In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson purchased land from France and commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to lead an expedition through what became known as the Louisiana Purchase territory. On February 28, 1803, Jefferson won approval from Congress for a visionary project that would become one of America’s great stories of exploration. Twenty-five hundred dollars were appropriated to fund a small expeditionary group to explore the uncharted West. Jefferson called the group the Corps of Discovery. Over the next four years, the Corps of Discovery would travel thousands of miles, experiencing lands, rivers, and peoples that no Americans ever had before.
In this illustration, Sacagawea (ca. 1788–1812) leads the Lewis and Clark Expedition across the Rocky Mountains into Oregon. Although Lewis and Clark’s “Corps of Discovery” was certainly a historical reality, many of the events and figures involved have become staples of American myth, folklore, and legend. (Bettmann/Corbis)
The story of the expedition has become legend, but is based on the original account of the journey. One of the enduring myths that continues to captivate the modern imagination involves Sacagawea, a member of the Lemhi band of the Shoshone Indian tribe in present-day Idaho. She was a teenager and wife of a French trader whom Lewis engaged as an interpreter. With her infant strapped on her back, she led the men to her childhood home among the Shoshones, crossing territory that was known to whites only by hearsay. What was her actual role in the expedition? Was she a help or a hindrance? When her husband was hired to assist Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their Corps of Discovery, Sacagawea, who spoke several Indian dialects, became many things to the expedition: an interpreter, a guide, a symbol to various tribes of the expedition’s peaceful intentions, and a diplomat when the expedition encountered the Lemhi band, where Sacagawea’s brother had become chief. She arranged for the Lemhi to provide horses, provisions, and shelter, the very things that made the journey possible. To some, Sacagawea was a great heroine in the history of the Shoshones, the West, and the United States who helped Lewis and Clark chart a route to the Pacific Northwest. To others, Sacagawea’s actions led to the conquest of all North America by whites, which led to the subjugation and genocide of Native American tribes.
The Corps of Discovery was not the first time that Jefferson proposed the exploration of lands beyond the Mississippi. Then-congressman Jefferson first discussed the idea of sending an explorer into the vast lands beyond the Mississippi as early as 1783 and continued to explore the possibility during his years as U.S. minister to France and then as George Washington’s secretary of state. Historians generally agree that Jefferson discussed the exploration with Lewis a number of times during 1803. In fact, Lewis was counseled in Philadelphia by leading scientists of the day, such as Benjamin Smith Barton (botany), Robert Patterson (mathematics), Benjamin Rush (medicine), and Caspar Wistar (paleontology).
Jefferson’s request for funds for the expedition was handled as a private message to Congress and not as a public declaration. Although the president was not secret about his intention for the Corps of Discovery when dealing with foreign officials, he tried to keep his intentions from his political enemies. By the time he was ready to request funds for the expedition, Jefferson had unfriendly relations with the opposing party in Congress, so when he was prepared to include expedition funding in his regular address to Congress, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin suggested that the request be confidential. Jefferson’s message focused on the state of Indian trade and mentioned the proposed western expedition near the end of the document.
One continuing myth is that the Corps of Discovery had only three members: Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea. The journey was actually an expedition composed of many individuals. The official listing includes thirty-two other members, including Sacagawea’s son Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, who was born in 1805 on the expedition, and her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau. On June 29, 1804, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn originally authorized the army paymaster to grant Lewis six months’ pay for “one Lieutenant, one Sergeant, one corporal, and ten Privates.”
To keep in touch with expedition members, Jefferson gave Lewis a keyword cipher, since he believed the Indians and the fur traders might carry small messages back to him. With it, Lewis was instructed to “communicate to us, at seasonable intervals, a copy of your journal, notes & observations, of every kind, putting into cipher whatever might do injury if betrayed” (Jefferson 2009, 428). The scheme was never used but the sample message reveals much about Jefferson’s expectations for the expedition. It also highlights the importance of the journals and field books that were maintained by the Corps of Discovery members.
