At Fort Mandan, the most carefully and sturdily constructed of their three winter encampments, the captains, prepared reports for President Jefferson on all they had observed and done so far and arranged botanical, biological, and mineralogical specimens for shipment back east. They quizzed their neighbors about the land that lay westward, and visited with traders from Fort Assiniboine, 150 miles to the north, to ask them as well. They drew the first draft of the new map of the Northwest that ultimately would be one of the most useful outcomes of the expedition.
In short, it all came together at Fort Mandan. Even the travel schedule. “You may . . . expect me to meet you at Montachello [Monticello] in September 1806,” Lewis wrote to Jefferson in a letter that accompanied the specimens and papers he sent in the spring of 1805. He almost made it.
In January the expedition gained two new members, interpreter and boatman Toussaint Charbonneau and one of his two wives, the teenage Shoshone Sacagawea (also spelled Sakakawea and Sacajawea). On 11 February 1805, she added another, her infant boy, Jean Baptiste. Lewis ultimately judged Charbonneau to be “a man of no particular merit,” though he had, overall, a long and productive career in the West.
The Mandans were “the most friendly, well disposed Indians inhabiting the Missouri . . . brave, humane and hospitable,” in Clark’s opinion. Over the winter, the captains talked peace and commerce, American style, to all who would listen.
Rested and refreshed, the Corps, having been tested by the rigors of winter on the Northern Plains, embarked again on 7 April 1805, “to “to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden.” Lewis proudly attested that his men were “in excellent health and sperits, zealously attached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed; not a whisper of murmur or discontent to be heard among them, but all act in unison, and with the most perfect harmony.”
For more, see Winter at Fort Mandan.
From Discovering Lewis & Clark from the Air
Photography by Jim Wark
Text by Joseph Mussulman
Reproduced by permission of Mountain Press
Fort Mandan is a High Potential Historic Site along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail managed by the U.S. National Park Service. The North Dakota Department of Parks and Recreation manages a modern reconstruction and the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center located at US Hwy 83 and ND Hwy 200A.—ed.
