Lewis & Clark Expedition In Depth

In an age after man has walked repeatedly on the surface of the moon, few people alive today have considered the valor, persistence and hardships experienced by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who confronted bad weather, unforgiving terrain, treacherous waters, injuries, starvation, disease and hostile Native Americans on their journey across the American West, from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back. This is the story of one of the guttiest adventures in the history of modern man. 

When France surrendered most of the Louisiana Territory to Spain and Great Britain during the French and Indian War, Spain’s ownership had little impact on the American economy, since Spain continued to allow American products to travel the Mississippi River and warehouse goods in New Orleans. That all changed after Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of France in 1799. Two years later, after Spain secretly returned the Louisiana Territory to France, Americans grew evermore fearful that France’s emerging new leader had plans to tighten his hold on New Orleans and vital shipping routes along the Mississippi, prompting President Thomas Jefferson to write in a letter to Robert Livingston, the U.S. minister to France, that “The day France takes possession of New Orleans…we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” 

A year later, after France denied American access to New Orleans, Jefferson sent future U.S. president James Monroe to Paris, where Livingston had previously been tasked with negotiating the purchase of New Orleans for an estimated ceiling price of $10 million. Instead, due to France’s weakened economy and Napoleon’s impending war with Great Britain, even before Monroe’s ship arrived into France, in April of 1803, Livingston was taken by surprise when French officials asked him if the U.S. might be interested in purchasing the entirety of the Louisiana Territory—some 828,000 square miles of pristine land, thereby doubling the size of the young republic. Upon Monroe’s arrival, negotiations came to a rapid end, when in late April the team of U.S. emissaries agreed to pay $15,000,000 for what would later become all or part of 15 American states.

Born in the colony of Virginia in 1770, Meriwether Lewis would spend in childhood in Georgia, before returning to Virginia to complete his college degree in 1793. Becoming the personal secretary for President Jefferson at the age of 27, even before the purchase from France was finalized, Jefferson asked Congress to finance a survey expedition into America’s newly purchased lands, and when Congress approved his request, he tasked Lewis with heading the expedition into virtually unknown lands that were now the newest part of the United States. Lewis chose fellow Virginian William Clark to co-lead the expedition—both having served as sharpshooters under the command of General Anthony Wayne, who rose to fame during the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. 

Jefferson laid out a five-fold objective for the expedition, including exploring the western frontier with hopes of finding water routes to the Pacific from the Mississippi River, surveying the Missouri and Columbia rivers, establishing trade with Native Americans while affirming U.S. sovereignty in the region, finding a rumored Northwest Passage waterway from the U.S. to the Pacific Ocean, and lastly, to gather cultural information, while identifying plants and animals and mapping newly acquired lands. 

Lewis started his preparations immediately, studying medicine, botany, astronomy and zoology in Philadelphia, at the same time scrutinizing every existing map of North America, such as the 1804 creation by cartographers Aaron Aerosmith and Samuel Lewis. Other maps included the works of Nicholas King, Andrew Elliott, David Thompson and George Vancouver, the later exploring the Washington and Oregon coast in 1792. Setting out on July 5th, 1803 to obtain munitions at Harper’s Ferry, Lewis then rode a custom-built, 55-foot keelboat nicknamed “the barge” down the Ohio River, where he joined up with Clark in present-day Clarksville Indiana, where he handed the barge over to Clark for a trip up the Mississippi, while Lewis continued on horseback in search of necessary supplies.

Knowing the trip would take them away from civilization for an extended period of time, Lewis and Clark provisioned vital supplies such as surveying instruments and compasses, quadrants, telescopes, sextants and chronometers. Other supplies included steel flints and tools, cooking utensils, mosquito netting and fishing gear, soap, salt, clothing and corn mill, along with 200 pounds of gunpowder and an experimental air rifle, medicines and medical supplies, maps and a number of books about botany, geography and astronomy. They also stocked up on gifts for Native Americans, including face paint, knifes, ivory combs, tobacco, mirrors and brightly colored cloth. 

Recruiting men for their “Corps of Volunteers for Northwest Discovery’ or simply the Corps of Discovery, during the winter of 1803 to 1804, Clark trained unmarried, healthy men who demonstrated good hunting and survival skills at Camp DuBois north of St. Louis. All told the Corps grew to 45 men, including Clark’s African American slave named York.

