Chapter 2
Setting Out
Camp Dubois, Illinois, and the lower Missouri River
The expedition spent the winter of 1803–04 training at Camp Dubois, across the Mississippi from the mouth of the Missouri, and set out up the Missouri on 14 May 1804 in a keelboat and two smaller boats called pirogues.
Winter 1803–1804
Camp Dubois is a cluster of log huts on the Illinois shore, across the Mississippi from the mouth of the Missouri. For five months it is a school for explorers. The men chop wood, hunt, build, and practise with their rifles. Clark drills them like soldiers, because most of them are soldiers now, signed into the army for the journey.
They are not always easy to handle. Some sneak off to a whiskey shop nearby. Some fight. When one man refuses to stand guard, Lewis writes that he “feels himself mortifyed and disappointed.” By spring the men know the rules: on this journey nobody wanders off, nobody steals from the supplies, and nobody sleeps on guard.
9–10 March 1804
Lewis spends much of the winter across the river in St. Louis, a town of French fur traders. In March he watches a strange ceremony there. On 9 March the Spanish flag comes down and the French flag goes up. The next day the French flag comes down and the American flag goes up. In two days, Upper Louisiana has passed through the hands of three countries.
Lewis uses his time in St. Louis to question traders who have been up the Missouri. The farthest any of them have gone regularly is the villages of the Mandan people, about 1,600 miles upriver. Beyond that their maps are blank, or wrong.
14 May 1804
It rains all morning on Monday, 14 May 1804. At four in the afternoon, in front of a crowd of neighbours, Clark pushes off with about forty-five men in three boats. There is the keelboat, and two big open boats called pirogues, one painted red and one white. Clark writes that they set off “under a jentle brease.”
Clark takes the boats about twenty miles up the Missouri to St. Charles, a little French village, while Lewis finishes his business in St. Louis. It is the start of a journey of about 8,000 miles.
21 May 1804
Lewis rides over from St. Louis and joins them at St. Charles. On 21 May the whole Corps of Discovery leaves together, and the real work begins.
The Missouri fights them every mile. It is brown with mud and fast, and dead trees stuck in its bottom, called snags, can rip a boat open. Its banks cave in without warning, and sandbars appear and vanish from one day to the next. When the wind is right they sail. Mostly they row, or push with long poles, or walk along the bank hauling the keelboat on a towrope. On a good day they make fifteen miles.
June–July 1804
Summer comes on hot and sticky. The men are bitten by ticks, gnats and what the journals call “musquetors.” They get boils and sunstroke. They eat enormously, because hard labour burns through food, and the hunters bring in deer, bear and turkey every day.
Discipline is hard. On 29 June, at the mouth of the Kansas River, two men who stole whiskey from the barrel are tried by a court of their fellow soldiers. One is sentenced “to receive one hundred lashes on his bear back,” the other to fifty. It sounds cruel, and it is, but it is the army’s law, and the whiskey has to last.
On the Fourth of July they fire the keelboat’s little cannon in the morning and again in the evening, drink an extra ration, and name a stream Independence Creek.