Rogers - Lewis and Clark in Missouri
Rogers - Lewis and Clark in Missouri
in Missouri
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Lewis and Clark
i n M i s s o u r i
Rogers, Ann.
Lewis and Clark in Missouri / Ann Rogers.—3rd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8262-1415-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806). 2. Lewis, Meriwether, 1774–
1809. 3. Clark, William, 1770 –1838. 4. Missouri—Description and travel.
5. Historic sites—Missouri. I. Title.
F592.7 .R63 2002
917.804'2—dc21 2002022564
This book has been published with the generous assistance of a contribution
from the William T. Kemper Foundation, Commerce Bank, Kansas City,
Missouri.
for my father and for joe
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Maps xiv
Notes 149
Bibliography 157
Index 163
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Preface
ix
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Acknowledgments
The deepest roots of this book are in my father’s love of the American
West. My interest in photographing its landmarks and learning its his-
tory began on trips with him.
Thirty years ago my husband suggested we retrace a portion of the
Lewis and Clark route, and we have made almost annual journeys
since, following various segments of the trail between Charlottesville
and Astoria.
Winifred George, who would later become president of the Lewis
and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, introduced me to that organiza-
tion. The foundation publishes We Proceeded On, with articles on spe-
cific aspects of the expedition, and holds annual meetings at different
locations along the trail. I have benefited from the articles and meetings
and from friendships formed with those who share a common interest.
Jerry Garrett has planned many enjoyable, substantive meetings of
the Metro–St. Louis Chapter and has generously given additional time
to reading the manuscript for this book. I am grateful for his insights
and comments.
Mimi and Darold Jackson have brought seemingly endless energy
to making the Lewis and Clark Center and the Discovery Expedition
of St. Charles effective tools for teaching, and I have always found
them ready to answer a question or assist in other ways on my Lewis
and Clark projects.
Joanne and Glen Bishop have been an inspiration to all. Glen pro-
vided a wonderful symbol for the Missouri portion of the expedition
when he handcrafted a full-scale replica of Lewis and Clark’s keelboat,
and he provided an amazing example of courage when he accepted
the loss of that boat in a warehouse fire and set out to replace it by
building another. The Discovery Expedition of St. Charles now has full-
size replicas of the three boats used in the 1804 journey across Missouri.
In writing this book, I have been fortunate to have at hand Gary
Moulton’s edition of the Lewis and Clark journals. My task was light-
ened by having all of the journals and related material in one edition,
xi
xii Acknowledgments
Ezra Winter’s mural entitled St. Louis: The Way Opened to the Pacific depicts
the 1804 ceremony transferring the Louisiana Territory to the United States.
State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia.
1
Preparing for the Journey
M eriwether Lewis and William Clark were in St. Louis when the
flags of three nations flew over the town within a period of
twenty-four hours. March 9, 1804, was the date set for the ceremony
marking the transfer to the United States of the French-owned and
Spanish-administered Louisiana Territory. While Spanish troops stood
at attention in front of the government house, Spain’s flag was low-
ered and replaced with the flag of France. As a courtesy to the many
French residents of the town, Captain Amos Stoddard, the principal
U.S. representative, then allowed the French tricolor to fly for a day
before his soldiers raised the Stars and Stripes, signaling America’s
possession of the Louisiana Territory. Drum rolls, gun salutes, and
speeches accompanied the changing of the colors. Stoddard, who
accepted the territory in the name of the United States, invited Captain
Lewis to step forward and sign the transfer document as the chief offi-
cial witness.
Lewis had arrived in St. Louis three months earlier, carrying a pass-
port that identified him as a “Citizen of the United States, who, by
authority of the President . . . is setting out on a voyage of discovery
with the purpose of exploring the Missouri river and the western
regions of the Northern Continent.”1
The man chosen for this mission was born in Virginia, on August 18,
1774, about nine miles from Jefferson’s home at Monticello. He was
five years old when his father, a soldier in the Revolutionary War, died
of pneumonia contracted after he crossed a flooded stream while
returning to duty following a brief winter visit with his wife and chil-
dren. As a young boy, Lewis developed a taste for solitary adventure
that would remain an integral part of his character. He seemed most at
home roaming fields and forests as a hunter, fisherman, woodsman,
and naturalist.
He first learned to hunt in his native Albemarle County, then
improved his wilderness skills when his mother remarried and his
stepfather moved the family from Virginia to a frontier settlement in
1
2 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
Statues of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark by James Earle Fraser in the
Missouri capitol at Jefferson City portray Clark as the expedition’s cartographer
and Lewis as its visionary leader. Ann Rogers.
the regular army, serving in the Indiana and Ohio Territories under
General Anthony Wayne.
As much at home in the wilderness as Lewis, Clark had a greater
interest in Indians and a better understanding of them. Complement-
ing the zeal and determination of the somewhat solitary Lewis, he was
practical, steady, and at ease with others. He was interested in natural
history, and his military training may have included instruction in
designing and constructing forts, as well as in cartography, a skill he
6 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
were inducted into the army along with George Shannon and John
Colter, who had come down the Ohio with Lewis. The seven were
William Bratton, George Gibson, John Shields, brothers Reubin and
Joseph Field, and cousins Charles Floyd and Nathaniel Pryor. Together
with Colter and Shannon, they formed the nucleus of the Corps of
Discovery and have become known as the “nine young men from Ken-
tucky.” Also joining the party at this point was York, a slave Clark had
inherited under the terms of his father’s will. The two had been com-
panions since boyhood, and York would travel with Clark to the Pacific.
After almost two weeks in the Louisville area, Meriwether Lewis,
joined now by William Clark and the growing number of recruits, con-
tinued down the Ohio toward its juncture with the Mississippi. About
thirty-five miles east of the convergence, near present-day Metropolis,
Illinois, they reached Fort Massac, where Lewis was able to hire inter-
preter George Drouillard. The son of a French Canadian father and
Shawnee mother, Drouillard knew a number of Indian languages,
including sign language, and was an excellent hunter and pathfinder,
all skills that would serve the expedition well. He would be paid month-
ly, since he had not yet agreed to make the entire journey. Drouillard’s
first assignment was to travel about three hundred miles to South West
Point, in Tennessee, and bring any recruits the commander released to
meet Lewis and Clark’s party, which would be heading north on the
Mississippi.
Lewis discharged at Fort Massac the soldiers who had helped bring
his boats down from Pittsburgh, so he reached the Mississippi with
about a dozen men, all of whom were expected to be members of the
permanent party. Also on board and expected to be part of the perma-
nent party was his Newfoundland dog, Seaman, described by Lewis
as “very active strong and docile.” Newfoundlands, which weigh 110 to
150 pounds when mature, were, in Lewis’s time, working dogs. Besides
being used to pull carts on land, they were often used by fishermen to
help haul in nets or for rescues because the large, powerful dogs are
intelligent and thoroughly at ease in the water. The first mention in
Lewis’s journal of his Newfoundland tells how the dog would kill
squirrels in the river and “swiming bring them in his mouth to the
boat.” (Lewis “thought them when fryed a pleasent food.”)
In the months ahead Seaman would demonstrate other abilities.
He could bring down a wounded deer or kill an antelope by drown-
ing it in the river. When the expedition moved through grizzly bear
country, Seaman’s barking would alert the explorers to the presence of
8 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
Cape Rock, the site of the original settlement at Cape Girardeau, is shown in
a painting by Humphrey Woolrych. University Museum at Southeast Missouri State
University, Cape Girardeau, Missouri; gift of Robert and Richard N. Remfro.
“an agreeable, affible girl, & much the most descent looking feemale
I have seen since I left the settlement in Kentuckey a little below
Louisville.” After dinner, one of Lorimier’s sons accompanied Lewis
on the three-mile trip by horseback to Old Cape Girardeau, where
Clark had brought the boats to shore for the night. The site, now
known as Cape Rock, is where Jean Girardot first visited as a young
French ensign and returned to establish a trading post. The name
“Cape Girardot” appeared on maps of the region as early as 1765.10
From Lorimier, or perhaps from Drouillard, or perhaps from the pilot
aboard his boat, Lewis had learned of settlements currently in the area,
and he noted two in his journal. About sixteen miles west of Cape
Girardeau was a large community of “duch” (actually German) descen-
dants, a “temperate, laborious and honest people,” who had “erected
two grist mills and a saw-mill.” A few miles to the north was the Apple
River, later called Apple Creek. Along this Missouri stream, some seven
miles from its entrance into the Mississippi, was a Shawnee village,
where as many as four hundred people lived by hunting and farming.11
12 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
The legendary
Grand Tower, now
called Tower Rock, is
a landmark on the
Mississippi River.
Casey Galvin.
While Lewis explored and wrote, Clark mapped the area. The Atlas
of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, edited by Gary E. Moulton, includes
two maps Clark made of the site, including one on which he sketched,
numbered, and described ten geographic features, beginning with the
“Grand Tower in the Mississippi.” To both of these maps Clark added
a small drawing of the keelboat, to mark the expedition’s campsite on
the west bank of the river, just north of the tower. The drawings show
the boat as having two masts, each with a yard. A flag flies from a staff
mounted on the windowed cabin at the boat’s stern. These sketches
are less detailed and far less familiar than the pair of drawings he
made months later as the vessel was being readied for its 1804 voyage.
Those give a deck plan showing the placement of oars and a profile
showing the boat with a single mast.13 But the tiny sketches on the
Grand Tower maps are Clark’s earliest representations of the keelboat
in which the Corps of Discovery would travel sixteen hundred miles
up the Missouri River.
Two days beyond the Grand Tower, Clark assumed command of the
keelboat and crew while Lewis visited Kaskaskia and Cahokia, on the
east side of the Mississippi, recruiting more men, obtaining supplies,
and making other preparations related to the expedition. Lewis would
also cross the river to discuss with Spanish officials in St. Louis his
planned ascent of the Missouri. On the day he left the keelboat, he
turned over to Clark the duty of journal-keeping and apparently did
not resume making regular entries until April 1805, when the expedi-
tion left the Mandan villages in present-day North Dakota.14
On the November morning William Clark took over the journal,
visibility was poor, and he strained to see more clearly the high bluffs
that gave this stretch of the river what he called “a bold and rockey
shore.” By midafternoon the sky turned dark and the current grew
increasingly swift as the crew threaded a dangerous course past sand-
bars before bringing the keelboat to shore for the night. A few miles
below, on the west side of the river, was a landing place for boats car-
rying salt from several nearby licks to the village of Ste. Genevieve.
Salt for trade, rich soil for agriculture, and the availability of lead ore
had given the town a measure of prosperity and a population that for
a time rivaled that of St. Louis.
Clark made no mention of visiting the village on this journey, but
he had seen it on his second trip west of the Mississippi, in 1797,
while trying to untangle his older brother’s financial affairs. (George
Rogers Clark had led a small band of men that captured British out-
Preparing for the Journey 15
posts in Illinois during the Revolutionary War, but his later years were
plagued by debts and lawsuits.) On William Clark’s 1797 visit to Ste.
Genevieve, a town then “Situated on the Spurs of the high land,” he
had been the guest of François Vallé II, the commandant.15 Clark’s stop-
ping point in 1803 was opposite old Ste. Genevieve, the site of the orig-
inal settlement, which suffered repeated flooding and was abandoned
after the devastating flood of 1785.
About fifteen miles to the north of the village, Clark found another
reminder of his earlier journey through this area. On the Illinois side of
the Mississippi stood the remains of Fort de Chartres. From an island
opposite the fort, he took readings to try to determine the latitude of
the site and recorded in his journal that he had been able to see two
sides of the structure, which was then in ruins. As a military man, he
knew Fort de Chartres had been the pride of French America, the most
impressive fortification on this part of the continent. The stone struc-
ture built in 1756 replaced earlier wooden stockades eroded by flood-
waters. Massive limestone walls eighteen feet high and nearly four feet
thick enclosed four acres of facilities capable of housing four hundred
16 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
John Colter and Reubin Field were among those also bringing in turkeys
and deer, as well as rabbits and raccoons. In the course of the winter,
a number of hunters provided meat, four men made sugar, some
caught catfish, and others discovered “Bee Trees” with “great quantities
of honey.”
Maintaining discipline was difficult, especially when hunting and
other activities drew men well beyond the bounds of the camp. Lewis
accused some of the recruits of using hunting forays as “a pretext to
cover their design of visiting a neighbouring whiskey shop,” and Clark
ordered at least one person to stop selling liquor to his men, but bouts
of drinking followed by fights went on. Two chronic offenders, Hugh
Hall and John Collins, would continue to cause problems in the first
weeks of the journey, but Collins eventually redeemed himself by
becoming one of the expedition’s best hunters. The journals record
only Drouillard, the Field brothers, and Shields as more successful.20
On a day in early January, Clark made a reconnaissance of the area
that led him to remnants of an earlier culture. Crossing a prairie, he
saw nine mounds forming a circle. Two of the mounds rose about
seven feet above the plain, and around them he found “great quanti-
ties of Earthen ware & flints.” The mounds he described as an “Indian
Fortification” or “fortress” are now thought to have been the bases for
ceremonial structures built between A.D. 900 and 1300. Only one of the
mounds believed to have been seen by Clark in 1804 remains, near
Mitchell, Illinois. But others in the same group stand within Cahokia
Mounds State Historic Site, a few miles to the south.21
Clark broke through the ice on a pond near the mounds and returned
to camp cold, wet, and with his shoes frozen to his feet—an experience
that left him feeling “verry unwell” for several days. His frequent ill-
nesses during the winter encampment, along with those of Nathaniel
Pryor and at least three other men, were treated with home remedies.
Captain Lewis, drawing on his knowledge of herbal medicine, pre-
scribed walnut bark for Clark’s illness; weeks later, when Pryor
became ill, Clark sent Reubin Field to kill a squirrel to make soup.
Lewis offered his prescription during one of his brief and infre-
quent visits to Wood River. He spent much of the winter of 1803–1804
in St. Louis, where he became a friend of Auguste Chouteau and his
younger half-brother, Pierre. In 1763, Auguste had been a boy of four-
teen when he watched his stepfather, Pierre Laclède, choose the site
for St. Louis.22 In the years that followed, the brothers became wealthy
fur traders and leading citizens of the city. They had prospered while
Preparing for the Journey 19
Pierre Chouteau’s home, one of the finest in St. Louis, was Lewis’s unofficial
residence during the last months of preparation for the journey west. Missouri
Historical Society, St. Louis; Clarence Hoblitzelle, artist.
St. Louis flew the flags of Spain and France, and their desire for a
good relationship with the new government made them eager to assist
Meriwether Lewis.
Pierre Chouteau’s home became Lewis’s unofficial residence during
the winter of preparation. From the Chouteaus he learned about the
lower Missouri region and its native peoples, drawing on the experi-
ence the brothers had as established traders with the Osage Indians.
Throughout the winter, Lewis continued outfitting the Corps of Dis-
covery with purchases of gunpowder, bullets, knives, blankets, and
trade goods from the Chouteau warehouse. The brothers later recruit-
ed French Canadian boatmen to accompany the Corps of Discovery on
the first stage of the journey, and during that first stage the Chouteaus
would send letters to President Jefferson advising him of the expedi-
tion’s progress as reported to them by their contacts along the river.23
On March 26, 1804, Lewis sent Jefferson some slips of wild plum
and Osage orange from his host’s garden. Because the plum was a
small, thick shrub, Lewis felt it might “form an ornimental and usefull
20 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
about the Missouri River as far as the Mandan villages. But neither
they nor any other white men had an accurate picture of what lay
between the Mandan villages and the Columbia River. Because of this,
the captains seriously underestimated both the length and the diffi-
culties of the journey, as evidenced by a schedule Clark drew up at
Camp Dubois. The plan had the Corps of Discovery reaching the
Rocky Mountains before the winter of 1804 and returning to St. Louis
from the Northwest by December 1805.35 In reality, almost every stage
of the expedition took longer than anticipated. The explorers reached
the Rockies by a route that added hundreds of miles to the initial cal-
culations, and they returned to St. Louis nine months later than Clark
had estimated.
One part of the Wood River routine was making weather observa-
tions. A weather diary begun at the start of 1804 listed not only tem-
peratures but wind directions, river changes, and other information
for each day—a collection of data that foreshadowed the explorers’
remarkable documentation of their journey to the Pacific. The men
had arrived in December, amid snow, hail, and violent winds. Sleet
and snow fell throughout the next two months, with Clark describing
one blustery January day as “truly gloomy.” Blocks of ice filled the
Missouri River, while ice nine inches thick closed the Mississippi.
At Wood River and during the expedition, Clark repeatedly showed
an ability to look beyond personal discomforts and appreciate the
world around him. In his entry for January 25, 1804, the words “I was
Sick all night” are followed immediately by his observation that the
branches of surrounding trees were “gilded with Ice from the frost
of last night which affords one of the most magnificent appearances
in nature.” Weeks later he saw another of nature’s magnificent and
ephemeral displays, the changing colors of the aurora borealis, or the
northern lights. He would witness this phenomenon again at the expe-
dition’s next winter camp, at Fort Mandan. The sentry who awakened
him must have known William Clark would readily stand in the cold
to watch what his journal describes as floating columns of brilliant
light in the night sky.
Weather records Clark kept at Wood River show his search for har-
bingers of spring. By February the geese and ducks of various kinds
had returned. Warm, fair weather in March brought the sound of frogs
and the sighting of the first white cranes. By early April the spicewood
and violet had appeared, and summer ducks were arriving. On April
17, Clark wrote: “The trees of the forest particularly the Cotton wood
Preparing for the Journey 25
The Mississippi River as seen from the Lewis and Clark State Historic Site
south of Hartford, Illinois. The confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri
Rivers is now about four miles south of its 1804 location. Ann Rogers.
or any other persons know any thing about the grade.”38 Throughout
the expedition he would refer to his coleader as “Captain Clark,” and
there is no evidence that any of their men knew otherwise.
Whatever resentment Clark felt about the rank (and he later
acknowledged he felt some), it did not slow his activities. The day after
receiving Lewis’s letter, he practiced taking compass bearings and
tested the keelboat on the Mississippi while twenty oarsmen rowed
the boat several miles to the north. Because the test run revealed prob-
lems with balance, the next few days were given over largely to rear-
ranging cargo, hard work made more difficult by hot weather. Clark’s
response was to have drinking water brought over from the west side
of the river, for at Camp Dubois, just below the confluence, the “much
Cooler” waters of the Missouri River had not yet blended with those
of the Mississippi.
The keelboat’s appearance had changed since Clark sketched it on
his maps of the Mississippi’s Grand Tower. The detailed drawings he
made at Wood River are bordered by his notes on modifications,
including the addition of lockers to provide safe storage for cargo.
Because the tops could be raised, they would also provide a measure
of defense if the boat were attacked. There were two swivel guns
mounted on the keelboat’s stern, another on the six-oared white pirogue,
and another on the seven-oared red pirogue. Mounted at the bow of
the keelboat was a small cannon that Lewis apparently purchased in
the St. Louis area.
Some of the men recruited from the military carried army muskets,
some of Clark’s recruits brought Kentucky long rifles, and some of the
men would use the Model 1803 rifles Lewis had purchased at Harpers
Ferry. Clark ordered “every man to have 100 Balls for ther Rifles & 2
lb. of Buck Shot for those with mussquets.”
On May 11, George Drouillard arrived at the camp with seven French
engagés, experienced boatmen hired by the Chouteaus to travel with
the Corps of Discovery as far as the Mandan villages. Like the seven
men Clark recruited from the Louisville area, the engagés were young,
hardy, and free to embark on a long expedition. Unlike Clark’s seven
young men, they knew both the Missouri River and the Indian tribes
Lewis and Clark would encounter in the early portion of their journey.
In fact, many engagés were related by blood or marriage to Indian
women. These seven were assigned to crew the larger of the pirogues.
Two days later Clark reported in a letter to Lewis that the boats
were in order, the provisions stored, and the men “all in health and
28 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
readiness.” After more than five months of preparing and waiting, the
Corps of Discovery would at last set out from Camp Dubois.
2
Westward across Missouri
O n the afternoon of May 14, 1804, the keelboat and two pirogues
crossed the Mississippi to the mouth of the Missouri and head-
ed upriver. No dignitaries were present for the departure, simply the
people who had been the Corps of Discovery’s neighbors during the
winter at Camp Dubois. Perhaps the woman who laundered their
clothes was there and the man whose wagon hauled logs to build the
fort. Clark had decided to take the boats as far as the village of St.
