LEWIS AND CLARK EXPEDITION

The nation's economy diversified and grew during the first decades of the United States' independence from the British Empire. With the vast majority of the population engaged in agriculture, Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809) believed that the health of the republic rested on small independent farms, owned by men he called "Yeoman farmers." Jefferson also favored a strong agrarian economy to counter tendencies of concentrating wealth and power in emerging manufacturing centers of the east.

To find more farming land, Jefferson looked West. Although the Mississippi River formed the western boundary of the United States, Jefferson wanted to explore the region beyond, fearing that if the U.S. did not expand westward, Britain or other countries might soon colonize the region. The lack of sufficient funding and political support, however, hindered such efforts through the 1790s.

In March of 1801 Jefferson became the third president of the United States (1801–09) and was in a position to further his exploration and land acquisition plans. By the time of his administration, Americans had a clearer understanding of the size of the continent they inhabited. In part, their knowledge was expanded because of the work of Captain James Cook (1728–1779), who measured the longitude along the Pacific Coast in 1780, and later of American Captain Robert Gray (1755–1806), who mapped the precise location of the Columbia River's mouth in 1792.

In 1801, however, Britain, Spain, France, and Russia still held vague claims to western North America, though the territory was in the possession of Native Americans. With water travel essential to commerce, Jefferson favored exploration and development of new water routes. The primary objective of a proposed expedition was, in Jefferson's own words, "to determine the most direct and practicable water communication across the continent, for the purposes of commerce."

Jefferson recruited Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809), a young army captain serving as Jefferson's personal White House secretary, to lead the expedition. Lewis, in turn, identified Lieutenant William Clark (1770–1838), an earlier commander of his, to serve as the expedition's co-leader. With agrarian interests in mind Jefferson directed them to make observations and measurements along the exploration route concerning plants, animals, soils, geography, and climate. Jefferson had Lewis tutored in Philadelphia by experts in these fields to prepare him for the expedition.

With preparations for the journey well under way Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase with Napoleon Bonaparte of France in 1803. The acquisition instantly doubled the size of the United States by adding 827,000 square miles of land and, most importantly, control of the Mississippi River for commerce. The expedition's purpose suddenly expanded to include exploration and evaluation of the new lands to determine their settlement and commercial potential.

The party of more than 40 men, called the Corps of Discovery by Jefferson, departed on May 14, 1804, from near the mouth of the Missouri River. Using large canoes and a keelboat for the first part of their journey (up the Missouri River), the party carried provisions to be supplemented along the way with wild game and fish. Lewis was in charge of scientific observations, with Clark directing map making and journal writing. In 1805 after spending their first winter at a Mandan Indian village on the Missouri in North Dakota, the expedition continued to the Missouri's headwaters and through the ranges of the Rocky Mountains. The expedition then journeyed down the Snake and Columbia rivers arriving at the Pacific Coast in the middle of November. They built Fort Clatsop just south of the Columbia River mouth and waited for a supply ship that never arrived. After a miserably wet winter, the expedition roughly retraced its route back eastward in 1806, splitting apart for much of the time to explore as much territory as possible. They arrived safely in St. Louis with great celebration on September 23 after exploring almost 8,000 miles of terrain in 863 days.

Two centuries later the Lewis and Clark Expedition remains remarkable for several reasons. Only one member of the party died, early in the journey, possibly from a ruptured appendix. By treating the Native Americans with respect, the party created a firm basis for trade, peace, and assistance with settlement. Though the expedition showed that the long-sought major waterway for trade did not exist, a wealth of biological, geographic, and cultural information was gathered in the party's eight-volume journal and maps. Included are previously unrecorded descriptions of 122 animals and 178 plants. The information vividly addressed the commercial potential of the newly acquired lands and territories west of the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific shore. Though the crossing was more difficult than anticipated, the Corps demonstrated its feasibility. The maps and detailed journal more immediately aided the U.S. fur trade. The fur trade spread across the region by the 1820s, and provided furs to a demanding European market.

Most importantly the expedition introduced the first United States presence west of the Rocky Mountains. Once the natural resources and potential settlement sites of the Northern Plains and Pacific Northwest were recorded, the agrarian economy envisioned by Jefferson could become a reality. U.S. citizens settled rich farmlands and established ports to ship produce to markets. As an integrated national economy was first emerging, Lewis and Clark opened the way to U.S. expansion from one coast to the other. The stage was set for an agricultural transformation of the west.

LEWIS AND CLARK EXPEDITION

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