There were many stories that surrounded the publication of the journals. Clark’s elk-skin-bound field book contains rough notes he later transcribed onto permanent journal pages. Lewis and at least five others kept diaries on the voyage. Clark was also the artist and cartographer on the expedition. In late March or early April 1807, a Lewis prospectus appeared from the press of John Conrad of Philadelphia, which announced a work of two parts in three volumes, the first part the narrative and the latter the scientific observations and a compendium of twenty-three Indian vocabularies. The next year, A Journal of the Voyages and Travels of a Corps of Discovery Under the Command of Capt. Lewis and Capt. Clarke of the Army of the United States was published by Zadok Cramer. After a series of publishing starts and misses of mostly rephrased, bowdlerized, and truncated versions, Reuben Thwaites published the complete journals in seven volumes with an eighth volume composed of maps in 1904–1905.
The diaries and field books reveal quite clearly that Lewis and Clark were not equal partners, despite later claims by Lewis and even Clark himself, who had a lower rank than Lewis. This resulted in both men having to pretend that Clark was equal to Lewis in actual rank. From the beginning of the expedition, Clark was disadvantaged by this inequality. Clark also had to deal with another unchecked facet of the adventure: Lewis claimed all the epochal moments of discovery for himself. He made sure that he was the first one at a certain place, a fact that is highlighted by Clark in his journals. Lewis told Clark he needed to be alone and then he would be the first to arrive at a river or mountain peak before the rest of the expedition. For example, in November 1805, Corps of Discovery members set up camp at what Clark designated “dismal nitch” (near an opening to the Pacific Ocean) as Lewis and a few other men traveled ahead to reach the Pacific Ocean; this was the final component of Lewis’s calculated plan to put himself in the historical spotlight by reaching each major milestone on his own. Clark and the bulk of the party remained back in the nitch, exposed to the wintry elements.
Perhaps the most lingering, unresolved myth of the whole expedition is the death of Meriwether Lewis. Traveling through Tennessee, Lewis was found dead on October 11, 1809, allegedly from gunshot wounds inflicted while he was staying at Grinder’s Stand, a public roadhouse on the Natchez Trace near present-day Hohenwald, Tennessee. It is not known whether he was murdered or committed suicide. At the time of Lewis’s death in 1809, it was generally believed that he killed himself. Later scholarship has uncovered different possibilities. Lewis suffered from syphilis and depression, he was a drug addict and an alcoholic, and he was unable to live without the companionship he was used to in the days of the expedition. A theory was even put forth that Lewis faked his death and Jefferson and Lewis covered it up to avoid any public inquiry. If so, the question can be reasonably asked, where did he spend the rest of his life? The mystery of Lewis’s death and other questions linger in the telling and retelling of the Lewis and Clark story, which adds to the legend of these historical figures.
Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny is a fundamental American expansionist myth, which holds that the United States was preordained by a Higher Power to stretch from “sea to shining sea,” and thus that forceful removal of indigenous peoples or conflict with Mexico, for example, were at one and the same time validated and guaranteed by Providence. Western settlement became, through this lens, the righteous and indeed imperative duty of the burgeoning United States. First popularized as a political philosophy in the 1840s, Manifest Destiny became a shorthand term for an aggressive and self-justifying American policy of continental domination.
C. Fee
Martin J. Manning
See also Boone, Daniel; Crockett, Davy; Sacagawea
Further Reading
Gilman, Carolyn, and James P. Ronda. 2003. Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.
Hoxie, Frederick E., and Jay T. Nelson, eds. 2007. Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country: The Native American Perspective. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Jefferson, Thomas. 2009. The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. IX, edited by Paul L. Ford. New York: Cosimo.
Moulton, Gary E., ed. 2003. The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery: The Abridgement of the Definitive Nebraska Edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Ronda, James P. 1984. Lewis and Clark among the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Lewis and Clark Expedition—Primary Document
Journal of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1806)
The journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were written in 1804–1806 during their remarkable expedition westward from St. Louis to the Pacific coast. The journals were cited in Thomas Jefferson’s Report to Congress in 1806, which was printed later that year in New York, and the following year in London. In 1814, the journals were officially published, with 1,417 copies of the two-volume set in circulation. This excerpt from Lewis’s part of the journal records the first reunion of Sacagawea with her long-lost relatives, as well as Lewis and Clark’s efforts to negotiate with the Shoshone for help in passing through the Rocky Mountains.
