Lewis and Clark

On May 14, 1804, after a blustering day, darkness closed in on the row of tents neatly pitched on an island in the middle of the Missouri River. Alongside them were moored three heavily laden boats. The officer in charge watched the muddy Missouri swirl past the encampment before he entered his tent, lit a lantern, and wrote his notes of the day’s activities. Outside, forty-two men discussed the challenges they faced in the unexplored territory ahead.

But when Captain William Clark put his quill pen to paper, he had little to say. In a brief first paragraph, he noted it had rained that morning and that he planned to join Captain Meriwether Lewis, who was leading the expedition with him, at St. Charles, a village twenty-one miles up the river from St. Louis. Then, in an equally short second paragraph, he discussed abandoning the camp opposite the mouth of the Missouri, where the expedition had spent months preparing for their journey: “I Set out at 4 oClock P.M., in the presence of many of the neighbouring inhabitents, and proceeded on under a jentle brease up the Missouri to the upper Point of the 1st Island 4 Miles and camped on the Island which is Situated Close on the right (or Starboard) Side, and opposit the mouth of a Small Creek called Cold water, a heavy rain this after-noon.”

That was all Clark had to say as his party set out on their 4,000-mile journey to the Pacific Ocean and back, where he and Lewis would be opening a trail no Europeans had seen. But Clark was not an emotional man, and he was more conscious of the dangers than the adventures that lay ahead of him. His career as an army commander had taught him the value of traveling a short distance from base at the outset of an expedition; that way, anything left behind could be quickly retrieved. But strengthening his men physically and teaching raw recruits and regular soldiers the skills they needed to survive in the wilderness was no easy task.

Two days later, the villagers of St. Charles welcomed the men by arranging a ball in their honor, and Clark issued an order: “Note the Commanding officer is full assured that every man of his Detachment will have a true respect for their own Dignity and not make it necessary for him to leave St. Charles for a more retired situation.”

Three of Clark’s men briefly disappeared, and one not only behaved “in an unbecomeing manner” at the ball, but was disrespectful to his officers as well. Clark ordered the men court-martialed, and Sergeant John Ordway pronounced a sentence of twenty-five lashes each, with a recommendation for mercy, for two of the men. Clark honored the plea for mercy and substituted a stiff warning for the lashes. But for Private John Collins, the sentence was fifty lashes. Clark was determined to make an example of Collins.

John Collins, from Frederick County, Maryland, was one of the group’s five hunters. The hunters, Lewis wrote, were responsible for “4 deer, an Elk and a deer, or one buffaloe, to supply us plentifully for 24 hours.” The game did more than satisfy the party’s appetites; it provided hides for clothing and shelter and specimens for scientific study. But although he was a skilled rifleman, Collins was a troublemaker.

On Sunday morning, May 20, after three days of reloading the boats, taking on extra provisions, and dancing in the evenings, Clark sent his men to church. Later that day, in the middle of a thunderstorm, Lewis rode into St. Charles where he was organizing a visit to Washington for a group of Indian chiefs. A small group of close friends had come to say goodbye. The next afternoon, May 21, the expedition departed at half-past three. As Lewis’s friends gave three cheers, the boats hoisted sail and set off upstream.

The party traveled in three boats. The largest was a fifty-five-foot keelboat, with a mast and a square sail to use when the wind was favorable, and twenty oars for the more frequent times when the air was still. The boat had a ten-foot-deep deck and a small cabin aft, with lockers along each side. When raised, their lids formed a protective wall if the boat were attacked. At each end, mounted on a swivel, a small cannon could be loaded with grapeshot to repel intruders. The two other vessels were pirogues, flat-bottomed boats that could be sailed or rowed; the larger, painted red, had seven oars; the other, painted white, had six.

The party of forty-five included sixteen men - seven American soldiers and nine French sailors – who would accompany the expedition only as far as the villages of the Mandan Indians, in what is now North Dakota, and return the following spring. Two men, Pierre Cruzatte and François Labiche, would remain with the party. Fourteen soldiers and nine Kentucky volunteers had signed on for the trip; nearly all were under thirty, and one, George Shannon, was only seventeen. Each was healthy, hardy, single, and prepared to risk his life on a journey into uncharted territory for $5 a month. The three sergeants got $8 each, and Clark’s slave, York, whom he referred to as “my servant,” went unpaid.

