The Lewis and Clark Expedition

Preface

This article offers an extended account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the journey of the Corps of Discovery across the North American continent and back between 1804 and 1806. It is intended for the general reader who wishes to understand not only what happened on the journey but why it happened, what it meant, and what it set in motion. The treatment is divided into two broad movements. The first is a narrative, following the expedition from its origins in Thomas Jefferson's imagination and the Louisiana Purchase, through its preparation, its long ascent of the Missouri, its desperate crossing of the Rocky Mountains, its winter on the Pacific, and its return. The second is a series of thematic explorations that step back from the day-by-day chronicle to examine particular dimensions of the expedition in greater depth: Jefferson's instructions, the contest of empires, the daily life of the Corps, its health and its boats, its diplomacy and its science, its maps, and the long afterlife of the journey in American memory.

Throughout, the aim has been to tell the story accurately and fairly, neither inflating the expedition into uncomplicated heroism nor reducing it to a mere prelude to conquest. The Corps of Discovery accomplished a genuine feat of endurance, leadership, and scientific observation, and it did so in large part through the knowledge, generosity, and forbearance of the Native nations whose homelands it crossed. The same journey helped to open those homelands to an expansion that would, within a few generations, devastate the peoples who had made the expedition possible. Both of these truths are essential, and a faithful account must hold them together. The reader will find here admiration for what the expedition achieved alongside a clear-eyed reckoning with its costs and consequences.

A note on sources: this article draws on the expedition's own journals, kept by the captains and several of the enlisted men, and on the work of the many historians and editors who have studied, edited, and interpreted those journals across two centuries. A selected bibliography appears at the end for readers who wish to go further. The original maps that accompany the article were prepared specifically for it, and the reader is encouraged to consult the rich holdings of public archives and libraries for the contemporary portraits, manuscript maps, and other historical images that survive from the expedition and its era. What follows is an invitation to travel, in imagination, one of the most consequential journeys ever undertaken across the American continent.

1. Introduction: An Epic of the American West

Between the spring of 1804 and the autumn of 1806, a small party of soldiers, frontiersmen, an enslaved man, a French-Canadian interpreter, a young Shoshone woman, her infant son, and a large Newfoundland dog traveled from the edge of the young United States to the shores of the Pacific Ocean and back again. They called themselves the Corps of Discovery. History remembers them by the names of their two captains, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. In roughly twenty-eight months the expedition covered more than seven thousand miles of river, prairie, mountain, and forest, much of it utterly unknown to the government that sent them. They lost only one man, fought only one deadly skirmish, and returned with journals, maps, plant and animal specimens, and a wealth of geographic and ethnographic information that would shape the destiny of a continent.

The journey was at once a military reconnaissance, a scientific survey, a diplomatic mission, and a commercial scouting venture. It was conceived by President Thomas Jefferson, an Enlightenment intellectual who had dreamed for two decades of an American exploration of the West, and it was made suddenly urgent and feasible by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which doubled the size of the United States overnight. The expedition was meant to find a practical water route across the continent, to assert an American presence in lands claimed or coveted by Spain, Britain, and Russia, to open trade with the Native nations of the interior, and to catalog the natural world of a vast and largely undocumented region.

It is tempting to tell the story of Lewis and Clark as a simple tale of heroism and triumph, and there is genuine heroism in it: extraordinary endurance, loyalty, ingenuity, and courage. But the fuller story is more complicated and more interesting. The expedition succeeded only because of the knowledge, hospitality, and labor of the Native peoples it encountered, who fed the travelers, guided them, traded them horses, and tolerated their presence. Its success also helped open the West to a wave of American settlement that would, within a few generations, devastate those same Native nations. The expedition was a feat of human endurance and a turning point in the history of science and geography; it was also the opening act of a continental dispossession. A serious account must hold both truths at once.

This article traces the expedition from its intellectual and political origins through its preparation, its outbound journey up the Missouri River and across the Rocky Mountains, its winter on the Pacific coast, and its return. It examines the people who made the journey, the lands and peoples they encountered, the science they produced, and the long shadow the expedition cast over American history. It draws on the expedition's own voluminous journals and on the work of generations of historians who have studied them. The aim is neither to celebrate uncritically nor to condemn anachronistically, but to understand one of the most consequential journeys ever undertaken on the North American continent.

The Corps of Discovery did not, in the end, find the thing it was most explicitly sent to find: a convenient water passage across the continent. No such passage existed. The great discovery of the expedition was, in a sense, the discovery of how wrong the dream had been, how wide and high and forbidding the western mountains truly were. Yet in failing at its literal objective the expedition succeeded at almost everything else, and it returned with a portrait of the American West more accurate and more complete than anything that had come before. That portrait, and the journey that produced it, are the subject of what follows.

2. A Continent Imagined: Geographic Knowledge Before 1804

To understand why the United States sent an expedition west in 1804, it helps to understand how little the wider world actually knew about the interior of North America, and how much it imagined. By the end of the eighteenth century, European and American maps of the continent were detailed and confident along the coasts and increasingly so in the settled East, but they dissolved into guesswork, rumor, and hopeful invention beyond the Mississippi River. The middle of the continent was, to the cartographers of London, Paris, and Philadelphia, a blank to be filled with theories.

The most persistent and seductive of these theories was the dream of the Northwest Passage, or more precisely, of an easy water route across the continent. For nearly three centuries, European powers had searched for a navigable passage that would link the Atlantic to the Pacific and open a short trade route to the riches of Asia. Failing to find one through the Arctic, geographers transferred the hope inland. Perhaps, they reasoned, the great rivers of the West interlocked: perhaps the Missouri rose near the headwaters of a westward-flowing river, separated only by a short and gentle portage, so that a trader might paddle from the Mississippi nearly to the ocean. The idea of a single low divide between the Missouri and the "River of the West" became an article of faith. It was wrong, but it was a productive error, and it shaped the instructions Jefferson would give his explorers.

Competing empires

The West was not empty of European claims. Spain held a vast and loosely governed empire stretching up from Mexico through what is now the American Southwest and along the California coast; Spanish officials in Santa Fe and elsewhere watched American movements with suspicion. Britain, through the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company, dominated the fur trade of Canada and was pushing traders and explorers westward across the northern plains and into the Pacific Northwest. Russia, from its base in Alaska, was extending its sea-otter trade down the coast. France had ceded its Louisiana claims to Spain in 1762, only to reacquire them secretly in 1800 under Napoleon. Into this contested arena the United States, barely two decades independent, sought to insert itself.

The fur trade and prior explorers

The engine driving European penetration of the interior was the fur trade, above all the trade in beaver pelts prized for felt hats. French and British traders had pushed up the Missouri and across the northern plains, establishing relationships with Native nations who controlled the commerce of the region. The Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the upper Missouri, which Lewis and Clark would reach in late 1804, were already a thriving international trading hub visited by British and French-Canadian traders.

A few explorers had pierced the unknown before the Corps of Discovery. The Scottish-Canadian explorer Alexander Mackenzie, working for the North West Company, had crossed the continent to the Pacific in 1793, reaching the ocean overland in present-day British Columbia and scrawling his triumph in vermilion on a rock. Mackenzie published an account of his journey in 1801, and that book, with its call for Britain to seize the fur trade of the Pacific Northwest, alarmed and motivated Thomas Jefferson. If the United States did not move to explore and claim the western route, Britain might secure it first. Mackenzie's crossing also proved, though few wished to believe it, that the mountains of the West were no mere ridge but a formidable barrier.

Thus the geographic knowledge available in 1803 was a patchwork: reasonably good along the coasts and the lower Missouri, vague in the middle, and fantastical at the headwaters. Maps showed the Rocky Mountains, when they showed them at all, as a single narrow chain. The true breadth of the cordillera, the maze of ranges between the plains and the sea, was unsuspected. It was into this imagined geography that Jefferson dispatched his expedition, instructing it to find the water route that the best minds of the age confidently believed must exist.

3. Jefferson's Vision and the Louisiana Purchase

The expedition was, above all, the project of one man's restless and capacious mind. Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, was a planter, politician, architect, inventor, and naturalist whose curiosity about the natural world was boundless. Long before he held the presidency he had been fascinated by the American West, collecting maps and travelers' accounts, studying the fossils of extinct creatures, and speculating about the lands beyond the Mississippi. He believed that the future of the American republic lay in the West, in a continent of small independent farmers, and he believed that knowledge of that country was a matter of national importance.

Jefferson had tried before to send explorers west. In the 1780s he had encouraged the adventurer John Ledyard to attempt to cross Asia and reach North America from the west; the scheme collapsed when Russian authorities detained Ledyard in Siberia. In 1793 Jefferson, then secretary of state, helped arrange for the French botanist André Michaux to lead an expedition up the Missouri, but that plan dissolved amid international intrigue. The ambition, however, never left him. When he became president in 1801, he finally had the authority to act.

The secret message to Congress

In January 1803, Jefferson sent a confidential message to Congress requesting funds for an expedition to explore the Missouri River to its source and find a route to the Pacific. He framed the venture carefully. To Congress he emphasized its commercial value, the prospect of diverting the lucrative fur trade toward American channels. To Spain, France, and Britain, whose territory the expedition would cross, he described it as a scientific enterprise of no military significance. Congress quietly appropriated the modest sum of twenty-five hundred dollars. At this point Louisiana still belonged, at least on paper, to a foreign power. The expedition Jefferson was planning would have to pass, with permission, through lands the United States did not own.

The purchase

Then came one of the great accidents of history. Jefferson had sent envoys to France hoping to buy the port of New Orleans, vital to American commerce on the Mississippi, and perhaps a strip of Gulf coast. Napoleon Bonaparte, his dreams of a French American empire collapsing amid a disastrous war and slave revolution in Saint-Domingue and the looming renewal of war with Britain, abruptly offered to sell not merely New Orleans but the entire Louisiana Territory. The American negotiators, Robert Livingston and James Monroe, exceeding their instructions, accepted. For roughly fifteen million dollars, the United States acquired some eight hundred and twenty-eight thousand square miles of land stretching from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains and from the Gulf of Mexico to the present Canadian border. At a stroke the nation doubled in size.

The Louisiana Purchase, concluded in 1803, transformed Jefferson's expedition from a reconnaissance of foreign soil into a survey of national territory. It also troubled Jefferson, a strict constructionist who doubted that the Constitution authorized the federal government to acquire territory, though he set his scruples aside in the face of so extraordinary an opportunity. The purchase did not, it should be noted, transfer the land from its actual inhabitants; the Native nations who lived on it had not been consulted and did not recognize that their homelands had been bought and sold by distant empires. But for the United States, the acquisition gave the western expedition a new urgency and a new legitimacy. The Corps of Discovery would now explore American ground, at least as the United States understood it.

Jefferson's instructions to Lewis, drafted in the months before departure, were a remarkable document: a blend of soaring scientific ambition and minute practical detail. Lewis was to find "the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent." He was to record the latitude and longitude of significant landmarks, to study the climate and the soil, to catalog the plants and animals, to observe the customs, languages, and numbers of the Native nations, and to treat those nations "in the most friendly and conciliatory manner." He was to take careful notes and to make multiple copies against the loss of the originals. The instructions amounted to a syllabus for the systematic study of an unknown half of a continent.

4. Choosing the Leaders: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

Jefferson's choice to lead the expedition was Meriwether Lewis, his own private secretary. Lewis, born in 1774 in Albemarle County, Virginia, not far from Jefferson's Monticello, came from the same Virginia gentry world as the president. He had served in the army, rising to the rank of captain, and had developed a reputation as a capable, energetic officer with a deep love of the outdoors and a serious interest in natural history. Jefferson had brought him to Washington as his secretary in 1801 in part to have at hand a man suited to lead a western expedition. Lewis was intelligent, observant, and physically tough, but he was also moody and prone to periods of melancholy, a trait that would shadow the rest of his life.

To prepare Lewis for the scientific demands of the journey, Jefferson sent him to Philadelphia, the intellectual capital of the young republic, for an intensive education from the leading scholars of the American Philosophical Society. The astronomer and surveyor Andrew Ellicott and the mathematician Robert Patterson taught him celestial navigation and the use of instruments to fix latitude and longitude. The physician Benjamin Rush instructed him in field medicine and supplied his famous purgative pills. The botanist Benjamin Smith Barton trained him to collect and describe plants; the anatomist Caspar Wistar prepared him to recognize the fossils Jefferson hoped he might find, perhaps even living mastodons. Lewis absorbed this crash course in applied science with characteristic intensity, emerging as a competent field naturalist and surveyor.

A shared command

Lewis did something unusual for an army officer: he asked to share his command. He wrote to William Clark, an old friend and former commanding officer, inviting him to serve as co-leader of the expedition. Clark, born in 1770 in Virginia and raised partly on the Kentucky frontier, was the younger brother of the Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark. William Clark had served in the army on the frontier, where Lewis had briefly served under him, and the two had formed a lasting friendship. Clark was a skilled frontiersman, a gifted natural cartographer, a practical engineer, and an experienced leader of men, with extensive knowledge of rivers, boats, and Native diplomacy. Where Lewis was introspective and given to melancholy, Clark was steady, gregarious, and even-tempered. They complemented each other almost perfectly.

A bureaucratic awkwardness attended Clark's appointment. Lewis intended that Clark hold equal rank as captain, but the War Department issued Clark only a lieutenant's commission. The two men quietly agreed to ignore the discrepancy. To the members of the Corps and in the journals, Clark was always "Captain Clark," and he exercised authority equal to Lewis in every respect. This discretion was characteristic of their partnership, which over the course of the expedition never suffered a serious quarrel, a remarkable fact given the strains of the journey and the difficulties of dividing authority. The co-captaincy worked because both men were secure enough to make it work.

The pairing of Lewis and Clark proved one of the most effective leadership partnerships in the history of exploration. Lewis tended to range ahead on foot, observing, collecting, and writing long naturalist's descriptions; he was the more literary of the two and the more emotionally volatile. Clark generally managed the boats and the men, kept the most consistent journal, and produced the maps that were among the expedition's greatest achievements. His spelling was idiosyncratic, even by the loose standards of the age, but his eye for terrain and his ability to translate a day's travel into an accurate map were extraordinary. Together they possessed nearly every skill the expedition would require.

5. Forming the Corps of Discovery

An expedition is only as good as the people who make it, and Lewis and Clark assembled their party with care. Through the winter of 1803 to 1804 they recruited and trained at Camp Dubois, also called Camp Wood, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi opposite the mouth of the Missouri River. The core of the party was military: young, unmarried, healthy soldiers chosen for their skills as hunters, boatmen, blacksmiths, and carpenters, and for their ability to endure hardship and discipline. The captains weeded out the unfit and the unruly over the winter, building a hardened, capable company.