Charles, some twenty miles to the west, and wait for Lewis to com-
plete his preparations in St. Louis and come by land to meet them. This
plan would allow Clark time to make any needed changes in the load-
ing of cargo and attend to other final details while awaiting Lewis’s
arrival. Because the boats did not set out until four o’clock in the after-
noon, they traveled only about four miles before the men made camp
opposite a small creek referred to in Clark’s journal as “Cold water.”
Rain had fallen during the day and continued through the night,
extinguishing their campfires and soaking some items stored in the
pirogues. Soon after the flotilla set out the next morning, it became
clear one of the pirogues lacked the manpower to keep up. There were
also problems with the keelboat, which would strike submerged logs
three times as it made its way against the fast current of the Missouri.
The boat was too heavily loaded in the stern and was riding up on the
logs at the risk of damaging its hull. Clark realized that cargo would
have to be rearranged to bring the bow lower in the water.
On the third day of the shakedown cruise, the boats reached St.
Charles, where “a number [of] Spectators french & Indians flocked to
the bank to See the party.” Sergeant Ordway described the town as “an
old French Settlement & Roman Catholick,” with “Some Americans
Settled in the country around.” The villagers, who numbered about 450,
impressed Clark as “polite & harmonious.” Most lived in simple houses
on a street parallel to the river. Their small gardens were generally
tended by old men or young boys, since most men in the prime of life
were hunters or hired boatmen, away from the village for long periods.
29
30 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
While waiting for Lewis, Clark enjoyed local hospitality at the home
of François Duquette, “an agreeable man” with “a Charming wife.”
Although he had suffered financial reverses as a merchant, Duquette
lived in what his guest found “an eligent Situation on the hill Serounded
by orchards” and an excellent garden. A dozen years after Clark’s visit,
the home’s setting would be described in greater detail: “The town is
partly visible from this retirement. . . . The river spreads out below it
in a wide and beautiful bay. . . . The trees about the house were liter-
ally bending under their load of apples, pears, and yellow Osage
plums. Above the house and on the summit of the bluff is a fine tract
of high and level plain covered with hazel bushes and . . . a great
abundance of grapes.”1
Clark’s five days in St. Charles gave him little time to savor the tran-
quil surroundings. The keelboat became a hub of activity, as some peo-
ple came just to visit, while others brought fresh vegetables from their
gardens. The French boatmen arrived with eggs and milk, items that
would soon disappear from their diet, and Duquette sent a gift of fish.
Clark spent much of his time supervising the reloading of both the
keelboat and one of the pirogues to make them better able to handle
the hazards the river would present.
Another step in lessening the dangers of the voyage was the enlist-
ment at St. Charles on May 16 of Pierre Cruzatte. More than once this
able and experienced riverman would save the expedition’s boats from
disaster. Unlike the engagés, he was assigned to the keelboat on the
first portion of the journey and would remain with the expedition on
the trip to the Pacific.
Clark, as he would often do in the miles ahead, measured the width
of the Missouri, which he found to be 720 yards across at St. Charles,
and he used a sextant in an effort to determine the latitude. After writ-
ing a letter to Lewis and dispatching this with Drouillard, he made a
record of the day’s events, a practice he would continue throughout
the journey.
One incident he no doubt regretted having to report involved mis-
conduct by three of his party. Anticipating possible trouble, he had
cautioned the men to have “a true respect for their own Dignity and
not make it necessary . . . to leave St. Charles . . . for a more retired
Situation.” But after their months of confinement at Camp Dubois, some
found the town’s temptations more than they could handle. William
Werner and Hugh Hall were charged with being absent without leave,
and John Collins not only took unauthorized leave but also was accused
Westward across Missouri 31
The home built by Daniel Boone’s youngest son, Nathan, where the elder
Boone died in 1820, is near Defiance, Missouri. Ann Rogers.
Late afternoon sun spotlights the bluff where Lewis narrowly escaped a
deadly fall. In 1804, the river flowed directly below the bluff at St. Albans.
Ann Rogers.
“many different immages are Painted on the Rock at this place” where
both “the Inds & French pay omage.”3
Lewis, as part of his exploration, climbed onto a jagged outcropping
of rock at the top of the bluffs. Three hundred feet above the swift cur-
rent of the Missouri River, which in 1804 flowed directly below, he
suddenly lost his footing. Meriwether Lewis’s death, or even serious
injury, at this early stage of the journey would almost certainly have
marked the end of the expedition. Yet, in the terse style that is a trade-
mark of his journals, Clark wrote only that he “Saved himself by the
assistance of his Knife” and “caught at 20 foot.” Just over a year later,
in present-day Montana, Lewis described a similar mishap: “In passing
along the face of one of these bluffs today I sliped at a narrow pass . . .
and but for a quick and fortunate recovery by means of my espontoon
I should been precipitated into the river down a craggy pricipice of
about ninety feet.”4 The captains may have decided not to mention the
Tavern Rock incident to the rest of their party. None of the other jour-
nal keepers recorded it.
Westward across Missouri 35
More perils awaited them on the water. Melting snow upriver com-
bined with spring rains to make the Missouri high and its current
unusually fast. Banks undermined by the current’s force frequently
caved in, sending trees and large sections of earth into a boat’s path. Many
trees uprooted this way became embedded beneath the murky surface
of the water. Known to rivermen as “sawyers,” they were capable of rip-
ping open a vessel’s hull. Sandbars were also common hazards, lying
partially obscured and shifting with the current. The crews tried to keep
their boats away from the main channel where the current was strongest,
but close to the shore, there were overhanging branches that could snare
or break a mast.
An early test of the boatmen’s skills came a day after passing Tavern
Cave. Just beyond a place known as the Devil’s Raceground, where
“the Current Sets against Some projecting rocks for half a mile,” the
keelboat was forced to veer away from crumbling banks on the south
side of the river. While trying to pass between an island and the north
bank, the boat was driven onto a sandbar by the swift current, which
turned the vessel and broke its towrope. Clark’s journal details the
crew’s efforts to save the craft as it threatened to capsize: “All hand
Jumped out on the upper Side and bore on that Side untill the Sand
washed from under the boat and . . . by the time She wheeled a 3rd
Time got a rope fast to her Stern.” Crewmen were then able to pull the
boat into navigable water. After “So nearly being lost,” Clark called
that stretch of river “the worst I ever Saw.”
On May 25, having traveled about fifty miles beyond St. Charles,
the expedition arrived at the French settlement of La Charette. The site,
on the north bank of the river near present-day Marthasville, has since
been obliterated by flooding and river changes. Some of the expedi-
tion’s journalists referred to it as St. John’s, a name derived from the
Spanish fort of San Juan del Misuri, which had stood in the area a few
years earlier.5 In the spring of 1804, La Charette consisted of about
seven small cabins, whose occupants lived primarily by hunting. Its sig-
nificance to Lewis and Clark lay in the fact that it was “the Last Settle-
ment of Whites” on the Missouri River. More than two years would pass
before they would again see this or any other white community.
While at La Charette, the captains had an opportunity to speak with
Régis Loisel, a French Canadian trader who had come to St. Louis
about ten years earlier. When he met the expedition, Loisel was return-
ing from his post at Cedar Island, twelve hundred miles upriver in
present-day South Dakota. After their talk, Clark wrote that he had
36 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
The Missouri River, shown here about sixty miles west of the confluence with
the Mississippi, was the expedition’s principal highway on its journey to the
Pacific. Ann Rogers.
The engagés and their red pirogue were left to wait for the missing
man, while the other boat crews continued up the Missouri for a few
miles. During the night they could hear the sounds of gunfire as the
Frenchmen tried to help the apparently disoriented hunter find his
way back to the river. Ordway’s journal identifies the man as Joseph
Whitehouse, but it is Whitehouse’s own journal that solves the mys-
tery of his whereabouts: “As I was a hunting this day I came across a
cave on the South Side . . . about 100 yards from the River. I went a 100
yards under ground. had no light in my hand if I had, I Should have
gone further their was a Small Spring in it. it is the most remarkable
cave I ever Saw, in my travels.”
While the red pirogue waited for Whitehouse, the keelboat and
white pirogue passed a cave on the north side of the Missouri known
as Montbrun’s Tavern, which, like Tavern Cave at St. Albans, was used
as a refuge by river voyagers. The expedition’s journals mention only
a few of the state’s thousands of caves, formed by acidic water seep-
ing through the region’s porous limestone. Their number has given
Missouri the nickname “the Cave State.”
The Corps of Discovery spent the first three days of June at the
mouth of the Osage River, named for the Indians who in 1804 lived
near its headwaters and had earlier lived near its confluence with the
Missouri. The captains carried a map obtained from Antoine Soulard
that showed the entire Osage region, and they also would have learned
about the confluence area from the Chouteaus, who operated a trading
post from 1794 to 1802 on the south bank near some Osage villages.9
In preparation for taking celestial observations at the confluence,
Lewis immediately set a detail of men to the task of felling trees on the
point of land between the two rivers. He and Clark worked past mid-
night and throughout a good part of the following two days, but
clouds obscured the moon by night and the sun by day. Lewis’s list of
figures is interspersed with notations such as “probably a little inac-
curate” and “the observation completely lost.” Despite the difficulties
and frustrations, Lewis knew Jefferson’s instructions included the
directive to “take observations of latitude & longitude, at all remarke-
able points on the river, & especially at the mouths of rivers,”10 and so
the ritual of taking celestial observations would be repeated at major
confluences.
For the document he was preparing similar to Lewis’s “Summary
View,” Clark measured the width of the two rivers, finding the Osage
to be 397 yards wide and the Missouri 875 yards wide. He also enjoyed
40 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
After passing Little Moniteau Creek, named for the figure on the
rock, the boats came to a sandbar several miles in length. Clark wrote
that “York Swam to the Sand bar to geather greens for our Dinner and
returnd with a Sufficent quantity” of wild cresses and tongue grass.
Although the hunters had brought in seven deer the previous day and
the venison had been jerked before the boats set out in the morning,
the captains recognized the need to eat greens whenever possible to
augment a diet heavy with meat. At the Gasconade River, Lewis had
collected “a species of cress which grows very abundantly alonge the
river beach in many places,” noting that “my men make use of it and
find it a very pleasant wholsome sallad.”14
The sandbar that grew their dinner greens also forced the keelboat
to drop back two miles when rapidly shifting sands made passing on
the left side of it too difficult. Clark briefly lamented that they “had a
Westward across Missouri 43
The expedition passed the Big Moniteau Bluffs on June 7, 1804, where they
saw the Indian pictographs Clark described and sketched. James Denny.
fine wind, but could not make use of it, our Mast being broke.” Without
it, they still made twelve miles. While they waited at their campsite for
one of the pirogues, which needed two hours to catch up, a man sent
to scout the area reported he had found fresh signs of about ten
Indians. Clark speculated they were probably Sauks on their way to
war against the Osage nation.
After the mast was repaired, the boats continued to Salt Creek,
which Lewis noted in his “Summary View of Rivers” was navigable
for pirogues for forty to fifty miles, passing through “delightfull coun-
try intersperced with praries.” He had learned in St. Louis or from the
French boatmen that “so great is the quantity of salt licks and springs
on this river,” including one lick and spring about nine miles from the
Missouri, that the waters of Salt Creek “are said to be brackish at cer-
tain seasons of the year.” After traveling fourteen miles, the main party
camped earlier than usual to allow one of the pirogues to catch up.
44 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
Along with his field notes, Clark sketched an Indian pictograph showing a
man, a buffalo, and a Manitou. Natural forces and railroad blasting have
destroyed the pictographs that he and other nineteenth-century travelers
described. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
On June 7, near the mouth of the Big Moniteau, the men came on
a group of pictographs Clark described as “Courious Paintings and
Carveing in the projecting rock of Limestone inlade with white red &
blue flint of a verry good quallity.” Earlier in the day they had seen
evidence of buffalo in the area, and Clark now copied into his field
notes one drawing that showed a buffalo flanked by an Indian and a
Manitou. Scrutiny of the cliff yielded more than expected. “We landed
at this Inscription,” Clark wrote, “and found it a Den of rattle Snakes,
we had not landed 3 minutes before three verry large Snakes wer
observed on the Crevises of the rocks & Killed.” When the hunters
returned that evening with three black bears, the first shot by the expe-
dition, there was a full day’s ration of zoological information to record.
Setting out at dawn from their camp at Bonne Femme Creek, the
men passed a number of deer licks before coming to the Lamine River,
near present-day Boonville. Clark used the English translations, call-
ing them “Good Womans River” and the “Mine River,” but both are
better known today by their French equivalents. The latter had been
Westward across Missouri 45
The expedition’s journals during the westward crossing of Missouri are filled
with descriptions of the prairies and repetitions of the phrase “the land is
good.” Casey Galvin.
Westward across Missouri 47
large trees into the water, the expedition’s journalists turned to some
pleasant scenes. “A number of goslings” were sighted in the morning,
and, just below the Chariton River, grapevines and “plenty of Mulbery
Trees” with ripe berries caught the attention of Sergeant Ordway. A
few miles above the Chariton, in present Saline County, the captains
walked for about three miles through rich, open prairie, where wild
plums three times the size of other plums hung “in great quantities on
the bushes.” These were the Osage plum, which Clark was told were
“finely flavoured.” He had lived since boyhood in Kentucky, where
prairies called “barrens” were, in his words, “Void of every thing
except grass.” Looking on the fruitfulness of this Missouri prairie, he
expressed surprise at the “good Land and plenty of water.”
The wind blew so fiercely from the west the following day that
travel, already difficult against the current, was impossible. While they
waited, the men cleaned their weapons, checked on provisions, and
put water-soaked articles out to dry. The hunters went in search of
game, and the surplus meat was jerked. As Clark explained in his
journal, it was their “Constant Practice to have all the fresh meat not
used, Dried in this way.” In the first eleven days of June, at least twenty-
three deer and five bears had been brought in, and while the success-
ful hunters are not always identified in the journals, the names of
George Drouillard (usually spelled “Drewyer” or some variant of that)
and Reubin Field appear most often. Whitehouse had written on June
8 that Drouillard killed five deer before noon.
On June 11, Ordway recorded that “Drewyer & Several more went
out in the Praries a hunting, & Drewyer killed two Bear & one Deer. R
Fields killed one Deer.” In fact, Drouillard shot all five of the bears
killed during this period. Bears were valued more often as a source of
needed grease than of meat, but Clark’s notation that they “had the
meat Jurked and also the Venison” suggests that in this instance they
intended to eat the bear meat.
They were in a land of plenty, enjoying a day’s respite from their
struggle against the river. Evening found the men “verry lively Danceing
& Singing.” No doubt they danced to tunes played by Pierre Cruzatte,
who was not only a fine boatman but also a good fiddler. On numerous
occasions throughout the journey, his music would enliven the celebra-
tions of holidays or lift the party’s spirits during long winter encamp-
ments and other periods of stress. To the Indians they met along the
route, watching the men dance to Cruzatte’s fiddle was entertainment
and a glimpse into another culture.
48 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
When the boats were able to continue upstream the next day, the
expedition encountered traders returning from trading with the Sioux,
their boats loaded with furs and buffalo grease. In the week just past,
the Corps of Discovery had met other trading parties, including French-
men coming down from the Kansas River and three more men return-
ing with furs collected along the Big Sioux River to the north. From the
group met on this day, Lewis purchased moccasins and three hundred
pounds of buffalo grease, grease that could be used for cooking, mos-
quito repellent, and even boat caulking. But of greater interest to the
captains was a man aboard one of the canoes who knew the language
of the Sioux and was trusted by them. In Pierre Dorion, Lewis and Clark
saw their best hope of persuading some of the chiefs to visit President
Jefferson. Apparently without much hesitation, Old Dorion, as he was
called, agreed to reverse course and travel with the expedition as far
as the Sioux nation.
On June 13 the Corps of Discovery passed a bend in the river and
came on an extensive prairie that was the ancient home of the Missouri
Indians, a people whose tragic history was known to Lewis and Clark.
The Missouri had been the predominant tribe in the region until
attacks during the 1790s by Sauk and Fox war parties inflicted heavy
losses. Another deadly enemy, smallpox, completed the annihilation.
A few survivors fled their homeland to join other tribes, and the once-
proud Missouri ceased to exist as an independent nation. The expedi-
tion camped at the mouth of the Grand River, near the present town of
Brunswick. From atop a hill near their campsite the captains enjoyed
“a butifull prospect of Serounding Countrey,” and Lewis continued
his efforts to determine the latitude and longitude of important sites.
Just beyond the Grand River, Lewis found the landscape “a happy
mixture of praries and groves, exhibiting one of the most beatifull and
picteresk seens that I ever beheld.” He noted that “old Fort Orleans is
said to have stood on . . . an Island a few miles below this place” but
added that “no traces of that work are to be seen.” The fort had been
built by the French to keep control of the Missouri River and discour-
age Spanish incursions. Its location near the villages of the Little Osage
and Missouri was intended to strengthen relations with those Indians
and win them as allies against the Spanish. Erected in 1723, the post,
which included officers’ quarters, a chapel, a store, a powder maga-
zine, and a few houses, was constructed forty years before Pierre
Laclède chose the site for St. Louis.17 Fort Orleans was abandoned
after only five years, and river changes soon removed all traces of its
Westward across Missouri 49
The Countrey and Lands on each Side of the river is various as usial and
may be classed as follows. viz: the low or over flown points or bottom
land, of the groth of Cotton & Willow, the 2nd or high bottom of rich fur-
tile Soils of the groth of Cotton, Walnut, Som ash, Hack berry, Mulberry,
Westward across Missouri 51
Lynn & Sycamore. the third or high Lands risees gradually from the 2nd
bottom . . . and are covered with a variety of timber Such as Oake of dif-
ferent Kinds Blue ash, walnut &c. &c. as far as the Praries, which I am
informed lie back from the river at some places near & others a great
Distance.
tlement moved west. Carolina parakeets, the only parrots native to the
United States, were diminishing in number east of the Mississippi by
the 1830s, and the last known specimen died in a zoo in 1918.20
The three-day pause at the future site of Kansas City offered the
Corps of Discovery relief from the struggles against the Missouri River,
but work never stopped. Although the only Indians seen since the
expedition left St. Charles were those Clark had arranged to meet and
the small party seen by one of the hunters, Lewis ordered the men to
build a six-foot-high redoubt of logs and bushes between the two
rivers, giving them a protected point of land on which to camp. On
checking their boats’ cargoes, they found some provisions had been
ruined by water. Other items, such as gunpowder and wool clothing
that were damp but salvable, were put in the sun. One pirogue was
completely unloaded and turned up to dry so that repairs could be
made when work on the redoubt was completed. Someone, perhaps
Private Silas Goodrich, who was later described by Lewis as “remark-
ably fond of fishing,” caught “Several large Cat fish.” The captains
used their time to study the area that within seventeen years would
become home to Chouteau’s Post, a tiny fur-trading establishment des-
tined to be succeeded by the frontier town of Westport Landing and
eventually by the modern metropolis of Kansas City.21
As they had earlier done at other important confluences, the cap-
tains took celestial observations and measured the width of the rivers.
Clark recorded that the Missouri was about 500 yards wide and the
Kansas about 230 yards at the confluence, with the Kansas being wider
above its mouth. Lewis weighed the waters of the two rivers to deter-
mine the specific gravity of each, while Clark made a simpler but less
pleasant test, concluding that “the waters of the Kansas is verry disi-
greeably tasted to me.”
That same day Sergeant Ordway was quenching his thirst with
more refreshing water. “I went out hunting,” he wrote, and “passed a
fine Spring Running from under the hills I drank hearty of the water
& found it the best & coolest I have seen in the country.” In his record
of the day’s events, he added that the Field brothers had brought a
young wolf back to camp, “for to Tame,” as Ordway explained it.
Another of the hunters reported seeing buffalo along the Kansas River,
the first sighting of the huge, shaggy-coated American bison by a
member of the expedition.
On the last day of their stay at the Kansas River, John Collins, who had
repeatedly caused trouble with his drinking, got drunk on whiskey he
54 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
“A very large wolf came to the bank and looked at us this morning.”
—William Clark, June 30, 1804. Lynda Stair.
Despite the high temperatures, Clark saw deer skipping in every direction.
