Key role in planning and recruitment
by Trent Strickland
Fort Southwest Point, a frontier garrison in eastern Tennessee during the late 1790s and early 1800s, played an important role in the planning for and recruitment of soldiers for the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
10 January–30 August 1803
Before leaving for Pittsburgh, Lewis traveled between Jefferson’s home Monticello, Washington City, Harpers Ferry, and Philadelphia as plans coalesced and preparations ensued.
What Lewis was describing
by Joseph A. Mussulman
The Corps’ journalists, in their accounts of new species of mammals they encountered on the expedition, would occasionally call to mind comparable features of domestic canids whenever it was appropriate—in terms of their sizes, morphology, and “notes” or barks.
Early intelligence report
by Joseph A. Mussulman
The expedition had one major outcome that was made available to the public well before the expedition was over, the “Estimate of the Eastern Indians,” which Lewis and Clark sent back on the barge in April 1805.
Jonathan Clark mentions parting with the explorers at his son-in-law’s farm in present west Louisville, and Lewis records stopping at the first Kentucky settlement below Louisville. That settlement might have been West Point, at the mouth of Salt River, where John Shields lived.
Kentucky recruits
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Clark was waiting with seven more recruits who would become permanent members of the contingent soon to be known as the Corps of Volunteers for North Western Discovery.
Mapping the American future
by Joseph A. Mussulman, Pierce Mullen
Determining the extent of the upper Missouri watershed was the single most important task Lewis and Clark faced. Their search for the westernmost source of the Jefferson River nearly cost them their lives.
On 9 April 1682, René La Salle, claimed “possession of this country of Louisiana.” Thus, without any belligerent confrontations began the decline of one already ancient meta-culture, and the rise of a succession of new empires.
The President’s representatives in Paris had bargained successfully with Napoleon’s bureaucrats not only to buy the port of New Orleans, then the keystone of the continent, but also to acquire, at three cents an acre, an area extending from the Mississippi River to . . . where? No one knew until Meriwether Lewis stood at the crest of the Rocky Mountains at a place known today as Lemhi Pass, on 12 August 1805.
Easter week in Paris, 1803, was truly momentous for the young United States of America. The American Minister to France, Robert R. Livingston was sent to discuss the difficult question of New Orleans, the Mississippi and Franco-American relations.
Seeking the living animal
by Earle E. Spamer, Richard M. McCourt
The American fauna was not made up of degenerate forms of Old World animals. And it was not beyond the realm of possibility to find those elusive mastodons and megalonyxes alive. To imagine this sort of thing must have inspired awe in Lewis.
On the first Sunday after leaving Camp River Dubois, Joseph Whitehouse wrote that some of the party “went to church, which the french call Mass, and Saw their way of performing &c.”
As deists in the ‘wilderness,’ Lewis and Clark simply wanted to observe and admire the surrounding world and learn to understand the relationships that held it together.
Was it suicide or murder?
by Clay S. Jenkinson
Lewis was about to journey to Washington to face his accusers. He only made it as far as Grinder’s Stand. But did he commit suicide or was he murdered?
Lewis's "Mahometant yoke"
by Joseph A. Mussulman
The story of what was known by his detractors as “Jefferson’s War,” opens for us a narrow window on a little known but intriguing episode in Meriwether Lewis’s brief position as the President’s secretary.
Lewis's literary metaphor
by Joseph A. Mussulman
Lewis displays his talent for seeing the world metaphorically. Perhaps he wrote this vignette as he slapped at mosquitoes, waved off gnats, or plucked barbed spines from his feet.
(1761–1809), Private
by Robert E. Gatten
At the age of 43, Lepage was the oldest member of the expedition. He was a French-Canadian trapper and had lived among the Mandan prior to the expedition. His most embarrassing moment may have been losing the pack horse with Lewis’s winter clothing.
No one had tested modern replicas in demanding conditions: upstream ferries and eddy seam crossings in high water—canoeing techniques the Lewis and Clark party probably used many times a day. How were these dugouts shaped? How did they behave in river conditions?
The earliest baptism, marriage, and burial registers of St. Charles Borromeo parish help explain the identities and family connections of several of the french boatman from St. Charles.
Sturnella neglecta
by Joseph A. Mussulman
The species remained nameless until John James Audubon dubbed it neglecta because, he wrote in 1840, although “the existence of this species was known to the celebrated explorers of the west, Lewis and Clark . . . no one has since taken the least notice of it.”
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Lewis and Clark Trail Alliance
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Unless otherwise noted, journal excerpts are from The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, edited by Gary E. Moulton, 13 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983-2001).