York was close to the same age as Clark and had been his servant since boyhood. His mother, father, younger sister, and brother were all slaves of the Clark family; York was left to William by his father, John Clark. The Clarks dealt harshly with their slaves, but expedition journals suggest a measure of trust and respect in the relationship between William and York. More than William’s servant, York joined the other men in the daily work of the expedition. He hunted, which required him to be issued a rifle – unusual for a slave. Journal entries also attested to his skills in scouting and field medicine.

Aside from the two captains, the most valuable member of the party, commanding $25 a month, was the expedition’s interpreter and chief hunter, George Drouillard – misspelled as Drewyer in the journals of both Lewis and Clark. Half French, half Shawnee, Drouillard knew sign language - the only means of communicating with Indian tribes.

Also aboard was Lewis’s Newfoundland dog, Seaman. Lewis had bought the dog for $20 in Pittsburgh while waiting there for the boats to be prepared for voyage.

The first weeks went by without mishap, but summer brought thunderstorms, sudden gales, and sometimes hail. The swift-flowing Missouri proved a constant challenge, regardless of the weather. Its banks were caving in at one place while currents built sand bars at another. Countless bends were ensnared with dead trees embedded in the mud - often with sharp branches just below the surface, ready to tear the bottom out of a boat. Although the men sweated in turn at the oars, poles, and towlines, they were lucky to cover fifteen miles a day.

Lewis and Clark made careful notes about the animals, plants, and geographical features they passed along their way. Every river and brook, hill, and rock formation was recorded. Each night, Clark filled in more details on a map of their route, which was intended, like their voluminous notes, for the expedition’s absent patron, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson had not been farther west than fifty miles beyond Monticello, his home in Virginia, but he had a keen interest in the frontier stretching to the Pacific Ocean. Nearly twenty years earlier, Jefferson had suggested such a journey to General George Rogers Clark, William’s elder brother. General Clark had agreed that it was a worthwhile venture but declined to lead it. Clark had advised Jefferson to keep the expedition small, no more than three or four men.

In 1787, while serving in Paris as ambassador to France, Jefferson met John Ledyard, an American adventurer who had visited the Pacific Northwest with Captain James Cook nine years earlier. The two decided Ledyard should cross Russia and Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, board a Russian ship to the northwest coast of America, then walk across the Rockies to the Missouri River.

It was an impossible task. Western America was unknown; the Columbia River had not yet been discovered; and the Empress Catherine of Russia forbade Ledyard to cross her lands. But in 1788, the adventurer managed to evade the empress’s orders and traveled some 2,500 miles into Siberia before her guards captured him and deposited him in Poland.

Four years later, in 1792, as secretary of state, Jefferson suggested a new plan: He proposed to send André Michaux, a French botanist, up the Missouri to the Pacific with a single companion. Meriwether Lewis, then eighteen years old, asked to accompany Michaux. But Jefferson refused, claiming Lewis was too young. The project was halted, however, when it was discovered that Michaux was a secret agent of the French government, which intended to create a dispute between the fledgling American republic and Spanish colonies in the south and west.

In 1801, when Jefferson was elected president, he revisited his dream of an expedition to the Pacific. It would not only bring back valuable information, he said, but by opening a new trade route across the continent, the expedition would enable America to challenge Britain’s domination of the Pacific Northwest. He thought of Lewis.

Jefferson knew Lewis, who was born in Albemarle County, in the same Piedmont region of Virginia where Jefferson lived. The Lewis farm, Locust Hill, was ten miles west of Jefferson’s Monticello estate. Though Meriwether, at age five, had moved with his mother to Georgia, he and Jefferson liked to refer to each other as neighbors.

Meriwether’s father, Lieutenant William Lewis, who had fought in the Revolution, died of pneumonia in 1779. The next year, his mother, Lucy Meriwether, remarried another Virginian, Captain John Marks. Also a Revolutionary War veteran, Marks was a magistrate in Albemarle County. His brother, Hastings Marks, was married to Jefferson’s youngest sister, Anne. There were other prominent men in Lewis’s family, including a great-uncle who had married one of George Washington’s sisters.

