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Personnel: From Camp Wood to the
Mandan Villages, the exact figure is difficult to establish.
Leaving Camp Wood there were two captains,
three sergeants, one corporal, twenty-four privates, plus York
(Clark’s slave). In addition a number of engagés left with
them. Most were French-Canadians hired for their knowledge of the
Missouri River and Indian languages. Forty-two to forty-five or
more men departed from Camp Wood, with changes along the way to the
Mandan villages.
From the Mandan Villages to the ocean, the permanent party numbered
thirty-three: the two officers, three sergeants, twenty-three
privates, Charbonneau and Drouillard, York, Sacagawea and her son
Jean-Baptiste.
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Weapons: It is
often asserted that Lewis acquired at Harpers Ferry at least fifteen
new model 1803 rifles, fifty-four caliber guns especially designed
for the army, called short barreled (thirty-three inches long but
shorter than the longer civilian "Pennsylvania" rifles). A contrary
view maintains that the rifles he acquired were in fact Model 1792
rifles, ten inches longer than the 1803 rifles. The original locks
on these weapons had been replaced with locks bearing the date of
1803. Some of the men carried their own "Kentucky" or "Pennsylvania"
sixty-nine caliber long rifles. In addition, both pirouges had a
blunderbuss swivel gun, weapons with approximately twenty-four-inch
barrels and two-inch flared muzzles. Described as scatterguns they
were capable of firing about anything put into them.
A small cannon
(called the “large swivel”) was mounted on the bow of the keelboat,
firing buckshot or a single ball. The iron ball weighed about one
pound, fired from a bore of about two inches. The cannon was
presented as a gift to a Hidatsa chief on the return trip to St.
Louis.
Lewis had an
air rifle that he used to impress observers when he fired his
virtually silent weapon. He also carried a six foot one inch wooded
shaft with an iron blade and tip called an espontoon that he used as
a walking stick, weapon, and rifle support.
The
men’s armament included large knives and tomahawks.
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What Was Discovered:
Jefferson’s primary instruction to
Lewis was to “explore the most direct & practicable water
communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.”
The President reiterated the point in a January 1804 letter to
Lewis, stressing that “The object of your mission is simple, the
direct water communication from sea to sea. . . .”
Some two and a
half years later, having returned to St. Louis, Lewis writes what
first appears to be a mission accomplished report, informing the
anxious President that “we have discovered the most practicable rout
which does exist across the continent by means of navigable branches
of the Missouri and Columbia rivers.” Then the explorer goes on to
describe that this most “practicable rout” is in fact totally
impractical.
Jefferson
recognized before the expedition that there was no continual
waterway to the west as he directed in his instructions that points
of portage between the Missouri and waters to the Pacific should be
“fixed by observation.” In accord with geographic lore of the day,
he expected portages to be short and achieved without great
difficulty. Now he learns that it is necessary to go by boat 2,575
miles up a river with caving banks and other dangers to the foot of
the Great Falls. There an eighteen-mile portage waits, then two
hundred not particularly difficult miles, but followed by one
hundred forty miles of “tremendious” mountains, sixty miles of which
“are covered with eternal snow.” After a last leg of six hundred
boat miles with additional portages and “three roaring cascades” the
Pacific is finally reached. Lewis and Clark’s expedition brought to
an end the time-honored search for a Northwest Passage.
The short-term
effects of the mission were negligible. The Corps of Discovery's
long absence led to the assumption its members had perished during
the journey. On their way back to St. Louis, they encountered
several traders and trappers on their way up the Missouri River who
knew nothing about the Corps of Discovery. As news of their return
spread, Lewis and Clark were wined and dined, but they soon faded
from public view. Lewis was supposed to provide a manuscript for
publication of the journals, but died without doing so. When
Nicolas Biddle’s narrative of the journals did appear eight years
after Lewis and Clark's return, its impact was slight. Their
scientific data, their botanical and animal records, were not
included. Not until 1904 was a more complete edition of the
journals published, including Lewis and Clark’s scientific data and
some maps.
The pioneers
who headed west did not follow in their footsteps. Lewis and
Clark's hazardous and laborious route was not suited for families in
covered wagons heading for California and Oregon in the last half of
the nineteenth century. Therefore, they took the famed Oregon
Trail, following the flatlands of the Platte River and crossed not
the Bitteroot Mountains of The Rockies, but the manageable South
Pass in Wyoming. The movement west and the American frontier were
history by the time the Corps of Discovery was discovered. Not
until the 1960s did the Lewis and Clark Expedition become a subject
of widespread interest, largely because of Steven Ambrose's
Undaunted Courage and the recognition of multiculturism in the
American experience. Now the contributions of York, the Black slave,
the Native-Americans, and the French Canadians to the success of the
mission have been acknowledged. In the early nineteenth-century,
Sacagawea had emerged as an important member of the Expedition,
thanks to the Progressive era and women’s activism stressing her
role.
"If Lewis and
Clark had died on the trail," says Notre Dame Historian Thomas
Slaughter, "it wouldn't have mattered a bit."
Was the mission
a failure for not having found the waterway to the Pacific? No,
because proving that it did not exist was a momentous contribution
to geographic knowledge.
Although not
appreciated for many years, many other achievements followed in the
wake of the Corps of Discovery. Henceforth, the United States had a
primary claim to the territory from the Continental divide to the
Pacific Ocean, although contested for years. The journal’s pages
recorded for the first time the manifold and detailed results of the
natural and social science missions Jefferson assigned. They reveal
a geographic wonderland of mountains, rivers, and wildlife,
populated with diverse peoples engaged in large-scale trade
patterns, and possessed of civilizations. The Northwest was rich in
human, animal, and plant life.
They dispelled
many myths about the western territories, There were no mammoths, no
Welsh Indians, no active volcanoes. Blank spaces on maps previously
marked “unknown” were now known and charted.
In 2004, the
United States inaugurated its Bicentennial Commemoration of the
Lewis and Clark Expedition. It acknowledges that the men and woman
of the Corps of Discovery bequeathed to Americans their epic story.
They confronted together months of treacherous waters, threatening
animals, geographic obstacles, hunger, temptations, elation and
disappointments while facing the uncertainties of the unknown.
Their voyage into the wilderness revealed qualities that came to
embody the American Spirit: courage, persistence, endurance,
teamwork, admirable leaders, and the value of imagination and
exploration. The Lewis and Clark Expedition heralds what people
working together can accomplish, even against great odds.
But
a high price has been paid. Native-Americans, whose assistance made
success possible, have been ill paid for their contributions. Their
numbers have been decimated, their land taken, their beliefs
impugned, their dignity assaulted. The natural resources of the
territory have been despoiled and like its peoples, its once
bountiful animal and plant life endangered—the fate of the buffalo
tells us much about our “stewardship.” The Bicentennial
Commemoration of the Lewis and Clark Expedition highlights that
reconciliation among peoples and achieving harmony between nature
and humanity are long overdue.
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