Among the most important members were the three sergeants of the permanent party. Charles Floyd, a young Kentuckian, was a steady and well-liked noncommissioned officer; he would be the expedition's only fatality. John Ordway, a New Hampshire man, served as the senior sergeant and kept a faithful daily journal, one of the most complete records of the journey. Nathaniel Pryor, another Kentuckian, was a reliable leader of men. After Floyd's death, the private Patrick Gass, a skilled carpenter, was elected to fill his place; Gass would later be the first to publish an account of the expedition.

Interpreters, hunters, and specialists

Perhaps the single most valuable man after the captains was George Drouillard, the son of a French-Canadian father and a Shawnee mother. Drouillard was a superb hunter whose rifle fed the party through lean months, an expert in the Plains Indian sign language that allowed communication across the language barriers of the West, and a tireless, resourceful scout. Time and again the captains relied on him for the most difficult and dangerous tasks. Other key men included the half-French watermen Pierre Cruzatte and Francois Labiche, skilled rivermen who also spoke several languages; Cruzatte, blind in one eye and nearsighted in the other, was also the party's fiddler, and his music lifted morale and entertained Native hosts. The Field brothers, Joseph and Reubin, were among the best hunters and most dependable soldiers in the company.

York and Seaman

Two members of the party occupied unusual places in it. York was an enslaved man owned by William Clark, who had inherited him from his father; the two had grown up together. York made the entire journey, performing the same labor and facing the same dangers as the free members of the Corps, hunting, paddling, hauling, and standing guard. To the Native nations of the West, who had never seen a person of African descent, York was an object of intense interest and was often regarded with awe; his presence sometimes aided the expedition's diplomacy. Yet despite his full participation, York remained legally enslaved, and his eventual struggle for freedom after the journey is one of the more troubling threads in the expedition's aftermath.

The other unusual member walked on four legs. Seaman was a large Newfoundland dog that Lewis had purchased before the journey for twenty dollars. Seaman accompanied the Corps the entire way, catching squirrels and other game, guarding the camp at night, and at one point chasing off a buffalo bull that had blundered into the sleeping party. Native people repeatedly tried to buy or trade for the dog, and at one point Seaman was briefly stolen and had to be recovered. He survived the journey, one of the small, humanizing details that fills the expedition's journals.

By the spring of 1804 the captains had forged this collection of soldiers, frontiersmen, an enslaved man, and a dog into a disciplined company. There were courts-martial that winter for drunkenness and insubordination, and the captains did not hesitate to impose hard punishments; discipline was understood to be a matter of survival. But there was also a growing esprit de corps, a sense of shared purpose and adventure. The Corps of Discovery that pushed off into the Missouri was a tough, well-trained, and increasingly cohesive band.

6. Preparations, Science, and Equipment

The logistics of equipping an expedition into the unknown were daunting. The Corps had to carry, in its boats, everything it might need for a journey of unknown length through country where resupply would be impossible: weapons and ammunition, tools, clothing, medicine, scientific instruments, trade goods, and provisions, along with the means to hunt and to repair what broke. Lewis spent months gathering supplies in the East, drawing on the resources of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and the merchants of Philadelphia.

Boats

The expedition's principal vessel was a fifty-five-foot keelboat, a sturdy craft that could be rowed, poled, sailed, or towed from the bank. It carried the bulk of the supplies up the lower Missouri. Accompanying it were two pirogues, large open boats, one painted red and one white, which proved more durable than the keelboat for the upper river. When the keelboat was sent back from Fort Mandan in the spring of 1805, the party continued in the pirogues and in dugout canoes hewn from cottonwood logs along the way. Boats, and the endless labor of moving them against the current, were the central physical reality of the expedition's first phase.

The iron-frame boat

One of Lewis's pet projects was a collapsible boat with an iron frame, which he had designed and had built at Harpers Ferry. The idea was that the frame could be carried overland and, when needed, covered with hides to make a lightweight vessel for the upper rivers. Lewis was proud of his invention and called it Experiment. When the moment came to assemble it above the Great Falls of the Missouri, however, the party could find no pine pitch to seal the seams between the hides, and the boat leaked hopelessly. It was abandoned, a rare and instructive failure of the expedition's planning, and the men fell back on the reliable expedient of dugout canoes.

Science and instruments

In keeping with Jefferson's instructions, the expedition carried an array of scientific instruments: a sextant and an octant for celestial navigation, a chronometer, a theodolite-like surveying compass, thermometers, and other tools for fixing position and recording weather. Lewis and Clark were to take regular observations of latitude and longitude, though the difficulty of determining longitude without an accurate timekeeper meant that their positions were often approximate. They carried blank journals and were under strict orders to keep detailed records; several members beyond the captains also kept journals, providing the multiple, overlapping accounts that survive today. The men were to press and preserve plant specimens, prepare animal skins and skeletons, and collect mineral samples.

Medicine, arms, and gifts

For medicine, the party relied heavily on Dr. Rush's powerful purgative pills, nicknamed "Thunderclapping Pills" by some, along with laudanum, mercury preparations, and various tinctures; the medical knowledge of the age was limited, and it is a testament to the men's hardiness that so few died. For defense and hunting, the Corps carried rifles, muskets, knives, and tomahawks, plus a curiosity: an air gun, a pneumatic rifle that could fire repeatedly without powder or smoke. Lewis delighted in demonstrating the air gun to Native audiences, who found it astonishing. For diplomacy, the expedition carried a large stock of trade goods and gifts: peace medals bearing the likeness of Jefferson, to be presented to chiefs; flags; uniforms and military coats; mirrors, beads, knives, fishhooks, tobacco, and other articles. These gifts were the currency of diplomacy and trade on the journey, and their gradual exhaustion would become a serious problem on the return.

By the time the Corps pushed off in May 1804, it carried, in its cramped boats, a remarkable concentration of the tools, knowledge, and goods of its civilization, packed against every contingency the captains could foresee. Much of what they could not foresee, they would have to improvise, and much of what they would need most, food, horses, guidance, they would obtain not from their own stores but from the Native nations whose country they were entering.

7. Up the Missouri: Departure and the Lower River

On May 14, 1804, the Corps of Discovery set out from Camp Dubois and started up the Missouri River. Clark commanded the boats at the departure; Lewis joined the party a few days later at St. Charles, the last substantial settlement of European Americans on the river. From St. Charles the men entered country that grew steadily less familiar with each mile. Ahead lay more than a year of travel before they would reach the Pacific.

The labor of ascending the Missouri was brutal and unrelenting. The river ran fast and muddy, full of snags, shifting sandbars, and collapsing banks. On good days the men could sail with a favorable wind; far more often they rowed against the current, poled the boats along the bottom with long poles, or, worst of all, waded along the bank dragging the heavy keelboat by a towrope, their feet cut by rocks and their bodies tormented by mosquitoes, sun, and the river's grit. They made, on a typical day, perhaps ten to fifteen miles. The work was exhausting and dangerous, and the men's diet of game, supplemented by cornmeal and whatever they could gather, demanded enormous quantities of food; the hunters were kept constantly busy.

First councils

As the expedition moved up the river it began the diplomatic work that was central to its mission. Near the mouth of the Platte River, in early August 1804, the captains held their first formal council with Native leaders, meeting representatives of the Oto and Missouri peoples at a bluff Lewis named Council Bluff. The captains followed a script they would repeat many times: they assembled the men in their uniforms, fired the air gun and perhaps a small cannon to impress, delivered a speech announcing that the lands now belonged to a new "great father" in Washington who wished the nations to live in peace and to trade with the Americans, distributed peace medals and gifts according to each leader's perceived rank, and invited the chiefs to send delegations east to meet the president.

These councils reveal both the ambitions and the limits of the expedition's diplomacy. The captains assumed an authority over the Native nations that those nations did not recognize and announced a change of sovereignty that meant little on the ground. The Native leaders, for their part, were experienced diplomats and traders who received the Americans according to their own interests, seeking trade goods, alliances against their rivals, and an understanding of these newcomers. The exchange of speeches across a chasm of language and worldview, mediated by interpreters of varying skill, produced as much misunderstanding as understanding. Yet the councils generally proceeded peacefully, and the expedition moved on up the river.

The lower Missouri also began to yield the natural wonders that would fill the journals. The men marveled at the abundance of game: deer, elk, and increasingly the great herds of buffalo. They encountered animals new to them, and Clark's journal records the landscape with a frontiersman's practical eye while Lewis, when he wrote, produced more elaborate naturalist's descriptions. The party was entering the eastern edge of the Great Plains, a country of grass and sky unlike anything in the settled East, and the sense of moving into a new world grew with every passing week.

8. The Death of Sergeant Floyd and the Great Plains

On August 20, 1804, the expedition suffered its only death. Sergeant Charles Floyd, who had been ill for several days with severe abdominal pain, died near the site of present-day Sioux City, Iowa. The captains, with the limited medical knowledge of their time, could do nothing for him. Modern historians believe Floyd most likely died of a ruptured appendix and the peritonitis that followed, a condition that no physician anywhere in the world could have treated successfully in 1804. The men buried him on a bluff overlooking the river with the honors of war and named the stream beside it Floyd's River. That a single death was the expedition's total fatality, over more than two years and seven thousand miles, is a measure of both the party's toughness and its remarkable good fortune.

Following Floyd's death, the captains allowed the men to elect a new sergeant, an unusual democratic gesture in a military company. The private Patrick Gass, a skilled carpenter, received the most votes and was promoted. Gass would prove a valuable noncommissioned officer, and his journal, published in 1807, would give the American public its first book-length account of the expedition, years before the captains' own narrative appeared.

A new world of animals

As the Corps pushed up the river through the late summer and autumn of 1804, it entered fully onto the Great Plains and encountered a parade of creatures unknown to eastern science. The men captured a prairie dog, flushing it from its burrow by pouring water down the hole, and shipped the live animal back to Jefferson, who received it in Washington months later. They described the pronghorn, the swift "goat" of the plains, marveling at its speed. They saw enormous herds of buffalo, along with elk, mule deer (which they noted differed from the eastern white-tailed deer), coyotes, and jackrabbits. Lewis, the trained naturalist, recorded these animals with care, and the expedition's descriptions and specimens would introduce dozens of western species to the scientific world.

The plains themselves astonished men accustomed to the forests of the East. The vast open grasslands, the immense skies, the sense of distance and emptiness, all made a deep impression. The journals record the beauty and the strangeness of this country, as well as its practical challenges: the lack of timber for fuel and boats, the sudden violent storms, the difficulty of finding the party's bearings in a landscape without familiar landmarks. The Corps was learning, week by week, to read and survive in an unfamiliar world.

The Yankton Sioux

In late August the expedition held a generally cordial council with the Yankton Sioux, a band that had long-standing trade relations and was disposed to friendliness. The captains delivered their now-practiced speeches, distributed medals and gifts, and were entertained with dancing and feasting. The Yankton council went well, but it was, in a sense, a calm before a storm. The captains had been warned that farther up the river they would encounter the Teton Sioux, a powerful people who controlled a strategic stretch of the Missouri and who were unlikely to welcome an American effort to bypass them and trade directly with the nations upriver.

9. Confrontation with the Teton Sioux

The most dangerous diplomatic crisis of the outbound journey came in late September 1804, when the expedition met the Teton Sioux, also known as the Lakota, near the mouth of the Bad River at present-day Pierre, South Dakota. The Teton were a formidable power on the upper Missouri. They controlled the river trade, exacting tribute from boats that passed and from the village peoples upriver who depended on the goods that flowed through their territory. An American expedition proposing to open direct trade with the Mandan, Hidatsa, and other nations threatened the Teton's lucrative position as middlemen, and they had no reason to let the strangers pass freely.

The encounter quickly grew tense. The captains' interpreters were not fluent in the Teton language, so communication was poor, and the elaborate diplomatic script that had worked with other nations faltered. When the Americans invited several leaders aboard the keelboat and offered whiskey, the situation deteriorated. As the captains tried to send the leaders ashore, warriors seized the bowline of one of the pirogues, and a chief the Americans called the Partisan behaved, in their view, insolently and threateningly. Clark drew his sword; the men on the keelboat trained the swivel gun and readied their weapons; the Teton warriors strung their bows. For a few moments the two parties stood on the edge of a fight that, given the expedition's small numbers, the Corps might well have lost.

The crisis was defused largely through the intervention of Black Buffalo, a principal Teton leader, who ordered the warriors to release the boat. Over the following days the two sides maintained an uneasy peace, exchanging visits and hospitality even as mutual suspicion simmered. The Teton hosted the captains in their village, and the Americans were impressed by aspects of Teton life even as they resented what they saw as extortion. After several anxious days the expedition continued upriver, having neither been stopped nor having truly established the friendly trading relationship Jefferson had envisioned.

The encounter with the Teton Sioux left a lasting bitterness on the American side; Lewis and Clark wrote of the Teton with hostility and would carry that attitude into their later careers in Indian affairs. From the Teton perspective, the expedition was an intrusion that threatened their economic and political power, and their wary, assertive response was entirely rational. The episode is a useful corrective to any simple narrative of the expedition as a peaceful procession through welcoming country. The Corps survived its most dangerous early confrontation not through force but because a Native leader chose, for his own reasons, to step back from violence.

10. Winter at Fort Mandan

By late October 1804 the expedition reached the villages of the Mandan and Hidatsa peoples, clustered near the great bend of the Missouri in present-day North Dakota. These villages were among the most important settlements on the northern plains, populous towns of earth lodges that served as a hub of trade for the entire region. Crops of corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers grew in the bottomlands; the villagers traded agricultural surplus, horses, and goods with nomadic plains peoples and with British and French-Canadian traders who came down from Canada. Here the Corps would spend its first winter, sheltered among populous and generally hospitable hosts.

The men set to work building a fortified camp, which they named Fort Mandan, a triangular stockade of cottonwood huts that gave them shelter against a winter of extraordinary severity. Temperatures plunged far below zero; the journals record bitter cold that froze the river solid and tested even the hardy frontiersmen, several of whom suffered frostbite. Yet the winter was also a sociable and productive time. The captains conducted diplomacy with the Mandan and Hidatsa leaders, gathered intelligence about the country ahead from villagers and visiting traders who had been farther west, and traded for corn, partly with the help of the expedition's blacksmiths, whose ability to repair and make metal tools made them valued partners.

Diplomacy and rivalry

At the Mandan villages the expedition also brushed up against the wider imperial contest for the West. British traders from the North West Company were active among the Mandan and Hidatsa, and the captains were keenly aware that they were competing for influence with agents of a rival power. They sought to assert American authority and to draw the village nations toward trade with the United States, with mixed and largely symbolic success. The villagers welcomed the Americans chiefly for the trade goods and services they offered and pursued their own interests throughout, as Native nations did at every stage of the journey.

