In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson engineered the purchase of Louisiana from the French (800,000 square miles for 15 million dollars). Congress received a confidential message from Jefferson to outfit an expedition to explore the newly purchased territory for $2,500, $38,000 today. Jefferson placed his secretary Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838), both born near Monticello, in command of the expedition. The Corps of Discovery started up the Missouri River to its source in the Rocky Mountains and over the mountains to the Pacific Ocean. They returned 864 days later after making over 600 more camps, mapping 4,000 miles, collecting 122 new animals and 178 new plant specimens, and writing journals of over 1 million words. They crossed eleven states that today contain over 39 million people.Â
Thomas Jefferson’s Secretary and handpicked expedition leader, Meriwether Lewis, and his Newfoundland dog, Seaman, left Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a 55 foot keelboat and two 40 foot canoes or pirogues. Traveling down the Ohio River to Louisville, Kentucky, Lewis picked up his friend from their army days, William Clark, and his slave, York. They proceeded on to Saint Louis camping, where the Missouri River merges with the Mississippi River.
The only man lost was Sergeant Charles Floyd, who died of appendicitis in August 1804. The first winter was spent with the Mandan peoples in present day North Dakota, where new members joined the Corps of Discovery, including a Shoshoni woman named Sacagawea, her trapper husband Toussaint Charbonneau, and their baby Jean Baptiste.Â
The expedition encountered many Native peoples and had only two bad encounters. An encounter with the Sioux set a precedent that continued until Custer’s Last Stand and the Massacre at Wounded Knee less than a hundred years later. The Blackfeet tribe suffered the only fatality at the hands of the Corps. Twice, women would save the Corps from destruction at the hands of Indians when Sacagawea intervened with her own Shoshoni people, and a woman named Watkuweis saved them from the Nez Perce.
The expedition reached the Pacific Ocean on November 7, 1805. For the first time in American history, a woman, Sacagawea, and Clark’s slave, York, voted over the placement of the winter campsite, Fort Clatsop National Park in Oregon. The Corps of Discovery left for the return journey on March 23, 1806.Â
On September 23, 1806, nearly thirty men in boats came ashore in Saint Louis, Missouri, from the Mississippi River near the present day site of the arch that dominates the city’s skyline. Lewis and Clark were back, and they changed the history of the United States of America. Meriwether Lewis wrote President Thomas Jefferson the following letter on the day the Corps of Discovery returned to St. Louis.
“It is with pleasure that I anounce to you the safe arrival of myself and party at 12 OClk. Today at this place with our papers and baggage. In obedience to your orders, we have penitrated the Continent of North America to the Pacific Ocean, and sufficiently explored the interior of the country to affirm with confidence that we have discovered the most practicable rout which dose exist across the continent by means of the navigable branches of the Missouri and Columbia rivers.”
Over the years, I followed part of the expedition from Saint Louis to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas along the Missouri River. I visited the Daniel Boone home, where the explorers may or may not have met the famous explorer of an earlier generation. While in Oregon twice in the 1990s, I followed the expedition from the Pacific several hundred miles up the Columbia River across some of the most beautiful landscapes in this nation. From Fort Clatsop near Astoria, Oregon, where the mighty Columbia River empties into the ocean. Mount Hood to the south and what is left of Mount St. Helens to the north of the river make a startling difference in the landscape.
Stephen Ambrose wrote a book about Lewis and the expedition titled Undaunted Courage. You can say many things about two men, but you cannot doubt their courage. They left on a journey described by historians today as going to the moon with little knowledge of what they would face and if they would return. In 2022, I took Ambrose’s book and followed the expedition from Louisville to the Pacific Ocean.
On August 19, 1809, Lewis appointed his “three most intimate friends, William Clark, Alexander Stuart, and William Carr, his lawful attorneys with full authority to dispose of all or any part of his property.” In a letter to his brother, Clark said, “He has given all his landed property into the hands of Judge Stuart, Mr. Carr and me to pay his debts.” Lewis served as Governor of the Louisiana Territory after the trip and befriended Judge Alexander Stuart.
On August 25, 1809, Meriwether Lewis, Governor of the Louisiana Territory, stood on the dock near the Mississippi River at Saint Louis, preparing to board a ship for a trip to Washington D.C., hoping to restore his reputation and answer questions about his use of government monies. Deeply depressed, Lewis stood with three friends, among them was the man he crossed the continent to the Pacific Ocean with the Corps of Discovery from 1804 until 1806. William Clark wrote his brother the next day:
“I have not spent such a day as yesterday for many years…I took my leave of Governor Lewis, who set out to Philadelphia to write our book, but more particularly to explain some matter between him and the government…I do not believe there was ever an honester man in Louisiana not or who had purer motive than Governor Lewis. If his mind had been at ease I should have parted cheerfully.”Â
On October 11, 1809, along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, Meriwether Lewis took his own life, although many murder conspiracy theories about his death remain. William Clark served the government as Governor and Indian Agent before his death at the home of his son, Meriwether Lewis Clark. He rests today high above the Mississippi River in Saint Louis.
The death of Lewis was a waste of someone with so much to offer at the age of 35 after enduring so much is the tragedy of this story. He could have been President of the United States but rests today sadly along the Natchez Trace in a grave at one of the saddest places I have ever seen. It would be better for a man who had done so much for his country.
At his death, Lewis owed Judge Alexander Stuart $750, $15,000 today. Stuart, born in Augusta County, served as a judge in the United States Courts in Illinois and Missouri before serving in the legislature of the latter, rising to Speaker of the House. Judge Stuart returned to Augusta County, Virginia, in 1832 for a visit. He died in December, two months before the birth of his grandson James Ewell Brown Stuart, on February 6, 1833, in Ararat, Patrick County, Virginia. William Clark died in 1838 after serving as an Indian agent and Governor at his son’s Meriwether Lewis Clark’s home.
Ken Burns ends his documentary with Thomas Jefferson saying the following. “The work we are now doing is I trust done for posterity — in such a way that they need not repeat it. We shall delineate with correctness the great arteries of this country. Those who come afterwards will fill up the canvas—we begin.”
On April 28, Perry will teach a class on the expedition at the Reynolds Homestead for the College of Older Adults, which kicks off at the Reynolds Homestead on April 3 at 10 am.
