Blog Post 1 - Lewis and Clark

The Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804

During the spring of 1804 during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency and shortly after Jefferson’s “greatest achievement” (Foner) the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, “… Jefferson dispatched an expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, two Virginia-born veterans of Indian wars in the Ohio Valley, to explore the new territory.” (Foner) Lewis and Clarks tasks were “… to study the area’s plants, animal life, and geography, and to discover how the region could be exploited economically.” (Foner) The reason Jefferson wanted Lewis and Clark to explore the land bought from the Louisiana Purchase was that he “… hoped the explorers would establish trading relations with western Indians and locate a water route to the Pacific Ocean – an updated version of the old dream of a Northwest Passage that could facilitate commerce with Asia.” (Foner)

Throughout The Journals of Lewis and Clark, they document in their journal entries many interactions with the natives, their findings of plants and animals, and also their daily observations. From The Journal of Lewis and Clark, on May 13^th 1804 Clark wrote “I dispatched an express this morning to Captain Lewis at St. Louis.” (Bakeless) “Boats and everything complete, with the necessary stores of provisions and such articles of merchandise as we thought ourselves authorized to procure…” (Bakeless)

Their journey began in St. Lois and ended in Fort Clatsop as depicted above. “They spent the winter in the area of present-day North Dakota and then resumed their journey in April 1805. They were now accompanied by a fifteen-year-old Shoshone Indian woman, Sacajawea, the slave wife of a French fur trader, who served as their interpreter.” (Foner) Along their journey Sacajawea gave birth to a son as written in Lewis and Clark’s Journal on February 11, 1805 “About five o’clock this evening, one of the wives of Charbonneau was delivered of a fine boy. It is worthy of remark that this was the first child which this woman had born…” (Bakeless) Shortly after Lewis and Clark reached the end of their journey in Fort Clatsop they returned home in 1806. As Foner states “The success of their journey helped to strengthen the idea that American territory was destined to reach all the way to the Pacific” (Foner) he is referring to the term widely used in the 19^th century of ‘Manifest Destiny’ which means simply means “…the belief that the United States was destined, even divinely ordained, to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean.” (Contributors)

Works Cited

Bakeless, John. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. New York: New American Library, 2002.

Contributors, Wikipedia. Manifest Destiny . 18 September 2009 .

Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty!: An American History 2nd Seagull Ed. New York City: W.W.Norton & Company, Inc., 2009.