Charbonneau and Sacagawea

It was at Fort Mandan that the expedition acquired two of its most important members. Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian fur trader living among the Hidatsa, offered his services as an interpreter. More valuable than Charbonneau himself was one of his wives, a young Lemhi Shoshone woman whom history knows as Sacagawea. She had been captured as a girl by a Hidatsa raiding party far to the west, near the Rocky Mountains, and brought to the villages, where Charbonneau had acquired her. Because the expedition would need to obtain horses from the Shoshone to cross the mountains, a Shoshone interpreter was of immense potential value. The captains hired Charbonneau with the understanding that Sacagawea would accompany the party. In February 1805, while still at Fort Mandan, Sacagawea gave birth to a son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, whom Clark would later affectionately nickname Pomp. The infant would make the entire journey to the Pacific and back on his mother's back.

In the spring of 1805, as the river opened, the captains made their dispositions for the next phase. They sent the large keelboat back down the river to St. Louis under a small detachment, carrying the expedition's reports, maps, journals, and a remarkable collection of specimens for Jefferson: plants, animal skins and skeletons, mineral samples, Native artifacts, and live animals including the prairie dog. The permanent party that would continue west numbered around thirty-three people, including the captains, the soldiers, Drouillard, York, Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and the infant Jean Baptiste. On April 7, 1805, this company set off up the Missouri into country that no member of the expedition, and few people of European or American background, had ever seen.

11. Sacagawea: The Shoshone Interpreter

Few figures in American history have been so thoroughly transformed by legend as Sacagawea. In the popular imagination she became a romantic heroine, a beautiful Indian princess who guided the expedition across the continent. The historical reality, recoverable in fragments from the journals, is both more modest and more interesting. Sacagawea was a teenage mother, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, carrying an infant through some of the most difficult country on the continent, who made real and specific contributions to the expedition's success while remaining, in the eyes of the men who recorded her, a peripheral figure whose inner life they rarely tried to capture.

She was born among the Lemhi Shoshone, a people of the mountains near the present Idaho-Montana border, and was captured around the age of twelve by a Hidatsa raiding party that carried her hundreds of miles east to the villages on the Missouri. There she became one of the wives of Toussaint Charbonneau. When the expedition hired Charbonneau, it was Sacagawea's knowledge of the Shoshone language and country, not her husband's skills, that made the couple valuable, for the captains knew they would need to negotiate with the Shoshone for horses to cross the mountains.

Her contributions

Sacagawea's documented contributions were several and significant, though they fall short of the guiding role legend assigns her. She gathered wild plants, roots, and berries that supplemented and varied the party's meat-heavy diet, drawing on knowledge the men lacked. She recognized landmarks as the expedition approached her childhood country, providing reassurance that they were on the right track. Above all, her presence, and that of her baby, served as a living signal of the expedition's peaceful intent: a war party did not travel with a woman and an infant, and Native peoples who encountered the Corps could read that fact at a glance. Clark himself noted that her presence reconciled some they met to the party's good intentions.

One celebrated episode shows her composure. In May 1805, when a sudden squall nearly capsized the white pirogue and Charbonneau, at the helm, panicked, Sacagawea calmly retrieved many of the valuable instruments, books, and papers that had washed overboard, salvaging materials whose loss would have been a serious blow to the expedition's scientific mission. The captains praised her presence of mind. The episode, more than any imagined feat of guiding, captures her real value: competent, steady, and indispensable in concrete ways.

The reunion and after

The most dramatic moment of Sacagawea's journey came in August 1805, when the expedition finally made contact with the Shoshone and she discovered that the band's leader, Cameahwait, was her own brother. The reunion, recorded in the journals, was an emotional one, and it helped smooth the crucial negotiations for horses. Beyond such moments, the journals tell us frustratingly little about her thoughts and feelings. She endured illness, cold, hunger, and danger alongside the men, all while caring for a baby, and she did so without the recognition or reward the others received.

Sacagawea's later life is shrouded in uncertainty and competing traditions. The most widely accepted historical account holds that she died of an illness in 1812 at a fur-trading post on the Missouri, while still a young woman. A separate Shoshone oral tradition holds that she lived a long life and died on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming in 1884. Her son Jean Baptiste was educated under William Clark's patronage and led an adventurous life as a guide and frontiersman. Whatever the truth of her final years, Sacagawea has become one of the most commemorated women in American history, her image on coinage and her name on countless landmarks, a symbol whose fame far outstrips the modest, real, and genuinely valuable role she played.

12. Into Unknown Country: The Upper Missouri

When the permanent party left Fort Mandan in April 1805, it passed beyond the limit of reliable information. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and visiting traders had described the country ahead, but no one in the party had seen it, and the captains were navigating increasingly by their own observation and judgment. Lewis, in a famous journal entry as they set out, compared their little fleet of canoes and pirogues to the vessels of Columbus and Cook, and confessed that he embarked on this leg of the journey with as much pleasure as he had ever felt. The country they entered was indeed magnificent and strange: high plains, dramatic river bluffs, and an abundance of wildlife that astonished even men who had grown used to the plenty of the plains.

Grizzly bears

It was on the upper Missouri that the Corps made the acquaintance of an animal that would earn its deep respect and fear: the grizzly bear. The Mandan and Hidatsa had spoken of these bears with awe, and the confident American hunters at first discounted the warnings. They learned quickly. The grizzly was enormous, immensely powerful, and astonishingly hard to kill; a bear might absorb many rifle balls and still charge, scattering armed men and pursuing them into the river. Several hunters had narrow escapes, and the journals are full of vivid, alarmed accounts of encounters with the great bears. The grizzly, unknown to science before the expedition described it, became one of the Corps's most memorable discoveries and a standing hazard of the journey.

The Marias decision

In early June 1805 the expedition reached a fork in the river that posed a genuine crisis of navigation. One branch came in from the north, the other from the south, and the captains had no certain way of knowing which was the true Missouri, the one that would lead them toward the mountains and the route west. The men generally favored the north fork, which more resembled the muddy Missouri they had been following, but Lewis and Clark, after careful examination of the currents and the surrounding country, concluded that the south fork was the correct one. The captains' judgment, against the opinion of the experienced rivermen, was a calculated gamble; a wrong choice could waste precious weeks and doom the season's travel. Lewis named the north fork the Marias River, after a cousin. To resolve the question, he set off ahead on foot to reconnoiter.

The captains' confidence was vindicated when Lewis, pressing up the south fork, heard a distant roar and then saw rising spray: the Great Falls of the Missouri, which the Hidatsa had described, confirming beyond doubt that this was the main river. Lewis's account of his first sight of the falls is one of the most lyrical passages in the journals, a rapturous description of the cascading water and the rainbows in its mist. But the falls, magnificent as they were, also meant a formidable obstacle. The river that had carried the expedition for more than a thousand miles could no longer carry it; the boats and all their cargo would have to be hauled overland around the falls, and the season for crossing the mountains was advancing.

13. The Great Falls Portage and the Iron Boat

The portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri, undertaken in the summer of 1805, was one of the most grueling episodes of the entire expedition. The river dropped over a series of cascades across a stretch of roughly eighteen miles, and the men had to carry the canoes and tons of baggage overland the entire distance. They built crude wagons with wheels cut from a cottonwood trunk to haul the loads, but the ground was anything but easy. The prairie was studded with the spines of the prickly pear cactus, which pierced the men's moccasins and feet; the weather alternated between brutal heat and sudden violent storms; and the labor of dragging heavy loads across broken country under such conditions pushed the men to the edge of their endurance.

The journals record the misery and the perseverance of the portage in vivid detail. Men collapsed from heat and exhaustion at the end of each haul, only to rise and do it again. A sudden hailstorm pelted the party with stones of ice large enough to knock men down and draw blood. A flash flood very nearly swept away Clark, Sacagawea, the baby, and Charbonneau, who had taken shelter in a ravine; they scrambled to higher ground just ahead of a wall of water, losing equipment but not their lives. Through it all the men kept working, and the portage, which took the better part of a month, was completed through sheer determination.

The failure of Experiment

It was above the falls that Lewis pinned his hopes on his iron-frame boat, Experiment, the collapsible craft he had designed and had built at Harpers Ferry and carried all the way from the East for just this moment. The frame was assembled and covered with sewn hides, and Lewis confidently expected a light, capacious vessel for the upper river. But the plan depended on sealing the seams between the hides with pine pitch, and in that country there were no pines to supply it. The men improvised a mixture of tallow, charcoal, and beeswax, but it would not hold; when the boat was launched it leaked through every seam and had to be abandoned. Lewis recorded his disappointment with evident chagrin. The episode is a reminder that even the most careful planning could not anticipate the particular realities of an unknown country, and that the expedition's survival depended above all on its capacity to improvise.

With Experiment a failure, the men fell back on the proven method of the frontier: they found suitable cottonwood trees and laboriously hollowed out additional dugout canoes. By mid-July 1805 the expedition was afloat again above the falls, pressing on toward the mountains whose snow-capped peaks were now visible on the horizon. The country was growing higher and harder, the river faster and shallower, and a quiet anxiety ran beneath the journals: the season was advancing, the mountains loomed, and the expedition still had no horses with which to cross them. Everything now depended on finding the Shoshone.

14. The Shoshone and the Continental Divide

As the expedition pushed up the dwindling Missouri toward its source, the captains grew increasingly anxious to make contact with the Shoshone, the mountain people from whom they hoped to obtain the horses essential for crossing the Rockies. In late July 1805 the party reached a place where three rivers joined to form the Missouri, which the captains named the Three Forks; they called the three streams the Jefferson, the Madison, and the Gallatin, after the president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of the treasury. This was country Sacagawea recognized from her childhood, and her presence offered hope that the Shoshone were near. But the Shoshone, wary of raids by their enemies, had withdrawn into the mountains and were hard to find.

Lewis, characteristically, went ahead on foot with a small party to search for them. In mid-August he crossed the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass, and in doing so confronted the central geographic fact of the expedition. At the top of the pass, where Lewis and his men expected, in keeping with the old dream, to look down upon a gentle westward-flowing river that would carry them toward the Pacific, they instead saw range after range of mountains stretching to the horizon. There was no easy water passage, no short portage between the Missouri and the Columbia, no Northwest Passage. The defining hope of the expedition, and of three centuries of geographic speculation, died at Lemhi Pass. Ahead lay not a river road to the sea but a vast and forbidding sea of mountains.

Contact with the Shoshone

Just over the divide, Lewis at last made contact with a band of Shoshone. The meeting was delicate; the Shoshone, having suffered from the raids of better-armed enemies, were understandably suspicious of armed strangers. Lewis worked carefully to establish peaceful relations, and after tense initial encounters he persuaded the band's leader to accompany him back toward the river to meet the main party. The captains needed not only horses but goodwill, for without the Shoshone's cooperation the expedition could not cross the mountains before winter.

Then came one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the annals of exploration. When the Shoshone leader, Cameahwait, came face to face with Sacagawea during the negotiations, the two recognized each other: Cameahwait was Sacagawea's brother, from whom she had been separated since her capture years before. The reunion was deeply emotional, and it transformed the atmosphere of the negotiations. The captains, who had feared they might have to bargain hard or even fight for horses, found themselves dealing with a leader bound to their interpreter by blood. The Shoshone agreed to provide horses and a guide, an aged man the Americans called Old Toby, who knew a route through the mountains.

The encounter with the Shoshone illustrates, as clearly as any episode in the journey, how completely the expedition depended on Native peoples for its survival. Without Shoshone horses the Corps could not have crossed the Rockies; without Sacagawea's language and her kinship with Cameahwait, the negotiations might have failed; without Native guides the party would have been lost in the mountains. The captains were brave and capable, but they were also, at this crucial juncture and many others, utterly reliant on the knowledge, generosity, and forbearance of the people whose country they were passing through. The hardest part of the journey, the crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains, still lay ahead, and the expedition would need every horse and every scrap of guidance it had obtained.

15. Crossing the Bitterroots

The crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains in September 1805 was the most desperate ordeal of the entire expedition. Having obtained horses from the Shoshone, the Corps set out to follow an ancient Native trail, the route the local peoples used to cross the mountains to hunt buffalo on the plains. The trail, known to history as the Lolo Trail, wound through the rugged Bitterroot Range along narrow ridges and through dense forest, climbing and descending through some of the most difficult terrain in North America. The captains had been told the crossing was hard; they had not grasped how hard.

The party entered the mountains as autumn was turning to winter. Early snow blanketed the high country, obscuring the trail and chilling men already worn down by months of labor. The forest offered little game; the hunters, ranging through the timber, found almost nothing to shoot. The horses struggled and sometimes fell on the steep, icy slopes, and at least one rolled down a mountainside with its load. Hunger became acute. The men, having nothing else, were reduced to killing and eating some of their young horses, and to boiling the dried portable soup they detested. Lewis recorded that the men grew weak and dispirited, and the captains feared for the survival of the party.

Old Toby, the Shoshone guide, lost the trail at one point in the snow, costing precious time, though he eventually found it again. Day after day the men pushed forward through the cold and the timber, descending and climbing, never sure how much farther the mountains extended. It was, by the testimony of the journals, the closest the expedition came to disaster: not a sudden catastrophe but a slow grinding down of strength and hope in a frozen wilderness with no food and no certainty of escape. The crossing took roughly eleven days, and it left the men gaunt, sick, and exhausted.

Deliverance on the Weippe Prairie

At last, in late September, the Corps stumbled out of the mountains onto the Weippe Prairie, where they encountered the Nez Perce people. The Nez Perce fed the starving men generously with dried salmon and with cakes made from the camas root, a staple of their diet. The famished men ate greedily, and many fell sick, their bodies unaccustomed to the rich, strange food after near starvation. But they had survived. The Nez Perce, who might easily have taken advantage of the weakened strangers, instead extended hospitality that very likely saved the expedition. According to a tradition later recorded, the Nez Perce debated whether to kill the vulnerable newcomers and were dissuaded by an elderly woman who had once been treated kindly by white people; whatever the truth of the story, the Nez Perce chose friendship, and the expedition lived because of it.

Among the Nez Perce the men slowly recovered their strength. The captains arranged to leave their horses in the care of the Nez Perce, to be reclaimed on the return journey, and branded them for identification. Having crossed the mountains, the expedition was once again on waters that flowed toward the Pacific, and the men set about building canoes to carry them down the rivers to the sea. The hardest physical trial of the journey was behind them. Ahead lay the comparatively swift descent of the western rivers and, at last, the ocean that was their goal.

16. Down the Columbia to the Pacific

With their strength restored among the Nez Perce, the men built dugout canoes, burning and hollowing logs in the efficient manner their hosts taught them, and in early October 1805 they launched onto the Clearwater River. For the first time since leaving the Mississippi, the current was with them. After more than a year of fighting upstream against the Missouri, the sensation of being carried swiftly downstream toward their goal was exhilarating, even as the rapids of the western rivers posed new dangers. The Clearwater carried them to the Snake, and the Snake to the great Columbia, the major river of the Pacific Northwest.

