curious was he concerning the vast West, he had made preparations to send Americans into a foreign-held land. With the purchase, Louisiana became the new American West.
An Uncertain West
But as international politics had opened up the Louisiana Territory to the Americans, other international politics had kept them from starting their long trek into the West. When Lewis and Clark and many of their men arrived in St. Louis by late 1803, the Spanish superintendent had not yet been informed of the American purchase. To him the Americans were simply trespassers. Giving them permission to proceed up the Missouri River represented, to him, an unreasonable request. So, they had been stopped in their tracks before they even began. Now, it was spring. Months had passed, and the Spanish had received official word of Louisiana passing from their hands into those of the Americans. After camping through the winter of 1803–04, the men of the Corps of Discovery were ready to proceed. The adventure lay ahead of them.
As they made last-minute preparations to set out upriver and abandon their last familiar outpost, the party of nearly four dozen prepared to step off into a vast unknown. Ahead of them lay thousands of miles of river, prairie, and mountains that held some of the mysteries of the West. Some portions of those miles were relatively known, having already been reached by handfuls of non-Indians, including French fur trappers, British traders, and even American merchants. At that time, the geographic delineations of American states—Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana—did not exist. Few maps of the Lower Missouri River were available. Maps of the Middle Missouri were almost non-existent. No maps revealing the portion of the West stretching for hundreds of miles between today's Bismarck, North Dakota—where the Corps of Discovery would live with the Mandan Indians through the winter of 1804–05—to the Rocky Mountains and beyond had ever been made. This great void represented a blank in the knowledge anyone—except for the Indians who lived there—had of this region. And Lewis, Clark, and their small party were charged to cross it and map it.

During their three-year expedition from Missouri to the Pacific Coast and back, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark navigated dangerous river rapids, scaled treacherous mountain passes, and encountered both friendly and hostile Indian tribes. Throughout the journey, Lewis and Clark compromised with each other and took into account the views of their team members. Their strong leadership qualities contributed to the success of the expedition.
Source: Library of Congress. Prints and Photographs Division.
So vague was this great region of the West that others had already described it far beyond what they could possibly know. Back in President Jefferson's home at Monticello, Virginia, there were books in his library that claimed the landscape of the Far West featured great mountains of pure salt. Others suggested the region was home to mastodons and woolly mammoths, Pleistocene creatures that had been extinct for thousands of years. There were legends of blue-eyed Welsh Indians, the long-lost descendants of a party of refugees from the British Isles who had paddled their way to America hundreds of years earlier and subsequently intermarried with Native Americans. So little was known of the Far West Lewis and Clark were intending to enter and explore that they could only imagine exactly what they had signed up for by taking command of the Corps of Discovery. Could they even begin to understand the difficulties, the perils ahead of them?  
Setting a Course
The following day, May 21, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, the party finally set out. As they began their voyage up the Missouri River—their three boats packed to the gunwales with supplies, equipment, guns, and food—excitement ran through the men like an electric current.  They were engaged in one of the greatest explorations in the history of the United States. All the men understood they were part of something much larger than themselves. Yes, each man had been chosen for his particular skills—hunter, boatman, cook, interpreter, blacksmith, carpenter—but what they created as a whole—the Corps of Discovery—was greater than the sum of their parts. They were young men of the frontier who were accustomed to living off the land, sleeping under the stars, hunting for food, and were skilled with a rifle. Captains Lewis and Clark had picked them for these skills and more. Only time would tell if they had picked the right men for the long task ahead: an expedition the captains predicted would take at least two years to accomplish. These men were stepping off into a region so vague and uncharted, it was, as one U.S. senator back East compared things, the equivalent of making a trip to and from the moon. As the party set out from St. Charles, they began a journey that widened the distance between themselves and their version of civilization with each passing mile of river. They were a floating world of the familiar. Ahead was a seemingly endless unknown where they alone would have to handle each challenge that came to them. These explorers of two centuries ago were going West with no lifeline, no connection to civilization. If they were to survive, they thought, they would have to rely on their own skills, their own abilities, their own informed past. As they began their journey upriver, they could not imagine how much they would have to rely on the Native Americans they encountered for information, direction, shelter, protection, even food.
Their own frontier experiences gave them a relative respect for the challenges that lay ahead. Each man knew there were a dozen ways to die in the West. Ahead of them were scores of Indian nations. Would they prove friendly or hostile? Each man knew to expect difficulties. Living constantly outdoors, they anticipated freezing cold weather, hail storms, rain, and broiling heat from the summer sun. Out West, the animals were wild, ferocious, some of them killers. Were these young men up to the challenge?
The men of the Expedition did not have to wait long to find out just how treacherous their journey might prove. Just two days out from St. Charles, on May 23, Captain Lewis almost lost his life. While most of the men remained on the river most days, tasked with pulling the party's three boats—including a 55-foot-long keelboat—upriver against the current, Captain Lewis walked along the river's bank. He was a solitary man by nature, happy enough to walk alone, accompanied only by his dog, a large, black Newfoundland named Seaman. As Lewis followed the river bank, he collected plant specimens, one of the obligations of the Corps of Discovery—to report back one day, exploration completed, to President Jefferson, and present a clearer picture of what the West held in store, including plants and animals previously unknown back East.
On this day, he stepped too close to the edge and lost his footing. Suddenly, the captain found himself slipping, falling from an outcropping 300 feet above the river. His boots slid down the rocky cliff front, the captain unable to gain a foothold. The river loomed skyward as he slid down, seemingly to a certain death. But near the end of his fall, with only 20 feet remaining, Lewis managed to jab his hunting knife into the rocky cliff face and rescue himself. It was an early lesson signaling the dangers inherent in their mission. Only two days on the river, with the mysterious West still 2,000 miles distant, Captain Lewis had fallen nearly the vertical equivalent of the length of a modern football field. No Indian attack, no wild animals, no poisonous snakes, no stampeding bison, no threat of starvation, no accidental drowning, no hypothermia, no frostbite—just a slip, one false move, and the Corps of Discovery had already experienced its first brush with death. Lewis and Clark and the