Meriwether Lewis & William Clark

THE most exciting travel drama in U.S. history began May 14, 1804. On that rainy Monday President Thomas Jefferson’s private secretary. Captain Meriwether Lewis, 29, 1st Regiment of Infantry. U.S.A., and his friend, 2nd Lieut. William Clark, 33, of the Corps of Artillerists (he signed himself captain on Jefferson’s authority), headed westward from St. Louis at the head of a 43-man “Corps of Discovery.” Their objective was to explore the newly acquired territory of the Louisiana Purchase and find a route from the Missouri to the Columbia River, over which the rich fur trade of the Northwest might be diverted from British Canada to the U.S. . Eighteen months later —on Nov. 15, 1805— they reached the Pacific Ocean. This month Lewiston, Idaho, and cities of the Northwest in the valleys of the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia Rivers, are observing the 150th anniversary of the Lewis & Clark Expedition.

The Corps of Discovery was composed of hardy Kentucky hunters and frontiersmen, French boatmen and soldiers in leather collars with their hair in pigtails. Clark’s Negro servant, York, was along, and later they were joined by Sacajawea, the Indian wife of a French-Canadian interpreter. The expedition moved up the Missouri River and spent the first winter (1804-05) at Fort Mandan, the last outpost of white civilization, near present-day Bismarck, N. Dak. In descriptive and often charmingly misspelled prose, the captains recorded in their daily journals a lively narrative of the adventurous trip that, once they entered the unexplored land, included fierce meetings with “white bears” (grizzlies), narrow escapes in strange and unfamiliar surroundings, and new sights and marvels that filled them with wonder (see following color pages).

Crossing plains teeming with buffalo, and badlands and canyons filled with antelope, deer and elk, they reached the trappers’ legendary Roche Jaune River (Yellowstone). Then came the Milk, the Judith, which Clark named for his future wife, and the Marias, which Lewis named “in honour of Miss Maria W-d.” though “the hue of the waters … but illy comport with the pure celestial virtues and amiable qualifications of that lovely fair one.” At night on the plains, the ground around them shook from the stomping herds of buffalo, and once a buffalo bull bellowed into their camp and trampled two guns. The party was almost sunk by rapids and tormented by mosquitoes, cloudbursts and rattlesnakes. Still in present-day Montana, they portaged around the Great Falls, studied animals that were strange to them: prairie dogs, antelope, bighorn sheep. Then they passed the Gates of the Mountains (near Helena, Mont.) and the age-old Indian war ground at the Three Forks of the Missouri.

Near today’s Montana-Idaho border, they followed the Jefferson River to what they thought (wrongly) was the source of the Missouri; one man straddled the little stream and “thanked his god that he had lived to bestride the mighty & heretofore deemed endless Missouri.” At Lemhi Pass on the Continental Divide, they met Sacajawea’s people, the Shoshones, who supplied them with horses and a guide.

To the Columbia. The guide took them on a long detour through the land of the Flatheads, who like other tribes found York the most interesting member of the expedition. Crossing the snowclad Bitterroot Mountains’ Lolo Trail, they ran out of food in the wilderness, in desperation ate their horses to keep alive. Emerging on the western slope, in Idaho’s Weippe Prairie, they gorged on camas bulbs (which made them sick) and dog meat (which they found surprisingly good). On the banks of the Clearwater River they built canoes and floated down the Clearwater and the Snake to the Columbia River near present-day Pasco, Wash. Harassed by squat, fish-eating Indians, who tried to steal their possessions, they navigated the Columbia’s treacherous rapids and passed through the Cascades.

The climax came one day when the canoes were plowing through rain, fog and high, rolling waves near the mouth of the Columbia. For an instant the mist parted, and the men sighted the Pacific (“O! the joy,” Clark noted). On the Oregon shore, they built a salt cairn and wintered. Clark cut his name on a pine tree and added (in case they didn’t make it back): “By Land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805.” They celebrated Christmas and New Year’s among coastal tribes with flattened heads, who made life miserable by pilfering their supplies, and leaving some of the men with venereal disease.

Heading Home. In the spring, the expedition turned back, trying new routes. They had their horses stolen by Crows, got into a fight with Blackfeet, and had another Indian scare during which Lewis was accidentally shot in the buttocks. On Sept. 23, 1806, grimy, bearded and bursting with marvelous tales of things no other white man had ever seen or heard of, they reached St. Louis, “met by all the village and received a harty welcom from it’s inhabitants.”

The expedition was a huge success. At a cost of about $2,500, and with the loss of only one man (apparently from appendicitis, the first year out), it opened up the vast trans-Mississippi West to settlement and commerce, and established a firm basis for this nation’s later claim to the Oregon country.