The country and its peoples changed as the expedition descended. Here, in the rich salmon culture of the Columbia, lived numerous and populous nations whose way of life centered on the river's vast annual runs of fish. The men passed villages where salmon were caught, dried, and stored in great quantities, and they traded for food, increasingly relying on dried fish and on dogs, which they purchased and ate, a practice that the salmon-eating river peoples found odd but that the meat-hungry Corps adopted without complaint. The journals record the elaborate fishing technology of the Columbia peoples, their plank houses, their canoes, and their abundant material culture.

The rapids and the gorge

The Columbia was not an easy road. At Celilo Falls and the narrows below it, and again in the rapids of the Cascades where the river cut through the mountains, the canoes had to be portaged or run through dangerous water. The captains, eager to save time and labor, sometimes chose to run rapids that the local people portaged around, to the astonishment of Native onlookers who lined the banks to watch the strangers risk the white water. The expedition negotiated these hazards with skill and luck, losing no one, and pressed on down the great river through the spectacular gorge where the Columbia breaches the Cascade Range.

The ocean in view

In early November 1805, as the expedition descended the broadening estuary, the men believed they could see and hear the Pacific Ocean. Clark recorded the moment in his journal with a now-famous note expressing the great joy of the party at the sight of the ocean they had traveled so far to reach. In fact, what they first saw was the wide tidal estuary of the Columbia rather than the open sea, and rough water and storms would pin them down for days before they reached the coast proper. But the goal was as good as attained. The Corps of Discovery had crossed the continent. They had traveled from the Mississippi to the Pacific by a route no party of their nation had ever followed, and they had arrived, against all the hardships of the way, with their company nearly intact.

As the expedition prepared to settle for the winter on the Pacific coast, the captains faced a decision about where to build their winter quarters. In a striking moment, recorded in the journals, they put the question to a vote of the entire party. Every member was allowed to express a preference, including York, the enslaved man, and Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman. That an enslaved man and a Native woman were permitted to vote on a matter of consequence, decades before either could have done so in the wider society of the United States, has often been noted as a remarkable, if isolated, instance of frontier egalitarianism born of shared hardship. The party chose to cross to the south side of the Columbia, where game was reported to be more plentiful, and there they built their winter fort.

17. Fort Clatsop: A Wet Winter

The expedition spent the winter of 1805 to 1806 at Fort Clatsop, a small stockade they built near the south shore of the Columbia estuary, in present-day Oregon, named for the Clatsop people who lived nearby. If the previous winter at Fort Mandan had been a trial of cold, this one was a trial of damp. The Pacific Northwest coast in winter is a place of nearly ceaseless rain, and the journals record the unrelenting wet that rotted the men's leather clothing, spoiled their food, and kept them perpetually miserable. Clark noted that during their months on the coast there were only a handful of days without rain. The men, cooped up in their leaky huts, suffered from fleas, illness, and the grinding boredom of a long, gray, idle season.

Despite the discomfort, the winter at Fort Clatsop was a period of valuable work. The captains used the months to write up their observations, to refine their maps, and to compile detailed records of the country and peoples they had encountered. Clark produced careful charts; Lewis wrote extensive descriptions of the plants, animals, and especially the Native nations of the Columbia, recording their appearance, customs, technology, and the words of their languages. The journals of the Fort Clatsop winter are among the richest ethnographic and natural-history records the expedition produced. A detail of men was sent to the seashore to establish a salt-making camp, boiling seawater to produce the salt the party needed to preserve meat and season its food, and hunters ranged after elk, the mainstay of the winter diet.

Trade and a missed ship

The expedition had hoped to encounter one of the trading ships that occasionally visited the mouth of the Columbia, both to resupply and perhaps to send word and specimens home by sea. No such ship appeared during their stay, and the opportunity was missed, though the captains learned from the coastal peoples the names of various ship captains who traded there, evidence of the established maritime fur trade of the region. Relations with the local Clatsop and Chinook peoples were generally peaceful but marked by hard bargaining; the coastal nations were experienced traders, accustomed to dealing with European and American ships, and they drove shrewd bargains that the Americans, their trade goods dwindling, sometimes resented. In one celebrated episode, Clark led a party, which Sacagawea insisted on joining, to a whale that had beached near present-day Tillamook Head; finding that the local people had already stripped the carcass, the Americans traded for several hundred pounds of blubber and some oil to carry back to the fort. Another memorable exchange was the acquisition of a sea otter robe so fine that the captains coveted it.

By late winter the men were eager to begin the long journey home. Their trade goods were nearly exhausted, reduced to a quantity that, as Lewis ruefully noted, could scarcely fill a pair of pockets, a serious problem for a party that depended on trade for food and horses. The captains decided to depart as early as the season allowed, even though they would have to wait in the mountains for the snow to melt before they could recross the Bitterroots. On March 23, 1806, the Corps abandoned Fort Clatsop, leaving it to a local leader, and started up the Columbia, beginning the return to the United States. Behind them lay the ocean they had crossed a continent to reach; ahead lay the mountains, the plains, and the long river road home.

18. The Return and the Divided Parties

The return journey of 1806 was in some ways more confident than the outbound trip, for the captains now knew the country and the peoples along the way, but it carried its own dangers and difficulties. Ascending the Columbia against the current, the party again depended on trade for food, and with their goods nearly gone they struggled to feed themselves; relations with some of the river peoples grew strained. Reaching the country of the Nez Perce, they reclaimed the horses they had left the previous autumn and waited for the deep mountain snows to melt enough to permit a crossing. An early attempt to cross the Bitterroots failed when the party encountered impassable snow and had to turn back, the only time on the entire journey they were forced to retreat. With Nez Perce guides, they succeeded on a second attempt in late June, crossing in a fraction of the time the westbound ordeal had taken.

The expedition divides

At a place they called Travelers' Rest, near present-day Missoula, Montana, the captains made a bold decision: they would split the expedition into several parties to explore more of the country on the way home. Lewis would lead one group north and east to explore the Marias River, the very stream whose course had puzzled them the year before, hoping to determine how far north the watershed extended, a question of importance for the boundary with British territory. Clark would lead another group south and east to explore the Yellowstone River. The two leaders would travel separately across hundreds of miles of country and reunite at the confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri. It was a risky plan, dividing an already small party in unknown and sometimes hostile country, but it greatly increased the expedition's geographic yield.

The fight with the Blackfeet

Lewis's exploration of the Marias produced the only deadly violence between the expedition and Native people in the entire journey. In late July 1806, Lewis and a small party encountered a group of young Blackfeet men. The two groups camped together uneasily, and at dawn the Blackfeet attempted to take the Americans' guns and horses. In the ensuing struggle, two of the Blackfeet were killed, one stabbed and one shot. Lewis and his men, fearing pursuit by a larger Blackfeet force, made a desperate ride of many hours to rejoin the rest of the party and escape the country. The encounter, brief and violent, helped sour relations between the Blackfeet and Americans for decades afterward, with lasting consequences for the later fur trade. It stands in grim contrast to the expedition's generally peaceful passage and underscores how close the Corps came, more than once, to bloodier conflict.

An accidental wound and reunion

Lewis's bad luck on the return continued. Shortly after the Blackfeet fight, while hunting elk, he was accidentally shot through the buttocks and thigh by Pierre Cruzatte, the nearsighted, one-eyed boatman, who had apparently mistaken Lewis's buckskin-clad figure for an elk in the thick brush. The wound was painful and disabling, and Lewis spent the following weeks recovering, unable to walk and forced to lie in a canoe. Meanwhile Clark's party descended the Yellowstone, where Clark carved his name on a sandstone landmark he called Pompey's Pillar, after Sacagawea's son. The two parties reunited as planned near the mouth of the Yellowstone in mid-August 1806, the whole company together again after their separate explorations.

The reunited expedition then swept rapidly down the familiar Missouri, the current now carrying them homeward at a speed unimaginable on the upward journey. They paused at the Mandan villages, where Charbonneau and Sacagawea and their son left the party, returning to the life they had known before. The Corps pressed on, meeting traders coming upriver, the first heralds of the settlement and commerce their journey would help unleash. On September 23, 1806, the expedition arrived at St. Louis, to the astonishment of a population that had largely given them up for dead. They had been gone nearly two and a half years. They had crossed the continent and returned. The Corps of Discovery had completed its journey.

19. Science, Maps, and Discoveries

Although the expedition failed to find the all-water route across the continent that Jefferson had hoped for, it succeeded brilliantly in the scientific and geographic tasks he had set it. The Corps of Discovery returned with an unprecedented body of knowledge about the natural world and the human geography of the West, much of it recorded in the expedition's journals and embodied in the maps Clark produced. The journey was, among other things, one of the great scientific expeditions of its era, comparable in ambition if not in resources to the contemporaneous voyages of European exploration.

Natural history

The expedition described scores of plants and animals previously unknown to Western science. Historians have credited the Corps with documenting on the order of a hundred and seventy or more plants and roughly a hundred and twenty animals that were new to the science of the day. Among the animals were the grizzly bear, the pronghorn, the prairie dog, the mountain beaver, the bighorn sheep, several species of squirrel and bird, and many others. The men collected specimens where they could, pressed plants, prepared skins and skeletons, and recorded careful descriptions of size, color, habits, and habitat. Some specimens were lost to damp, accident, or the difficulties of transport, but a remarkable number reached the East, and the descriptions in the journals preserved knowledge of species the specimens could not. Lewis, with his Philadelphia training, was the principal naturalist, and his descriptions, for all the limits of his expertise, were often acute and valuable.

Ethnography

Equally important were the expedition's observations of the Native nations of the West. Following Jefferson's detailed instructions, the captains recorded the names, locations, populations, customs, technologies, and languages of the many peoples they encountered, from the Oto and the Sioux of the plains to the Mandan and Hidatsa of the upper Missouri, the Shoshone and Nez Perce of the mountains, and the salmon-fishing nations of the Columbia. They collected vocabularies, described material culture, and noted the trade networks, alliances, and rivalries that structured Native political life. These records, for all their limitations and biases, constitute an invaluable early portrait of Native peoples of the West at the moment before sustained American intrusion transformed their world. They are read today not only as records of the peoples described but as documents of how the Americans saw, and often misunderstood, those peoples.

The maps

Perhaps the single greatest scientific achievement of the expedition was cartographic. William Clark, drawing on his own observations, the reports of others, and information gathered from Native peoples, produced over the course of the journey and in the years after a master map of the American West that was vastly more accurate than anything that had come before. His great map, completed after the expedition, showed for the first time the true breadth and complexity of the western mountains, correcting the old fantasy of a single narrow range and a short portage to the Pacific. It depicted the courses of the major rivers, the relationships of the watersheds, and the general lay of the country between the Mississippi and the sea. For decades it remained the foundational map of the region, the framework on which later explorers and settlers built. In replacing imagined geography with observed geography, Clark's map was the expedition's most enduring intellectual legacy.

The journals themselves, finally, are a treasure of a different kind. Kept by the captains and by several enlisted men, they record the journey day by day in a mixture of practical observation, scientific description, and unguarded human feeling. They are, by turns, dry, vivid, lyrical, and harrowing, and they have become one of the great primary sources of American history and a work of unintended literature. Their idiosyncratic spelling and unpolished prose only add to their immediacy. It is largely through the journals that we know the expedition at all, and it is through them that the long effort to understand and publish the Corps's discoveries has proceeded across the two centuries since.

20. Aftermath, Legacy, and the Fates of the Corps

The members of the Corps of Discovery returned as heroes, and a grateful government rewarded them. The enlisted men received double pay and grants of land; the captains received larger land grants and prominent appointments. Jefferson was delighted with the expedition's results, and the captains were celebrated, at least for a time, as national figures. But the later lives of the principal members of the expedition were as varied, and in some cases as tragic, as the journey itself had been eventful.

Meriwether Lewis

Lewis was appointed governor of the vast Upper Louisiana Territory, with its capital at St. Louis. The role proved ill-suited to his temperament. He struggled with the administrative and political demands of the office, fell into financial difficulties and disputes over his expenses, and was slow to prepare the expedition's journals for publication, a task Jefferson urgently wished him to complete. His old melancholy deepened, very likely compounded by heavy drinking and possibly by illness. In the autumn of 1809, traveling east to defend his conduct and to advance the publication of the journals, Lewis died of gunshot wounds at an inn called Grinder's Stand on the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. The weight of evidence, including the judgment of Jefferson and Clark, who knew his troubled state of mind, points to suicide, though some have argued for murder, and the question has never been settled with certainty. He was thirty-five. The death of the expedition's leader, so soon after its triumphant return and with the journals still unpublished, was a melancholy coda to the journey's success.

William Clark

Clark, by contrast, lived a long and prominent life. He became the federal government's principal agent for Indian affairs in the West and later governor of the Missouri Territory, positions in which he dealt for decades with the Native nations the expedition had encountered. His record in those roles was complex: he was regarded by many Native leaders as relatively fair and trustworthy by the standards of the time, yet he was also an instrument of the very expansion that dispossessed them, and he oversaw treaties that stripped Native nations of their lands. Clark took a personal interest in the education of Sacagawea's son, Jean Baptiste, whom he had nicknamed Pomp. He carried the burden of seeing the expedition's journals into print after Lewis's death, arranging for an edited narrative, and he kept the expedition's memory alive until his own death in 1838.

York, Sacagawea, and the others

The fates of the expedition's other notable members varied widely. York, who had labored and risked his life alongside the free members of the Corps, returned to enslavement, and his request for the freedom he felt he had earned was for years denied by Clark, straining their relationship. Clark eventually freed York, who by some accounts went into business with a wagon and team, though the details of his later life and death are uncertain and contested. The thread of York's story is among the most painful in the expedition's aftermath, a reminder that the journey's celebrated egalitarianism did not survive its return to the society that had produced it. Sacagawea, as noted, died young by the most widely accepted account, though Shoshone tradition holds otherwise. Several of the enlisted men went on to careers in the western fur trade that the expedition had helped to open; some prospered, and some met violent ends in the country they had helped to map. George Drouillard, the invaluable interpreter and hunter, was killed by Blackfeet a few years later while trapping on the upper Missouri.

The journals and the long reckoning

The publication history of the expedition's records is itself a long saga. A narrative account, edited by Nicholas Biddle and based on the journals, appeared in 1814, but it presented the story of the journey while largely omitting the wealth of scientific data the expedition had gathered. For most of the nineteenth century the full scientific harvest of the expedition lay unpublished and underappreciated, scattered among manuscripts and partly lost. Only with the scholarly editions of later generations, culminating in the comprehensive modern edition of the journals edited in the late twentieth century, did the complete record become available and the expedition's full achievement become clear. The slow recovery of the journals mirrors the slow recovery of the expedition's reputation, which has risen and fallen and been reexamined many times across two centuries.

