It is March 2nd. Welcome to Episode 61 of History in a Year. Today, Thomas Jefferson looks at a blank map of the American West and decides to fill it in. Even before the ink is dry on the Louisiana Purchase, the President plans a top-secret military expedition into the uncharted wilderness. He chooses his brilliant but brooding personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to lead the charge. Lewis immediately recruits his former army commander, the steady and pragmatic William Clark. We explore the grueling scientific training in Philadelphia, the massive stockpile of supplies, and the birth of the legendary Corps of Discovery.
STEPHEN:
Welcome to History in a Year: America’s First 250 Years.
LEAH:
Join us every single day as we journey from the Revolution of 1776 to the 250th anniversary of the United States.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode and join the discussion at PointedWords.com. I’m Stephen.
LEAH:
And I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
It is March 2nd. Welcome to Episode 61. Yesterday, Thomas Jefferson pulled off the greatest real estate deal in history. He bought the entire Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte for pennies on the acre.
LEAH:
The United States doubled in size overnight. But there was a massive, glaring problem. Nobody in Washington D.C. actually knew what they had just bought.
STEPHEN:
The maps of the American West in 1803 were basically just giant blank spaces with the word “UNEXPLORED” written across them. Some people actually believed there were woolly mammoths wandering around out there, or mountains made of solid salt.
LEAH:
Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment. He was a scientist at heart. He couldn’t stand not knowing what was out there.
STEPHEN:
More importantly, he was obsessed with finding the “Northwest Passage.” For centuries, European explorers had been searching for a direct water route that would connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. Whoever controlled that route would control global trade with Asia.
LEAH:
Jefferson believed that if you sailed far enough up the Missouri River, you would eventually hit a small mountain ridge. And he thought you could just carry your boats over that ridge for a few miles, drop them into the Columbia River, and float all the way down to the Pacific Ocean.
STEPHEN:
Spoiler alert: That is not how the Rocky Mountains work. But Jefferson didn’t know that yet!
LEAH:
To find this water route, Jefferson needed to send a military expedition deep into hostile, uncharted territory. And he knew exactly who he wanted to lead it.
STEPHEN:
He chose his 28-year-old personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis.
LEAH:
Lewis was a fascinating guy. He was an army captain who had grown up in the woods of Virginia. He was brilliant, he was an expert woodsman, and he was fiercely loyal to Jefferson. But he was also deeply prone to what Jefferson called “melancholy.” Today, we would probably diagnose him with clinical depression.
STEPHEN:
Jefferson knew about Lewis’s dark moods, but he trusted him completely. In January 1803—before the Louisiana Purchase even happened—Jefferson sent a secret message to Congress asking for $2,500 to fund Lewis’s expedition.
LEAH:
Congress approved the money. And Jefferson sent Lewis to Philadelphia to go to school.
STEPHEN:
For months, Lewis was trained by the greatest scientific minds in America. He learned how to navigate by the stars. He learned botany, zoology, and how to preserve animal and plant specimens. He even learned rudimentary medicine from Dr. Benjamin Rush.
LEAH:
And speaking of Dr. Rush, we have to talk about the medicine he gave Lewis for the trip.
STEPHEN:
Oh, this is the best part.
LEAH:
Dr. Rush gave Lewis 50 dozen of his patented “Bilious Pills.” These pills were essentially massive doses of mercury and jalapa. They were ultra-powerful laxatives.
STEPHEN:
The men on the expedition affectionately called them “Thunderclappers.” And because the pills were made of heavy metals that don’t easily break down in the environment, modern archaeologists have actually been able to track the exact campsites of the expedition by finding the mercury deposits they left behind in their latrine trenches!
LEAH:
While Lewis was buying medicine, scientific instruments, and massive amounts of supplies in Philadelphia, he realized something crucial. He couldn’t lead this expedition alone.
STEPHEN:
He needed a co-commander. Someone who could handle the men, navigate the rivers, and balance out his own moody personality.
LEAH:
So, Lewis wrote a letter to his old army buddy, William Clark.
