The Lewis and Clark Expedition

This series has eight easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: The Importance of the Expedition.

Introduction
More and more, as American history is rewritten, importance is added to this great work of discovery at the opening of the nineteenth century. Next to the purchase of the vast territory called Louisiana, which more than doubled the area of the United States, the most memorable act of President Jefferson was the sending of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark up the Missouri to the great Northwest.

These explorers were the first to carry the American flag across the continent. In the very year of the Louisiana Purchase (1803) this enterprise, forerunning “the winning of the West,” was set on foot. It is difficult to realize the tremendous obstacles and hazards attending its prosecution. For over a year no tidings of the explorers reached the country and at length they were given up as lost. But their successful work “was the real discovery of the Great West, and indeed of America, to an extent beyond the accomplishment of any similar endeavor before or since.”

Lewis and Clark, according to their instructions, kept journals of the expedition, and these proved to be of the greatest value, not only for official purposes, but also for the use of historians. In this work the two commanders were aided by some of their subordinates. The notebooks, as soon as filled, were soldered in water-tight cases, and by such careful preservation were brought back without the loss of a word.

Southey, in England, was an interested student of this expedition and of the explorers’ journals, of which he wrote and published an account. He quotes the journals frequently in his appreciative narration, given here in connection with that of James D. Butler, a recent American writer on the subject.

The selections are from:

• Great Events by Famous People, Vol. 15 by James Davie Butler published in 1905.
• an essay published in Great Events by Famous People, Vol. 15 by Robert Southey published in 1905.

For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

There’s 1.5 installments by James Davie Butler and 6.51 installments by Robert Southey.

We begin with James Davie Butler (1815-1905). He was an American clergyman and historian.

Time: 1804-1806

Lewis and Clark were the first men to cross the continent in our zone, the truly golden zone. A dozen years before them Mackenzie had crossed in British dominions far north, but settlements are even now sparse in that parallel. Still earlier had Mexicans traversed the narrowing continent from the Gulf to the Pacific, but seemed to find little worth discovery. It was otherwise in the zone penetrated by Lewis and Clark. There development began at once, and is now nowhere surpassed. Along their route ten States, with a census, in 1890, of eight and a half millions, have arisen in the wilderness.

These millions, and more yet unborn, must betake themselves to Lewis and Clark as the discoverers of their dwelling-places, as authors of their geographical names, as describers of their aborigines, as well as of native plants, animals, and peculiarities. In all these States the writings of Lewis and Clark must be monumental. In disputes about the ownership of Oregon, when it was urged that the United States could claim only the mouth of the Columbia because Captain Gray [1] had discovered nothing more, while a British vessel had been first to sail a hundred miles up the river, it was answered that the two American captains (Lewis and Clark) had explored it ten times as far. But they did very much more. They were the first that ever burst through the Rocky Mountain barrier, and they made known practicable passes. They first opened the gates of the Pacific slope, and hence filled the valley of the Columbia with Americans. We thus obtained possession, which is proverbially nine points, and that while diplomacy was still vacillating.

[1. Captain Robert Gray, a Boston trader, visited the mouth of the Columbia-which he so named after one of his vessels—in 1792.—ED.]

The credit of our Great Western discovery is due to Jefferson, though he never crossed the Alleghanies. When Columbus saw the Orinoco rushing into the ocean with irrepressible power and volume, he knew that he had anchored at the mouth of a continental river. So Jefferson, ascertaining that the Missouri, though called a branch, at once changed the color and character of the Mississippi, felt sure that whoever followed it would reach the innermost recesses of our America. Learning afterward that Captain Gray had pushed into the mouth of the Columbia only after nine days’ breasting its outward current, be deemed that river a worthy counterpart of the Missouri, and was convinced that their headwaters could not be far apart in longitude. In augurated in 1801, before his first Presidential term was half over he had obtained, as a sort of secret-service fund, the small sum which sufficed to fit out the expedition. He had also selected his private secretary, Lewis, for its head, and put him in a course of special training. But the actual voyage up the Missouri, purchased April 30, 1803,[2] was not begun till the middle of May, 1804.

[2: Included in the “ Louisiana Purchase,” of that date.—ED.]

Forty-five persons in three boats composed the party. They were good watermen, but navigation was arduous, the river extremely rapid, changeful in channel, and full of eddies and sawyers. The last white settlement was passed within a week, but some meat and corn could be bought of Indians, though delays were necessary for parleys and even councils with them. Others were occasioned by hunting parties, who were kept out in quest of game.

After one hundred seventy-one days the year’s advance ended with October, for the river was ready to freeze. The distance up stream they reckoned at sixteen hundred miles, or little more than nine miles a day, a journey now made by railroad in forty-four hours. But it is not likely that any other men could then have laid more miles behind them. In addition to detentions already enumerated, rudders, masts, oars were often broken, and replacing them cost time; boats were swamped or overset, or could be forced onward only with tow-lines.

Winter quarters were thirty miles above the Bismarck of our day. Here they were frozen in about five months. The huts they built, and abundant fuel, kept them warm. Thanks to their hunters and Indian traffic, food was seldom scarce. Officials of the Hudson’s Bay Company -— who had a post within a week’s journey -— and many inquisitive natives paid them visits. From all these it was their tireless endeavor to learn everything possible concerning the great unknown of the river beyond. Scarcely one could tell about distant places from personal observation, but some second-hand reports were afterward proved strangely accurate, even as to the Great Falls, which turned out to be one thousand miles away. It was not long, however, before they learned that the wife of Chaboneau, whom they had taken as a local interpreter, was a captive whose birth had been in the Rocky Mountains. She, named the “Bird-Woman,” was the only person discoverable after a winter’s search who could by any possibility serve them as interpreter and guide among the unknown tongues and labyrinthine fastnesses which they must encounter.

Early in April, 1805, the explorers, now numbering thirty-two, again began to urge their boats up the river, for their last year’s labors had brought them no more than half-way to their first objective, its source. No more Indian purveyors or pilots: their own rifles were the sole reliance for food. Many a wigwam, but no Indian, was espied for four months and four days after they left their winter camp. It was through the great Lone Island that they groped their dark and perilous way. In twenty days after the spring start, they arrived at the Yellowstone, and in thirty more they first sighted the Rocky Mountains. Making the portage at the Great Falls had cost them a month of vexatious delay. Rowing on another month brought them on August 12th to a point where one of the men stood with one foot each side of the rivulet, and “thanked God that he had lived to bestride the Missouri, heretofore deemed endless.”

Robert Southey begins here.

More information here and here and below.

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