Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1774-1809) and (1770-1838)

Sources

Soldiers and explorers

Early Years. The names of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark survive as perhaps the most famous pair in American history. Yet beneath the legacy surrounding their 1804–1806 expedition and the partnership that directed it lay a friendship between the two men whose names have become indissolubly linked. Although Lewis and Clark both descended from prominent Virginia families, they did not meet until adulthood. Clark’s family (which included his brother, George Rogers Clark, a famed Revolutionary War general) had moved to Kentucky in the 1770s. Following their formal education, Lewis and Clark enlisted for military service. While campaigning with Gen. Anthony Wayne in 1795, they served in the same unit and became friends. Both developed reputations as efficient commanders and hardened outdoorsmen although Clark’s skills in surveying and water navigation outpaced those of Lewis. Their mutual acquaintance with Thomas Jefferson aided them in subsequent years. Following Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801, Lewis became the president’s personal secretary. While planning the Corps of Discovery expedition, Jefferson endorsed Lewis’s choice of Clark as cocommander; even though Clark served officially as the second in command, Lewis regarded Clark as his equal, and the two made all decisions jointly during the expedition.

Trip to the Pacific. While Lewis supervised material preparations, Clark recruited and trained most of the men who served on the expedition. Departing in May 1804, the party ascended the Missouri River and, after five months, reached the Mandan Indian country, where they camped for the winter. With the crucial help of Native American guides and interpreters, the most significant of whom was Sacagawea, a Shoshoni woman, Lewis and Clark crossed the Rocky and Bitterroot Mountains. The tortuous terrain often required them to travel on foot, using horses they had obtained from natives as pack animals. Reaching the tributaries of the Columbia River, the party built boats that carried them to the mouth of the Columbia and to the Pacific Ocean. Lewis spent much of his time recording natural observations and ministering to the men’s health while Clark oversaw physical operations and mapped mountains and rivers, trying to deduce navigable routes. Following their winter in present-day Oregon in 1805–1806, the team began their return journey, splitting up along the way to explore the Continental Divide and the Upper Missouri River. Arriving in St. Louis in September 1806, Lewis and Clark set to work in preparing their journals, which would assist later explorers in constructing an accurate geographical portrait of North America.

Territorial Governors. The expedition proved to be the high point of their careers. In 1807 Jefferson appointed Lewis as governor of the Louisiana Territory, a position that would sustain him while he prepared his papers. Always prone to melancholy, Lewis had badly managed his financial affairs and went into debt, increasing his depression and proclivity toward excessive drinking. In 1809 Lewis, only thirty-five years old, died from a gunshot wound while staying at an inn in central Tennessee. Some researchers claim a conspiracy in his death, but most of the available evidence supports the conclusion that Lewis took his own life. Clark became superintendent of Indian affairs in 1807 and six years later was appointed as governor of the Missouri Territory. After Lewis’s death, Clark assumed the task of preparing his journals for publication, obtaining the assistance of the banker Nicholas Biddle, who edited the papers for their 1814 printing. Biddle focused mostly on the expedition’s geographical discoveries, including few of Lewis’s meticulous notes on flora and fauna, but the journals’ release did stimulate curiosity about the West for its information on Indian tribes and its descriptions of natural wealth, proving extremely valuable to the geologists, surveyors, and anthropologists who followed in Lewis and Clark’s wake.

Sources

Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996);

James Ronda, Lewis and Clark among the Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).