Before setting out on May 14th of 1804—a mere 23 years after the end of the Revolutionary War— Lewis wrote in his journal, “We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trod. The good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessels contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves. However, as the state of mind in which we are, generally gives the coloring to events, when the imagination is suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one. I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life.”

The Corps of Discovery set out on the barge and two smaller boats on an upstream journey along the Missouri River, averaging fifteen miles a day despite swarms of insects, intense heat and strong opposing river currents. The expedition suffered its first and only fatality on August 20th near modern-day Sioux City Iowa, when 22-year-old Sergeant Charles Floyd died of an apparent appendicitis. During their journey, the Corps encountered an estimated 50 indigenous tribes, including the Shoshone, the Mandan, the Minitari, the Blackfeet, the Chinook and the Sioux, where they bartered for needed supplies and presented each tribes leader with a Jefferson Indian Peace Medal, which had the image of Thomas Jefferson on one side, while the other showed two clasped hands beneath of peace pipe and a tomahawk, with the inscription “Peace and Friendship.” Fascinated by the loose sexual behavior of Native American women, Clark wrote in his diary that “Those people appear to view sensuality as a necessary evil, and do not appear to abhor it as a crime in the unmarried state,” yet for the most part, Lewis and Clark tolerated the Corps’ dalliances with Native American women, unless there were concerns about the spread of venereal disease.

While Jefferson believed that the party might encounter extinct species like woolly mammoths, the Corps encountered innumerable non-extinct species, including the American Bison, prompting Lewis to write, “I sincerely believe that there were not less than 10,000 buffalo within a circle of 2 miles.” Zoologically speaking, one of the most remarkable periods occurred during the month of September, 1804, during a 262-mile passage from the Niobrara River in present-day Nebraska to the Teton River in present-day Pierre South Dakota. In just over two weeks, the Corps encountered four classic Western animals for the first time— prairie dogs, pronghorns, coyotes and the jack rabbits. The Corps also had run-ins with less docile animals, including rattlesnakes, wolverines, charging bison and grizzly bears, and when Lewis was nearly attacked by each of these species over the span of a single day, he wrote in his journal, “The entire animal kingdom has conspired against me!” In another encounter with a grizzly while traversing Montana, Lewis wrote “a most tremendious looking anamal, and extreemly hard to kill notwithstanding he had five balls through his lungs and five others in various parts… and made the most tremendous roaring from the moment he was shot.”

In August, Lewis and Clark held peaceful Indian councils with the Odo tribe near present-day Council Bluffs Iowa, followed by the Yankton Sioux near present-day Yankton South Dakota, however, in late September they encountered the Teton Sioux, who attempted to demand a toll for the Corps’ boats to pass. Once the Corps demonstrated the effectiveness of their military weapons, including Lewis’ novel air gun, the Teton Sioux quietly dispersed into the woods. 

As winter began to close in, the Corps encountered several villages of friendly Mandan and Minitari Indians near present-day Washburn North Dakota, where they set up their winter quarters at Fort Mandan within four week’s time. The Corps spent the next five months in the fort, building up their food stocks by hunting and foraging, making canoes, ropes, moccasins and leather clothing, while Lewis and Clark worked diligently on their maps and journals during the dead of winter. According to Clark’s journal, the men were in good health overall, other than those suffering from sexually transmitted infections.

While at Fort Mandan, the two explorers hired fur trapper Toussaint Charbonneau as their interpreter, and while Charbonneau initially declined their offer, he became the oldest member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition at 38 years of age, departing by boat with Sacagawea and his 55-day-old son Jean Baptiste. During the two-year trek to the Pacific Ocean and back, Charbonneau proved to be an excellent chef and a great negotiator with local Native Americans, yet his skills as a waterman proved to be wildly deficient, and after he nearly capsized a pirogue filled with vital supplies—saved only by Sacagawea’s quick thinking—Lewis wrote that Charbonneau was “a man of little merit,” and “perhaps the most timid waterman in the world.”

