Part I · Up the Missouri
Chapter 1
The President’s Secret
Washington, Philadelphia and the Ohio River
President Thomas Jefferson wanted a water route across North America for trade. In 1803 he quietly asked Congress for money to send Captain Meriwether Lewis up the Missouri River and on to the Pacific, and Lewis asked his friend William Clark to lead it with him.
18 January 1803
In January 1803 the United States ends at the Mississippi River. West of it lies a country so big that nobody in Washington knows how big it is. Spain and France have both claimed it. British fur traders work its northern rivers. And it is home to dozens of nations, among them the Osage, the Lakota, the Mandan, the Shoshone and the Nez Perce, who have lived there for thousands of years and never asked anyone’s permission.
On 18 January, President Thomas Jefferson sends Congress a message marked confidential. He asks for $2,500 to send a small party of soldiers up the Missouri River, over the mountains and down to the Pacific Ocean. He describes it as a trip to help American trade.
That is true, but it is not the whole truth. Jefferson has wondered about the West since he was a young man. He owns shelves of books about it, and most of what is in them is guesswork. He wants to know what is really out there.
Congress quietly says yes.
Spring 1803
Jefferson already knows who should lead the trip. Meriwether Lewis is 28, an army captain from Virginia who has been living in the President’s House as Jefferson’s private secretary. He is moody, brave and restless, a tireless walker and a crack shot, and he knows the woods. What he does not know is science. So Jefferson sends him to Philadelphia to learn it, fast.
In a few weeks Lewis studies how to work out where he is from the sun and stars, how to press plants and describe animals, and how to treat wounds and fevers. The famous doctor Benjamin Rush gives him a supply of his own pills, powerful laxatives that people later nicknamed “thunderclappers.”
Lewis also goes shopping. He buys rifles and gunpowder, fishhooks, a chronometer for keeping exact time, medicines, blankets, and gifts for the nations he expects to meet: beads, mirrors, knives, needles, cloth, and silver medals with Jefferson’s face on them.
June 1803
Lewis wants a partner. On 19 June he writes to William Clark, his old commanding officer from the army, who is now 32 and living on the Ohio River at Clarksville. Clark is the steadier of the two: red-haired, practical, good with boats, maps and people. Lewis offers to share the command equally.
The next day Jefferson signs Lewis’s orders. “The object of your mission,” they begin, “is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course & communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.” In plain words: find a river road to the Pacific.
Lewis is also to map everything, describe every plant, animal and people he meets, and keep careful journals, with copies in case the originals are lost.
Clark says yes. In a rough draft of his answer he wrote a line and then crossed it out: “My friend I join you with hand & Heart.”
4 July 1803
On the Fourth of July, the day before Lewis leaves Washington, astonishing news is announced. France has sold the United States the whole of Louisiana: every river that flows into the Mississippi from the west, all the way to the Rocky Mountains. The price is fifteen million dollars. Overnight, the country has roughly doubled in size.
It changes the expedition. Much of Lewis’s route now lies, on paper, inside the United States. But the people who live along the Missouri have not sold anything, and nobody has asked them. Part of Lewis’s job now is to tell each nation he meets that it has a new “great father” in Washington, and to hand out flags and medals to prove it.
Autumn 1803
Lewis’s big boat is being built in Pittsburgh, and it is late. The boatbuilder drinks, and the summer slips away. When the keelboat finally floats on 31 August, the Ohio River is so low that the men sometimes have to hire oxen to drag it over the shallows.
In mid-October Lewis reaches Clarksville, and the two captains meet. Clark has been choosing men: strong young hunters and woodsmen from Kentucky, among them the brothers Joseph and Reubin Field. Clark also brings York, a Black man about his own age whom Clark’s family has enslaved since both were boys. York will do everything the others do on the journey. He will not be paid for any of it.
By December the boats have come down the Ohio and up the Mississippi to the mouth of a small stream in Illinois, the Wood River. There the captains stop for the winter. Across the wide water, the Missouri pours in, brown and fast.