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Distance:
Most sources say over eight thousand miles.
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Doctor: No, army regulations
provided for one “surgeon” for each forty-five soldiers, and
Secretary of War Henry Dearborn had authorized only twelve enlisted
men and two officers. Moreover, Jefferson had little faith in the
doctors of the time (with good reason, many probably did more harm
than good with their bleedings, emetics, and purgatives).
Consequently the Captains became the “medical
officers” of the expedition.
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Duration:
Two years, four months, nine days. The Corps
of Discovery left Camp Wood on May 14, 1804, and returned to St.
Louis on September 23, 1806. Upon the Corps’s return its equipment
was auctioned off for approximately $430.00.
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Engagés: Lewis and Clark needed men who knew the
Missouri River and Indian languages and hired several experienced
French-Canadian voyageurs for their skills and knowledge.
Their number varied during the journey, as men left or were added on
the journey upstream to the Mandan villages. Five of them went with
the permanent party to the Pacific Ocean, Toussaint Charbonneau and
Georges Drouillard as civilians, and three who had enlisted in the
army for the expedition: Pierre Cruzatte, François Labiche, and
Jean Baptiste Lepage. Drouillard, who was half French-half Shawnee,
became one of Lewis and Clark’s most valuable men due to his
knowledge of sign language and hunting prowess.
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Entertainment:
Campsite entertainment included singing,
dancing, making music with a tambourine and a “Sounden horn” (a
bugle), and listening to Pierre Cruzatte and George Gibson play the
fiddle. The men probably spent time telling one another stories and
may have played jewish harps and clicked items together in what was
known as “sticks, “bones,” or “spoons.”
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Fate: Records of the era are
scanty and little is known of what happened to them after their
perilous journey. Of the soldiers, there was one probable suicide
(Lewis), two went into politics (Clark and George Shannon), ten
became settlers, and ten or so returned to the mountains where
Indians killed four of them. The fate of the rest is unknown.
Information on the voyageurs is even
more scarce. It is known that the Blackfeet killed Cruzatte,
Drouillard, and Alexander Carson. Charbonneau went on to a long life
as a trader and interpreter, marrying again three years before his
death at age eighty.
Sacagawea is thought to have died in 1812
(about twenty-five years old) of the “putrid fever” at Fort Manuel,
just below the North Dakota/South Dakota border. Another version
has her dying at about one hundred years of age on the Wind River
Indian Reservation in Wyoming. There are more statues in the U.S.
of Sacagawea than of any other woman.
Her son Jean Baptiste received an education in
St. Louis thanks to Clark, and spent six years in Europe with Prince
Paul of Wurttemberg. For most of his life he was a mountain man and
guide, dying in 1866 in Oregon.
York, who had experienced a taste of life as a
free man, asked for his freedom after the expedition, but Clark
refused him until sometime after 1811. After a brief unsuccessful
effort at being a waggoner, he died of the cholera in Tennessee on
his way back to Clark in St. Louis, according to Clark. Another
version has him returning to the west to live with the Crow Indians
in North-Central Wyoming.
The fate of Lewis’s dog Seaman is unknown.
Lewis last mentions him on July 15, 1806.
Lewis was appointed by Jefferson to be Governor
of the Territory of Upper Louisiana. He died in 1809 on the Natchez
Trace, about sixty miles southwest of today’s Nashville, Tennessee.
There is controversy as to whether he died by his own hand or was
murdered.
Jefferson appointed Clark a brigadier general
of the militia, named him Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the
Territory of Louisiana, and in 1813 appointed him the territorial
governor of Louisiana. From 1820 to his death in 1838 he devoted
himself to Indian affairs.
On January 17, 2001, President Clinton promoted
Clark to the rank of Captain in the Regular Army, and promoted
Sacagawea and York to honorary sergeants in the Regular Army.
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Food: Three sources of food: what
they brought with them, what they obtained by hunting and fishing,
and provisions supplied by Indians.