Missouri Department of Conservation; Paul Childress, photographer.
falls well Calculated for mills.” In the bottomlands, amidst large quan-
tities of grapes and raspberries, pecan trees were seen. But by the end
of June, the men needed neither calendars nor southern trees to remind
them of warm weather. In midafternoon on the last day of the month,
the thermometers Lewis had brought registered ninety-six degrees,
and with a number of his men becoming ill, he ordered a three-hour
rest period. In the sultry atmosphere, only the deer remained lively. They
appeared in great numbers on the banks, “Skipping in every derection.”
Clark’s journal entry for the final day of June concludes with the
terse statement “Broke our mast.” There would be another delay while
a replacement was made and installed.
In the first days of July, the expedition passed several reminders of
the brief French presence in the region. Across from what is now
Leavenworth, Kansas, the men camped on one of a cluster of islands
where, according to an engagé, “the french Kept their Cattle & horses
. . . at the time they had in this quarter a fort & trading establishment.”
After dark the next evening, the party made camp across the river
from the site of Fort de Cavagnolle, in present-day Leavenworth County,
where soldiers had been sent in the mid-1700s to found a post near the
Kansa Indians.22 By 1804 the Kansa village was gone, and only a faint
outline on the ground and a few chimney stones remained near the
spring where the fort’s occupants had obtained their water.23
56 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
A diorama in the St. Joseph Museum reminds us of the large role the beaver
played in the history of the American West. St. Joseph Museum, St. Joseph, Missouri.
If the fading vestiges of the old French fort represented an era that
had passed, a discovery soon to be made represented an era that was
beginning. On July 3, Clark wrote of “a large Pond Containg Beever,”
his first mention of the North American beaver (Castor canadensis),
which the expedition would see in far greater numbers as it continued
upriver. Two days later, he reported the men “came to for Dinner at a
Beever house,” adding that Lewis’s dog entered the house and drove
the beavers out. An encounter about a year later nearly cost the
Newfoundland his life. One of the hunters had wounded a beaver, and
Seaman was retrieving it from the water when it bit the dog on one leg,
severing an artery. For a time Lewis feared he wouldn’t be able to stop
the bleeding and Seaman would die.
Lewis and Clark’s reports of seemingly limitless beaver on the
upper Missouri, coupled with the vogue for beaver hats (then recently
revived by London dandy Beau Brummell) made the next three
decades the golden age of the American fur trade. From St. Louis, the
center of that commerce, hardy adventurers set out to test their skills
and luck. In the process of creating the legendary figure of the moun-
Westward across Missouri 57
tain man, they wrote a dramatic chapter in the history of the West,
blazed trails countless pioneer families would follow, and brought the
North American beaver to near-extinction. The quiet pond the Lewis
and Clark Expedition dined beside that day held just beneath its sur-
face the beginning of another American epic.
The Fourth of July, 1804, was welcomed by the Corps of Discovery
with the firing of the keelboat’s cannon. At sunset the gun was dis-
charged again, and an extra allotment of whiskey was given each man.
On the twenty-eighth anniversary of America’s independence, the
expedition moved upriver fifteen miles through fine landscape, cele-
brating the occasion by bestowing on previously unmapped streams
names appropriate to the day. Entering from the port side was a creek
they called “Fourth of July.” Another became Independence Creek, the
name that a tiny stream at Atchison, Kansas, retains.
Not every name bestowed that day had a patriotic theme. At the
Kansas prairie where the men stopped for their midday meal, Joseph
Field was bitten on the foot by a snake, leading them to call the place
“Jo Fields Snake Prarie.” On the Missouri side of the river was an
oxbow lake nearly a mile wide and seven to eight miles long, which
Clark described as brilliantly clear and containing a large number of
geese and goslings. What he named Gosling Lake is believed by some
to be the lake that borders Lewis and Clark State Park, located in
Buchanan County, between Kansas City and St. Joseph.
North of the lake that Independence Day, the men made camp at a
place described by Clark as “one of the most butifull Plains, I ever Saw,
open and butifully diversified with hills & vallies all presenting them-
selves to the river.” The description appears with very similar wording
in Ordway’s account and in Floyd’s. When telling Jefferson that seven
men were keeping journals, Lewis had added that “in this respect we
give every assistance in our power.”24 Clearly the accounts were not
written in isolation. Although they are distinct and individual, the
journals contain many passages that indicate the men borrowed from
each other’s writings or talked about what should be mentioned and
how to describe it.
Western Missouri, a major migratory flyway, attracted an assort-
ment of waterfowl. Clark wrote of seeing pelicans, a large number of
dramatically colored wood ducks with their young, and many geese,
whose goslings were “not yet feathered” and unable to fly. After hunt-
ing on the Missouri side of the river, George Drouillard told the captains
he had seen young swans on a lake. When a nonaquatic bird, a whip-
58 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
vious night, a capital offense since it endangered the lives of the other
men. Because the death sentence could be imposed in this case, the
captains constituted the court. After hearing Willard admit to lying
down but not to sleeping, they found him “guilty of every part of the
Charge” and sentenced him to one hundred lashes to be imposed in
equal portions on four successive evenings.
Near the end of his long entry for that day, Clark wrote: “Tred [tried]
a man for sleeping on his Post & inspected the arms amunition &c. of
the party found all complete.” At the time or probably later, he inter-
lined the letters “Wld,” an abbreviation for Willard. Despite the serious
nature of the offense under military law, Clark’s journal seems to
downplay Willard’s falling asleep. Clark does not spell out the man’s
name, and he includes the court-martial as one of several events relat-
ed in a single sentence. And, as with the previous cases of Hall and
Collins, there is nothing in the journals to indicate whether Willard’s
punishment was fully carried out.
Ordway wrote that some of the men used this day of rest to wash
their clothes. Drouillard brought his two-day total of deer to eight.
Lewis took more celestial observations, and there was the usual scout-
ing to determine the quality of the land. Soon after breakfast, Clark left
with five men in one of the pirogues to ascend the Nemaha River,
which enters the Missouri near the point where the southeastern tip of
Nebraska meets the state of Missouri. About three miles up the
Nemaha, in present-day Richardson County, Nebraska, he went ashore
to study several Indian burial mounds. After admiring the surround-
ing prairie, he returned to the pirogue for the trip back to camp, stop-
ping en route to gather some grapes and, he said, to inscribe his name,
along with the day, month, and year, on a sandstone bluff where he
observed Indians had earlier left inscriptions.
On July 14, just below the Nishnabotna River, which flows through
Atchison County, Sergeant Ordway reported: “We Saw three large Elk
the first wild ones I ever Saw. Capt. Clark & drewyer Shot at them, but
the distance was too long.” It was not Clark’s only frustration that day.
The keelboat and pirogues had been caught by a sudden and violent
squall hours earlier, and Ordway’s report added: “Capt. Clarks notes
& Remarks of 2 days blew Overboard this morning in the Storm, and
he was much put to it to Recolect the courses.”
The next morning, July 15, Ordway accompanied William Clark on
a shore excursion in the area that is today Nemaha County, Nebraska.
The elk they hoped to find eluded them, but they did see large quan-
Westward across Missouri 61
tities of grapes, cherries, plums, and berries of various kinds. From atop
a high ridge the two men had a view of open plains to the west, Ordway
wrote, “as far as our eyes could behold.” Looking back across the river
to the region that would be the northwestern tip of Missouri, they saw
an “extensive prarie,” which they found to be “verry handsome.”
The expedition’s last full day in Missouri on the outward journey
was spent on Bald-pated Prairie, located in what is now Atchison
County. Throughout most of the day Lewis rode along the Nishnabotna
River, which flowed parallel to the Missouri through land he described
as “one of the most beautiful, level and fertile praries that I ever beheld.”
To the east were the Bald Hills, a long ridge that formed the backdrop
for a variegated landscape of open expanses and tree-lined banks that
Lewis found “handsome country.” Bald-pated Prairie held rewards for
the hunters and fishermen as well. Clark’s field notes record that “G
Drewyer kill’ed 3 deer, & R Fields one,” while Goodrich “caught two
verry fat Cat fish.”
On July 18, 1804, the Corps of Discovery set out in fair weather, and
in the course of that day’s travel the boats moved beyond what is now
the northern boundary of Missouri. The traverse of the area that would
become Missouri had taken sixty-six days and had advanced them
along nearly six hundred miles of the Missouri River. Far ahead lay the
Rocky Mountains, the Pacific shores, and, finally, a triumphant return
to St. Louis.
3
The Months Between
T hree days after leaving the region that would become Missouri,
the expedition reached the mouth of the Platte River, flowing in
from the west. For St. Louis–based traders, who had not yet traveled
beyond the Mandan villages, the Platte was seen as the dividing line
between the lower Missouri and the upper portion of that river. For
Lewis and Clark, arriving at the Platte presented an opportunity to
hold a council with the first Indians they had seen since Clark’s pre-
arranged meeting just a few miles beyond St. Charles. Lewis decided
they would remain for several days to see if any chiefs could be found.
While waiting, he and Clark used the time to update their maps and
notes. The delay failed to produce a meeting with Indians, and when
none were found, the party moved about ten miles north to try again.
Scouts sent by Lewis to a nearby village returned saying the place was
deserted, apparently because at this season the Indians were away
hunting buffalo. Sergeant Floyd’s journal entry for July 25 begins:
“Continued Hear as the Capts is not Don there Riting.” He then added:
“Ouer men Returnd whome we had Sent to the town and found non
of them at Home.”
Several days later Drouillard brought to camp a Missouri Indian
who was living with the Oto tribe and was willing to act as a liaison.
On August 2, about fifty miles above the Platte, Lewis and Clark wel-
comed to the place they called Council Bluff a group of Otos and
Missouris, among them a number of lower-echelon chiefs.1 The format
for the council established what would become a ritual as the Corps of
Discovery met successive tribes in the months ahead. There were
speeches by the captains stressing the sovereignty of the United States,
promises of trade, calls for intertribal peace, and speeches by the
Indians. Drawing on goods purchased by Lewis and systematically
arranged and packed at Wood River, the captains would bestow gifts,
both practical and symbolic. Among the symbolic gifts Lewis brought
from Philadelphia were peace medals, with the image of President
Jefferson or Washington on one side and an image such as hands clasped
62
The Months Between 63
in friendship on the other. Chiefs took pride in these medals and in the
certificates Lewis would present after filling in the individuals’ names.
While the expedition waited for Indians at the place called Council
Bluff, Sergeant Floyd wrote: “I am verry Sick and Has ben for Somtime.”
For a while he seemed to recover, and his brief journal entries for the
next eighteen days make no mention of the illness. Then suddenly his
condition became critical. On August 20, as the keelboat neared the
present site of Sioux City, Iowa, it was clear Floyd was dying. Ordway’s
journal gives an account of what followed:
Sergt. Charles Floyd Expired directly after we halted a little past the
middle of the day. he was laid out in the Best Manner possable. we pro-
ceeded on to the first hills. . . . there we dug the Grave on a handsome
Sightly Round knob close to the Bank. we buried him with the honours
of war. the usal Serrymony performed by Capt. Lewis as custommary in
a Settlement, we put a red ceeder post . . . & branded his name date
&C—- we named those Bluffs Sergeant Charles Floyds Bluff.2
When the expedition had moved far beyond his solitary grave, his
cousin Nancy received a letter from her brother telling her: “Our dear
Charles died on the voyage. . . . He was well cared for as Clark was
there.”3 Throughout the final hours of the sergeant’s life, Clark and
others had sat with him, offering comfort but unable to do much more.
If Floyd’s death was due to a perforated or ruptured appendix, as is
generally believed, the finest doctors of the time could not have saved
him, because no successful appendectomy was performed until the
1880s.4 The twenty-two-year-old Kentuckian recruited by Clark and
praised by Lewis as “a young man of much merit” had become the
first U.S. soldier to die west of the Mississippi.
A week after the death of Floyd, with Patrick Gass chosen to replace
him as sergeant, the expedition located a group of Yankton Sioux. The
meeting went so well that the captains asked Old Dorion to remain with
them to encourage intertribal peace and make arrangements for some
of their chiefs to visit President Jefferson. A meeting in September with
the Teton Sioux proved far more challenging. The tribe had previous-
ly harassed both rival tribes and European traders, and these Indians
quickly applied their bullying tactics to the Corps of Discovery. A chief
who had come aboard one of the boats jostled and insulted Clark
while insisting the expedition’s flotilla would not be allowed to pro-
ceed. Clark drew his sword, Indians on the banks prepared their bows
and arrows, and Lewis ordered his men to ready their guns. After an
64 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
A hundred-foot-tall obelisk at
Sioux City, Iowa, marks the
grave of Sergeant Charles
Floyd, the only member of the
Corps of Discovery to lose his
life on the journey. Ann Rogers.
for a few grapes and one rabbit he had shot by cutting some sticks and
putting them in his gun. One of his horses had given out and been left
behind, and he was preparing to kill the other for food. Clark wrote in
dismay that the “man had like to have Starved to death in a land of
Plenty for the want of Bulletes or Something to kill his meat.”
As Clark had traced the progress of spring at Camp Dubois, he now
recorded the coming of winter to the Northern Plains. On September
19 he wrote that “the leaves of some of the cottonwood begin to fade.”
October 5 brought the first “slight white frost,” and on October 9 he
watched “geese passing to the south.” By October 14 “the leaves of all
the trees . . . except the cottonwood” had fallen, and three days later he
wrote that “antilopes are passing to the black hills to winter, as is their
custom.” The first snow fell before the men reached, on October 26, the
place where they would spend the winter of 1804–1805.
The site the captains selected was near the Mandan villages, about
fifty miles north of present-day Bismarck, North Dakota. The villages,
with a combined population of over four thousand, included Indians
from the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes, who had come together as a
defense against the Teton Sioux. Near the southernmost of the five
villages, the Corps of Discovery erected a log structure later called Fort
Mandan. Although the fort was not completed until Christmas Eve,
harsh weather forced the men into the partially built shelter in mid-
November.
During the bitter winter at Fort Mandan, with the temperatures
sometimes reaching forty degrees below zero, the captains were called
upon to treat frostbite among their own men and the Indians. The long
months of severe cold were difficult for the hunters and tedious for the
men assigned routine chores in the confinement of the fort. For Lewis
and Clark, however, one of the most important activities of the five-
month encampment was learning as much as possible about the rivers
and lands to the west, because the maps they had brought from St.
Louis showed little between the Mandan villages and the Pacific coast.
From the Hidatsas, whose forays carried them as far as the Continen-
tal Divide, the captains were able to gain information about the Great
Falls of the Missouri, the division of that river into three forks, and
possible land routes through the Rocky Mountains.
At the end of February, Lewis had the two pirogues chopped free of
the ice and sent a detail of men to cut cottonwoods to make dugout
canoes. These would replace the keelboat, which was considered too
large for the upper Missouri and was being readied for its return to St.
66 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
Reconstructed Mandan earth lodges stand today at Fort Lincoln State Park,
near Bismarck, North Dakota. Ann Rogers.
boat’s cargo. (Although all the animals survived the trip to St. Louis,
only the prairie dog and one magpie eventually reached the nation’s
capital. Jefferson later received a letter at Monticello telling him the bird
and “little burrowing dog” both “appear healthy” and had been put in
the room where he received callers.)5
During the winter at Fort Mandan, the captains hired the services of
Toussaint Charbonneau, an interpreter who had lived for years in the
Northwest and claimed the ability to communicate with tribes they
would meet along the upper Missouri. The captains were interested to
learn that his young wife, who was expecting her first child, had lived
near the headwaters of the Missouri until raiding Hidatsas kidnapped
her from her Snake, or Shoshone, tribe when she was about ten.6 The
Shoshones, as the captains knew, owned large numbers of horses, and
the expedition would need horses for the overland crossing of the
Rockies. Sacagawea could be helpful in locating her tribe and in the
negotiations with them. Moreover, she and her child would serve as a
sign to the Indians that the explorers came in peace, because to the
Indians a war party accompanied by a woman was unthinkable.
68 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
On the eleventh of February, 1805, the men waited out her long and
difficult labor until, in the words of Sergeant Gass’s journal, she “made
an addition to our number.” The arrival may have been speeded by
another interpreter’s suggestion that she be given crushed rattles from
a snake. Lewis wrote: “Having the rattle of a snake by me I gave it to
him and he administered two rings of it to the woman broken in small
pieces with the fingers and added to a small quantity of water.” On
learning she delivered the child no more than ten minutes later, Lewis
observed: “This remedy may be worthy of future experiments.” Eight
weeks later, with her baby son strapped to her back, Sacagawea joined
her husband and the Corps of Discovery as the voyage resumed.
The same afternoon that the keelboat started downstream toward
St. Louis, the thirty-three members of the permanent party, traveling
now in two pirogues and six smaller boats, set out on the Missouri to
continue westward. Following the pattern established early in the
journey, Clark would usually remain with the boats while Lewis would
often choose to walk along the banks, accompanied by his dog, Seaman.
On the Northern Plains the party saw “immence quantities of game in
every direction . . . consisting of herds of Buffaloe, Elk, and Antelopes
with some deer and woolves.” But Lewis noted: “We only kill as much
as is necessary for food.”
A week after leaving Fort Mandan, the explorers began to see the
“white bear,” the humpbacked grizzly, whose awesome size and strength
they would come to fear even more than hostile Indians. Meriwether
Lewis provided detailed descriptions of this animal that was far larg-
er and more dangerous than the black bears the expedition found in
Missouri. As the party moved through the Northwest, Seaman made his
contribution by barking to signal the approach of these dreaded beasts.
When the bears neared the expedition’s campsites, Lewis wrote, “our
dog gives us timely notice of their visits, he keeps constantly padrol-
ing all night.”
On a day when the men were still shaken by an encounter between
six hunters and a grizzly who remained in pursuit after taking eight
bullets, there was a second brush with disaster. Having judged the white
pirogue the most stable of the boats, Lewis had stored in it the cap-
tains’ “papers, Instruments, books, medicine, a great part of our mer-
chandize and in short almost every article indispensibly necessary to
. . . insure the success of the enterprize in which we are now launched
to the distance of 2200 miles.” It also held several persons who could
not swim. Charbonneau, described by Lewis as “perhaps the most timid
The Months Between 69
Lewis described the Great Falls of the Missouri, near present-day Great Falls,
Montana, as “truly magnifficent and sublimely grand.” The scene is still
impressive, despite a dam above the falls and far less water cascading over
the rock ledge. Ann Rogers.
and more supplies were cached near the falls. Two crude wagons built
to haul the canoes and heavier gear would have to be pulled by the
men. Other supplies would be carried on men’s backs. The twelve-day
portage was accomplished despite intense heat, miles of walking on
moccasined feet pierced by cactus, a flash flood preceded by hail-
stones large enough to knock a man to the ground, and the constant
threat of grizzlies and rattlesnakes.
While the portage was under way, Lewis began supervising the
assembly of a boat whose thirty-six-foot iron frame he had brought
from Harpers Ferry for use on the upper Missouri. His men cleaned it
of rust, bolted the frame together, cut timber for the struts, and sewed
animal skins to cover the hull. Lewis proudly noted that his experi-
mental boat looked “extreemly well” and “will be very light, more so
than any vessl of her size that I ever saw.” His pride turned to dismay
when the seams began to leak soon after it was put in the water. No
pitch or tar was available for caulking, and Lewis’s mixture of buffalo
The Months Between 71
tallow, beeswax, and charcoal had proved inadequate. With more than
two weeks invested in the project, Lewis abandoned his “favorite boat”
and had a pair of canoes built to replace it, a task requiring an addi-
tional five days at the portage site.
On July 4, 1805, one year after the Corps of Discovery celebrated
Independence Day in northwest Missouri, Lewis wrote in his journal
that he and Clark had decided not to send a detachment back to St.
Louis from the Great Falls, a plan they had earlier considered but “never
once hinted to any one of the party.” With the journey proving longer,
more arduous, and even more uncertain than anticipated, they want-
ed every man for whatever lay ahead.
The stay at the falls had extended to a full month. During the portage
a number of men became ill, others suffered injuries, and almost all
were exhausted, leading Clark to write: “To State the fatigues of this
party would take up more of the journal than other notes which I find
Scercely time to Set down.” One hopeful note was Sacagawea’s recov-
ery from an illness that nearly took her life at the start of the portage.
Along with concern for the woman and the “young child in her arms,”
there was the realization she was “our only dependence for a friendly
negociation with the Snake Indians on whom we depend for horses to
assist us in our portage from the Missouri to the columbia River.”