A contested legacy

The legacy of the Lewis and Clark expedition is genuinely double-edged, and any honest assessment must hold its achievements and its consequences together. On one side stand the undeniable accomplishments: an epic feat of endurance and leadership, a major advance in the scientific knowledge of the continent, a cartographic achievement that reshaped the map of North America, and a wealth of records that remain invaluable to this day. The expedition demonstrated that the continent could be crossed, strengthened the American claim to the Pacific Northwest, and captured the national imagination in a way that endures. On the other side stand the consequences for the peoples whose country the expedition crossed. The Corps of Discovery was the advance guard of an American expansion that, over the following century, would dispossess, displace, and devastate the Native nations of the West, the very peoples who had fed, guided, sheltered, and spared the expedition. The hospitality of the Mandan, the Shoshone, the Nez Perce, and others made the journey possible; the expansion the journey helped set in motion repaid that hospitality with conquest.

Two centuries on, the expedition is commemorated across the American landscape in the names of rivers, mountains, counties, and towns, in a national historic trail that follows its route, and in a vast literature of scholarship and popular history. The bicentennial of the journey, observed in the early years of the twenty-first century, occasioned a notable reexamination, much of it conducted in dialogue with the descendants of the Native nations the expedition encountered, who brought their own histories and perspectives to a story long told only from the explorers' side. The Lewis and Clark expedition endures as one of the central episodes of American history precisely because it contains so much: courage and cruelty, discovery and dispossession, the opening of a continent and the closing of a world. To understand it fully is to understand something essential, and something troubling, about the nation it helped to make.

21. Jefferson's Instructions: A Blueprint for Discovery

The letter of instructions that Thomas Jefferson composed for Meriwether Lewis in June 1803 deserves to be read as one of the founding documents of American science, for it laid out, in a few thousand words, an entire program for the systematic study of an unknown half of a continent. Jefferson was not a passive sponsor who handed over money and waited for results. He was the intellectual author of the expedition, and his instructions reflect the breadth of his Enlightenment curiosity and the precision of his planning. They specify what to observe, how to record it, how to preserve the records against loss, and how to behave toward the peoples encountered along the way. To study the instructions is to understand the expedition's purposes as its sponsor conceived them.

The central charge was geographic and commercial: Lewis was to explore the Missouri River and such principal streams of it as might offer, by their course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, the most direct and practicable water route across the continent for the purposes of commerce. This single sentence encapsulated the great hope of the venture, the dream of an easy passage that would channel the wealth of the western fur trade through American hands and link the Mississippi valley to the markets of Asia. Everything else in the instructions, however expansive, was in some sense secondary to this commercial and strategic objective, which the expedition would ultimately prove to be unattainable.

The scientific program

Around this core Jefferson built an extraordinarily ambitious scientific agenda. Lewis was to take careful observations of latitude and longitude at the mouths of rivers, at rapids, at islands, and at other notable points, fixing the geography of the West with instruments. He was to study the soil and the face of the country, its growth and vegetable productions, the animals of the country generally and especially any not known in the East, the mineral productions of every kind, and the climate as characterized by the proportion of rainy, cloudy, and clear days, by temperature, by the winds, by the dates of the appearance of particular birds, reptiles, or insects, and by the times of flowering and leafing of plants. This was a charge to conduct, in effect, a continuous natural-history and meteorological survey across thousands of miles, and the journals show the captains making a genuine and sustained effort to fulfill it.

Observing the nations

Jefferson devoted careful attention to the Native peoples of the West. He instructed Lewis to learn the names of the nations and their numbers; the extent and limits of their possessions; their relations with other tribes or nations; their language, traditions, and monuments; their ordinary occupations in agriculture, fishing, hunting, war, and the arts; their food, clothing, and domestic accommodations; the diseases prevalent among them and the remedies they used; and the moral and physical circumstances that distinguished them from the tribes the Americans already knew. He directed Lewis to treat the nations in the most friendly and conciliatory manner, to acquaint them with the peaceful and commercial intentions of the United States, and to make a real effort at goodwill. This ethnographic charge produced some of the most valuable records the expedition generated, even as the gap between Jefferson's intentions and the realities of contact, and the cultural assumptions the captains carried, limited and shaped what they saw.

Redundancy and care

Characteristically, Jefferson thought about the fragility of knowledge. He instructed Lewis to keep his records carefully and to make multiple copies, entrusting them to the care of the most trustworthy of his attendants, against the accidents of the journey, so that one set might survive even if another were lost. He suggested that some copies be written on the paper of the birch, which resisted damp, as a safeguard. He even contemplated the possibility that the expedition might find it safer to return by sea, and he authorized Lewis to draw on the credit of the United States to obtain passage on any trading vessel he might encounter on the Pacific coast, furnishing him with a letter of credit to that effect. The thoroughness of these provisions, anticipating loss, disaster, and the need for alternate routes home, reflects the seriousness with which Jefferson approached the venture and his determination that its hard-won knowledge should not perish with its members. The instructions, in sum, were the expedition's true charter, and the degree to which the captains fulfilled them is a measure of the journey's success.

22. The Imperial Chessboard: The Contest for the West

The Lewis and Clark expedition was not a journey into an empty land or a purely scientific excursion; it was a move in a long contest among empires for control of the western half of North America. To understand the expedition's strategic dimension, one must see the West of 1804 as it appeared to the statesmen of the age: a vast arena in which Spain, Britain, Russia, and the young United States all pressed competing claims and ambitions, and in which the Native nations who actually inhabited the country pursued their own interests amid the maneuvering of distant powers.

Spain

Spain possessed the oldest and largest European presence in the West. Its empire reached up from Mexico through the present American Southwest, with outposts at Santa Fe and missions and presidios along the California coast. Spanish officials regarded the American expedition with deep suspicion, correctly perceiving it as a threat to their northern frontier. In fact, Spanish authorities, alerted to the expedition, dispatched parties from Santa Fe to intercept and turn back the Americans; these parties searched for the Corps but never found it, the vastness of the country defeating their efforts. Spain's claims in the West were extensive but thinly held, and the Louisiana Purchase, by transferring France's claims to the United States, brought an aggressive new rival to the borders of Spain's empire.

Britain

Britain was the rival Jefferson feared most, for British power in the West was commercial, dynamic, and expanding. Through the Hudson's Bay Company and the North West Company, British traders dominated the fur trade of Canada and were pushing westward across the plains and into the Pacific Northwest. British traders were active among the Mandan and Hidatsa villages when the expedition wintered there, and the captains were acutely conscious of competing with them for the allegiance of the village nations. Alexander Mackenzie's crossing of the continent in 1793 and his published call for Britain to seize the western fur trade had directly spurred Jefferson to action. The expedition was, in part, a race to plant the American flag and American influence in the Pacific Northwest before Britain could consolidate its hold, a contest that would continue for decades and would not be settled until the boundary agreements of the mid-nineteenth century.

Russia

From the far northwest, Russia extended its reach down the Pacific coast from its base in Alaska, pursuing the lucrative trade in sea-otter pelts prized in the Chinese market. Russian activity gave the contest for the Pacific Northwest a fourth player and added urgency to the American and British efforts to establish claims on the coast. The mouth of the Columbia River, which the expedition reached in 1805, was a focal point of this maritime competition; trading ships of several nations visited the coast, and the coastal peoples were already experienced in dealing with seaborne traders. The expedition's overland arrival at the Columbia was meant, among other things, to strengthen the American claim to this contested coast by right of exploration.

The Native nations

Beneath and around the rivalries of the European powers lay the older and more immediate reality of Native political life. The nations of the West were not pawns in the imperial game but sovereign peoples with their own territories, alliances, rivalries, and interests, and they engaged the newcomers accordingly. The Teton Sioux sought to preserve their control of the river trade; the Mandan and Hidatsa welcomed traders who served their commercial interests; the Shoshone and Nez Perce calculated the advantages of alliance with a people who might supply them with guns against their enemies. The captains' announcements of a new great father in Washington and a change of sovereignty meant little on the ground, where real power lay with the nations who controlled the country. The expedition moved through this Native world as a small and vulnerable party, dependent on the goodwill of its hosts, even as it imagined itself the herald of a new imperial order. The contest for the West, in the end, would be decided not in the councils of European capitals but in the long, grinding encounter between an expanding United States and the Native nations whose country it coveted, an encounter the expedition helped to begin.

23. Daily Life in the Corps of Discovery

Behind the grand narrative of discovery lay the daily reality of an expedition's life: the food, the labor, the discipline, the small pleasures, and the endless physical demands that filled the hours between the dramatic episodes. The journals, read closely, reveal a great deal about how the members of the Corps actually lived through their long journey, and that texture of daily experience is essential to understanding what the expedition was.

Food and the hunt

The central fact of daily life was food, and the central labor of feeding the party was hunting. The men of the Corps were prodigious eaters; the heavy physical work of moving boats and baggage demanded enormous quantities of calories, and the journals record consumption that astonishes modern readers, with estimates that an active man might eat several pounds of meat in a day when meat was plentiful. The hunters, above all the incomparable George Drouillard and the Field brothers, ranged ahead and to the sides of the party in search of game, and the party's fortunes rose and fell with their success. On the game-rich plains, the men feasted on buffalo, elk, deer, and pronghorn; in the lean country of the mountains, they went hungry and were reduced to eating horses, dogs, and the despised portable soup. To the meat the party added what it could: roots and berries gathered by Sacagawea and others, fish traded from the river peoples, corn obtained from the village nations, and a dwindling stock of flour and other staples carried from the East.

Labor and routine

The expedition's days were governed by labor and by a military routine. On the river, the men rowed, poled, sailed, and towed the boats from dawn until the captains called a halt, the work varying with the current and the weather but rarely easy. In camp, there were boats to repair, baggage to dry, game to butcher and preserve, journals to write, observations to take, and guard to stand against theft or attack. The party generally rose early, traveled through the day with a midday rest, and made camp in the evening, when the cooks prepared the meal, the hunters brought in their game, and the captains recorded the day. Sundays brought no rest in unknown country, though the men sometimes had occasion for celebration on holidays; the journals note observances of Christmas, New Year, and Independence Day, marked with extra rations, a dram of whiskey, music, and dancing.

Discipline and morale

Discipline was strict, as it had to be in a small party whose survival depended on order. Early in the journey the captains held courts-martial for drunkenness, sleeping on guard, and insubordination, and they imposed hard punishments, including flogging, to establish their authority and to weed out unreliable men. As the journey progressed and the party hardened into a cohesive company, such offenses grew rare, and the captains relied increasingly on the men's loyalty and shared sense of purpose. Morale was sustained by the small pleasures available in the wilderness: the music of Cruzatte's fiddle, around which the men and their Native hosts often danced; the camaraderie of shared hardship; the satisfaction of work accomplished and dangers survived; and the steady, fair, and humane leadership of the captains, who shared the party's privations and earned its devotion. The remarkable cohesion of the Corps, which crossed a continent and back with only one death and almost no serious internal conflict, was itself one of the expedition's quiet achievements.

Clothing and shelter

The clothing the party set out with, the cloth and leather of the settled East, wore out quickly under the demands of the journey, and the men increasingly dressed themselves in garments made from the skins of the animals they hunted, sewing buckskin shirts, leggings, and moccasins in the manner of the country. Moccasins wore through with brutal speed on the rocky portages and the cactus-studded plains, and the men were perpetually making new ones. For shelter, the party used tents and improvised lean-tos on the trail and built substantial winter quarters, the forts at Mandan and Clatsop, where they could escape the worst of the weather. The relentless damp of the Pacific coast rotted their leather and tormented them with fleas, while the cold of the northern plains froze the river and brought frostbite. Through all of it the men endured, adapting to each new country as they came to it, and the daily business of staying fed, clothed, and sheltered in unknown lands was, in its way, as great a feat as any of the journey's celebrated dramas.

24. Health, Medicine, and the Body

That the Corps of Discovery crossed and recrossed the continent with the loss of only a single man is, given the state of medicine in 1804 and the hazards of the journey, little short of astonishing. The expedition faced disease, injury, exposure, near starvation, and the constant risk of accident, and it confronted these dangers armed with the limited and often counterproductive medical knowledge of its age. The story of health on the expedition is a window into both the hardihood of the men and the primitive state of the healing arts they relied upon.

The medicine of the age

The medical theory of the early nineteenth century, inherited from older traditions, held that many illnesses arose from impurities or imbalances in the body that should be purged, and treatment accordingly emphasized bleeding, blistering, and above all purging. The expedition's principal medicine was the powerful purgative pill devised by Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, a compound of mercury and other ingredients so vigorous in its effect that the men nicknamed it for the thunderclap of its action. Lewis, who served as the party's physician, dosed the men with these pills for a wide range of complaints, along with laudanum for pain, various tinctures and salves, and mercury preparations used to treat venereal disease, which the men contracted in their encounters with Native women at the villages along the way. By modern understanding, much of this treatment was useless or harmful, and the mercury in particular was a poison; yet it was the best the age could offer, and remarkably the party survived it.

Injuries and ailments

The journals record a steady stream of injuries and ailments: boils, dysentery, fevers, sore eyes inflamed by sun and dust, rheumatism, sprains, cuts, and the chronic miseries of exposure and overwork. The men suffered from the prickly pear that pierced their feet, from the toothache that no one could treat, from the digestive disorders that followed feast and famine, and from the venereal infections that mercury could suppress but not cure. The most serious injuries were the two gunshot wounds of the return journey, the accidental shooting of Lewis by Cruzatte and a wound suffered in the Blackfeet fight, both of which the victims survived. The single death, that of Sergeant Floyd in 1804, was caused by a ruptured appendix, a condition utterly beyond the power of any physician of the time to treat; Floyd would almost certainly have died wherever he had been.

Diet and survival

Diet was both a source of health and a source of affliction. The meat-heavy diet of the plains, monotonous as it was, kept the men strong, but the absence of fresh vegetables and fruit raised the specter of scurvy, which the party largely avoided, perhaps through the roots and berries it gathered and the fresh meat it ate. The feast-and-famine pattern of the journey, gorging on buffalo in times of plenty and starving in the mountains, taxed the men's bodies severely. After the near starvation of the Bitterroot crossing, the sudden rich diet of salmon and camas root provided by the Nez Perce made many of the men violently ill, their bodies unable to cope with the abrupt change. The captains learned, over the journey, to read the relationship between food, country, and health, and their management of the party's nutrition, within the constraints of what the land offered, was a quiet element of the expedition's success.

In the end, the survival of the Corps owed less to the medicine it carried than to the youth, fitness, and toughness of its members, to the captains' attentive and humane care, and to a substantial measure of good fortune. The men were hardened frontiersmen and soldiers in the prime of life, selected for their constitution and inured to hardship. They endured wounds, diseases, and privations that might have killed softer men, and they came home, all but one of them, having survived not only the dangers of the wilderness but the ministrations of their own physician. The medical history of the expedition is a reminder of how perilous such a journey was, and of how much the party's safe return depended on factors the captains could neither fully control nor fully understand.

