Thomas Rodney

Thomas Rodney, Revolutionary War soldier, was journeying to Washington, the capital of the Mississippi Territory. In July 1803, Thomas Jefferson had appointed him as territorial judge and also as a land commissioner.^[1]Dwight L. Smith and Ray Swick, ed., A Journey Through the West: Thomas Rodney’s 1803 Journal from Delaware to the Mississippi Territory (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), 8. Rodney’s journals show that he considered himself somewhat of a gentleman’s scientist in line with the contemporary Age of Enlightenment. Although he wasn’t the caliber of Meriwether Lewis, Rodney documented many of the natural curiosities that would have also piqued Lewis’s interest traveling down the Ohio River in 1803.

Contemporary traveler Thomas Rodney arrived at the Big Bone Lick just days after Lewis had left. Rodney seems almost miffed that Lewis got the best specimens.^[2]Ibid., 111–112.

After departing Big Bone Lick, Rodney examined the fossils he had collected there. He speculated that they may be not be the actual bones of animals, but nature’s recreation, and exaggeration, of decomposed animals. Lewis likely made his own speculations as he traveled between Big Bone Lick and the Falls of the Ohio that October.

Because Lewis wrote so little during the Ohio segment and Rodney wrote so much, selections from Rodney’s journal are used to describe the journey from 7 October 1803 to 11 November 1803. The pages below are the days when Lewis and Rodney were physically together.