Increasingly concerned about finding Shoshones, they set out again
on July 15. Clark and three other men were making their way over an
old Indian road when the rest of the party, traveling now in eight canoes,
entered a canyon Lewis called the “gates of the rocky mountains.”
North of Helena, Montana, the area is known today as the Gates of the
Mountains. “Clifts rise from the waters edge on either side perpendic-
ularly to the hight of 1200 feet,” he wrote, while “the river appears to
have forced it’s way through this immence body of solid rock for the
distance of 5 3/4 miles.” Traveling the narrow corridor in late evening
light, Lewis felt “every object here wears a dark and gloomy aspect” as
the “projecting rocks in many places seem ready to tumble on us.”
By July 25, Clark and his weary party, unsuccessful in their search
for Shoshones, reached the headwaters of the Missouri River, where
they were joined within two days by Lewis and the boat crews. Three
streams converged here, but only one would further their advance to
the Pacific. After studying the possibilities independently, both Lewis
and Clark decided it was the river they named the Jefferson that
would carry them westward.8 Sacagawea, who had been kidnapped
years earlier in the Three Forks area, was unable to tell the captains
72 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
Today’s visitors can take an afternoon boat trip through the Gates of the
Mountains near Helena, Montana, seeing the area Lewis described in 1805.
Ann Rogers.
which river to follow, but ten days later she recognized a large rock
formation having a shape somewhat like a swimming beaver and said
the “beaver’s head” was a landmark to her people, who would be
nearby at this season.
Encouraged, Lewis took Drouillard, John Shields, and Hugh McNeal
and set out on foot to find Shoshones. On August 12 they followed an
Indian trail across 8,000-foot Lemhi Pass on the present Montana-Idaho
border, becoming the first U.S. citizens to cross the Continental Divide.
Lewis was overjoyed when he “first tasted the water of the great
Columbia river.” (The stream he drank from flowed to the Lemhi
River, then to the Salmon and Snake Rivers, and finally to the Columbia.)9
His joy increased the next day when he found Indians who directed
him to their village. With Drouillard to help bridge the language bar-
rier, Lewis met with Chief Cameahwait and learned that despite their
horses the Indians were without meat and subsisting on berries.
Realizing that any game his men could provide would facilitate the
negotiations, he was glad Drouillard was also his best hunter.
The Months Between 73
At Lemhi Pass, on the Montana-Idaho border, Lewis and three of his men
became the first U.S. citizens to cross the Continental Divide. Ann Rogers.
In discussions with the Indians, Lewis and Clark were told the river
into which the Lemhi emptied could not be traveled, owing to its fast
current, dangerous rapids, and the scarcity of game along its banks.
But to the captains a river flowing westward through the mountains
offered a possibility they could not easily pass by. While Lewis cached
more supplies, supervised the repacking of baggage, and continued
bartering for more horses, Clark set out with a contingent of men
along the river he named for Meriwether Lewis. His reconnaissance
soon confirmed the Indians’ reports. What he found was mile after
mile of white water coursing between steep and rocky banks. The
river is now called the Salmon, and one treacherous portion Clark saw
carries a name he would have understood: the River of No Return.
Four days after starting his exploratory probe he decided that travel
by this route would be impossible.
Having accepted the land route as their only alternative, the cap-
tains hired an Indian guide known as Old Toby to lead them over the
mountain trail used by the Nez Percé Indians in their annual crossing
of the Bitterroots. On August 30 the expedition began moving north-
ward. Four days later there was a portent of what lay ahead when a
cold rain turned to sleet, glazing the rocky precipices on which they
were traveling. Better fortune awaited them on a meadow where they
met friendly Flathead Indians and obtained from them more than
enough horses to replace those injured in falls during the previous
day’s storm. The expedition then continued northward through a val-
ley presided over by the magnificent and formidable Bitterroot Range.
At Travelers Rest, near present-day Missoula, Montana, the men made
camp and prepared to cross these mountains.
The eleven-day traverse of the Bitterroots, over an Indian road later
known as the Lolo Trail, was the expedition’s worst ordeal. The trail
along the ridges of the mountains was not clearly defined, and in this
heavily timbered region fallen trees often blocked the path. Old Toby,
it turned out, had little familiarity with the route, and when snow
obscured the trail, he led the party far off course. The horses had trou-
ble keeping their footing; some were injured in falls, while others simply
gave out. Game, scarce before, virtually disappeared. To provide food,
Lewis decided they would kill the horses that had the least value as
pack animals. Clark’s journal entry for September 15 ends: “We melt-
ed the Snow to drink, and Cook our horse flesh to eat.”
September 16 brought another early winter storm, and by evening
eight inches of new snow obliterated the trail, which had now reached
The Months Between 75
Today, a two-lane road parallels the Lolo Trail, where the explorers struggled
for eleven days to make their way through the mountains. Ann Rogers.
for the return trip, and left them in the care of this hospitable tribe. In
1892, a branding iron with the marking “U S Capt. M. Lewis” would
be found on a sandbar in the Columbia River, and it is now in the pos-
session of the Oregon Historical Society.11
Accompanied by two Nez Percé guides, the expedition set out again
by water, making its way down the Clearwater and the Snake to the
Columbia. The men of the Corps of Discovery had, weeks earlier,
become the first U.S. citizens to cross the Rocky Mountains, and on
October 16, 1805, they became the first white men to see the Columbia
River east of the Cascade Range.12 The Pacific once more seemed an
attainable goal, but reaching it would not be easy. When rapids forced
portages, the men who were unable to swim carried the expedition’s
guns and ammunition, the captains’ papers, and other valuables over-
land while other men guided the canoes past the most hazardous por-
tions of the river.
“Ocian in view! O! the joy!” Clark’s journal entry for November 7
proclaims: “We are in View of the Ocian . . . this great Pacific Octean
which we [have] been So long anxious to See.” But what the explorers
were actually seeing was the wide Columbia estuary; the long-awaited
Pacific was still a frustrating week away. Rain fell almost constantly,
soaking everyone, while choppy waters caused some to become sea-
sick. At times, strong head winds made forward movement impossi-
ble, and at night, Ordway complained, the dispirited travelers “had
Scarsely room for to camp” between the steep hills and the encroach-
ing tides.
When they at last beheld “with estonishment the high waves dash-
ing against the rocks & this emence ocian,” it was mid-November and
time to construct winter quarters. On the evening of November 24,
Lewis and Clark asked each adult member of the party, including York,
a black slave, and Sacagawea, an Indian woman, to express a choice
regarding the fort’s location. Essentially, the choice was between find-
ing a site a short distance inland on the river or one south of the
Columbia and near the coast. Clark listed thirty names and recorded
and tallied the responses, including Sacagawea’s preference for “a place
where there is plenty of Potas.”13 The vote favored examining the south
side, which was also the captains’ choice. About four miles southwest
of present-day Astoria, the explorers built Fort Clatsop, a replica of
which stands today on the site selected in 1805.
Christmas Day brought an exchange of small gifts and an attempt at
festivity, though the dinner consisted of “pore Elk, So much Spoiled
The Months Between 77
Part of the reconstruction of Fort Clatsop, near Astoria, Oregon. The explorers
moved into their winter quarters on Christmas Eve, 1805. Ann Rogers.
that we eate it thro’ mear necessity.” As weeks passed, the hunters had
to range farther to find game and had greater difficulty bringing it
back. The winter at Fort Clatsop grew increasingly dreary, with rain
and fog so prevalent that the journals record only six clear days dur-
ing the four-month stay. The constant dampness permeated firewood,
spoiled meat, rotted clothing, damaged equipment, caused illness, and
created a sense of confinement that tested tempers and lowered spirits.
Throughout the winter a rotating detail of several men was assigned
the tedious chore of boiling countless gallons of sea water to obtain the
salt needed to preserve meat on the eastward trip. (A reconstruction of
the salt cairn can be seen today at Seaside, Oregon, about twelve miles
south of Fort Clatsop.) At the fort, the captains used the time to expand
and refine their notes and maps, just as they had used the winter at
Fort Mandan to work on data gathered in the first months of the journey.
Men stood guard duty to protect diminished supplies from Indians
who visited almost daily, while other men made clothing, including
more than three hundred pairs of moccasins. These would be needed
for the return journey, a journey everyone was impatient to begin.
78 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
Cannon Beach, on the Oregon Coast. Rain and fog were so common during
the winter encampment that the expedition’s journalists recorded only six
clear days. Ann Rogers.
Finally, in late March, Lewis and Clark turned over the fort to a
Clatsop chief, from whose tribe the structure derived its name, and the
Corps of Discovery prepared to leave this place where they had lived,
in the words of the captains, “as comfortably as we had any reason to
expect.” They did not leave their problems behind. Traveling east on
the Columbia meant traveling against that river’s strong current, a
voyage made more difficult by Indians who pilfered continually and
even stole Seaman. The thieves quickly surrendered the dog when
they realized the Corps of Discovery considered this a serious offense.
The explorers had been so eager to leave Fort Clatsop that they
arrived back at the Lolo Trail much too early in the spring for a cross-
ing of the Rockies. Almost six weeks passed before they could begin
their eastward traverse of the Bitterroots, a long wait for those “as anx-
ious as we are,” Lewis wrote, “to return to the fat plains of the Missouri
and thence to our native homes.” The snows were still deep in the
mountain passes when the expedition set out, but this traverse was
accomplished in only six days compared to the eleven required for the
westward crossing.
The Months Between 79
At Travelers Rest, reached on June 30, the captains divided the party.
Both groups would later divide again, but all were to assemble at the
confluence of the Yellowstone and the Missouri. Clark’s group, which
included the Charbonneau family, would travel through Shoshone
country to the Three Forks and then along the Yellowstone River.
Clark’s group experienced no major difficulties, but Lewis’s party
was less fortunate. On July 26, after a long reconnaissance of the Marias,
Lewis and the three men accompanying him encountered eight Black-
feet, with whom they uneasily camped for the night. Towards dawn the
Indians attempted to steal their guns and horses, and in the ensuing
struggle one Indian was stabbed and another was shot. Taking four of
the best horses, Lewis and his companions rode all day and throughout
the night, almost without pause, more than one hundred miles to the
Missouri River, where they were relieved to find the rest of their party.
One more misfortune occurred before the reunited group joined
Clark. While pursuing an elk in a thicket of trees, Lewis was acciden-
tally shot in the thigh by Pierre Cruzatte, a better waterman than
hunter, who was limited by blindness in one eye. Although the ball
missed both bone and artery, the painful wound left Lewis feverish
that night and restricted his mobility for several weeks. When his party
caught up with Clark’s, Lewis cited discomfort from his injury and the
difficulty of trying to write while lying on his stomach as the reasons
to “leave to my frind Capt. C. the continuation of our journal.”
By mid-August, after a separation of almost six weeks, all members
of the expedition were reunited and moving rapidly along the Missouri
River towards the Mandan villages. On their arrival there, Private John
Colter asked the captains to release him so he could join two trappers
headed west to the Yellowstone. Colter had proved an able and valu-
able member of the Corps of Discovery, and since his services were no
longer crucial, the two leaders were quick to grant his request and
wish him well in his future endeavors.
Farewells were also said to Sacagawea, Charbonneau, and the cou-
ple’s son, whom Clark had nicknamed “Pomp.” Clark offered to take
the three to St. Louis, but for the time being they would remain at the
Indian villages. Joining the returning party was a Mandan chief, Sheheke
(also called “Big White”), who had accepted Lewis’s invitation to visit
President Jefferson. With his wife and son, Sheheke would travel to
St. Louis in preparation for his trip to Washington.
Arikara chiefs declined a similar invitation when Lewis and Clark
held a council with them four days after leaving the Mandan villages,
80 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
and a week later there was an unpleasant exchange with Teton Sioux;
but the Corps of Discovery’s final encounter with Indians was with a
small group of Yankton Sioux, whose friendly reception repeated the
experience the explorers had with this tribe during the outward voyage.
Before all thoughts could turn to home, there was one remaining
mission. At noon on September 4, the two captains and a number of
their men climbed a bluff rising from the east side of the Missouri
River and located the grave of the one member of the Corps of Dis-
covery who lost his life on the journey. Finding the burial site dis-
turbed, they restored it and then said a last goodbye to Sergeant
Charles Floyd, who had not been with them when they saw the jagged
peaks of the Bitterroots or the white-crested breakers on the Pacific
shores but who had found much to admire in the gentler landscapes
of Missouri.
4
The Return through Missouri
81
82 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
“a bottle of whisky only which we gave to our party.” Just three miles
farther on, they met a larger pirogue, this one also from St. Louis and
carrying seven men on a trading expedition to the Omahas. The con-
versation with the second group was brief and overshadowed by the
difficulties the river presented.
While they had been able to cover sixty-five miles that day, it had
been along “a very bad part of the river” with “moveing Sands and a
much greater quantity of Sawyers or Snags than above.” Steering clear
of these hazards was made more difficult by the low state of the water.
Sandbars and sawyers had plagued the expedition in the first crossing
of Missouri, but low water had not been a problem. When the keelboat
and pirogues were moving westward through Missouri in 1804, the
river was full with snowmelt and spring rains. Now, in late summer,
the flow of the Missouri and its tributaries was significantly dimin-
ished. The Nemaha River “did not appear as wide as when we passed
up,” Clark noted, while the “Wolf river Scercely runs at all.”
The creatures for whom this second stream was named made their
presence known after dusk. “Wolves were howling in different direc-
tions this evening after we had encamped,” Clark wrote, as the men
paused on an island north of present-day St. Joseph. Joining their voic-
es to the nocturnal chorus were coyotes (Canis latrans), or “little prarie
wolves” as he called them. The Corps of Discovery had listened to
them throughout much of the journey, and the captains had been the
first to provide a detailed description of them. Clark admitted that
when he heard these animals barking west of the Rockies he had mis-
taken them for “our Common Small Dogs.” Even now, most of the
men “believed them to be the dogs of Some boat . . . which was yet
below us.”
Boats were, in fact, coming upriver toward them, and the next day
they saw a familiar face. They had gone about seven miles when they
came upon a pair of pirogues from St. Louis. One, loaded with trade
goods from the Chouteau warehouse, was headed for the Platte; the
other carried trappers who planned to go farther upriver. Among
them was one of the engagés who had accompanied the Corps of
Discovery to the Mandan villages in 1804. Although Clark’s journal
and Ordway’s mention the chance encounter, neither gives any hint of
the Frenchman’s reaction to seeing again the explorers with whom he
had spent almost a year. If he expressed the slightest curiosity about
the epic adventure they had west of the Mandan villages after he
returned to St. Louis, their journals do not record it.
The Return through Missouri 83
Instead, they note only that he reported a Mr. McClellan was a short
distance below. This was Robert McClellan, with whom Lewis and
Clark were acquainted from their earlier army service. Now engaged
in the fur trade, he was headed north to the Yankton Sioux in a twelve-
oared keelboat that was, by Ordway’s account, “well loaded down” with
merchandise from St. Louis. The trader “rejoiced to see us,” Ordway
continued, and “gave our officers wine and the party as much whiskey
as we all could drink.” While camped at the future site of St. Joseph,
Lewis and Clark learned from McClellan that people “were concerned”
about them after hearing rumors the entire party had been killed or
were prisoners of the Spanish.1
The captains were glad to disprove those stories, but they had
heard some disturbing news. Accompanying McClellan was Joseph
Gravelines, an interpreter whom they had asked in 1804 to escort an
Arikara chief on a visit to the president. They learned Gravelines now
had the unhappy duty of informing the Arikaras that their chief had
died while in Washington. Jefferson had instructed Gravelines to pre-
sent gifts to the tribe and to introduce improved methods of agricul-
ture. In addition, he was to make every effort on this trip to learn
something regarding the fate of the expedition, since there had been
no report in more than a year.
Traveling with Gravelines was Old Dorion, who two years before
had gone with Lewis and Clark to Sioux country and was now charged
with helping Gravelines move safely through Sioux territory with the
gifts intended for the Arikaras. Along with being told to “make every
enquirey” about the long-absent Corps of Discovery, Dorion had been
asked to persuade no more than six principal Sioux chiefs to visit the
city of Washington the following spring. On learning this, the captains
made what Clark called “Some Small addition to his instructions” by
increasing the number of chiefs to ten or twelve.
Two days after meeting McClellan’s boat, the explorers came on
another group of traders from St. Louis. These young men, traveling
in three large boats, “received us with great friendship,” Clark wrote,
“and pressed on us Some whisky for our men, Bisquet, Pork and
Onions. . . . We continued near 2 hours with those boats, makeing
every enquirey into the state of our friends and Country.” That night,
he added, “our party received a dram and Sung Songs untill 11 o’Clock
. . . in the greatest harmoney.”
On September 15 the expedition’s boats passed the mouth of the
Kansas River and arrived at the future location of Kansas City, Missouri.
84 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
The captains had been impressed when they first saw the site, and
now Clark described their second inspection. “Capt Lewis and my Self
assended a hill which appeared to have a Commanding Situation for
a fort, the Shore is bold and rocky imediately at the foot of the hill,
from the top of the hill you have a perfect Command of the river, this
hill fronts the Kanzas and has a view of the Missouri.”
On the outward journey, the expedition had paused for two days at
the confluence, but on this day the boats continued despite strong
head winds to Hay Cabin Creek, later called the Little Blue River. The
weather was “disagreeably” warm, and Clark wrote that “if it was not
for the constant winds . . . we Should be almost Suficated Comeing out
of a northern Country . . . in which we had been for nearly two years.”
A few miles above the Grand River, two days later, the explorers met
another Captain McClellan, this one a John McClellan, an acquain-
tance of Meriwether Lewis’s. From the trading parties they met on the
river, Lewis and Clark would have learned that Jefferson was still
president, having been reelected in 1804. Alexander Hamilton, the
nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, was dead, killed in a duel with
Aaron Burr, a longtime political adversary. In St. Louis, political ene-
mies were calling for the removal of General James Wilkinson, the
appointed governor of the Louisiana Territory, who had become the
focus of numerous suspicions and accusations. Anxious for a clearer
picture of the “political State of our Country,” the captains talked with
McClellan from noon until almost midnight.
They were told that the president “had yet hopes” for their return,
but they “had been long Since given . . . [up] by the people of the U S
Generaly and almost forgotton.” That word gave added incentive to
reach St. Louis as soon as possible and assure family, friends, and the
nation that they had indeed survived. Early the next morning the
boats raced on.
Western Missouri had no shortage of game and fish. Near the future
site of Independence the hunters shot a buck elk, described by Clark
as “large and in fine order.” It was the last of nearly four hundred elk
killed during the expedition,2 and it was the only one killed by the
Corps of Discovery in Missouri, although Clark described the region
as abounding in “Bear Deer & Elk.”3 The following evening another
member of the party caught a catfish estimated at one hundred pounds.
Deer were plentiful, and Ordway reported seeing a black bear running
into a thicket. The animals were there, but the speed of the downriver
journey and the party’s lack of horses didn’t give the hunters time to
The Return through Missouri 85
search out game and still keep up with the boats. Just below the Grand
River, they told the captains they had not been able to kill anything. In
place of meat, the expedition turned to pawpaws, a far more accessi-
ble food that had the added advantage of requiring no cooking or
other preparation.
After two years of subsisting chiefly on deer and elk, meat that was
usually tough, often dried, and sometimes “so much spoiled” that
they ate it through “mear necessity,” the men welcomed this change in
diet. Ordway wrote that the pawpaws, “which our party are fond of
. . . are a kind of fruit which abound in these bottoms and are now
ripe.” When an “emence Site of pappaws” was spotted, the men were
even willing to brave “a number a rattle Snakes” to gather in the fruit.
On September 18, Captain Clark recorded in his journal that while
the party was “entirely out of provisions [and] Subsisting on poppaws,”
the men “appear perfectly contented and tell us that they can live very
well on the pappaws.” His next observation in this same journal entry
would seem to be totally unrelated: “One of our party J. Potts com-
plains very much of one of his eyes which is burnt by the Sun from
exposeing his face without a cover from the Sun. Shannon also com-
plains of his face & eyes &c.”
The following day, with the crews making good speed and stopping
only long enough to gather more pawpaws, Clark added to his descrip-
tion of the problem:
A very singular disorder is takeing place amongst our party that of the
Sore eyes. three of the party have their eyes inflamed and Sweled in
Such a manner as to render them extreamly painfull, particularly when
exposed to the light, the eye ball is much inflaimed and the lid appears
burnt with the Sun, the cause of this complaint of the eye I can’t
[account?] for. from it’s Sudden appearance I am willing to believe it
may be owing to the reflection of the Sun on the water.