In Georgia, on his stepfather’s 293-acre tobacco plantation, Lewis explored the wilderness and became a skilled hunter at an early age. He received no formal schooling until, at age thirteen, he was sent back to Virginia to be tutored privately; his uncle Nicholas Lewis became his guardian.

In 1793, Lewis graduated from Liberty Hall (now Washington and Lee University) and joined the Virginia militia. The next year, he was part of a detachment sent by President Washington to put down the Whiskey Rebellion. Lewis joined the United States Army in 1794 as an ensign, a rank subsequently renamed as lieutenant, and by 1800, rose to the rank of captain. Lewis enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1794, served six years in the Frontier Army, and was named a captain in 1800.

In 1801, Jefferson sent a letter to Lewis offering him the position of personal secretary. The twenty-six-year-old captain, a paymaster for the 1st United States Infantry Regiment, then making his way through the Ohio country to pay frontier soldiers, found the president’s letter waiting when he returned to Pittsburgh in March 1801. He accepted, thanking Jefferson for “this mark of your confidence and esteem.”

Lewis rode into Washington on April 1. The president had just left for Monticello, his home in Virginia, so Lewis followed him there. From then on, whether at Monticello or at the newly erected White House, Meriwether Lewis lived as Jefferson had promised, “as . . . one of my family.”

For two years, Lewis served as the president’s constant companion.

By 1802, encouraged by Jefferson to plan an expedition for which the “aim would be to make friends and allies of the far Western Indians while at the same time diverting valuable pelts from the rugged northern routes used by another nation [Britain] . . . and bringing the harvest down the Missouri to the Mississippi and thence eastward by a variety of routes,” Lewis had started to organize an expedition westward. In 1803, he began collecting equipment and estimating expenses. Though some thought the expedition should be led by a scientist, Jefferson had “no hesitation in confiding the enterprise to” Lewis. In February 1803, Jefferson wrote to a friend: “Capt. Lewis is brave, prudent, habituated to the woods, & familiar with Indian manners & character. He is not regularly educated, but he possesses a great mass of accurate observation on all the subjects of nature which present themselves here, & will therefore readily select those only in his new route which shall be new. He has qualified himself for those observations of longitude & latitude necessary to fix the points of the line he will go over.”

Jefferson’s note had to be confidential because the expedition would be in foreign territory once the explorers crossed the Mississippi, and the president did not want the Spaniards or French governments to think it was anything more than a peaceful scientific exploration.

The French had originally colonized the Louisiana country after Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, followed the Mississippi to its delta in 1682 and claimed the vast valley for Louis XIV. French towns and settlements grew up along the river: New Orleans, St. Louis, Vincennes in present-day Indiana, and Kaskaskia in today’s Illinois. After seventy years of warring with Britain for control of the American continent, in 1762, France ceded all of Louisiana west of the Mississippi to Spain and relinquished New Orleans. The next year at the Treaty of Paris, Britain forced France to give up all its North American possessions, and Louisiana east of the Mississippi became part of the new United States.

In 1800, in the secret Treaty of Ildefonso, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte acquired Louisiana from Spain in exchange for Etruria in northern Italy. Jefferson asked Robert Livingston, the American minister in Paris, to talk to the French about selling part of the territory, which was bordered by the Rocky Mountains on the west and extended approximately to the present Canadian border on the north, with the Mississippi River as its eastern boundary. New Orleans, which lay on the east side of the river, was vital to the United States: All the commerce west of the Appalachian Mountains traveled down rivers that led into the Mississippi and cargoes were transferred from river boats to ships at the delta. Whoever owned the city could choke off American trade in the West.

In the meantime, Lewis went ahead with his preparations. At Jefferson’s urging, Congress allotted $2,500 to outfit the expedition, and in March 1803, Lewis was at the government arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, ordering knives, tomahawks, rifles, and 176 pounds of gunpowder in waterproof lead canisters.