The Lewis and Clark Expedition

Preface

This article offers an extended account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the journey of the Corps of Discovery across the North American continent and back between 1804 and 1806. It is intended for the general reader who wishes to understand not only what happened on the journey but why it happened, what it meant, and what it set in motion. The treatment is divided into two broad movements. The first is a narrative, following the expedition from its origins in Thomas Jefferson's imagination and the Louisiana Purchase, through its preparation, its long ascent of the Missouri, its desperate crossing of the Rocky Mountains, its winter on the Pacific, and its return. The second is a series of thematic explorations that step back from the day-by-day chronicle to examine particular dimensions of the expedition in greater depth: Jefferson's instructions, the contest of empires, the daily life of the Corps, its health and its boats, its diplomacy and its science, its maps, and the long afterlife of the journey in American memory.

Throughout, the aim has been to tell the story accurately and fairly, neither inflating the expedition into uncomplicated heroism nor reducing it to a mere prelude to conquest. The Corps of Discovery accomplished a genuine feat of endurance, leadership, and scientific observation, and it did so in large part through the knowledge, generosity, and forbearance of the Native nations whose homelands it crossed. The same journey helped to open those homelands to an expansion that would, within a few generations, devastate the peoples who had made the expedition possible. Both of these truths are essential, and a faithful account must hold them together. The reader will find here admiration for what the expedition achieved alongside a clear-eyed reckoning with its costs and consequences.

A note on sources: this article draws on the expedition's own journals, kept by the captains and several of the enlisted men, and on the work of the many historians and editors who have studied, edited, and interpreted those journals across two centuries. A selected bibliography appears at the end for readers who wish to go further. The original maps that accompany the article were prepared specifically for it, and the reader is encouraged to consult the rich holdings of public archives and libraries for the contemporary portraits, manuscript maps, and other historical images that survive from the expedition and its era. What follows is an invitation to travel, in imagination, one of the most consequential journeys ever undertaken across the American continent.

1. Introduction: An Epic of the American West

Between the spring of 1804 and the autumn of 1806, a small party of soldiers, frontiersmen, an enslaved man, a French-Canadian interpreter, a young Shoshone woman, her infant son, and a large Newfoundland dog traveled from the edge of the young United States to the shores of the Pacific Ocean and back again. They called themselves the Corps of Discovery. History remembers them by the names of their two captains, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. In roughly twenty-eight months the expedition covered more than seven thousand miles of river, prairie, mountain, and forest, much of it utterly unknown to the government that sent them. They lost only one man, fought only one deadly skirmish, and returned with journals, maps, plant and animal specimens, and a wealth of geographic and ethnographic information that would shape the destiny of a continent.

The journey was at once a military reconnaissance, a scientific survey, a diplomatic mission, and a commercial scouting venture. It was conceived by President Thomas Jefferson, an Enlightenment intellectual who had dreamed for two decades of an American exploration of the West, and it was made suddenly urgent and feasible by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which doubled the size of the United States overnight. The expedition was meant to find a practical water route across the continent, to assert an American presence in lands claimed or coveted by Spain, Britain, and Russia, to open trade with the Native nations of the interior, and to catalog the natural world of a vast and largely undocumented region.