25. Boats, Rivers, and the Labor of Movement

The Lewis and Clark expedition was, for most of its length, a journey by water, and the craft that carried it and the labor of moving them were central to the entire enterprise. The rivers were the highways of the expedition, the means by which a small party could carry tons of supplies into the heart of a roadless continent, and the daily struggle to move the boats against the current or to run them safely through rapids was the physical heart of the journey. To understand the expedition is to understand its boats and the immense labor they demanded.

The keelboat and the pirogues

The expedition's flagship on the lower Missouri was a fifty-five-foot keelboat, a substantial vessel that could be rowed with oars, pushed with poles, pulled by a towrope, or sailed when the wind allowed. It carried the bulk of the expedition's supplies and mounted a small swivel cannon for defense and for the impressive salutes that punctuated diplomatic councils. Accompanying it were two pirogues, large open boats, one painted red and the other white, which were more maneuverable and proved better suited to the upper river. The keelboat, too large for the shallow and obstructed waters above the Mandan villages, was sent back down to St. Louis in the spring of 1805, carrying the expedition's first reports and specimens to Jefferson, while the party continued in the pirogues and in canoes.

The dugout canoe

Above the Mandan villages, and again after the crossing of the mountains, the expedition relied on the dugout canoe, the workhorse craft of the North American interior. When more boats were needed, the men would find suitable large trees, usually cottonwood on the plains, and laboriously hollow out the trunks by burning and chopping, a skill they refined over the journey and learned in part from Native practice. The dugouts were heavy, unwieldy, and prone to swamping in rough water, but they were rugged, repairable, and made from materials at hand, and they carried the expedition down the swift western rivers to the Pacific and much of the way home. The shift from the carried craft of the East to the improvised craft of the country was emblematic of the expedition's broader adaptation to the lands it crossed.

The labor of the upstream journey

The defining physical labor of the expedition's first phase was the upstream journey on the Missouri, more than a thousand miles against a strong, muddy, treacherous current. When the wind served, the men could sail, a blessed relief; far more often they rowed, or, when the water was too shallow or swift for oars, they poled the boats along the bottom, walking the length of the vessel pushing against long poles set in the riverbed. Worst of all was cordelling, towing the boats from the bank by a long rope, the men wading through mud and over rocks, plagued by mosquitoes and sun, dragging tons of boat and cargo against the river's pull. The journals record this labor as the hardest of the journey's physical work, a grinding, daily ordeal that built the iron endurance the party would need in the mountains. That a small party could move so much so far by such means, day after day for months, is a testament to the discipline and strength of the Corps.

Portages and rapids

Where the rivers became impassable, at the Great Falls of the Missouri and at the falls and rapids of the Columbia, the expedition faced the brutal labor of the portage, carrying the boats and all their cargo overland around the obstruction. The portage around the Great Falls, some eighteen miles across cactus-studded prairie under brutal weather, was among the hardest episodes of the entire journey. On the swift western rivers, the party faced the opposite danger, the peril of running rapids that could swamp or smash a canoe in an instant; the captains, eager to save time, sometimes ran water that local people portaged around, astonishing Native onlookers with the risks they took. Through portage and rapid, upstream slog and downstream rush, the rivers shaped every day of the expedition, and the boats that carried it, the great keelboat, the red and white pirogues, the burned-out dugouts, and the failed iron-frame Experiment, were as essential to its story as any member of the Corps.

26. Diplomacy by Object: Medals, Flags, and the Language of Gifts

The diplomacy of the Lewis and Clark expedition was conducted as much through objects as through words. In a world of many languages and few skilled interpreters, the exchange of gifts and emblems carried meaning across barriers that speech could not cross, and the captains arrived equipped with a carefully chosen stock of articles intended to impress, to honor, and to bind. Understanding the role of these objects illuminates how the expedition actually conducted its relations with the Native nations, and how those relations were understood, and misunderstood, on both sides.

Peace medals

The most charged of the diplomatic objects were the peace medals, struck with the likeness of President Jefferson on one face and emblems of peace and friendship on the other, in several sizes corresponding to the rank the Americans wished to assign their recipients. At each council the captains would distribute these medals to the leaders they identified as principal chiefs, presenting the largest medals to those they deemed most important. The Americans intended the medals to signify recognition, alliance, and the acceptance of American authority; they also, less openly, intended them to designate and elevate particular leaders as the recognized chiefs through whom the United States would deal, a practice that could disrupt the actual political arrangements of the nations by privileging some leaders over others. Native recipients, for their part, received the medals according to their own understanding, as marks of honor and tokens of a trading relationship, not as acknowledgments of submission to a distant great father.

Flags, uniforms, and the theater of power

Beyond medals, the captains distributed flags of the United States, military coats and cocked hats for the leading chiefs, and a range of manufactured goods, and they staged their councils as theater designed to impress. The men would parade in uniform, the captains would deliver formal speeches, and demonstrations of American technology, the firing of the swivel cannon, the marvel of Lewis's air gun that could shoot many times without reloading, the magnifying glass and other curiosities, were calculated to display the wealth and power of the nation the captains represented. This theater of power was a recognized instrument of frontier diplomacy, and it worked to a degree, impressing and sometimes intimidating Native audiences. But it also rested on a fiction, for the small, vulnerable party that staged these displays was in no position to enforce the authority it claimed, and the Native nations, experienced in dealing with European traders and powers, were not so easily overawed as the captains might have wished.

Trade goods as currency

The expedition's stock of trade goods, beads, knives, fishhooks, mirrors, cloth, tobacco, vermilion, and metal tools, served as the practical currency of the journey. With these articles the party purchased food, horses, and services, and the gradual exhaustion of the stock became one of the expedition's gravest problems. By the time the Corps reached the Pacific and turned for home, its trade goods were nearly gone, and the captains faced the alarming prospect of crossing a continent of peoples who dealt in goods with almost nothing left to offer them. The dwindling of the trade stock shaped the return journey, straining relations with the river peoples of the Columbia and forcing hard bargains. The blacksmith's forge proved an unexpected resource in this regard: at the Mandan villages, the party's ability to repair and make metal tools became a valued service that could be exchanged for the corn the Corps needed, a reminder that skill and labor, as well as objects, were instruments of frontier exchange. In all of this, the expedition's diplomacy reveals itself as a negotiation conducted across a vast cultural distance, in which objects spoke louder than words and in which both sides pursued their interests according to understandings that rarely fully aligned.

27. The Native Nations: Sovereignty, Trade, and Misunderstanding

No theme is more central to a full understanding of the Lewis and Clark expedition than its relationship with the Native nations of the West, for the expedition moved entirely through inhabited country, and at every stage its survival and success depended on the peoples whose homelands it crossed. The older histories of the expedition tended to treat the Native nations as a colorful backdrop to a drama of Euro-American heroism; more recent scholarship, much of it informed by Native perspectives, has placed those nations at the center of the story, as the sovereign actors whose decisions repeatedly determined the expedition's fate.

Sovereign peoples

The nations the expedition encountered were not a single undifferentiated people but a great diversity of distinct societies, each with its own language, territory, economy, political organization, and history, and each engaged in its own web of alliances and rivalries with its neighbors. The agricultural village peoples of the Missouri, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, lived in populous towns and anchored vast trade networks; the nomadic plains peoples followed the buffalo; the mountain Shoshone and the plateau Nez Perce occupied the high country between the watersheds; the salmon-fishing nations of the Columbia commanded the rich resources of the great river. Each of these peoples encountered the expedition as a sovereign power dealing with a small party of strangers, and each responded according to its own calculation of interest, not as subjects receiving a new ruler but as nations assessing a potential trading partner, ally, or threat.

The indispensable hosts

The expedition's dependence on Native peoples was not occasional but continuous and fundamental. The Mandan and Hidatsa sheltered and fed the Corps through its first winter and supplied the intelligence about the country ahead on which the captains planned their route. Sacagawea, a Shoshone, served as interpreter and, through her kinship with the Shoshone leader, helped secure the horses without which the mountains could not be crossed. The Shoshone provided those horses and a guide. The Nez Perce fed the starving party as it stumbled out of the Bitterroots, kept its horses through the winter, and very likely chose, when they might have done otherwise, to spare rather than to harm the vulnerable strangers. The Columbia peoples traded the food that carried the expedition to the sea. At point after point, the journey continued only because Native peoples permitted, assisted, and provisioned it. The expedition's famous self-reliance was, in truth, a profound reliance on the knowledge, generosity, and forbearance of others.

Misunderstanding and its costs

The encounter was nonetheless shot through with misunderstanding, much of it rooted in the gulf between the captains' assumptions and Native realities. The Americans announced a change of sovereignty that the nations did not recognize and could not have accepted; they designated chiefs according to their own convenience, disrupting Native political arrangements; they interpreted Native customs through the distorting lens of their own culture, and their journals are full of judgments, some admiring, some contemptuous, that reveal as much about the observers as the observed. Where understanding failed, danger followed: the tense standoff with the Teton Sioux, who rationally sought to protect their control of the river trade, and the deadly clash with the Blackfeet on the return, which poisoned relations for decades, both grew from the collision of incompatible understandings and interests. The expedition's generally peaceful passage owed much to Native restraint and goodwill; its moments of violence revealed how fragile that peace could be.

The deepest irony of the expedition's relationship with the Native nations lies in its long-term consequences. The very peoples who fed, guided, sheltered, and spared the Corps of Discovery were, within a few generations, dispossessed and devastated by the American expansion that the expedition helped to set in motion. The maps the expedition drew, the routes it opened, the reports it carried home, all served to draw American traders, settlers, soldiers, and officials into the West, with results catastrophic for the nations already there. William Clark himself, who dealt with many of these nations as a federal official for the rest of his life, presided over treaties that stripped them of their lands. To tell the story of the expedition honestly is to recognize that its Native hosts were not merely supporting characters but central actors, and that their generosity toward the explorers was repaid, in the long unfolding of history, with conquest. That recognition does not diminish the expedition's achievements, but it places them in a fuller and more sober light.

28. The Scientific Harvest in Detail

Among the most enduring achievements of the Lewis and Clark expedition was its contribution to natural science. Charged by Jefferson to study and record the plants, animals, and minerals of the West, the captains, and Lewis in particular, conducted what amounted to a continuous biological and geological survey across thousands of miles, returning with descriptions, specimens, and observations that introduced a substantial portion of the western flora and fauna to the science of the day. The scientific harvest of the expedition, scattered and partly lost though it was for many years, ranks among the great early achievements of American natural history.

New animals

The expedition is generally credited with providing the first scientific descriptions of well over a hundred animals previously unknown to Western science. Among the most famous was the grizzly bear, whose size, power, and ferocity the captains described with a mixture of admiration and alarm born of repeated dangerous encounters. The party described the pronghorn, the fleet antelope of the plains, marveling at its speed and keen sight; the prairie dog, one of whose number they captured alive and sent back to Jefferson; the bighorn sheep of the mountain crags; the mountain beaver, the swift fox, the coyote, the black-tailed and white-tailed jackrabbits, several species of squirrel and prairie bird, the western rattlesnake, various fish and waterfowl, and many others. Lewis brought his Philadelphia training to bear in describing these creatures, recording measurements, coloration, habits, and habitat, and where specimens could be preserved and carried, the party prepared skins and skeletons for the naturalists of the East. Several species new to science were later given names commemorating the captains, a lasting recognition of the expedition's contribution.

New plants

The botanical harvest was equally rich. The expedition is credited with documenting on the order of a hundred and seventy or more plants new to the science of its day, pressing specimens between sheets of paper and recording where and how they grew. The collection ranged across the prairie grasses and wildflowers of the plains, the shrubs and trees of the mountains, and the distinctive flora of the Pacific Northwest, including plants of great importance to the Native economies the expedition observed, such as the camas root that sustained the plateau peoples and the bitterroot that gave a mountain range its name. Many of the pressed specimens survived the journey, were studied by botanists in the East, and remain preserved in herbaria to this day, tangible relics of the expedition's passage. The plant collection, like the animal descriptions, made the expedition a foundational event in the scientific exploration of the American West.

Method and loss

The methods available to the expedition were those of an early-nineteenth-century field survey: observation, description, measurement, the pressing of plants, the preparation of skins and skeletons, and the collection of seeds and mineral samples. The conditions of the journey made the work difficult; specimens were lost to damp, to accident, to the swamping of canoes, and to the simple impossibility of carrying everything across a continent. A cache of specimens left at the Great Falls was partly ruined by flooding. Yet a remarkable quantity of material survived, and where physical specimens were lost, the descriptions in the journals often preserved the knowledge. The expedition's scientific records, like its geographic ones, suffered a long delay in publication; the narrative account of 1814 largely omitted the scientific data, and much of the natural-history material remained unpublished and underappreciated for the better part of a century, until the scholarly editions of later generations finally made the full harvest available. Only then could the scope of the expedition's scientific achievement be properly appreciated, and Lewis recognized, belatedly, as one of the significant field naturalists of his era.

29. Clark the Cartographer: Mapping a Continent

If the expedition had a single greatest intellectual achievement, many historians would locate it in the maps of William Clark. Clark was not a trained cartographer, but he possessed an extraordinary natural gift for translating the experience of travel into accurate representation of terrain, and over the course of the journey and the years that followed he produced a body of cartographic work that transformed the map of North America and remained the foundation of western geography for decades. The making of these maps was a central and continuous labor of the expedition, and their importance can hardly be overstated.

Mapping as you go

Throughout the journey, Clark made a continuous record of the country through which the expedition passed, sketching the course of the rivers, noting the bearings and distances of each day's travel, recording the position of tributaries, islands, rapids, and notable landmarks, and supplementing his own observations with information gathered from Native peoples, who possessed detailed knowledge of the country and often drew maps in the dirt or on skins to convey it. The celestial observations of latitude and, less reliably, longitude provided fixed points to anchor the work. From these materials Clark constructed running maps of the route, building, mile by mile and day by day, a detailed picture of the geography of the West. The accumulation of this daily labor, sustained across thousands of miles and more than two years, was the raw material from which his great syntheses would be drawn.

The great map

In the years after the expedition, drawing on his running maps, his observations, the reports of other travelers, and the geographic knowledge he had gathered from Native informants, Clark compiled a master map of the American West that was vastly more accurate and more complete than anything that had preceded it. For the first time, a map showed with reasonable fidelity the true breadth and complexity of the western mountains, dispelling the old fantasy of a single narrow range crossed by an easy portage. It traced the courses of the Missouri, the Columbia, the Yellowstone, and their tributaries, depicted the relationships among the great watersheds, and conveyed the general lay of the country between the Mississippi and the Pacific. The map corrected centuries of geographic speculation with the hard evidence of observation, and it became the authoritative representation of the region, the framework on which subsequent explorers, traders, and mapmakers built. In replacing imagined geography with observed geography, Clark's map gave the expedition's hardest-won lesson, the true shape and scale of the West, a permanent and influential form.