In
addition to other durable foods, Lewis had purchased 193 pounds of
portable soup. It had a leatherlike consistency and the men would
eat it only when nothing else was available. Mostly they lived off
the land: meat, fish, edible plants, nuts, and fruit. It is
estimated the men ate about nine pounds of meat a day (when it was
available). When game was scarce they ate dog (Lewis liked it, Clark
didn’t) and horses. If it walked, flew, or swam, they killed and ate
it.
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Fort Clatsop: It was the
1805-1806 winter camp built by the Corps near today’s Astoria,
Oregon. Named for a helpful nearby tribe, it was fifty feet square
with a palisade for protecting the Corps and its two rows of
quarters on either side of a parade ground.
Clark recorded they were there from December 7,
1805, to their departure date of March 23, 1806, following a wet and
miserable winter.
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Gifts:
Gifts accounted for $696 of Lewis’s $2500 dollar
authorization for expenditures, more than any other category. Lewis
used his letter of credit to supplement that amount, buying
$3,879.72 worth of additional gifts in St. Louis. He purchased
beads (but not enough blue ones, the Indians favorite), ribbons,
rings, magnifying glasses, tobacco, kettles, knives, sewing needles,
vermilion, looking glasses, scissors, thimbles, tomahawks, and combs
to mention a few items. They also took Peace Medals to present to
chiefs, with Jefferson’s bust on one side, and two clasped hands and
a tomahawk on the other. They were of three sizes: two, three, and
four inches in diameter, the more important the chief the larger the
medal bestowed. Some 235 of the medals were handed out, causing
problems when it was difficult to determine the ranking of chiefs.
The “gifts” were also used as trade goods with the Indians.
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Journals:
President Jefferson’s instructions contained
references to keeping notes and a journal during the expedition.
Gary Moulton’s magisterially edited thirteen volumes (the first one
is an atlas) of the Lewis and Clark Journals display the results of
the two captains, three sergeants, and a private fulfilling the
President’s enjoinder. Therein is the written record of the Corps
of Discovery’s trip to the Pacific Ocean and back, chronologically
recording findings and events along the way. They present to us map
sketches, astronomical observations, the weather, Indian tribes,
streams and rivers, tables of distance, and describe plants and
animals. Descriptions of their daily experiences are invaluable for
enriching our knowledge of their transcontinental journey. Clark is
the faithful and major contributor; for unknown reasons there are
large gaps in Lewis’s entries (some four hundred days without words
by him).
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Liquor: Yes. Lewis’s requirements
list of provisions included thirty gallons of “strong rectified
spirits.” The army ration of the time was a gill (pronounced jill)
a day, i.e. four ounces. They ran out on July 4, 1805. Also part
of the medical chest was thirty gallons of “strong spirit wine” to
be diluted and spooned into patients as medicine. He purchased one
hundred twenty gallons of whiskey in St. Louis in preparation for
the journey.
Beer made from moldy camas roots was made by
John Collins and “presented us” on October 21, 1805. There is no
other mention of beer.
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Mandans and Hidatsas:
Two Indian nations with their villages near
today’s Bismarck, North Dakota. The Mandans were an important part
of the Indian trade system and had been engaged in trade with white
men since early in the eighteenth century. The Corps reached the
Mandan Villages on October 24, 1804, some 1600 miles and 164 days
from Camp Wood. The Mandans and their neighbors to the north, the
Hidatsas (also called Gros Ventres [Big Bellies] or Menetarra)
numbered about 4,000 people in five villages, the largest Indian
concentration on the Missouri River, larger than the population of.
St. Louis.
Deciding to winter in the
vicinity, the Corps in November built the triangular Fort Mandan.
They were there until April 7, 1805, when the permanent party
departed for the Pacific Ocean, and the rest set off in the keelboat
for the return to St. Louis. During the winter they learned from the
Indians, socialized with them, exchanged gifts, traded goods, and
received food.
Toussaint Charbonneau was hired at Fort Mandan
as an interpreter, and his wife Sacagawea was welcome because she
spoke Shoshone, which would be vital for trading for horses with
that tribe when they reached the continental divide. Jean Baptiste
Charbonneau was born on February 11, 1805, in Fort Mandan, a little
less than two months before he left there with his father and mother
and the permanent party for the journey to the west.
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