Lewis and Clark Archives - Wolf Creek Angler

December 3rd, 1805

Today’s post is shared from The American Patriot’s Daily Almanac & Salem National

Of Courage Undaunted
“I marked my name & the day of the month and year on a large Pine . . . ‘Capt William Clark December 3rd 1805. By Land. U States in 1804 & 1805.’”

So wrote William Clark in his journal after nearly nineteen months of trekking across the West. Captains Clark and Meriwether Lewis, along with a band of about thirty explorers, had finally reached the Pacific.

They had set out from the St. Louis area on May 14, 1804, with instructions from President Jefferson: see what was out there. The explorers made their way up the Missouri River in boats,
wide-eyed at a land filled with deer, turkeys, geese, and herds of buffalo. Lewis and Clark held councils with the Indians they met. They made maps of their route. They collected specimens – insects, animal skins, fossils, a prairie dog – and sent them back to the curious Jefferson.

The explorers spent about a month dragging their canoes around the Great Falls of the Missouri. When the river took them as far as it could, they traded with Shoshone Indians for horses and started over the Rockies. The horses often lost their footing on snow-covered trails. The explorers ran out of food and began to go hungry.

They finally stumbled out of the mountains, built canoes, and dashed down foaming waters to the Columbia River. The river widened, slowed, and lay shrouded with fog. When the fog lifted, they found that they had reached the Pacific.

As Jefferson said, the Lewis and Clark expedition was one “of courage undaunted, possessing a firmness and perseverance of purpose which nothing but impossibilities could divert from its direction.” By the time they got back to St. Louis on September 23, 1806, they had traveled 8,000 miles. They brought back reports of a country grand enough to hold any dream.

This day in history…

One year after the United States doubled its territory with the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition leaves St. Louis, Missouri, on a mission to explore the Northwest from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.

Even before the U.S. government concluded purchase negotiations with France, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned his private secretary Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, an army captain, to lead an expedition into what is now the U.S. Northwest. On May 14, the “Corps of Discovery”–featuring approximately 45 men (although only an approximate 33 men would make the full journey)–left St. Louis for the American interior.

The expedition traveled up the Missouri River in a 55-foot long keelboat and two smaller boats. In November, Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian fur trader accompanied by his young Native American wife Sacagawea, joined the expedition as an interpreter. The group wintered in present-day North Dakota before crossing into present-day Montana, where they first saw the Rocky Mountains. On the other side of the Continental Divide, they were met by Sacagawea’s tribe, the Shoshone Indians, who sold them horses for their journey down through the Bitterroot Mountains. After passing through the dangerous rapids of the Clearwater and Snake rivers in canoes, the explorers reached the calm of the Columbia River, which led them to the sea. On November 8, 1805, the expedition arrived at the Pacific Ocean, the first European explorers to do so by an overland route from the east. After pausing there for the winter, the explorers began their long journey back to St. Louis.

On September 23, 1806, after almost two and a half years, the expedition returned to the city, bringing back a wealth of information about the largely unexplored region, as well as valuable U.S. claims to Oregon Territory.