The death of a dream, the birth of a map

There is a profound irony in the cartographic achievement of the expedition. The journey had been launched to find an easy water route across the continent, and its maps recorded, above all, the nonexistence of any such route, the unwelcome truth that the West was a vast and mountainous barrier rather than a gentle corridor to the sea. In this sense the expedition's greatest geographic discovery was a negative one, the death of a cherished dream. Yet from that disappointment came something of lasting value: an accurate map where there had been only hope and rumor, a true picture of the country that would guide the generations to come. Clark's maps stand as the enduring monument of the expedition's geographic work, the tangible distillation of all the miles traveled, the observations recorded, and the knowledge gathered, including the knowledge generously shared by the Native peoples whose country the maps depicted. They are, in the most literal sense, the shape the expedition gave to the American imagination of the West.

30. Memory, Myth, and Reassessment

The afterlife of the Lewis and Clark expedition, its long career in American memory, is a story almost as interesting as the journey itself. Over two centuries the expedition has been forgotten and rediscovered, mythologized and reexamined, celebrated and criticized, and the changing ways in which Americans have remembered it reveal as much about the rememberers as about the events recalled. The expedition that lives in the national imagination today is the product of this long process of memory and revision.

From obscurity to icon

For much of the nineteenth century, remarkably, the expedition occupied a relatively modest place in American memory. The narrative account edited by Nicholas Biddle and published in 1814 told the story of the journey but omitted most of its scientific data, and the full record of the expedition's discoveries remained scattered, unpublished, and underappreciated. The expedition was overshadowed by the rush of later western exploration and settlement that it had helped to inaugurate. Only in the later nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, as scholars recovered and published the journals, first in the edition of Elliott Coues, then in the fuller edition of Reuben Gold Thwaites, and finally in the comprehensive modern edition edited by Gary Moulton, did the full scope of the expedition's achievement become widely known and its reputation rise to the iconic status it now enjoys. The recovery of the journals was, in effect, the rediscovery of the expedition itself.

The making of myths

As the expedition rose in the national memory, it gathered myths. Sacagawea, in particular, was transformed from the teenage mother and occasional interpreter of the journals into a romantic heroine, an Indian princess who guided the explorers across the continent, a figure who served the needs of later generations, including the women's suffrage movement that adopted her as a symbol, more than the historical record could support. The expedition as a whole was woven into a triumphal national narrative of westward expansion and manifest destiny, a heroic tale of brave explorers opening an empty wilderness. These myths, like all national myths, simplified and idealized, smoothing away the dependence on Native peoples, the moral complications of slavery and conquest, and the human frailties of the participants, in favor of a clean story of heroism and progress.

Reassessment

In more recent decades, and especially around the bicentennial of the expedition observed in the early twenty-first century, the story has been substantially reassessed. Historians have placed the Native nations at the center of the narrative, emphasizing their agency, their indispensable assistance, and the catastrophic consequences they suffered from the expansion the expedition helped to launch. The commemoration of the bicentennial was conducted, in significant part, in dialogue with the descendants of the nations the expedition encountered, who brought their own histories and memories to a story long told only from the explorers' side, and who often experienced the celebration with profound ambivalence. The troubling aspects of the expedition's aftermath, the return of York to slavery, the dispossession of the Native nations, the violence that flickered through the journey and erupted on the return, have received the attention the older triumphal narrative denied them. The result is a richer, more complicated, and more honest understanding of the expedition, one that holds its genuine achievements and its troubling consequences together rather than choosing between them.

An enduring story

The Lewis and Clark expedition endures in American memory because it contains, in compressed and dramatic form, so much of the larger American story. It is a tale of courage, endurance, ingenuity, and discovery, and also a tale of conquest, dispossession, and the collision of peoples and ways of life. It opened a continent to scientific knowledge and to a wave of expansion that would remake, and in many ways destroy, the world the expedition had passed through. It was led by two remarkable men, one of whom would meet an early and tragic end, and it succeeded through the labor of soldiers, the skill of an enslaved man and a Native woman, and the generosity of the nations whose country it crossed. Two centuries on, the expedition remains a subject of fascination, study, and debate, its rivers and routes traced by a national historic trail, its journals read as a primary source and a work of unintended literature, its meaning argued over by each generation anew. To understand the Corps of Discovery in full, with both its glory and its shadow, is to understand something essential about the making of a nation, and about the costs at which it was made.

31. The Cast of the Corps: Profiles of Key Members

An expedition is its people, and the Corps of Discovery brought together a remarkable assortment of individuals, each of whom contributed in distinctive ways to the success of the journey. While the captains stand at the center of the story, the expedition depended on a supporting company of soldiers, frontiersmen, interpreters, and others whose skills, character, and labor carried the enterprise across the continent. A closer look at some of these figures fills out the human portrait of the Corps.

The captains

Meriwether Lewis was the expedition's scientific mind and its restless, questing spirit. Trained in natural history and surveying, given to long solitary rambles ahead of the party, and prone alternately to soaring enthusiasm and brooding melancholy, he produced the journals' most elaborate descriptions of the natural world and bore the heaviest weight of the expedition's intellectual ambitions. William Clark was its steady heart and practical hand: the manager of boats and men, the maker of maps, the diplomat with a frontiersman's ease among Native peoples, and the keeper of the most consistent daily record. The complementarity of the two men, the introspective scientist and the practical leader, the volatile and the steady, was the keystone of the expedition, and their friendship, never seriously strained across the whole ordeal, was one of its quiet marvels.

Drouillard, the indispensable man

George Drouillard, of French-Canadian and Shawnee descent, was arguably the most valuable member of the party after the captains. As the expedition's chief hunter he fed the company through lean months; as a master of the Plains Indian sign language he made communication possible where spoken interpreters failed; as a scout and a man of resource and courage he undertook the most difficult and dangerous tasks the captains could assign. His skills bridged the worlds the expedition moved between, and the journals' repeated reliance on him testifies to his worth. He met a violent end a few years after the journey, killed by Blackfeet while trapping on the upper Missouri, a casualty of the very fur trade the expedition had helped to open.

York and Sacagawea

York, the enslaved man owned by Clark, made the entire journey performing the same labor and facing the same dangers as the free members of the Corps, and he occupied a place of unusual prominence within it, even being permitted to vote on the choice of winter quarters at the Pacific. To the Native peoples of the West, who had never before seen a person of African descent, York was an object of fascination and sometimes of awe. Yet he returned to enslavement, and his struggle for the freedom he felt he had earned would long be denied. Sacagawea, the young Lemhi Shoshone woman, served as interpreter and as a living emblem of the party's peaceful intent, gathered food, salvaged precious cargo from a swamped boat, and through her unexpected kinship with the Shoshone leader helped secure the horses that made the mountain crossing possible, all while carrying and caring for her infant son. Together these two figures, an enslaved Black man and a Native woman, were essential to the expedition and stood, however briefly and incompletely, on a footing of rough equality with the others that the wider society of their day would never have granted them.

Sergeants, soldiers, and a dog

The sergeants, Floyd, Ordway, Pryor, and the elected Gass, provided the noncommissioned backbone of the military company, and several of them kept journals that survive as valuable records. Charles Floyd, the only man to die, was buried on a bluff above the Missouri; John Ordway kept the most complete enlisted man's journal; Patrick Gass, the carpenter elected to replace Floyd, was the first to publish an account of the journey. The half-French watermen Pierre Cruzatte and Francois Labiche brought skill on the rivers and knowledge of languages; Cruzatte, half-blind, was also the party's fiddler, and it was he who accidentally shot Lewis on the return, mistaking him for an elk. The Field brothers, Joseph and Reubin, were among the best hunters and most reliable soldiers. Toussaint Charbonneau, Sacagawea's husband and the nominal interpreter, was less valuable than his wife and is treated unflatteringly in the journals, but he completed the journey. And presiding over the camp through it all was Seaman, Lewis's great Newfoundland dog, who caught game, stood guard, survived an attempt to steal him, and made the whole journey to the Pacific and back, a beloved member of the company whose presence humanizes the journals at every turn.

32. A Chronology of the Expedition

The Lewis and Clark expedition unfolded over a span of roughly two and a half years, its progress governed by the great rivers it followed and the turning of the seasons. A chronological overview helps to fix the sequence of its principal events and to convey the rhythm of a journey that alternated between long stretches of arduous travel and lengthy halts at winter quarters.

1803 to 1804: Origins and preparation

The expedition took shape in 1803, the year of Jefferson's confidential request to Congress, of Lewis's scientific education in Philadelphia, and of the momentous Louisiana Purchase that transformed the venture's significance. Through the winter of 1803 to 1804 the party gathered and trained at Camp Dubois near the mouth of the Missouri, recruiting and weeding out its members and preparing its boats and supplies. The captains finalized their plans, and the Corps hardened into a disciplined company under the strict regime of the winter camp.

1804: Up the Missouri

On May 14, 1804, the expedition set out up the Missouri. Through the spring and summer it labored upstream, holding its first councils with the Oto and Missouri near Council Bluff in August and losing Sergeant Floyd to a ruptured appendix later that month. In September came the tense confrontation with the Teton Sioux. By late October the party reached the Mandan and Hidatsa villages, where it built Fort Mandan and settled in for a severe winter, conducting diplomacy, gathering intelligence, and, in February 1805, witnessing the birth of Sacagawea's son.

1805: To the Pacific

In April 1805 the keelboat was sent back to St. Louis with reports and specimens, and the permanent party of about thirty-three pressed on into wholly unknown country. The summer brought the grizzly bears of the upper Missouri, the difficult choice at the Marias fork, the magnificent Great Falls and the grueling portage around them, the failure of the iron boat, the naming of the Three Forks, and, in August, the crossing of the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass, the death of the dream of an easy passage, and the crucial contact with the Shoshone and Sacagawea's reunion with her brother. September brought the desperate crossing of the Bitterroots and deliverance among the Nez Perce. Through October the party descended the Clearwater, Snake, and Columbia, reaching the Pacific in November and building Fort Clatsop for the winter.

1806: The long road home

The expedition left Fort Clatsop in March 1806 and worked its way back up the Columbia, reclaimed its horses from the Nez Perce, and waited for the mountain snows to melt. After a failed first attempt, it recrossed the Bitterroots in late June. At Travelers' Rest the party divided to explore more country: Lewis to the Marias, where the only deadly clash with Native people occurred, and where he was later accidentally shot; Clark to the Yellowstone and Pompey's Pillar. The parties reunited near the Yellowstone's mouth in August, swept down the Missouri, parted from Charbonneau and Sacagawea at the Mandan villages, and arrived at St. Louis on September 23, 1806, after an absence of nearly two and a half years. The journey was complete; its long afterlife in American history was just beginning.

33. The Geography of the Route

The route of the Lewis and Clark expedition traversed an extraordinary diversity of landscapes, from the wooded country of the lower Missouri to the high plains, the northern Rockies, the interior plateau, and the rain-soaked coast of the Pacific Northwest. To follow the expedition's path is to take a tour of the physical geography of the western half of the continent, and the changing country shaped every phase of the journey.

The lower and middle Missouri

From its start near the mouth of the Missouri, the expedition ascended a great muddy river winding through wooded bottomlands and rolling country, the eastern edge of the prairie. As it climbed, the timber thinned and the land opened into the vast grasslands of the Great Plains, a country of immense skies, sweeping distances, and abundant game that astonished men accustomed to the forested East. The middle Missouri carried the party through the heart of the plains to the great bend where the Mandan and Hidatsa villages stood, the populous trading hub that marked the limit of reliable geographic knowledge and the site of the first winter quarters.

The upper Missouri and the mountains

Above the villages, the upper Missouri grew wilder and more spectacular, running through dramatic bluffs and badlands, home to the formidable grizzly. The river led the party to the puzzling Marias fork, the thundering Great Falls, and the Three Forks where the Missouri was born of three streams. Beyond lay the mountains: the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass, where the waters and the dream of an easy passage parted, and then the terrible Bitterroot Range, a maze of forested ridges and snowbound peaks that nearly destroyed the expedition and that stands as the great barrier of the journey. The mountains were the crux of the whole enterprise, the place where the comfortable old geography failed and the true scale of the West revealed itself.

The plateau and the Columbia

West of the mountains the country changed again. The party descended from the Bitterroots onto the interior plateau, the country of the Nez Perce, and took to the rivers, the Clearwater, the Snake, and the great Columbia, which carried them swiftly westward. The Columbia led through the arid interior, past the falls and rapids where the river dropped toward the sea and where the salmon-fishing peoples gathered, and then through the spectacular gorge where the river breaches the Cascade Range, the country growing greener and wetter as the party neared the coast. At last the river broadened into its great estuary, and beyond lay the Pacific, the goal of the journey, on whose rainy southern shore the party built its second winter quarters.

The return journey retraced this route in reverse, with notable variations: the division of the party at Travelers' Rest sent Lewis north to the Marias and Clark south to the Yellowstone, adding the exploration of that great tributary of the Missouri to the expedition's geographic harvest before the parties reunited and swept home. Taken as a whole, the route described an enormous arc across the western half of the continent and back, a transect of its rivers, plains, mountains, and coast that, recorded in Clark's maps, gave Americans their first reasonably accurate picture of the country between the Mississippi and the sea. The geography of the route was not merely the setting of the expedition; it was, in a sense, its subject, the thing the journey existed to discover and to describe.

34. Time as the Expedition's Master

If the rivers set the spatial terms of the expedition, the seasons set its temporal ones, and the calendar was in many ways the expedition's true master. The journey was governed throughout by the turning of the year, by the need to travel when the rivers were open and the passes clear, to find shelter before the deep cold, and above all to cross the mountains in the narrow window when they could be crossed at all. The captains' decisions, and the expedition's fate, turned repeatedly on the management of time.

The race against winter

The fundamental temporal challenge of the outbound journey was to reach and cross the mountains before winter closed them. The long, slow ascent of the Missouri consumed the first full season of travel and carried the party only as far as the Mandan villages, where it was obliged to winter, having covered a fraction of the total distance. The second season, in 1805, was a race: the party had to ascend the upper Missouri, portage the Great Falls, find the Shoshone, obtain horses, and cross the Bitterroots, all before the autumn snows made the mountains impassable. The portage and the search for the Shoshone consumed precious weeks, and the party entered the mountains dangerously late, in September, with early snow already falling. The desperate quality of the Bitterroot crossing owed much to this pressure of time; a few weeks' more delay might have trapped and destroyed the expedition in the high country. The captains' awareness of the closing season drove them forward through the worst of the journey's hardships.