As for Sacagawea, she had been kidnapped by Hidatsa Indians at age twelve and later sold to Charbonneau. Nicknamed Janey by Lewis, Sacagawea and her 55-day-old son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau—nicknamed Little Pomp or Pompey by Clark—became in many ways more important to the expedition than Charbonneau himself, since the presence of a Native American woman and child in the party, as Clark wrote, “reconciles all the Indians as to our friendly intention—a woman with a party of men is a token of peace.” During a run-in with a less than friendly band of Shoshone in the summer of 1805, Sacagawea discovered that the tribe’s chief was none other than her long-lost brother, which led to a tearful reunion and peaceful relations between the Corps and the Shoshone, allowing Lewis to procure much-needed horses for his trek over the Rockies.

Reaching the Continental Divide on April 7th, 1805, Lewis and Clark sent the barge and a good many of their crew back for St. Louis with a cargo of botanical samplings, maps, reports and letters, before heading out of Lemhi Pass for a harrowing trip across the Bitterroot Mountains on the Lolo Trail, which proved to be a suffer fest as the Corps experienced frostbite, hunger, dehydration, bad weather, freezing temperatures and exhaustion. After a brutal eleven-day journey, the Corps met a tribe of friendly Nez Perce along the Clearwater River in present-day Idaho, who fed the Corps and nursed them back to health.

Once they were recovered, the Corps traversed the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia Rivers, until they completed their mission in November of 1805, when they finally reached the stormy Pacific Ocean, prompting Clark to write in his journal, “Ocean in view! O! the joy.” On December 10th, the remaining Corps began construction of Fort Clatsop near present-day Astoria Oregon, before moving in just before Christmas. The winter proved to be a brutal one, as the Corps struggled to keep supplies dry, while battling the torments of fleas, insects and recurrent stomach problems. 

Retrieving their horses from the Nez Perce in late March of 1806, the Corps waited until June for snows to melt off at higher elevations, before beginning their second brutal traverse of the Bitterroot Mountains. Splitting into two groups along the Lolo Pass, Lewis chose a shortcut north to the Great Falls of the Missouri River, which allowed the group to explore the Marias River, a tributary of the Missouri in present-day Montana. Clark’s group, including Sacagawea and her family, traveled south along the Yellowstone River, where Clark carved his name on a large rock formation on July 25th, naming it Pompey’s Pillar in honor of Sacagawea’s son, who Clark had nicknamed Pomp or Pompey. Pompey’s Pillar is now a protected national monument under the management of the U.S. Department of Interior.

With plans to join up where the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers meet in present-day North Dakota, on July 27th, Lewis and his group encountered eight Blackfeet warrior near present-day Cut Bank Montana—now known as Two Medicine Fight Site—where they were forced to kill two Blackfeet when the warriors tried to steal weapons and horses. The event would prove to be their last encounter with less than friendly Native Americans, although Lewis was accidentally shot in the butt during a hunting trip, when a nearsighted Corps member mistook him for an elk in a heavy thicket of trees. The painful injury would force Lewis to ride in a canoe on his stomach, until his injuries could heal enough for him to once again sit upright on one of the spars. 

The two parties rendezvoused on August the 12th, before dropping Sacagawea and her family at the Mandan village for an emotional farewell. The Corps then rowed down the Missouri River—this time with the currents in their favor—arriving into St. Louis on September 23rd to a hero’s welcome and much fanfare by jubilant locals. 

Returning to Washington D.C. in the fall of 1806, Lewis and Clark told of their experiences to President Jefferson, and while the Corps failed to identify the mythical Northwest Passage waterway across the continent, they completed their survey mission against untenable odds, with only one death and surprising little violence compared to the years ahead during the peak years of American westward expansion. Having trekked more than 8,000 miles in two years, the expedition produced critically important maps and geographical information, while identifying some 120 animal specimens and more than 200 botanical samples. Both men received double pay and 1,600 acres of land. Lewis was made Governor of the Louisiana Territory, while Clark was appointed Brigadier General of the Louisiana Territory militia, as well as a federal Indian Agent. 

Battling depression and mood swings for most of his life, Lewis suffered from money troubles and bouts of heavy drinking, until he died from two most likely self-inflicted gunshot wounds on October 11th, 1809. As for William Clark, after Sacagawea rejected his offer to adopt Pompey to “raise him as my own child,” she later allowed him to educate Pompey in a St. Louis school. Following her death in 1812, Clark became the legal guardian of both Jean Baptiste and a daughter named Lisette, raising both children, as he had promised Sacagawea, just like his own.