Pawpaws were considered a delicacy by the Corps of Discovery, but the fruit
may have caused the eye and skin discomforts Clark described in his journal.
Casey Galvin.
remidy” for the “violent inflamation of the eyes” that was “a disorder
common in this quarter.”6 Lewis wrote detailed instructions for prepar-
ing and using the root, which include placing pieces of carefully
washed roots in a bottle or vial, adding water (preferably rain water),
and applying the liquid to the eyes with “a piece of fine linin.” His
notation that it also “makes an excellent mouth water” accords with
the more common use of goldenseal as a treatment for mouth sores,
while applying it to the eyes seems almost as dangerous as bleeding a
man suffering from sunstroke or giving harsh purgatives for undiag-
nosed abdominal pains. But Lewis’s medical treatments were general-
ly in line with the practice of the time, and his knowledge of herbal
remedies was far above average.
Clark’s journal makes no mention of whether goldenseal was tried
or even remembered on the return voyage, but by the morning of
88 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
September 20, 1806, the eye problem had become so severe that three
men were unable to row. The captains decided to leave behind a pair
of twenty-eight-foot canoes Clark had ordered built on the Yellowstone
two months earlier, and with the men and their supplies aboard the
remaining boats, the party proceeded to the confluence of the Osage
and Missouri Rivers. The expedition had spent two days there in June
of 1804 while the captains took observations, but in 1806 the boats con-
tinued, passing the Gasconade River by noon.
While the rivers and streams Clark had mapped on the way west
served as markers to tell the men they were now in the final miles of
their journey, it was the sight of cows along the bank that “Caused a
Shout to be raised for joy.” Near sunset, after covering sixty-eight
miles, the canoes arrived at the tiny French settlement of La Charette.
Although it was the farthest outpost of white civilization on the Mis-
souri River, to the members of the Corps of Discovery it was proof
they were almost home.
The men fired three rounds as they drew near the shore and were
answered by several trading boats, whose crews provided the explorers
with a “very agreeable supper,” one that was apparently a welcome
change from the recent monotony of pawpaws. With rain imminent,
the boatmen offered the captains a tent for the night, while residents
of La Charette invited other members of the party to visit their simple
cabins. Clark noted that villagers and traders alike were “astonished”
at seeing the men and “informed us that we were Supposed to have
been lost long Since.” Expressions of wonder that they had survived
and returned were repeated in the miles ahead. As the canoes moved
downriver the next day, passing settlements that had not been estab-
lished when the expedition began, the people at each “were Surprized
to See us,” Ordway wrote, “as they Said we had been given out for
dead above a year ago.”
About fifty miles beyond La Charette, the oarsmen quickened their
pace as they drew within sight of St. Charles. Many of the town’s res-
idents were taking Sunday afternoon walks near the river, and a three-
round salute from the boats brought a crowd to the banks. Here, as
with all their encounters of the past week, delight was coupled with
incredulity, for these people too “had heard and had believed,” in
Ordway’s words, “that we were all dead and were forgotton.”
That evening, with their men quartered in the town, the captains
visited the homes of a few prominent citizens but had to decline sev-
eral other invitations. “The inhabitants of this village,” Clark wrote,
The Return through Missouri 89
“seem to vie with each other in their politeness to us all.” The kindness
of the St. Charles residents, coupled with a heavy rain, delayed depar-
ture until almost noon on Monday. With their safe return known and
their men “all Sheltered in the houses of those hospitable people,” the
captains talked with their hosts and used some of the time to write let-
ters. They could slow the pace in these last few miles, because in con-
trast to the ten weeks needed to cross Missouri in 1804, the return trip,
with the current in their favor, had been made in only two.
Their next stop was Fort Belle Fontaine, on the south bank of the
Missouri River at Cold Water Creek. Located about four miles west of
the Mississippi, the fort had been built a year after the expedition’s
departure, but Lewis and Clark had learned of it during their conver-
sations of the past week. The returning party was honored with a
salute fired from the artillery company’s field pieces and greeted by
Colonel Thomas Hunt. Like Lewis and Clark, Hunt had lived the his-
tory of his time. He fought at Lexington and Concord, was wounded
at Yorktown, served under General Anthony Wayne in the old North-
west Territory, and held a series of commands leading to his appoint-
ment to the newly established Fort Belle Fontaine.
Sergeant Ordway found it a “handsome place” and discovered “a
number of these Soldiers are aquaintances of ours.” Along with reunions,
reminiscences, and the chance to hear more about events of the past
two years, the captains had the opportunity to visit the post’s store the
next morning and outfit Chief Sheheke in preparation for the Mandan
leader’s introduction to St. Louis society.
On the final day of the voyage, the boats left the Missouri River and
entered the Mississippi, stopping only briefly at the site of Camp
Dubois, where the recruits had spent a winter preparing and waiting
for the journey that was now drawing to a close. At noon on September
23, 1806, the canoes of the expedition arrived at the riverfront in St.
Louis, where the captains allowed their men to fire three volleys “as a
Salute to the Town.” In return, they received a “harty welcom” from
the large crowd of cheering St. Louisans who gathered at the water’s
edge when word came overland that the boats of the explorers would
soon be in sight.
During the two years and four months of their journey, the men
of the Corps of Discovery traveled over seven thousand miles and
were eminently successful in carrying out the instructions of President
Jefferson. They followed the Missouri River to its source, mapping
that river and its tributaries. They traversed the Rocky Mountains,
90 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
becoming the first citizens of the United States to cross the Continental
Divide. They found the Columbia, the great river of the West, and fol-
lowed it to the Pacific.
Lewis and Clark met the Indians of the Northern Plains and North-
west as official representatives of the United States and told the Indians
the U.S. government wanted peaceful relations and trade. As they met
tribes along the route, they noted their appearance, attire, and activi-
ties and systematically collected Indian vocabularies.
They sent artifacts to President Jefferson from Fort Mandan, and
throughout the journey they collected animal and plant specimens,
including more than two hundred plants Lewis dried and preserved.7
They described species not known outside the West and helped define
the range of known species. Their reports of vast numbers of beaver
on the upper Missouri stimulated the developing American fur trade,
which was centered in St. Louis.
Lewis’s detailed scientific descriptions, combined with the daily
accounts written by Clark, Ordway, and at least four other members of
the expedition, constitute an extraordinary response to Jefferson’s
directive to keep multiple records of the voyage. In the words of one
historian, the journalists of the Lewis and Clark Expedition became
“the writingest explorers of their time.”
And despite the difficulties and dangers they faced, their mission
was accomplished with remarkable camaraderie and with the death
of only one man. Two hundred years later, the Lewis and Clark
Expedition remains an inspiring epic of diligence, courage, intelli-
gence, and endurance.
5
Missouri Sequels
From St. Louis on September 23, Meriwether Lewis sent a long let-
ter to President Jefferson beginning: “It is with pleasure that I anounce
to you the safe arrival of myself and party at 12 OClk. today at this
place with our papers and baggage.” Continuing what he knew would
be welcome news to the president, Lewis briefly outlined their success-
ful route to the Pacific, noting that, despite difficulties, “navigation of
the Missouri may be deemed safe and good.” With an eye to the future
fur trade, he informed Jefferson that the “Missouri and all it’s branch-
es from the Chyenne upwards abound more in beaver and Common
Otter, than any other streams on earth.” He then wrote that he would
soon be coming to Washington, bringing a Mandan chief who had
agreed to accompany him.1
Near the close of his letter, Lewis paid tribute to the man who had
been his coleader throughout the hardships and triumphs of the long
expedition: “With rispect to the exertions and services rendered by that
esteemable man Capt. William Clark in the course of late voyage I can-
not say too much; if sir any credit be due for the success of that arduous
enterprize in which we have been mutually engaged, he is equally with
myself entitled to your consideration and that of our common country.”2
Both men were again welcomed by the Chouteau family, and when
Lewis’s letter had been dispatched, he and Clark turned their attention
to the hospitality offered by their St. Louis friends. There was a dinner
at Auguste Chouteau’s home and a banquet and ball hosted by promi-
nent St. Louisans. Between events the captains paid “visits of form, to
the gentlemen of St. Louis,” some of whom no doubt had been part of
their send-off delegation two years earlier. One house they would not
91
92 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
visit was the one in which they had been frequent guests during the
months of preparation. Early in 1805, while they wintered at Fort
Mandan, Pierre Chouteau’s home, along with all his personal property
and papers, had been destroyed by fire.3
In the first weeks after his return, Lewis discharged the enlisted men
(who would each receive double pay and warrants for 320 acres of public
land west of the Mississippi), sold at auction supplies and equipment
left over from the expedition, and prepared for his visit to President
Jefferson. After about a month in St. Louis, the captains set out for Wash-
ington. Their party included Chief Sheheke and his family, York, several
former members of the Corps of Discovery, Pierre Chouteau, who was
the Osage Indian agent, and a number of Osage chiefs.
William Clark paused at Louisville to spend some time with his
family before going to Virginia, where he courted Julia Hancock. In
mid-November the group divided again: Chouteau and the Osage
Indians proceeded directly to the nation’s capital, while Lewis and his
party traveled by way of the Wilderness Road to Virginia. In his
September 23 letter, Lewis had written that he was “very anxious to
learn . . . whether my mother is yet living.” Three months later he
spent Christmas with her and also visited Monticello, where he saw
displayed various artifacts he had sent to Jefferson.
Lewis’s arrival in Washington with Chief Sheheke a few days after
Christmas inaugurated a series of balls and banquets that included a
White House reception hosted by President Jefferson. Washington soci-
ety delighted in its Indian guests, and the president celebrated Lewis
and Clark’s fulfillment of his long-cherished dream.
Within weeks Jefferson sent to the Senate his nomination of Meriwether
Lewis to be governor of Upper Louisiana. The nomination was approved
on March 3, 1807. For reasons that remain unclear, Lewis waited a full
year before returning to St. Louis to assume these duties. Some of that
time was spent in Philadelphia, where he had gone to lay the ground-
work for publication of the journals, but other factors were obviously
at work in his procrastination.
In 1808, Lewis brought journalism to Missouri by persuading an
Irish immigrant named Joseph Charless to come to St. Louis from
Louisville to establish the city’s first newspaper. Realizing Charless’s
press could have a major role in making citizens aware of new laws,
the governor and others provided financial support, and the Missouri
Gazette began publication in July of that year. The following year
Charless published the Laws of the Territory of Louisiana.4
Missouri Sequels 93
Meriwether Lewis is believed to have sat for this crayon portrait by Charles
St. Mémin during an 1803 visit to Philadelphia. Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.
Missouri Sequels 95
in a hostile environment. But if Seaman had been with one of the boats
rather than with Lewis, he might have survived, and research by his-
torian James Holmberg recently offered hope that the dog did indeed
return to St. Louis.
In 1814, Timothy Alden, a man with scholarly credentials, published
a five-volume collection of inscriptions copied from headstones, mon-
uments, and other sources. One of these inscriptions came from a most
unlikely source: a dog’s collar. The inscription as recorded by Alden
read: “The greatest traveller of my species. My name is SEAMAN, the
dog of captain Meriwether Lewis, whom I accompanied to the Pacifick
ocean through the interior of the continent of North America.” The
likely time, perhaps the only time, for the inscription to have been made
was after the expedition’s return.12
The collar, with its amazing inscription, was in a small museum in
Alexandria, Virginia. Many of the museum’s artifacts were lost in a fire
in 1871, and records of its holdings are incomplete, but Holmberg dis-
covered that the museum wrote to William Clark on August 21, 1812,
thanking him for the “Curiosities” he had presented. Of a “curiosity”
believed to be part of Clark’s donation, Alden wrote: “The foregoing
was copied from the collar . . . which the late gov. Lewis’s dog wore
after his return from the western coast of America. . . . After the melan-
choly exit of gov. Lewis, his dog would not depart for a moment from
his lifeless remains. . . . He refused to take every kind of food . . . and
died with grief upon his master’s grave.”13
No witness to Lewis’s last journey mentions a dog accompanying
him, nor is there any ready explanation for how the collar would have
come to William Clark if Seaman died in Tennessee unless, perhaps, it
was removed from the dog when Lewis’s possessions were being
assembled after his death. In any case, Alden almost certainly record-
ed the story as it was related to him. If that was, in fact, Seaman’s end,
it would be in keeping with the service Lewis’s dog had rendered and
the esteem in which he was held.
John Colter was not with the Corps of Discovery when the canoes
arrived at St. Louis in September 1806, but he, too, became a Missourian
after a series of adventures that made him one of the best-known
members of the expedition. Colter, whose name would become part
of the history of the American West, was born in Virginia about 1774.
Some five years later he moved with his parents to Maysville, Ken-
tucky, on the Ohio River, where he was recruited by Captain Lewis in
1803, becoming one of the “nine young men from Kentucky.” A blue-
eyed man of medium height and muscular build, Colter was endowed
with quick intelligence, amazing stamina, and unfailing courage.
During the winter at Camp Dubois, he demonstrated his skill as a
hunter, and during the journey he was often given assignments in
reconnaissance.18
When the returning explorers stopped at the Mandan villages in the
summer of 1806, Colter asked permission to leave the expedition and
join two trappers headed west. Clark wrote that both he and Captain
Missouri Sequels 99
Lewis “were disposed to be of Service to any one of our party who had
performed their duty as well as Colter had done.”19 He left with not
only their blessings but with powder, lead, and other useful articles
provided him by the captains and their men.
After trapping along the Yellowstone River, he was again headed
down the Missouri when he met the party of Manuel Lisa, the St.
Louis fur trader. Once more Colter reversed course. From a small trad-
ing post Lisa had established at the confluence of the Yellowstone and
Bighorn Rivers, Colter set out alone, exploring the region at the base
of the Teton Range in present-day Wyoming. Here he became the first
white man to see the geysers and mudpots that characterize Yellow-
stone National Park. “Colter’s Hell,” a name first given to a neighbor-
ing area of thermal activity the explorer described, was later applied
to Yellowstone Park.20
While trapping near the Three Forks in the autumn of 1808, Colter
and another former member of the Corps of Discovery, John Potts,
found themselves surrounded by hostile Blackfeet. Potts was killed as
soon as he shot one of the Indians. Then, according to a story that has
become legend, the Indians decided to have some sport with Colter
before killing him. Stripped of his clothing, he was ordered to begin
running. To the surprise of the Blackfeet, he outran all his pursuers but
one, whom he killed with the warrior’s own spear. This act of self-
defense, according to biographer Burton Harris, was the only time
Colter is known to have taken a human life. After plunging into a
river, he remained with only his nostrils above water while the Indians
spent several hours searching the riverbanks. When they finally left,
Colter swam downstream a short distance and completed his escape
by walking for eleven days—without clothing, moccasins, or food,
except for roots and tree bark—until he reached the safety of Manuel
Lisa’s fort.21
In 1810, after other narrow escapes from death, he returned to St.
Louis, where he met with William Clark and supplied him with valu-
able information for a map of the West that Clark was preparing for
publication along with the journals of the expedition. Then, with his
western adventures ended, Colter began a new life as a Missouri farmer.
His land lay just across the river from La Charette, which had been the
last white settlement the explorers saw when they set out in 1804. Some
sixty miles west of St. Louis, where the Big and Little Boeuf Creeks
flowed into the Missouri, he spent his few remaining years with his
wife, whom he had married after his return, and their son, Hiram.
100 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed ver-
sion of this work.
John Colter returned from his western adventures to become a farmer in this
area near New Haven, Missouri. Ann Rogers.
Although many of the men who traveled with Lewis and Clark lived
in Missouri after the Corps of Discovery returned, George Drouillard
had lived in Missouri before being recruited for the journey. Fathered
by a French Canadian, Drouillard had been born in or near Canada,
but he lived as a boy in the Cape Girardeau area with his Shawnee
mother. In what would become southeast Missouri, he grew up not far
from Louis Lorimier’s trading post and home, which Captain Lewis
visited as the explorers moved up the Mississippi in 1803.23 At the time
of Lewis’s visit to the commandant and his Shawnee wife, Lewis wrote
that he was bringing Lorimier letters of introduction, including one
from “a Mr. Drewyer, a nephew of the Commandt’s.” It is possible that
the nephew was in some way related to George Drouillard.
Missouri Sequels 101
Cape Girardeau was the address Drouillard gave after the expedi-
tion when he purchased the land warrants of two of his fellow explorers,
but he, like Colter, was drawn to the West and life beyond the frontier.
In April 1807, less than seven months after the Corps of Discovery
returned to St. Louis, Drouillard set out again on the Missouri River.
This time he was in the company of Manuel Lisa, engaged in what has
been called “the first organized trading and trapping expedition to
ascend the Missouri to the Rocky Mountains.”24
Among the fifty or sixty men traveling in a pair of keelboats were
several other former members of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,
whom Drouillard had recruited for this new venture. His presence and
theirs no doubt had a role in Colter’s decision to join Lisa’s party when
he met it at the mouth of the Platte. Colter, in turn, may have influ-
enced Lisa in his decision to leave the Missouri at its junction with the
Yellowstone and follow that river to the area where Colter had trapped
the previous winter. Friendly Crow Indians willing to trade and an
abundance of beaver made the fifteen-month trip a commercial suc-
cess, but Drouillard learned on returning to St. Louis that he was to stand
trial for murder.
The charge stemmed from an incident early in the 1807 journey.
Near present-day Jefferson City, about 120 miles into the voyage, one
man took some supplies and deserted. Lisa ordered Drouillard to
bring him back “dead or alive.” Shot by Drouillard, the man died from
his wound while being taken by canoe to St. Charles. Public sympathy
was with Drouillard and with the view that traders must be allowed
to maintain discipline. The jurors concurred and took less than fifteen
minutes to return a verdict of not guilty. Although Drouillard pointed
out that he had been following Lisa’s orders, he also expressed regret
for his action. Meriwether Lewis had written following the Lewis and
Clark Expedition that Drouillard had performed his duties “in good
faith and with an ardor which deserves the highest commendation.”
Of the incident during Manuel Lisa’s trading expedition, a biographer
has noted: “Drouillard was ever faithful in the discharge of a duty.
It was unfortunate that this time his zeal in this respect should have
carried him too far.”25
He again left St. Louis and returned to the West, where his skills as a
hunter and interpreter had been so valuable to Lewis and Clark. In 1810,
while trapping near the Three Forks, where Potts had died and Colter
had made his famous escape, George Drouillard was killed by Blackfeet.
102 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
Robert Frazer, along with at least nine other men in the Corps of
Discovery, was a Virginian by birth, but he settled in Missouri follow-
ing a postexpedition assignment. Like Ordway, he was part of the
group accompanying Captain Lewis and Chief Sheheke to Washing-
ton. After festivities at the White House and celebrations throughout
the capital, Frazer returned to the area that would be his home for the
rest of his life.
In the late 1820s Clark wrote that Frazer was living on the Gasconade,
the winding river that enters the Missouri west of Hermann. It was in
nearby Franklin County that Frazer died in 1837, thirty-three years
after he and his fellow explorers had camped at the mouth of the
Gasconade on their outward journey.
Not long before his death, Frazer shared with neighbors his account
of that great journey. John R. McBride noted in 1884: “He was a fre-
quent visitor at my father’s house in Franklin County, Missouri, and I
can distinctly recall many of his conversations.” Remembering him as
“a man of education and talent,” whose journal was “in many respects
more interesting than that of his commanders,” McBride wrote: “In his
declining years, the delight of the old explorer was to sit by the fire-
side of some friend, read extracts from this journal written thirty years
before, and add incidents from memory to the written tale.”29
Frazer intended his account to have far wider circulation. Within a
month after returning, he obtained Lewis’s permission to have the
104 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
Like Bratton, George Gibson was another of the “nine young men
from Kentucky.” They, along with Joseph Field, formed the small
group sent out soon after Christmas in 1805 to establish a salt-making
camp on the Oregon Coast. It has been suggested that these three Ken-
tuckians were given the assignment because high-quality salt was made
at springs south of Louisville, and Clark was aware that one or more
of them knew the process.
Salt making was not the only skill Gibson demonstrated while with
106 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
After setting out from Louisville in 1803 with the captains and their
recruits, York functioned not as Clark’s personal servant but as a mem-
ber of the expedition. The day after Christmas he and Joseph Whitehouse
were “sawing with the whip Saws” at Wood River. On the journey
west York killed an elk, brought down geese and other wild fowl, and
shot buffalo on the plains.