The long winters

Set against the frantic travel of the open seasons were the long, enforced halts of the two winters, at Fort Mandan in 1804 to 1805 and at Fort Clatsop in 1805 to 1806. These months of confinement, the one bitterly cold and the other relentlessly wet, were periods of waiting, of riding out the season in which travel was impossible. But they were not idle. The winters were given over to the work that movement did not allow: writing up observations, refining maps, conducting diplomacy, gathering intelligence, repairing equipment, making clothing and salt, and resting and recovering for the next season's exertions. The rhythm of the expedition, in this sense, was the rhythm of the northern year: a frantic surge of travel through the open months, punctuated by long halts through the frozen or sodden depths of winter.

The timing of the return

The return journey of 1806 was likewise governed by the calendar, and especially by the snows of the Bitterroots. The party left Fort Clatsop early, in March, eager to be moving, but found itself obliged to wait among the Nez Perce for the mountain snows to melt enough to permit a crossing. An impatient first attempt failed against impassable snow, the only forced retreat of the journey, and the party had to wait further before a successful second crossing in late June. The whole shape of the homeward journey, the early departure, the long wait, the failed and then successful crossings, the division of the party to explore on the way home, was dictated by the need to fit the journey to the seasons. Time, in the end, was as formidable an adversary as distance or terrain, and the expedition's success owed much to the captains' shrewd, if sometimes anxious, management of the relentless calendar of the western year.

35. The Expedition in the Age of Exploration

The Lewis and Clark expedition did not occur in isolation. It belonged to a great age of exploration, a period in which the nations of Europe and the young United States dispatched expeditions across the globe to chart unknown coasts, survey unfamiliar interiors, and catalog the natural world. To place the Corps of Discovery in this wider context is to understand both what it shared with the exploratory enterprises of its time and what made it distinctive.

An age of scientific exploration

The decades around 1800 were a golden age of scientific exploration. The voyages of James Cook had charted the Pacific in the preceding generation; Alexander von Humboldt was conducting his celebrated scientific exploration of the Americas in the very years of the Lewis and Clark expedition; European powers were dispatching survey expeditions across the world's oceans and into the interiors of continents. These ventures combined the practical aims of empire and commerce with the systematic ambitions of Enlightenment science, seeking not merely to claim and exploit new lands but to know them, to measure, describe, and catalog the natural world with the new rigor of the age. Jefferson's instructions to Lewis, with their detailed program of geographic, biological, ethnographic, and meteorological observation, place the expedition squarely within this scientific tradition, a continental survey conceived in the same spirit as the great voyages of the era.

The overland tradition

Yet the expedition also belonged to a particular tradition of overland exploration of the North American interior, a tradition shaped by the fur trade and carried forward by men who traveled by river and on foot through inhabited country, dependent on Native peoples for guidance, provisions, and passage. In this respect the Corps of Discovery had important predecessors, above all Alexander Mackenzie, whose crossing of the continent to the Pacific in 1793 had directly inspired Jefferson and whose published account had set the competitive stakes. The expedition's reliance on Native knowledge and hospitality, its use of interpreters and guides, its travel by canoe and horse, and its passage through the territories of sovereign Native nations all marked it as an heir to the long history of European and American penetration of the interior, conducted within and dependent upon the Native world.

What made it distinctive

What distinguished the Lewis and Clark expedition was the combination of its scope, its scientific ambition, its national sponsorship, and its consequences. It was conceived and directed at the highest level of the American government, charged with an extraordinarily broad program of inquiry, and tied to the strategic and commercial ambitions of a young and expanding nation that had just doubled its territory. It crossed an entire continent and returned, a feat few overland expeditions of its era accomplished, and it did so with remarkable discipline and minimal loss of life. And its consequences were vast: it produced the first reasonably accurate map of the American West, introduced a substantial portion of the western flora and fauna to science, and helped to set in motion the American expansion that would, over the following century, transform the continent and devastate its original inhabitants. Few expeditions in the history of exploration have combined so successful a journey with so consequential a legacy.

Seen in the long view, the Lewis and Clark expedition stands as a hinge between worlds: between the imagined geography of the eighteenth century and the observed geography of the nineteenth; between a West inhabited and controlled by sovereign Native nations and a West engulfed by American expansion; between the Enlightenment dream of cataloging the natural world and the harder realities of empire and conquest. It was at once a triumph of science, endurance, and leadership and the opening act of a continental tragedy. That doubleness is the source of its enduring fascination, and the reason that, two centuries on, the journey of the Corps of Discovery continues to be told, studied, and argued over by a nation still reckoning with the country it crossed and the world it helped to make.

36. The Journals: Record and Literature

The Lewis and Clark expedition is unusually well documented for an early exploration, and the reason is that its members wrote. Under Jefferson's explicit instructions, the captains kept detailed journals, and they encouraged or required several of the enlisted men to do the same, so that the journey is preserved in multiple overlapping accounts. These journals are the foundation of everything we know about the expedition, the primary source from which every history is drawn, and they are also, almost incidentally, a remarkable work of American writing, vivid, immediate, and unintentionally eloquent.

A chorus of voices

The surviving journals form a chorus rather than a single voice. Clark kept the most continuous record, writing nearly every day in his idiosyncratic, phonetic spelling, attentive to distances, courses, weather, game, and the practical business of the journey. Lewis wrote more intermittently but at greater length and with greater literary ambition, producing the expedition's most elaborate descriptions of landscapes, animals, and plants, and its most introspective passages. Among the enlisted men, Sergeant John Ordway kept a faithful daily journal that fills gaps in the captains' records; Sergeant Patrick Gass kept the journal that, edited, became the first published account; and Privates Joseph Whitehouse and others added further accounts. Where these records overlap they corroborate and supplement one another, and where they diverge they reveal the different vantage points of the men who made the journey. The result is a richly textured record, capable of being cross-checked and triangulated, that allows historians to reconstruct the journey in extraordinary detail.

The character of the writing

The journals' literary power lies precisely in their lack of literary pretension. These were working documents, written by tired men at the end of hard days, recording what they had seen and done without the smoothing and shaping of later composition. Their immediacy is their virtue. When Lewis describes his first sight of the Great Falls, or his bitter disappointment at the summit of Lemhi Pass, or the misery of the Bitterroot crossing, the reader feels the experience at first hand, unmediated by hindsight. Clark's terse, practical entries convey the relentless rhythm of the journey, the daily distances, the weather, the game killed, the miles gained. The phonetic spelling, far from being a defect, lends the journals a voice, a sense of the actual men speaking, that polished prose would have lost. The journals are, in this sense, a great work of American vernacular literature, valued not despite their roughness but because of it.

The long road to publication

The history of the journals after the expedition is a saga of delay, loss, and eventual recovery. Lewis, charged by Jefferson with preparing the records for publication, was slow to act and died in 1809 with the task scarcely begun. Clark arranged for an edited narrative, prepared by Nicholas Biddle and published in 1814, which told the story of the journey but omitted most of the scientific data, the natural history, the ethnography, the systematic observations, that Jefferson had most wished to see in print. For much of the nineteenth century the full record lay scattered and unpublished, its scientific treasures neglected. The recovery came gradually: the edition of Elliott Coues late in the century, the fuller edition of Reuben Gold Thwaites at its turn, and finally the comprehensive modern edition edited by Gary Moulton in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which at last presented the complete journals, with all their richness, to scholars and the public. The slow emergence of the journals into print mirrors the slow emergence of the expedition itself into its full place in American memory, and it is largely thanks to the labor of these editors that the journey can be known today in such detail.

37. Controversies and Unanswered Questions

For all that the journals tell us, the Lewis and Clark expedition is surrounded by enduring controversies and questions that the records do not finally resolve. Some concern matters of fact that the evidence leaves genuinely uncertain; others concern matters of interpretation and judgment over which thoughtful people continue to disagree. These unresolved questions are part of what keeps the expedition a living subject of inquiry rather than a closed chapter of settled history.

The death of Lewis

The most debated factual question is the manner of Meriwether Lewis's death in 1809. Traveling east along the Natchez Trace, Lewis died of gunshot wounds at a remote inn called Grinder's Stand in Tennessee. The weight of the evidence, and the considered judgment of both Jefferson and Clark, who knew Lewis well and were aware of his troubled state of mind, his financial difficulties, his disputes with the government, and his bouts of depression, points to suicide. Yet from the beginning some have argued for murder, pointing to the violence of the frontier, the money Lewis carried, and certain ambiguities in the accounts of his death, and the question has never been settled beyond dispute. Periodic calls to exhume his remains for examination have not been carried out. The death of the expedition's brilliant, troubled commander, so soon after its triumph and with his great task unfinished, remains a genuine and poignant mystery.

The fate of Sacagawea

Nearly as contested is the fate of Sacagawea. The documentary evidence indicates that she died young, of an illness, in 1812, at a fur-trading post on the Missouri, while still in her twenties. Against this stands a Shoshone oral tradition, recorded much later, that holds she lived to a great age and died on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming in 1884. Historians have generally favored the documentary account of an early death, but the competing tradition retains its adherents, and the question touches on larger issues of how the histories of Native peoples are recorded and whose evidence is credited. The uncertainty surrounding the end of so celebrated a figure is a reminder of how little the written record preserved of the lives of the expedition's Native and enslaved members.

York's freedom

The story of York raises questions both factual and moral. Having labored and risked his life across the continent as a full participant in the expedition, York returned to enslavement under Clark, and the records indicate that his request for freedom, or at least for arrangements that would let him live near his family, met with resistance and even punishment from Clark, straining a relationship that had begun in shared childhood. Clark eventually freed York, and by some later accounts York went into business with a wagon and team, though the details of his subsequent life and the time and manner of his death are uncertain and contested, with conflicting traditions including an unverified story that he returned to live among a Native people in the West. The gap between York's full participation in the journey and his return to bondage, and the obscurity that swallowed his later life, stand as a sharp indictment of the society that so circumscribed him, and as one of the expedition's most troubling unresolved threads.

Questions of interpretation

Beyond these factual mysteries lie the larger questions of interpretation that each generation answers anew. How should the expedition's achievements be weighed against its consequences for the Native nations of the West? To what extent should the captains be judged by the standards of their own time, and to what extent by ours? What is the proper place of the expedition in the national story, hero's tale, scientific landmark, opening act of conquest, or all of these at once? These are not questions the journals can answer, for they are questions of value and perspective, and the shifting answers Americans have given them, from the triumphal narratives of the past to the more critical and inclusive reassessments of recent decades, trace the changing conscience of the nation itself. The Lewis and Clark expedition endures as a subject of controversy precisely because it matters, because in arguing about the meaning of the journey, Americans are arguing about the meaning of their own history, and about the country the Corps of Discovery helped to bring into being.

38. Opening the Western Fur Trade

Among the most immediate and consequential results of the Lewis and Clark expedition was its effect on the fur trade of the American West. The expedition had been justified to Congress, in part, as a commercial venture, a reconnaissance of the routes and resources by which the lucrative western fur trade might be channeled toward American hands. In this commercial purpose, unlike in the search for an easy water passage, the expedition succeeded, perhaps too well, for the information it brought home helped to launch a rush into the western mountains that would transform the region within a single generation.

Reports of abundance

The journals and reports of the expedition described a western interior teeming with fur-bearing animals, above all the beaver whose pelts commanded high prices in the markets of the East and of Europe. The upper Missouri and the streams of the Rocky Mountains, the captains reported, abounded in beaver and other valuable furs, largely untapped by the established trade. This intelligence, spreading among the merchants and adventurers of St. Louis and beyond, acted as a powerful magnet. Even before the full expedition had returned, members of the Corps carried word of the rich trapping grounds they had seen, and some of the expedition's own veterans turned immediately to the trade, guiding and joining the first ventures up the river.

The first ventures

The rush began almost at once. Within a year or two of the expedition's return, traders were ascending the Missouri to establish posts and trapping operations in the country the Corps had described. The St. Louis merchant Manuel Lisa led an early and influential venture up the river to the Yellowstone country, building a post and inaugurating a sustained American push into the upper Missouri trade; he employed veterans of the expedition who knew the country. Some of the Corps's former members became prominent figures in this new commerce, while others met violent ends in it: George Drouillard, the expedition's invaluable hunter and interpreter, was killed by Blackfeet while trapping with Lisa's enterprise, one of the early casualties of the trade the expedition had helped to open. The hostility of the Blackfeet, inflamed by the deadly clash on Lewis's return journey, made the richest beaver country of the northern Rockies a place of recurring danger for American trappers for years to come.

The mountain men and the larger consequences

Over the following decades the western fur trade evolved into the era of the mountain men, the hardy and often solitary trappers who roamed the Rockies in search of beaver, and of the great fur companies that organized the commerce and reaped its profits. This trade, set in motion in significant part by the knowledge the expedition brought home, drew Americans ever deeper into the West, established routes and rendezvous and posts, and accumulated further geographic knowledge that filled in the picture Clark's maps had begun. The fur trade was, in many respects, the leading edge of American penetration of the West in the decades between the expedition and the great overland migrations that followed, the channel through which American presence and influence flowed into the interior.

The opening of the western fur trade illustrates, as clearly as any consequence of the expedition, the double character of its legacy. The trade brought wealth, knowledge, and the extension of American reach into the West, fulfilling the commercial promise that had helped to justify the venture. But it also accelerated the disruption of the Native nations whose country it entered, drawing them into a commerce that altered their economies and societies, spreading disease, intensifying intertribal competition for hunting grounds and trade, and depleting the very animals on which Native and newcomer alike depended. The beaver that the expedition had reported in such abundance were trapped toward scarcity within a few decades, and the trade moved on, leaving altered landscapes and altered peoples in its wake. The fur trade was thus both a fulfillment of the expedition's commercial purpose and an early stage of the long transformation, and dispossession, that the journey helped to set in motion, a reminder that the expedition's discoveries had consequences far beyond anything its members could have foreseen as they made their way home down the Missouri in the autumn of 1806.

Maps

Bibliography

Ambrose, Stephen E. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Moulton, Gary E., ed. The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. 13 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983-2001.

DeVoto, Bernard, ed. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953.

Ronda, James P. Lewis and Clark among the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Duncan, Dayton, and Ken Burns. Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Jackson, Donald, ed. Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents, 1783-1854. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962.

Lavender, David. The Way to the Western Sea: Lewis and Clark across the Continent. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Gilman, Carolyn. Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2003.

Slaughter, Thomas P. Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Fresonke, Kris, and Mark Spence, eds. Lewis and Clark: Legacies, Memories, and New Perspectives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Thwaites, Reuben Gold, ed. Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806. 8 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1904-1905.

Coues, Elliott, ed. History of the Expedition under the Command of Lewis and Clark. 4 vols. New York: Francis P. Harper, 1893.

National Park Service. Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail. U.S. Department of the Interior (nps.gov).

Jefferson, Thomas. Instructions to Captain Meriwether Lewis, June 20, 1803. (Primary document, reproduced in Jackson, Letters.)