Saturday August 17th 1805. This morning I arrose very early and dispatched Drewyer and the Indian down the river. sent Shields to hunt. I made McNeal cook the remainder of our meat which afforded a slight breakfast for ourselves and the Cheif. Drewyer had been gone about 2 hours when an Indian who had straggled some little distance down the river returned and reported that the whitemen were coming, that he had seen them just below. they all appeared transported with joy, & the chef repeated his fraturnal hug. I felt quite as much gratifyed at this information as the Indians appeared to be. Shortly after Capt. Clark arrived with the Interpreter Charbono, and the Indian woman, who proved to be a sister of the Chif Cameahwait. the meeting of those people was really affecting, particularly between Sah cah-gar-we-ah and an Indian woman, who had been taken prisoner at the same time with her, and who had afterwards escaped from the Minnetares and rejoined her nation. At noon the Canoes arrived, and we had the satisfaction once more to find ourselves all together, with a flattering prospect of being able to obtain as many horses shortly as would enable us to prosicute our voyage by land should that by water be deemed unadvisable.
We now formed our camp just below the junction of the forks on the Lard. side in a level smooth bottom covered with a fine terf of greenswoard. here we unloaded our canoes and arranged our baggage on shore; formed a canopy of one of our large sails and planted some willow brush in the ground to form a shade for the Indians to set under while we spoke to them, which we thought it best to do this evening. acordingly about 4 P.M. we called them together and through the medium of Labuish, Charbono and Sah-cah-gar-weah, we communicated to them fully the objects which had brought us into this distant part of the country, in which we took care to make them a conspicuous object of our own good wishes and the care of our government. we made them sensible of their dependance on the will of our government for every species of merchandize as well for their defence & comfort; and apprized them of the strength of our government and it’s friendly dispositions towards them. we also gave them as a reason why we wished to petrate the country as far as the ocean to the west of them was to examine and find out a more direct way to bring merchandize to them. that as no trade could be carryed on with them before our return to our homes that it was mutually advantageous to them as well as to ourselves that they should render us such aids as they had it in their power to furnish in order to haisten our voyage and of course our return home. that such were their horses to transport our baggage without which we could not subsist, and that a pilot to conduct us through the mountains was also necessary if we could not decend the river by water. but that we did not ask either their horses or their services without giving a satisfactory compensation in return. that at present we wished them to collect as many horses as were necessary to transport our baggage to their village on the Columbia where we would then trade with them at our leasure for such horses as they could spare us.—They appeared well pleased with what had been said. the chief thanked us for friendship towards himself and nation & declared his wish to serve us in every rispect; that he was sorry to find that it must yet be some time before they could be furnished with firearms but said they could live as they had done heretofore untill we brought them as we had promised. he said they had not horses enough with them at present to remove our baggage to their village over the mountain, but that he would return tomorrow and encourage his people to come over with their horses and that he would bring his own and assist us. this was complying with all we wished at present. we next enquired who were chiefs among them. Cameahwait pointed out two others whom he said were Chiefs we gave him a medal of the small size with the likeness of Mr. Jefferson the President of the U States in releif on one side and clasp hands with a pipe and tomahawk on the other, to the other Chiefs we gave each a small medal which were struck in the Presidency of George Washing Esqr. we also gave small medals of the last discription to two young men whom the 1st Chief informed us wer good young men and much rispected among them. we gave the 1st Chief an uniform coat shirt a pair of scarlet legings a carrot of tobacco and some small articles to each of the others we gave a shirt leging handkerchief a knife some tobacco and a few small articles we also distributed a good quantity paint mockerson awls knives beads lookingglasses &c among the other Indians and gave them a plentifull meal of lyed corn which was the first they had ever eaten in their lives. they were much pleased with it. every article about us appeared to excite astonishment in ther minds; the appearance of the men, their arms, the canoes, our manner of working them, the back man york and the segacity of my dog were equally objects of admiration. I also shot my air-gun which was so perfectly incomprehensible that they immediately denominated it the great medicine. the idea which the indians mean to convey by this appellation is something that eminates from or acts immediately by the influence or power of the great sperit; or that in which the power of god is manifest by it’s incomprehensible power of action.
Source: Lewis, Meriwether and William Clark. History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, to the Sources of the Missouri, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains and Down the River Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. Performed During the Years 1804-5-6. Philadelphia: Published by J. Maxwell for Bradford & Inskeep, 1814.