Clark’s journal singles him out as being especially attentive to the
dying Sergeant Floyd, but York himself became the center of attention
when the explorers met the Arikaras. “Those Indians wer much aston-
ished,” Clark wrote. “They never Saw a black man before, all flocked
around him & examind him from top to toe.” Sergeant Ordway, who
often wrote in detail about the Indians, said of the Arikaras: “The
Greatest Curiousity to them was York. . . . [A]ll the nation made a
Great deal of him. the children would follow after him, & if he turned
towards them they would run from him & hollow as if they were ter-
108 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
reyfied, & afraid of him.” York “Carried on the joke,” not only demon-
strating his physical strength but also telling the Indians that before
Clark caught him he was “wild & lived upon people,” finding “young
children was verry good eating.” Clark began to regret that York was
making “him Self more turrible in thier view than I wished.”43
The awe with which the Arikaras and other Indians regarded him
and the easy acceptance the white recruits accorded him were only
memories when the journey ended.44 The return to his former status
could be seen as reason enough for his discontent in the years that fol-
lowed, but recently discovered letters show another cause. York had a
wife in Louisville, whom he had married before the expedition, and he
wanted to be with her. Instead, he was expected to live in St. Louis,
Clark’s new home.
In 1988, more than 175 years after they were written, forty-two let-
ters from William Clark to his eldest brother, Jonathan, were found in
the attic of a Louisville home belonging to Jonathan’s descendants.
Eleven of these letters mention York. On November 9, 1808, William
told his brother that he was allowing York “to Stay a fiew weeks with
his wife” but that “he wishes to Stay there altogether and hire him-
self.” Although “he prefers being Sold to return[ing] here,” Clark
wrote, “I am determined not to Sell him.”45
On his return to St. Louis, York did little to hide his resentment, and
Clark wavered. In an apparent mixture of frustration and compassion,
Clark did at some point hire out York to a man in Louisville. In May
1811, John O’Fallon, Clark’s nephew, was in that city and reported to
his uncle what he had learned about York’s situation. He understood
Clark’s reason for sending York to Louisville was “that he might be
with his wife,” but O’Fallon had found her owner was preparing to
move within a few months to Natchez, taking her along. Moreover,
York’s shabby appearance suggested he was not being treated well,
and, the letter continued, he seemed “wretched under the fear that he
has incurred your displeasure.”46
Among the Clark letters is one written to Jonathan in 1805 from the
expedition’s winter quarters at Fort Mandan mentioning that York
was sending a buffalo robe to his wife and another to a person identi-
fied as Ben. Ben was a former slave Clark had freed in 1802 “in con-
sideration of the services already rendered to me” and because he
believed “perpetual involuntary servitude to be contrary of the prin-
ciples of natural Justice.” These reasons should have compelled him to
free York, and still he hesitated.47
Missouri Sequels 109
Also returning from Fort Mandan in the spring of 1805 were about
four French boatmen. Other engagés had returned the previous autumn.
Because the expedition’s journalists spelled names a variety of ways,
110 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
Fort Mandan was the place the French engagés and the half-dozen
soldiers returning the keelboat parted from the expedition in 1805. It
was also the place Toussaint Charbonneau, his young Shoshone wife,
Sacagawea, and their infant son had joined the explorers. A multitude
of paintings, statues, and writings portray Sacagawea as Lewis and
Clark’s indispensable guide on their transcontinental journey. That
was not her role, but she did make significant contributions. To the
Indians they encountered, she was a sign the explorers came in peace,
because a war party would never be accompanied by a woman. As the
Corps of Discovery neared the place where she had been kidnapped
years earlier, her recognition of landmarks provided welcome assur-
ance to the captains that they would soon find Shoshones. With her
people located, Sacagawea acted as an interpreter, and her recognition
of the chief as her brother aided in the negotiations. She again served
as an interpreter when the explorers found members of her tribe else-
where. Whenever possible, she gathered edible roots and berries that
supplemented the party’s meager rations or provided some healthful
balance to a diet heavy in meat. On the return journey, when she was
again in the area she knew from her childhood, she acted as a guide
for Clark’s segment of the divided party, directing the captain to use
present-day Bozeman Pass as the best route to the Yellowstone River.
Missouri Sequels 111
had died two months earlier, and William Clark was in Washington,
D.C., dealing with some of the consequences of that death.
Because St. Louis had no resident priest in 1809, the baptism was
performed by Father Urbain Guillet, a Trappist monk who crossed the
Mississippi to spend Christmas week tending to the spiritual needs of
the town. His order had recently established a small community of
monks at Indian mounds located several miles south of those Clark
explored during the winter at Camp Dubois. Monks Mound, now part
of Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois, takes its name from
these nineteenth-century religious who lived at this site and farmed
the mound’s terraces.55
Records in St. Louis show that in 1810 Toussaint Charbonneau
bought from Clark a tract of land on the Missouri River in St. Ferdinand
Township, just west of St. Louis, but they also show he sold the land
back to Clark the following year. The departure of Charbonneau and
Sacagawea from Missouri in 1811 was described by Henry Brackenridge
in his Journal of a Voyage Up the River Missouri:
In the winter of 1812, John Luttig, a fur company clerk from St. Louis,
was working at Fort Manuel, located on the Missouri River just below
the present border between North and South Dakota. On December 20
he made the following entry in his journal: “This evening the wife of
Charbonneau, a Snake squaw, died of a putrid fever. She was a good
and the best woman in the fort, aged about 25 years. She left a fine
infant girl.”57
The fort, established by Manuel Lisa and named for him, faced
increasing threats by Indians and was abandoned in March 1813.
Fifteen of Lisa’s men were killed by Sioux as they came downriver,58
but Luttig escaped and returned to St. Louis, bringing with him the
baby girl he called Lizette. Because he stopped making daily journal
entries in the final hours at the besieged post, there is no account of
how he was able to care for an infant during the long trip from Fort
Manuel. But a record in the Orphans’ Court in St. Louis shows that
he applied to be appointed guardian for Lizette and her brother, the
Missouri Sequels 113
child who had traveled with the Corps of Discovery. This record also
shows Luttig’s name was later crossed out and replaced with the name
of William Clark.59
Charbonneau had been away from Fort Manuel when its occupants
scattered. He continued to work as an interpreter and may have come
to St. Louis sporadically, but there is no evidence he took any interest
in his children. In 1839, when about eighty years old, he reappeared
at the Office of Indian Affairs in St. Louis, asking to be paid for prior
services as an interpreter at the Mandan villages, where a smallpox epi-
demic two years earlier had virtually eliminated the tribe. Joshua Pilcher,
the superintendent, approved a modest payment, and Charbonneau
once more went on his way.60
Jean Baptiste Charbonneau (sometimes called by his father’s name,
Toussaint) was educated in St. Louis, as Clark had promised, and trav-
eled to Europe at the invitation of Prince Paul of Württemberg, whom
he met on the Missouri River at the present site of Kansas City. After
six years in Europe, Jean Baptiste returned to America to work as a
trapper and as a guide for western travelers. Among those he escort-
ed through the American wilderness was Jefferson K. Clark, the
youngest son of William Clark. Later, Jean Baptiste tried his luck in
the California gold rush and, after disappointments, was en route to
goldfields in Montana when he died in 1866, at the age of sixty-one.
His grave is in Danner, Oregon.61
between the Arkansas River and a line running east from Fort Osage.
The vast area included almost all of present-day Missouri south of the
Missouri River. The benefits the Osages received were principally the
government trading house and the promise of protection from feared
eastern tribes. The chiefs expressed approval, cannon boomed, and the
Indians celebrated.
Clark could not know then that the treaty would soon be rejected
by other chiefs and replaced by one written by Meriwether Lewis.
Language difficulties and misunderstandings were part of the prob-
lem, and apparently Pierre Chouteau, the Osage agent, urged the
chiefs to reject any treaty that did not validate his land claims in the
area—but neither he nor the Osages would gain by having the treaty
rewritten. When the second version was presented by Chouteau in
November 1808, the post was officially named Fort Osage. Some con-
tinued to use its earlier name, Fort Clark, and that is the name William
Clark used when he placed it on his 1810 map of the West.68
By September 15, the fort Clark had sketched out only days earlier
Missouri Sequels 117
Clark described the Fort Osage site as “elegant, commanding and healthy.”
Ann Rogers.
but Biddle’s lack of scientific knowledge led him to omit a large amount
of valuable material. Only about fifteen hundred copies were made
available, and two years after the publication Clark was still trying to
obtain a copy for himself. Later he reported he was able to borrow one.71
In 1813 William Clark became the first governor of the newly formed
Missouri Territory. Appointed by President Madison and later reap-
pointed to three more terms, he served until Missouri attained state-
hood. Clark’s tenure as governor, like Lewis’s, came at a difficult time.
The rapidly increasing white population disliked his order to respect
Indian lands or face removal by the military. Land claims made dur-
ing the earlier Spanish control of the territory were a source of contin-
uing disputes, and tensions increased when the federal government
moved eastern Indians west of the Mississippi, bringing them into con-
flict with both whites and established tribes. The War of 1812 pulled
U.S. troops away from the frontier at the same time the British were
inciting Indians against American settlers. Recurrent rumors that large
numbers of Indians were massed for an attack on St. Louis sent waves
of panic through the town. Meanwhile, small settlements in more remote
areas were raided, and reports of Indian atrocities fueled a growing
demand for revenge.
Throughout his eight years as territorial governor, Clark worked to
secure the safety of Missouri citizens. One major effort was the coun-
cil held at Portage des Sioux, in St. Charles County. For three months
during the summer of 1815, Governor Clark, Auguste Chouteau, and
Governor Edwards of Illinois met with chiefs from more than a dozen
tribes. A number of peace treaties resulted, but for the many white set-
tlers who wanted vengeance rather than mediation, Clark’s approach
to the problem was too conciliatory. Against this background he entered
the race to become Missouri’s first elected governor.
Clark was away from Missouri during much of the campaign. His
twenty-eight-year-old wife had been in failing health and was staying
at her former home in Fincastle, Virginia. Under criticism for spending
too much time away from his official duties, Clark had just returned
to St. Louis when he received word of Julia’s death on June 27, 1820.
Almost immediately he left again to make the long trip between Mis-
souri and Virginia. Sorrow would be added to sorrow when his six-
year-old daughter became ill and later died at the home of relatives
in Kentucky.
By the time Clark and his sons returned to St. Louis, Missouri had
its first elected governor: Alexander McNair. Clark had been defeated
120 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
This portrait of William Clark by Joseph Bush was painted in Louisville about
1817. Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky.
Missouri Sequels 121
St. Charles just before the expedition set out from there in 1804.)74
Clark’s public and private life found expression in the residence he
built in 1816 at the corner of Main and Vine, on land now part of the
Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. The two-story brick home was
large enough for Clark’s growing family, and in a wing at the south end
of the mansion was his Council Chamber, a hundred-foot-long room
displaying Indian artifacts, many of them presented by the Indians who
visited him. Set out on tables and in cases, attached to the walls, and
suspended from the ceiling were canoes, snowshoes, papoose cradles,
beaded clothing, fur robes, feathered headdresses, and bear-claw neck-
laces. There were tomahawks, battleaxes, and bows and arrows, as well
as peace pipes, cooking utensils, and musical instruments. And because
the display was open to the public on request, William Clark’s Council
Chamber was the first museum west of the Mississippi.75
Months before Clark died, Meriwether Lewis Clark gave the natu-
ral history portion of his father’s museum to the Western Academy of
Natural Sciences in St. Louis, and a year earlier Albert Koch had pro-
cured many of the Indian pieces for his St. Louis Museum. Nothing
from the original collection can be traced. The Indian portraits that vis-
itors mentioned seeing on the walls of the Council Chamber disap-
peared and were not mentioned when Clark’s estate was inventoried.76
St. Louis lost a treasure when Clark’s museum was dismantled.
One famous visitor to the Council Chamber was the Marquis de
Lafayette, who years earlier had come from France to help America in its
war for independence. A welcomed guest on return visits, he came to
St. Louis in 1825 as part of an extensive tour of the United States. Clark
received from Lafayette a mahogany camp chest, carefully fitted with
a coffeepot, dishes, candlesticks, and other items useful for travel. (The
Missouri Historical Society now owns and sometimes displays the chest.)
A frequent caller at William Clark’s home was a Pennsylvania-born
artist, George Catlin. At Clark’s invitation, he painted portraits of many
native chiefs as they met in the Council Chamber with the man they
called the Red Head. Fascinated by the Indians he met and by Clark’s
descriptions of the Northwest, Catlin became the first artist to travel up
the Missouri River, adding to his collection of Indian portraits and
recording on canvas the Nebraska bluffs, Sergeant Floyd’s gravesite, the
Mandan villages, and other landmarks of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
The individuals who had shared in that journey were not forgotten
by William Clark. Sometime between 1825 and 1828 he used the cover
of one of his account books to list the members of the expedition. After
Missouri Sequels 123
127
128 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
from 1904 points out the symbols of Lewis’s dual role on the expedi-
tion: “One hand grasps the long rifle and the other the commission
and papers of official character. . . . He was at once the official repre-
sentative of the Jefferson administration and the head of a hardy
adventurous band finding a path to the Pacific.”1 The statue, which
stood in a prominent location along the Grand Basin near the Cascades,
was the nation’s first to honor Meriwether Lewis.
Also along the Grand Basin and among the “Pathfinders of the
Purchase” was the first statue of William Clark. Sculptor F. W. Ruckstahl
used facial features from Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of Clark and
Lewis and Clark and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition 129
To represent their state and honor the man considered the “patron
saint of the exposition,” Virginians looked to examples of Jefferson’s
architecture. “The choice lay between one of the university buildings
designed by him and the home he designed for himself and in which
he lived and died.”6 A replica of either would have been a fitting trib-
ute, but Monticello, already standing at the time of the Louisiana
Purchase, has strong links to that event and to the Lewis and Clark
Expedition. It was at Monticello that Jefferson and Lewis made plans
for the great journey. It was there that Jefferson displayed Indian arti-
facts sent back from Fort Mandan; and it was there that he met with
William Clark to discuss publication of the journals that described the
Louisiana Territory and recorded the explorers’ achievements.
Photographs of the full-size replica of Monticello show an exterior
faithful to Jefferson’s design. Inside were displays of letters and other
Lewis and Clark and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition 131
To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed ver-
sion of this work.
The Virginia State Building at the World’s Fair was a faithful replica of
Monticello. Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.
materials, were sold and moved. Some traveled as far as Iowa, Okla-
homa, and New Mexico. At least seven stayed in the St. Louis area, and
four of these remain standing. The Oregon Building was purchased by
Anderson Gratz and moved to his property in the St. Louis suburb of
Kirkwood. Rebuilt and renamed the “Wickiup,” it was used by his
daughter for “parties and other entertainments” before being destroyed
by fire in 1913.11
By then its significance had been lost, but during the summer of 1904
its meaning was never obscured. A sign at the entrance told visitors:
“This structure is a replica of Old Fort Clatsop, the winter quarters,
1805–6, of Captains Lewis and Clark with their company after they
had, in the greatest of American explorations, crossed the continent to
the Pacific.”12
As part of the 1904 commemoration, a granite obelisk and bronze
bust of William Clark were dedicated on October 2, at Bellefontaine
Cemetery. Clark’s body had been moved from his nephew’s farm in
1860 and reinterred along with those of five family members at the
cemetery north of the city. At the 1904 dedication, Mayor Wells spoke
of Clark’s untiring energy and the great good he had done for St. Louis;
and David R. Francis, president of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition,
said people in this part of the country were only beginning to appre-
ciate Clark’s achievements. Just before the unveiling of the monument,
a Creek chief from the Indian Territory praised Clark as “a brave man
and a man of mercy,” who throughout a difficult mission “made friends
with the Indians.”13
A photograph from the next day’s edition of the St. Louis Republic
shows Clark family members posed on the obelisk’s terraced base.
Nine children seated on the steps represent what was then the youngest
generation. Standing behind them is Mrs. Jefferson K. Clark, the widow
of Clark’s last son, whose will provided for his father’s monument. Also
pictured are John O’Fallon Clark, who had loaned the fair a portrait of
his grandfather painted by Chester Harding; Julia Clark Voorhis; and
her daughter, Eleanor Glasgow Voorhis.14 The Missouri Historical Soci-
ety would eventually receive from Julia Voorhis the Lewis and Clark
journals she had inherited, including Clark’s field book with his sketch
of Fort Clatsop on the elkskin cover.15
David R. Francis and others who had worked to make the Louisiana
Purchase Exposition a success proposed a memorial to Thomas Jefferson
as a legacy of the fair. The exposition company and the City of St. Louis
agreed their share of the profits should go to this purpose, and Francis
134 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
135
136 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
the explorers’ route and contains excerpts from the journals. In the log-
gia are Karl Bitter’s statue of Jefferson and a bas relief of the signing of
the Louisiana Purchase treaty. The museum offers exhibits and pro-
grams relating to early St. Louis, and those interested in Lewis and
Clark may be fortunate enough to visit when items such as Lewis’s tel-
escope or Clark’s elkskin journal are on display. The Historical Society’s
library on Skinker Boulevard, a few minutes’ drive west of the museum,
is a favorite place for scholars researching western history.
Powder Valley Conservation Nature Center, 11715 Cragwold Road,
in the suburb of Kirkwood, features a half-scale replica of Lewis and
Clark’s keelboat, natural history exhibits and programs, and hiking
trails. The lobby has a windowed viewing area for watching songbirds,
wild turkey, and small mammals feeding. A three-thousand-gallon
simulated pool with catfish, bass, and bluegill provides aquarium-
The Trail Today 137
style viewing on the lower level but from the upper level looks like a
natural pool. Powder Valley is a favorite with families because it offers
activities and exhibits that are interesting to both children and adults.
The Mercantile Library, on the St. Louis campus of the University of
Missouri, at 8001 Natural Bridge Road in the suburb of Normandy,
specializes in the history of St. Louis and America’s westward expan-
sion. The library includes a gallery of western art, featuring Chester
Harding’s full-length portrait of William Clark and Indian portraits by
George Catlin, who painted in Clark’s Council Chamber.
The stately General Bissell House, 10225 Bellefontaine Road, dates
to about 1812 and was the home of the general who commanded near-
by Fort Bellefontaine. When a captain, he was the commander at Fort
Massac when Lewis and Clark stopped there in 1803.
Jefferson Barracks, overlooking the Mississippi in Lemay, about ten
miles south of the Arch, replaced Fort Bellefontaine in 1826, with William
Clark helping to choose the site. Exhibits tell the history of the post
where Grant, Lee, Sherman, Longstreet, and Fremont were stationed.
One diorama shows the Sauk chief Black Hawk guarded by a recent
West Point graduate, Lieutenant Jefferson Davis. Clark visited here in
1833 at the request of Sauk and Fox Indians who wanted him to inter-
cede on behalf of the chief who fought to reclaim Indian lands east of
the Mississippi.
The St. Louis Zoo, located in Forest Park, is one of the best zoos in
the United States, and admission is free (except for a parking charge).
It offers a chance to see some of the species Lewis and Clark described.
A visit to St. Louis should include the Missouri Botanical Garden,
4344 Shaw Avenue, in south St. Louis. There is a large variety of indoor
and outdoor gardens, as well as pools, fountains, a maze, a pleasant
restaurant, and a bookstore and gift shop. Visitors can see beautiful
specimens of many of Missouri’s indigenous plant species that Lewis
and Clark noted, including Osage orange and sycamore trees and a
representative planting of prairie grasses.
The expedition’s journals abound in favorable references to Missouri’s
prairies, which once covered 40 percent of the state. The Shaw Nature
Reserve (formerly the Shaw Arboretum), thirty miles west of St. Louis
at Gray Summit, I-44 exit 253, includes a seventy-eight-acre tallgrass
prairie accented by native wildflowers. An observation deck provides
an overview, while miles of hiking trails introduce visitors to the plants,
flowers, birds, animals, and trees of the twenty-five-thousand-acre
nature preserve. In addition to this extension of the Missouri Botanical
138 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed ver-
sion of this work.
Garden, a number of other prairies across the state have been preserved
or restored through the efforts of the Missouri Department of Conserva-
tion, the Missouri Prairie Foundation, and the Missouri Department of
Natural Resources.
The Columbia Bottom Conservation Area in northeast St. Louis
County has biking and walking trails, boat access, and an observation
deck for viewing the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi
Rivers.