STEPHEN:
Clark was four years older than Lewis. He had been Lewis’s commanding officer during the Indian Wars in the Ohio Valley. Where Lewis was an introverted, brooding intellectual, Clark was an extroverted, practical, incredibly steady leader of men.
LEAH:
And Clark was a master mapmaker. He couldn’t spell to save his life—his diary entries are famous for their incredibly creative spelling—but he could draw a topographical map of a river with astonishing accuracy.
STEPHEN:
Lewis sent the letter asking Clark to join him as co-captain. Clark wrote back immediately and said, “My friend, I join you with hand and heart.”
LEAH:
Together, they began assembling the team that would become known as the Corps of Discovery.
STEPHEN:
They recruited young, unmarried, healthy frontiersmen. They needed men who could hunt, row a boat all day, and survive freezing winters. They also brought along a French-Canadian interpreter, and a highly skilled enslaved man named York, who belonged to William Clark.
LEAH:
And we can’t forget the most popular member of the crew! Lewis bought a massive, 150-pound black Newfoundland dog named Seaman. He paid $20 for him, which was a huge amount of money back then. Seaman went on the entire journey, hunting squirrels and acting as a guard dog.
STEPHEN:
The logistics of this trip were mind-boggling. They were essentially packing for a mission to Mars. They had no idea how long they would be gone, and there were no resupply stations along the way.
LEAH:
They built a massive, 55-foot keelboat in Pittsburgh. It was essentially a floating warehouse. They loaded it with tons of pork, flour, salt, and coffee.
STEPHEN:
But the most important things they packed were the “Indian Presents.”
LEAH:
Jefferson knew they would be passing through the territory of dozens of powerful Native American nations. He told Lewis that his primary diplomatic mission was to inform these tribes that their land now belonged to the “Great Father” in Washington, and to establish peaceful trade.
STEPHEN:
To do that, they packed huge amounts of trade goods. They brought blue glass beads, brass buttons, silk ribbons, mirrors, and dozens of peace medals made of solid silver that featured Thomas Jefferson’s face on one side and two hands shaking on the other.
LEAH:
They also brought an incredible piece of technology to impress the Native Americans. It was a Girandoni air rifle.
STEPHEN:
This wasn’t a musket that required gunpowder and a flintlock. This was a cutting-edge pneumatic rifle that used compressed air pumped into the stock of the gun. It could fire 22 shots in under a minute without making a loud bang or producing a cloud of smoke.
LEAH:
Lewis used it at every major tribal council to demonstrate the magical, advanced technology of the United States.
STEPHEN:
By the winter of 1803, Lewis, Clark, and the men of the Corps of Discovery had gathered near St. Louis, Missouri. They set up a winter camp called Camp Dubois on the eastern side of the Mississippi River, waiting for the spring thaw.
LEAH:
They spent the winter training. Clark drilled the men constantly, turning a bunch of rowdy frontiersmen into a disciplined military unit.
STEPHEN:
And they waited for the official transfer of the Louisiana Territory. In March 1804, the Spanish flag in St. Louis was lowered, the French flag was raised for a day, and then the American flag finally went up.
LEAH:
The land was officially theirs. The map was waiting to be drawn.
STEPHEN:
On May 14, 1804, it was time to go. The men loaded their massive 55-foot keelboat and two smaller wooden pirogues. William Clark fired a cannon from the bow of the boat, and the men pushed their oars into the muddy water.
LEAH:
They turned their boats against the current of the Missouri River—the “Big Muddy”—and started rowing west into the absolute unknown.
STEPHEN:
Join us tomorrow for Episode 62. The Corps of Discovery. We watch as the men face the grueling, agonizing physical labor of pulling a multi-ton boat up a wild river. We explore their first tense, dangerous encounters with the powerful Native American empires of the Great Plains, and the moment the expedition nearly ends in a bloodbath before it even truly begins.
LEAH:
I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
And I’m Stephen.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode at PointedWords.com. And this… is our story.