St. Charles
The historic district of St. Charles retains the basic pattern of the
town Lewis and Clark saw in 1804. Missouri’s first state capitol has
been restored, and other buildings from the early nineteenth century
serve as shops, homes, and restaurants.
The Trail Today 139
Under the leadership of Glen Bishop, the Discovery Expedition of St. Charles
built full-scale replicas of the keelboat and two pirogues used in the 1804
crossing of Missouri. Darold Jackson.
The Lewis and Clark Boat House and Nature Center, on Riverside
at Bishop’s Landing, offers a fine overlook of the Missouri River, nat-
ural history exhibits recalling a variety of animals seen by Lewis and
Clark, and a series of dioramas depicting the explorers’ route to the
Pacific.
St. Charles resident Glen Bishop spent a dozen years building by
hand a full-scale replica of Lewis and Clark’s keelboat that could trav-
el the river. The Discovery Expedition of St. Charles now has full-scale
replicas of the 1804 expedition’s two pirogues, as well as a fifty-five-
foot keelboat. When the boats are not traveling the river, fulfilling their
educational mission, they can be seen at the lower level of the boat-
house. Nearby, in Frontier Park, is a fifteen-foot-high monument rep-
resenting Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Lewis’s dog, Seaman.
Lewis knew the Femme Osage region was “generally called Boon’s
settlement” when the expedition moved through in 1804. The Daniel
Boone Home, where the elder Boone died in 1820, was built by his son
140 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed ver-
sion of this work.
Nathan in the years Lewis and Clark were making their journey. The
attractive, two-story stone house is near Defiance, in St. Charles County,
and can be reached by taking Missouri 94 to Route F and following the
signs. Boonesfield Village, behind the home, is a collection of buildings,
including a steepled church, moved from other sites.
Illinois
To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version of this
work.
Monks Mound, at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, was named for the
Trappists who established a community at this place for a short period in the
nineteenth century. Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site.
attended mass would have looked much like this. The Cahokia Court-
house Historic Site was built as a residence in 1737, when the region was
part of France’s colonial empire, and began twenty-one years of service
as a courthouse in 1793, with Cahokia under U.S. jurisdiction. The Jarrot
Mansion, in the Federal style, was built in 1810 for Nicholas Jarrot,
who interpreted for Lewis when he met Spanish officials in St. Louis.
Camp Dubois, where the recruits trained during the winter of 1803–
1804, was located on the south bank of Wood River, opposite the Mis-
souri River’s entrance into the Mississippi. The Missouri today flows
several miles south of its 1804 channel, and the Mississippi has moved
east. The wooded site selected for the monument commemorating the
winter camp is in the same position relative to the Mississippi and
Missouri as the original site, and a nearby visitors center focuses on the
preparations for the journey. The Lewis and Clark State Historic Site is
two miles south of Hartford, on Illinois 3.
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, which is near Collinsville rather
than Cahokia, contains within its 2,200 acres sixty-eight man-made
142 Lewis and Clark in Missouri
mounds used for ceremonies and burials. During his stay at Camp
Dubois, Clark saw the northern edges of this group of mounds, which
were made by the Mississippian culture, which reached its peak about
A.D. 1100. The site includes an excellent interpretive center, level walk-
ways, and a challenge for those who choose to climb the hundred-foot-
high Monks Mound, named for the Trappists who lived at this site in
the nineteenth century and raised vegetables and fruit trees on the
mound’s terraces.
Excellent reconstructions of the gatehouse and walls give today’s
visitors a better perspective on Fort de Chartres than Clark had when
he saw it in ruins. About fifty miles southeast of St. Louis, the 1,100-
acre Fort de Chartres State Historic Site is four miles west of Prairie du
Rocher on Illinois 155. Costumed reenactments throughout the year
and an annual rendezvous bring life to the stone fort.
Fort Massac State Park, on the Ohio River at the southern tip of
Illinois, features a reconstruction of the 1794 fort Lewis and Clark vis-
ited in 1803, a museum, living history weekends, hiking trails, and pic-
nic areas. The Clark statue here is of William’s brother George Rogers
Clark, who captured the Illinois Territory in the Revolutionary War.
Southeastern Missouri
Central Missouri
found on the site and other objects are on display, and a mural in the
visitors center provides a view of the people for whom Missouri is
named. The beautifully wooded park has facilities for picnics, camp-
ing, hiking, and fishing.
Kansas
To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed ver-
sion of this work.
Leavenworth has two parks at river level and two esplanades with
broad vistas of the river.
U.S. 73 goes north through pleasant farmland to Atchison, which
sits on a high bluff overlooking the Missouri. There is a Chamber of
Commerce Visitors Center in the Santa Fe Depot, and in front of the
depot is a small stream identified as Independence Creek, named by
Lewis and Clark on July 4, 1804. At Atchison a bridge crosses the river
to Buchanan County, Missouri.
Northwestern Missouri
Weston Bend State Park, a mile south of Weston on Missouri 45, offers
a short biking trail and five miles of hiking trails, but its best-known
feature is a picturesque overlook that provides a serene, unspoiled
view of river and forests recalling Clark’s descriptions of cottonwood
and willow along the banks and oak and walnut at higher elevations.
The Trail Today 147
To view the complete page image, please refer to the printed version
of this work.
The lake bordering Lewis and Clark State Park may be the one Clark named
Gosling Lake when the expedition passed through this area on the Fourth of
July in 1804. Ann Rogers.
life Refuge, off U.S. 159, southwest of Mound City, gives photographers
and others a chance to see numerous species of migratory birds, as
well as beaver, deer, and other wildlife.
1. Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with
Related Documents, 1783–1854, 1:20.
2. Paul Russell Cutright, “Meriwether Lewis Prepares for a Trip West.”
3. Jackson, Letters, 1:57–60, 110–11.
4. Ibid., 125.
5. Lewis’s account of his Ohio River journey appears in volume 2 of
Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. All
quotations from the journals will be from Moulton’s edition and will
hereafter be cited only if they appear out of sequence and would therefore
be difficult to locate.
6. Jackson, Letters, 1:58.
7. Moulton, Journals, 4:215.
8. Samuel Thomas, “William Clark’s 1795 and 1797 Journals and Their
Significance.”
9. Jackson, Letters, 1:7–8.
10. Missouri: The WPA Guide to the “Show Me” State, 200.
11. Moulton, Journals, 2:113 n. 5.
12. John Shea, Early Voyages Up and Down the Mississippi, 68.
13. Moulton, Journals, 1:3a, 3b; 2:162.
14. Lewis’s descriptions of Missouri in 1804 are found in his “Summary
View of the Rivers,” in Moulton, Journals, 3:336–47. Lewis wrote this doc-
ument during the winter at Fort Mandan.
15. Thomas, “Clark’s 1795 and 1797 Journals,” 290.
16. Ibid., 291.
17. Robert Ramsay, Our Storehouse of Missouri Place Names, 109.
18. Thomas, “Clark’s 1795 and 1797 Journals,” 292.
19. Frances Stadler, “St. Louis in 1804,” 11–16.
20. Arlen Large, “Expedition Specialists,” 5.
21. Moulton, Journals, 2:154 n. 3.
22. Pierre Chouteau’s father was Pierre Laclède, with whom his mother
lived for more than twenty years. Because both French law and the Catholic
Church still considered her to be married to the husband who deserted her,
her four children by Laclède were given the surname Chouteau (William E.
Foley and C. David Rice, The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis, 3).
149
150 Notes
1. Lewis and Clark’s Council Bluff was on the west side of the Missouri
River, in present-day Nebraska, and north of today’s city of Council
Bluffs, Iowa.
2. For a description of the military and religious ceremonies that would
probably have taken place, see Robert Hunt, “For Whom the Guns
Sounded.”
3. Jackson, Letters, 1:370 n. 3. George Yater identifies the letter’s writer,
Nathaniel Floyd, and its recipient, Nancy, as cousins of Sergeant Floyd
(“Nine Young Men from Kentucky,” 5–6). Yater blames the confusion as to
whether they were his cousins or his siblings on the fact that their father
was named Charles Floyd. The elder Floyd, Yater says, was the sergeant’s
uncle rather than his father.
4. Eldon G. Chuinard, Only One Man Died: The Medical Aspects of the
Lewis and Clark Expedition, 238–39.
5. Jackson, Letters, 1:254–56.
6. Sacagawea’s year of birth is not known; she was probably about six-
teen or seventeen in 1805.
7. Moulton, Journals, 4:175 n. 5.
8. They named the others the Madison, for Secretary of State James
Madison, and the Gallatin, for Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin.
9. Moulton, Journals, 5:76 n. 8.
10. Jackson, Letters, 2:519.
152 Notes
11. Roy Appleman, Lewis and Clark: Historic Places Associated with Their
Transcontinental Exploration, 373 n. 120.
12. York was the first of his race to achieve these goals.
13. Wapatoo or wappato, an arrowhead plant (in the genus Sagittaria)
with edible tubers, was not found near the expedition’s fort; it grew in
swampy places and was eaten by the Indians of the Northwest. “The bulb
of the plant . . . when roasted, tasted much like a potato” (Cutright, Lewis
and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists, 265).
5. Missouri Sequels
with Lewis and Clark, 106, notes that “nowhere in any of the journals . . . is
there a derogatory remark made about him [York] or is an act suggesting
racial prejudice reported.”
45. Holmberg, “I Wish You to See & Know All,” 7.
46. Betts, In Search of York, 112–13.
47. Ibid., 108.
48. Ibid., 119.
49. Clarke, Men of the Expedition, 60.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., 65–70; Moulton, Journals, 2:525–29; Jo Ann Brown, “New Light
on Some of the Expedition Engages.”
52. Jackson, Letters, 1:315–16.
53. Bob Moore, “Pompey’s Baptism.” The first three children born to
William and Julia Clark were baptized in this same church on August 8,
1814, by Bishop Benedict Flaget of Kentucky during his visit to St. Louis
that year. I thank Monsignor Bernard Sandheimrich for allowing me to
examine the Old Cathedral’s Register of Baptisms for 1814.
54. Ibid., 11.
55. Ibid., 11–14.
56. H. M. Brackenridge, Journal of a Voyage Up the River Missouri,
Performed in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 32–33. Brackenridge added that
Sacagawea’s husband “had become weary of a civilized life.”
57. John C. Luttig, Journal of a Fur-Trading Expedition on the Upper Mis-
souri, 1812–1813, 106. Another account, unaccepted by most historians,
has Sacagawea leaving Charbonneau, eventually finding her way to
Shoshones in Wyoming, and dying there in 1884. This version first
appeared before Luttig’s journal was published and before the discovery
of Clark’s notations from the 1820s in which he listed Sacagawea as dead.
58. Ibid., 15.
59. Harold P. Howard, Sacajawea, 161.
60. Luttig, Journal, 140–41.
61. Ann Hafen, “Jean Baptiste Charbonneau.”
62. Kate Gregg, ed., Westward with Dragoons: The Journal of William Clark
on His Expedition to Establish Fort Osage, August 25 to September 22, 1808.
63. When Meriwether Lewis returned to St. Louis to assume his duties
as governor, his brother accompanied him. After serving at Fort Osage
and as a partner in the Missouri Fur Company, he returned to Virginia,
where he died in 1844.
64. Company Book of John Symmes and Eli Clemson, National Archives
RG 98. The date of Whitehouse’s birth as ascertained from this record
does not correspond to that in other sources, but it seems likely he was the
former expedition member. I am indebted to Dave Bennett, historian at
Fort Osage, for the information and regret I have not yet reconciled the
differences between this record and others.
65. Clark to Dearborn, June 25, 1808, and Lewis to Dearborn, July 1,
Notes 155
1808, Territorial Papers of the United States, 14:194–203, Clarence Carter, ed.
66. Elliott Coues, ed., History of the Expedition under the Command of
Lewis and Clark, 1:30.
67. Jackson, Letters, Biddle Notes, 2:509.
68. The map is reproduced in volume 1 of Moulton’s edition of the
Journals.
69. Holmberg, “I Wish You to See & Know All,” 11.
70. Jackson, Letters, Clark Memorandum, 2:486.
71. Cutright, History, 62–66.
72. Robert C. Carriker, Father Peter John De Smet: Jesuit in the West, 9, 39.
73. Louise Callan, Philippine Duchesne, 358. By 1822 Clark would have
been the former governor of the Missouri Territory.
74. Ibid., 271.
75. John Francis McDermott, “Museums in Early St. Louis,” and John
Ewers, “William Clark’s Indian Museum in St. Louis, 1816–1838.” Clark’s
home was torn down in 1851 and replaced with warehouses and eventu-
ally by the grounds of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. No
homes from Clark’s period survive in downtown St. Louis.
76. Ewers, “William Clark’s Indian Museum,” 66–70; John Francis
McDermott, “William Clark’s Museum Once More.”
77. Jackson, Letters, 638–39. Clark’s listing of Lewis as “dead” rather
than “killed” is evidence that Clark believed Lewis’s wounds were self-
inflicted.
78. Donald Jackson, Voyages of the Steamboat Yellow Stone, 31–35.
79. Bernard DeVoto, ed., The Journals of Lewis and Clark, xlviii.
80. Ibid., xlix.
157
158 Bibliography
Coues, Elliott, ed. History of the Expedition under the Command of Lewis
and Clark. 1893. Reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1965.
Cutright, Paul Russell. A History of the Lewis and Clark Journals. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1976.
———. Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1969.
———. “Meriwether Lewis Prepares for a Trip West.” Missouri
Historical Society Bulletin 23, no. 1 (October 1966): 3–19.
Dahl, June. A History of Kirkwood, 1881–1965. Kirkwood, Mo.: Kirkwood
Historical Society, 1965.
Denny, James. “Lewis and Clark in the Boonslick.” Boonslick Heritage 8,
nos. 2–3 (June–September 2000): 3–27.
DeVoto, Bernard. Across the Wide Missouri. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1975.
DeVoto, Bernard, ed. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1953.
Dillon, Richard H. Meriwether Lewis: A Biography. New York: Coward-
McCann, 1965.
Ewers, John. “William Clark’s Indian Museum in St. Louis, 1816–1838.”
In A Cabinet of Curiosities: Five Episodes in the Evolution of American
Museums, by Whitfield J. Bell et al., 49–72. Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1967.
Foley, William E., and C. David Rice. The First Chouteaus: River Barons of
Early St. Louis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
———. “The Return of the Mandan Chief.” Montana: The Magazine of
Western History 29, no. 3 (summer 1979): 2–14.
The Forest City: Official Photographic Views of the Universal Exposition. St.
Louis: N. D. Thompson Publishing, 1904.
Forshaw, Joseph. Parrots of the World. Illustrated by William Cooper.
Melbourne, Australia: Lansdowne Press, 1973; Neptune, N.J.:
T.F.H. Publications, 1977.
Francis, David R. The Universal Exposition of 1904. St. Louis: Louisiana
Purchase Exposition Co., 1913.
Frick, Ruth Colter. “Conflict: Frederick Bates and Meriwether Lewis.”
We Proceeded On 19, no. 3 (August 1993): 20–24.
Gregg, Kate, ed. Westward with Dragoons: The Journal of William Clark on
His Expedition to Establish Fort Osage, August 25 to September 22,
1808. Fulton, Mo.: Ovid Bell Press, 1937.
Hafen, Ann. “Jean Baptiste Charbonneau.” In The Mountain Men and the
Fur Trade of the Far West, vol. 1, ed. LeRoy R. Hafen, 205–24.
Bibliography 159
163
164 Index
Charbonneau, Jean Baptiste, 68, 79, 121, 154n53; publication of jour-
111, 112, 113 nals of, 118; as governor of
Charbonneau, Lizette, 112 Missouri Territory, 119; loses elec-
Charbonneau, Touissant: as inter- tion, 120–21; portraits of, 120, 127,
preter, 67; and accident with 133; as Superintendent of Indian
pirogue, 68–69; leaves expedition, Affairs, 121, 122; Council
79; in St. Louis, 111–12, 113 Chamber of, 122; death of, 125;
Chariton River, 47 Bellefontaine monument for,
Charless, Joseph, 92 125–26, 133. See also Journals; Maps
Chief Joseph (Nez Percé), 125 Clarksville, 6
Chouteau, Auguste: as merchant, 18; Clatsop Indians, 77–78
assists Lewis, 19, 20, 21, 27, 31; as Clearwater River, 76
godparent to Jean Baptiste Clemson, Captain Eli, 114
Charbonneau, 111; mentioned, 23, Cold Water Creek, 29, 89
36, 39, 110, 119 Collin, Joseph (engagé), 110
Chouteau, Auguste Pierre (Pierre’s Collins, John: as hunter, 18; disci-
son), 93, 118 pline problems of, 18, 30–31,
Chouteau, Eulalie (godmother to 53–54, 107
Jean Baptiste Charbonneau), 111 Colter, John: joins Lewis on Ohio, 7,
Chouteau, Pierre: as merchant, 18, 98; as hunter, 18; leaves expedi-
118; assists Lewis, 19, 20, 21, 27, tion, 79, 98–99; described, 98;
32; home of, 19, 92; escorts explores Yellowstone region, 99,
Indians to D.C., 66, 92; as Osage 153n20; escapes Blackfeet, 99,
agent, 92, 116; returns Sheheke to 153n21; settles in Missouri, 99;
Mandans, 95; lineage of, 149n22 grave site of, 100, 153n22; with
Chouteau, Therese (wife of Pierre), Lisa’s party, 101
31 Colter’s Hell, 99, 153n20
Chouteau’s Post, 53 Columbia Bottom, 138
Clark, George Rogers, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, Columbia River, 2, 72, 76, 78, 90
14, 20; statue of, 142 Continental Divide, 65, 72, 73, 90
Clark, Harriet (second wife of Corps of Discovery: “Nine young
William Clark), 121 men” form nucleus of, 7; perma-
Clark, John O’Fallon, 133 nent party chosen, 25; leaves
Clark, Jonathan, 95, 108, 118 Camp Dubois, 29; departs from
Clark, Julia Hancock (first wife of St. Charles, 32; at Continental
William Clark), 113, 119 Divide, Rockies, and Pacific, 76;
Clark, Meriwether Lewis, 118, 122, division of, on return trip, 79, 97;
125, 135 arrives at St. Louis, 89; accom-
Clark, Mrs. Jefferson K., 133 plishments of, 89–90; compensa-
Clark, William: military service of, tion of, 92, 103
2, 4–5; early life of, 4; statues of, 5, Coues, Elliott, 115
128–29, 143, 145; joins Lewis, 6, 7; Council Bluff, 62
recruits men, 7; establishes Camp Council Chamber, 122, 124, 155n75
Dubois, 17; denied captain’s com- Court-martial. See Discipline prob-
mission, 26; aboard keelboat, 68; lems
praised by Lewis, 91; as partner in Coyote, 82
Missouri Fur Company, 95, 118; as Crane, 24
Indian agent, 113; establishes Fort Crow Indians, 101
Osage, 113–17; marriages of, 113, Cruzatte, Pierre: joins at St. Charles,
Index 165
30, 91; as boatman, 30, 106; as fid- hunter, 18, 38, 47, 61; mentioned,
dler, 47; saves white pirogue, 69; 33, 53, 106
accidentally shoots Lewis, 79 Fire Prairie, 51, 114
Fish: catfish, 18, 53, 61, 84, 136; pike,
Daniel Boone Home, 32, 139 59
Danner, Oregon, 113 Flathead Indians, 74, 121, 124, 125
Daub, Eugene, 42, 145 Florissant, 121
Dearborn, Henry, 114 Floyd, Charles: recruitment of, 7;
Deer, mule, 58, 66 named sergeant, 25; duties of, 37;
Delassus, Carlos Dehault, 17 journal of, 40; fatal illness of, 63;
Delaware Indians, 8, 10 gravesite of, 63–64, 80, 122; men-
Deschamps, Jean Baptiste, 110 tioned, 45, 62, 106, 107
De Smet, Peter John, 121, 124 Fort Belle Fontaine, 89, 93, 102, 109,
Detachment Orders, 37, 41 114, 137
Discipline problems, 18, 23; court- Fort Clark, 51, 116. See also Fort
martial, 30–31, 53–54, 59–60; men- Osage
tioned, 106, 107 Fort Clatsop, 76, 77; replica of, at St.
Discovery Center (Kansas City), 145 Louis, 131–33; reconstruction of,
Discovery Expedition of St. Charles, at original site, 77
139 Fort de Cavagnolle, 55
Dorion, Pierre, 48, 63, 83 Fort de Chartres, 15–16, 142
“Drewyer.” See Drouillard, George Fort de Chartres State Historic Site,
Drouillard, George: skills of, 7; joins 142
expedition, 7, 17; early life of, 7, Fort Jefferson, 9
100; as hunter, 17, 18, 32, 40, 47, Fort Lincoln State Park, 66
60, 61, 72, 73; after expedition, Fort Mandan, 24, 65, 66, 67, 90, 108,
101; death of, 101 109, 110
Dubourg, Louis, 121 Fort Manuel, 112
Duchesne, Philippine, 121 Fort Massac, 7, 10, 17, 137
Duck, 24; wood duck, 57 Fort Massac State Park, 142
Duquette, François, 30 Fort Orleans, 48
Duquette, Madame, 30, 121 Fort Osage: site of, 51, 114–15, 117;
fort at, 115–17; reconstruction of,
Earthquakes, 97–98 116, 144
Edwards, Governor Ninian, 119 Fourth of July Creek, 57
Elk, 60, 66, 68, 76, 79, 84, 85, 114 Francis, David R., 133, 134
Ellicott, Andrew, 3 Fraser, James Earle, 5
Engagés: join expedition, 27, 32; Frazer, Robert, 58, 103–4, 124
return from Fort Mandan, 66, 109; French Colonial Period: in Missouri,
information on, in church records, 1, 19, 29, 48, 93, 142–43; in Illinois,
110; mentioned, 30, 39, 40, 82 15–16, 140, 141, 142; in Kansas, 55,
Eustis, William, 95 59
Evans, John, 22 Frontier Army Museum, 145
Fruits: Osage plums, 19–20, 30, 47,
Femme Osage region, 33, 139 51, 61; mulberries, 47, 50, 51;
Femme Osage River, 33 grapes, 47, 55, 60, 61; gooseber-
Field, Joseph, 7, 18, 33, 53, 57, 105, ries, 50; raspberries, 50, 51, 55;
106 cherries, 61; pawpaws, 85–86
Field, Reubin: joins expedition, 7; as Fur Trade, 16, 18, 48, 56, 90, 91
166 Index
Gallatin River, 151 Frazer’s sunstroke, 58; Floyd’s ill-
Gasconade River, 37, 38; 42, 88, 103 ness, 63; at Great Falls portage, 71;
Gass, Patrick: named sergeant, 63; from fish, 75; at Fort Clatsop, 77;
journal of, 68, 104 eye and skin ailment, 85–86;
Gates of the Mountains, 58, 71, 72 smallpox among Mandans, 113
Gateway Arch, 135–36 Independence Creek, 57, 146
Geese, 24, 47, 57, 65, 107 Indians. See individual tribes
General Bissell House, 137 Iron boat, 70–71
Gibson, George, 7, 105, 106
Girardot, Jean, 11, 142 Jarrot, Nicholas, 17, 141
Glasgow, Mary Susan (Mrs. Jarrot Mansion, 141
Jefferson K. Clark), 133 Jefferson, Thomas: gives instructions
Goldenseal, 86–87 to Lewis, 1, 89–90; asks Lewis to
Goodrich, Silas, 53, 61 be secretary, 2; plans expedition of
Gosling Lake, 57, 147 West, 2; writes to Philadelphia sci-
Grand River, 48, 85 entists, 3; receives explorers in
Grand Tower (Tower Rock), 12–14, 1806, 92; nominates Lewis to be
142 governor, 92; designs Monticello
Gratiot, Charles, 20, 21, 22, 31 and University of Virginia, 20,
Gravelines, Joseph, 83 130; original tombstone of, 131;
Grays Creek (Mast Creek), 41 memorials of, in Missouri, 133–34,
Great Falls of the Missouri, 65, 69; 135–36, 143
portage at, 69–70 Jefferson Barracks, 137
Grouse, 66, 114 Jefferson City, 5, 40, 41; today’s
Guillet, Father Urbain, 112 attractions at, 143
Guns, 4, 27, 65, 76, 79, 105 Jefferson Memorial, 134, 135
Jefferson National Expansion
Hall, Hugh, 18, 30–31, 54, 107 Memorial, 135; mentioned, 111, 122
Hamilton, Alexander, 84 Jefferson River, 71, 151n8, 102
Hancock, Julia, 92, 113. See also Jerry Smith Park, 145
Clark, Julia Hancock Joachim Creek, 16
Harding, Chester, 133, 137 Jo Fields Snake Prairie, 57
Harpers Ferry, 4, 70 Joliet, Louis, 13, 127
Hay, John, 17, 22, 26 Joseph, Chief (Nez Percé), 125
Hay Cabin Creek (Little Blue River), Journals: Jefferson’s directive on, 37;
84 and Lewis’s instructions and
Haynes, Michael, 145 assistance, 37, 57; number of writ-
Hebert, Charles, 110 ers of, 37, 57, 150n6; one sent from
Hidatsa Indians, 65, 67, 69 Fort Mandan, 66; and response to
History Museum, 135 Jefferson’s directive, 90; complete-
Holy Family Catholic Church ness of Ordway’s and Clark’s, 97,
(Cahokia), 140 153n14; publications of, 102,
Horses, 67, 71; from Shoshones, 73; 103–4, 118–19; Clark’s elkskin-cov-
from Flatheads, 74; branding of, 75 ered journal, 132, 133, 134; at
Hunt, Colonel Thomas, 89 Missouri Historical Society, 134
Hunters, 18, 44, 47, 49, 59, 68, 77, 84
Kansa Indians, 55
Illness: at Camp Dubois, 18; in Kansas City: today’s attractions at,
Missouri, 40, 49, 55, 58, 85, 86; 42, 144–45; site of, 52, 53, 83–84
Index 167
Kansas River, 51, 53, 83, 84, 145 Nature Center, 139
Kaskaskia, 14, 25, 26, 96 Lewis and Clark Centennial
Katy Trail State Park, 143, 144 Exposition (Portland, Oregon), 129
Keelboat: construction of, 6; Clark’s Lewis and Clark Center, 139
sketches of, 13, 14, 27; duty Lewis and Clark State Historic Site,
assignments on, 37; broken mast 25, 141
of, 41, 55; returns from Fort Lewis and Clark State Park, 57, 147
Mandan, 66; replicas of, 136, 139 Lindenwood College, 117
Kennerly, William Clark, 113 Lisa, Manuel, 95, 99, 101, 112, 118
Kentucky, 4, 33, 47, 98, 102, 105, 109 Little Blue River, 51, 84
Kickapoo Indians, 22, 32 Little Moniteau Creek, 42
Koch, Albert, 122 Little Platte River, 54
Little Prickly Pear Creek, 58
Labiche, François, 91, 106, 124 Little Tarkio Creek, 59
La Charette, 35, 88, 99 Locust Hill, 2
Laclede, Pierre, 18, 127 Loisel, Régis, 35
Lafayette, Marquis de, 122 Lolo Trail, 74, 75, 78
La Jeunesse, Jean Baptiste, 110 Lopez, Charles, 127
Lamine River, 44, 45 Lorimier, Louis, 10–11, 20, 100, 142
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 3 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 127–33
Latitude and longitude. See Louisiana Territory: transfer of,
Celestial observations xviii, 1; purchase of, 4; population
Lead Mine Hill (Sugar Loaf Rock), of, 22; Lewis appointed governor
40–41, 150n12 of, 92; laws of, published, 92; and
Lead ore, 14, 21, 40, 44–45 internal conflicts, 93; mentioned,
Leavenworth, Kansas, 55; today’s 84, 121, 127, 131
attractions at, 145–46 Louisville, 6, 20, 92, 107, 108, 109, 118,
Ledyard, John, 2 120
Lemhi Pass, 72, 73 Luttig, John, 112–13
Lemhi River, 72, 74
Les Petites Côtes, 31. See also St. Mackay, James, 22, 26, 114
Charles Mackenzie, Alexander, 3
Lewis, Meriwether: early life of, 1–2; Madison, James, 95, 119
as secretary to Jefferson, 2; and Magpie, 66, 67
preparations in Philadelphia, 3–4; Malboeuf, Etienne, 110
and invitation to Clark, 4; statues Mandan Indians: villages of, 22, 65;
of, 5, 127–28, 145; on the Ohio, expedition winters nearby, 65–66;
6–7; on the Mississippi, 9–15; and and expedition’s 1806 return, 79;
preparations in St. Louis, 18–23; and smallpox, 113. See also Fort
collects plants, 42, 86, 90, 152n7; Mandan; Sheheke (Mandan chief)
reports to Jefferson, 91; as gover- Man of the Morning, 124
nor of Louisiana Territory, 92, 93; Maps: Clark’s, of route, 6, 23, 89;
portrait of, 94, 134; death of, 95, Clark’s, of Grand Tower, 13–14;
152n11. See also Corps of obtained before 1804 departure,
Discovery; Journals 21–22; one sent from Fort Mandan,
Lewis, Reuben, 95, 114, 118, 154n63 66; Clark’s, of West, 99, 116;
Lewis, William (father of Meriwether Frazer’s, 104
Lewis), 1 Marias River, 69, 79, 95
Lewis and Clark Boat House and Marks, Lucy Lewis (mother of
168 Index
Meriwether Lewis), 1, 21, 92 Nez Percé Indians, 74, 75, 76, 125;
Marquette, Father Jacques, 13, 127 and visit to St. Louis, 123, 124
Mast Creek (Grays Creek), 41 Nightingale, 41, 150n13
Matches, 20–21 Nightingale Creek, 41
McClellan, John, 84 Nine Young Men from Kentucky, 7,
McClellan, Robert, 83 17, 32, 98, 102, 104, 105, 106. See
McMahon, Bernard, 20 also individual men
McNair, Alexander, 119 Nishnabotna River, 60, 61
McNeal, Hugh, 72, 73 No Horns on His Head, 123
Mercantile Library, 137 Northern Lights, 24
Michaux, André, 2
Mississippi River: Lewis and Clark O’Fallon, Colonel John, 108, 125
at confluence with Ohio, 9; ascent Ohio River, 6, 7, 8, 9, 102, 142
of, 9–17; Camp Dubois estab- Old Cathedral, 111, 135
lished on, 17–18; deaths on, in Old Courthouse, 135
earthquakes, 97–98 Old Dorion. See Dorion, Pierre
Missouri Botanical Garden, 20, 137 Old Toby, 74
Missouri Fur Company, 95, 118 Omaha Indians, 82
Missouri Historical Society, 118, 122, Ordway, John: duties of, 23, 31, 37,
133, 134, 135, 136 41, 97; letter of, to parents, 25–26;
Missouri Indians, 48, 62, 110, 143 settles in Missouri, 96, 97–98; jour-
Missouri River: and Jefferson’s nal of, 97, 104; death of, 98
instructions to Lewis, 1; naviga- Ordway Creek (Mace Creek), 58,
tional difficulties of, 29, 35, 45, 49, 151n27
51, 82; miles of, in Missouri, 61; Oregon Building, 131–133
Missouri Breaks of, 69; Great Falls Oregon Historical Society, 76, 132
of, 69; portage of, 69–71; headwa- Osage Indians, 10, 19, 20, 21, 22, 36,
ters of, at Three Forks, 71; Lewis’s 39, 92, 114, 144; Fort Osage Treaty,
report on, to Jefferson, 91 51, 115–16
Missouri State Capitol, 5, 143 Osage Orange, 19, 20, 137
Missouri Territory, 119 Osage Plum, 19, 47
Moccasins, 10, 70, 77, 99, 127 Osage River, 39, 86, 88, 114
Montbrun’s Tavern, 39 Oto Indians, 62
Monticello, 1, 2, 67, 92, 118; replica
of, in St. Louis, 130-32 Palmyra, 103
Mosquitoes, 49–50, 51, 58, 81, 95 Parakeet, Carolina, 52–53, 147
Mountain goat, 58 Patterson, Robert, 3
Mountain sheep, 58, 66 Pawpaws, 85–86
Museum of Westward Expansion, Peace medals, 62, 135
135 Pelican, 50, 57
Philadelphia: scientists instruct
Napoleon I, Emperor, 4 Lewis, 3; Lewis’s purchases in,
Natchez Trace, 118 3–4, 26; Osage orange planted in,
National Frontier Trails Center, 145 20; Lewis in (1807), 92; journals
Nemaha River, 60, 82 prepared by Biddle in, 102, 118–19
Newfoundland dog, 7. See also Pictographs, 41, 43, 44
Seaman Pierre à Flèche, 45
New Madrid, 9, 97, 98, 105 Pike, Zebulon, 109
New Orleans, 4, 118 Pilcher, Joshua, 113
Index 169
Pinaut, Peter, 110 145; early life of, 67, 151n6; gives
Pirogues: described, 6, 27; leave birth, 68; joins expedition, 68; con-
Camp Dubois, 29; replicas of, 139; tributions to expedition, 69, 73,
red pirogue, crewed by engagés, 106, 110; illness of, 71; in St. Louis,
27, 110; waits for delayed hunter, 111; death of, 112, 154n57
39–40; white pirogue, almost lost, Sacagawea River, 69
68–69; hidden at Marias, 69; hid- Saeger Woods Conservation Area,
den at Great Falls, 69–70 145
Pittsburgh, 6, 7 Saline Creek, 10
Platte River, 62, 81, 82 Salmon River, 72, 74
Pomp. See Charbonneau, Jean Salt, 14, 43, 105; salt making, 45, 77,
Baptiste 105, 114
Portage des Sioux, 110, 119 Salt Creek, 43
Portland, Oregon, 129 San Juan del Misuri, 35
Potts, John, 85, 99, 101 Saugrain, Antoine, 20–21, 31
Powder Valley Conservation Nature Sauk and Fox Indians, 48, 106, 137
Center, 136–37 Seaman: described, 7–8; protects
Prairie: described in journals, 40, 47, party, 7–9, 68; attacked by mos-
48, 50, 51, 58, 61; seen today, 137, quitoes, 49, 95; encounters with
138, 145 beaver, 56; stolen by Indians, 78;
Prairie Center, 145 collar of, located, 96
Prairie dog, 58; sent to White Shannon, George: recruited by
House, 66–67 Lewis, 7; as hunter, 38; becomes
Prairie of Arrows, 45 lost, 64; after expedition, 102–3
Primeau, Paul, 110 Shannon County, Missouri, 103
Pryor, Nathaniel: joins expedition, 7; Shaw Nature Reserve, 137–38
named sergeant, 25; duties of, 37; Shawnee Indians, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13,
attempts to return Mandan chief, 100, 107
93, 102; buried in Pryor, Okla- Sheheke (Mandan chief): visit to
homa, 106; indirect link to D.C., 79, 92; in St. Louis, 89, 93;
Lewis’s death, 118 attempts to return to Mandans,
93, 102; returns to Mandans, 95
Rabbit, 18, 65 Shields, John: recruited, 7; as hunter,
Rabbit-Skin Leggings, 123, 124 18, 40, 73, 104; as gunsmith,
Raccoon, 18, 81 104–5; after expedition, 104–5
Radford, Harriet Kennerly (second Shoshone Indians: provide horses,
wife of William Clark), 121 73; mentioned, 67, 71, 72, 106, 110
Rat. See Wood rat Sibley, George, 114, 117
Rattlesnake, 44, 68, 70, 85 Sioux: Yankton, as friendly, 63, 80;
River of No Return, 74 Teton, as hostile, 63, 80; and
Rocky Mountains, 65, 75, 76, 89–90, attack of Pryor’s party, 93; and
101, 109 attack of Lisa’s party, 112
Rosati, Joseph, 121 Smallpox, 48, 113
Ruckstahl, F. W., 128 Snake Indians. See Shoshone
Runge Conservation Nature Center, Indians
143 Snake River, 72, 76
Rush, Benjamin, 3 Soulard, Antoine, 21–22, 39
Southeast Missouri State University,
Sacagawea: statues of, 67, 129, 130, 142
170 Index
South West Point, 7 50, 51; ash, 49, 50, 51; hackberry,
Spanish: administration of 50; walnut, 50, 51, 81, 146; willow,
Louisiana Territory, 1, 16, 19, 21; 50, 51, 146; Clark’s list of forest
officials, 9, 10, 14, 17; and land types in relation to river, 50–51;
grants, 10, 33, 93, 119; attempts to linden, 51; oak, 51, 81, 146;
intercept expedition, 83, 152n1 sycamore, 51, 137; pecan, 55; elm,
Squaw Creek National Wildlife 81; hickory, 81; pawpaw, 85–86
Refuge, 147 Turkey, 17, 18, 50, 81, 114, 136
Squirrels, 7, 18 Tywappity Bottom, 10, 97
St. Albans, 33, 34
St. Charles: described, 29; expedi- University of Missouri–Columbia,
tion’s final preparations at, 30–31, 131
32; 1806 return to, 88–89; as home University of Missouri–St. Louis,
to engagés, 110; today’s attrac- 137
tions at, 138–39 University of Virginia, 20, 130, 131
St. Charles Borromeo, 31 U.S. Military Academy, West Point,
Ste. Genevieve, 14–15, 142 20, 93, 137
St. Joseph, Missouri, 56, 58, 83
St. Joseph Museum, 56, 147 Vallé, François, II, 15
St. Louis: in 1804, 16–17, 18; Lewis’s Van Meter State Park, 50, 143
preparations at, 19–23; expedition Vide Poche, 16
returns to, 89, 91–92; Indians’ visit Virginia: as birthplace of Lewis, 1; as
to, 124; 1904 exposition at, 127–34; birthplace of Clark, 4; as birth
today’s attractions at, 135–37 place of other expedition mem-
St. Louis Place, 135 bers, 98, 103, 104, 105
St. Louis World’s Fair, 127–33 Virginia Building, 130–31
St. Louis Zoo, 137 Voorhis, Eleanor Glasgow, 133
St. Mémin, Charles, 94, 134 Voorhis, Julia Clark, 132, 133
Stoddard, Amos, 1, 23, 31, 66
Sugar Loaf Rock (Lead Mine Hill), Walla Walla Indians, 129
40–41, 150n12 War Department, 20, 26, 95, 114
Swan, 57 War of 1812, 105, 117, 119
Warfington, Corporal Richard, 66
Tavern Cave, 33–34, 150n3 Washington, D.C., 66, 83, 92, 118
Tavern Rock, 34 Wayne, General Anthony, 5, 9, 89
Tayon, Charles, 31 Waynetown, Indiana, 105
Tennessee, 7, 95, 96, 104, 109 Weather diary, 21, 24–25, 65
Thermometers, 20, 21, 55 Wells, Jake, 142
Three Forks, 71, 79, 97, 99, 101 Werner, William, 30–31, 107
Tower Rock (Grand Tower), 12–14, Weston Bend State Park, 146
142 West Point (U.S. Military Academy),
Traders, 18, 33, 36, 48, 81, 82, 83, 88, 20, 93, 137
93, 101 Westport Landing, 53
Trappers, 79, 82, 98, 101 Whippoorwill, 41, 57–58
Trappists, 112, 141, 142 Whippoorwill Creek, 58
Travelers Rest, 74, 79 White House, 2, 67, 92
Trees: Osage plum, 19, 20, 30, 47; Whitehouse, Joseph, 39, 40, 104; at
Osage orange, 19–20, 137; cotton- Fort Osage, 114, 154n64
wood, 24, 50, 146; mulberry, 47, Wilderness Road, 33, 92
Index 171
Wilkinson, General James, 84 Yellow root (goldenseal), 86–87
Willard, Alexander, 59–60, 106–7, Yellow Stone (steamboat), 124
124 Yellowstone National Park, 99
Windsor, Richard, 107 Yellowstone River, 79, 88, 99, 110,
Winter, Ezra, xviii 124
Wistar, Caspar, 3 York: joins expedition, 7, 32; gathers
Wolf, 53, 54, 68, 82 greens, 42; statue of, 42, 145;
Wolf River, 82 accompanies Clark to
Wood, Maria, 69 Washington, D.C., 92; as hunter,
Wood rat, 58, 151n25 107; reaction of Indians to, 107–8;
Wood River, 17. See also Camp after expedition, 108–9
Dubois
Woolrych, Humphrey, 11 Zimm, Bruno, 129, 130
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About the Author
Ann Rogers is a member of the Missouri Lewis and Clark Bicentennial
Commission. She resides in St. Louis, Missouri.