Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen E. AmbroseMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
A quintessentially American enterprise I knew nothing about, and learned a great deal.
Lewis was an elite Virginia landowner in Jefferson’s social circle. When Jefferson came to the presidency he made Lewis his personal secretary. He was a very close confidant for years. The Louisiana purchase from Napoleon was in the works for years, but not a certainty. For 2 years, Jefferson trained Lewis in celestial navigation, botany, etc., and prepared an expedition to explore the continent to the Pacific, especially seeking a river / water route up the Missouri River over the Rockies to the Pacific. The goal was mainly to take the fur trade away from the British/Canadian Northwest company.
They planned the trip for 2 years, knowing the territory was not American. Parts of it were British, parts Spanish. But they simply assumed it would be American soon, and were going to explore it as if it were theirs, anyway. Jefferson tutored Lewis privately in the natural arts for months, while he was president. The day before Lewis left, they got word from Napoleon confirming he would sell “the Louisiana territory” to America.
Clark was an army buddy of Lewis, very trusted and respected. Although officially not a peer in rank with Lewis, Lewis treated him as such, giving him equal say in all decisions on the expedition. Typical lore is that it was Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea on the trip, but they actually spent a lot of time recruiting a team of men – between 30-50 – and built a large riverboat and several canoes for the journey. Lewis was a fabulous leader of men, building immense loyalty among his team. At a few points they all thought they should take route A, but Lewis and Clark believed in route B, and the men followed. While they paddled canoes, Lewis wrote his journal, taking notes on many new plants and animals unknown to Western science until then.
Lewis and Clark were both slave owners, and Clark had a black slave York with him the whole time. They treated each Indian tribe they met in a rather patronizing manner – they had a new great Father now in Washington. They were his children, now, and should send their chiefs to meet him. They seldom gave out rifles though the Indians grabbed for all the gifts they would give. The Indians often hounded and stole from the expedition along the way.
The abundance of buffalo around present day Kansas made the land seem a Garden of Eden to them. They feasted on buffalo for weeks. Later in the Rockies, they had to eat horses and dogs, nearly starving.
Crossing the Rocky Mountains was especially tricky. They had to trade with Indians for horses, hire them as guides, and leave their canoes and supplies behind. They made it through an arduous journey to the Colombia river, where they built canoes again, and floated down the river to the Pacific. Some Indians were friendly, others were hostile.
Lewis advised Jefferson on trade policy from the Pacific Ocean. The expedition wasn’t just exploratory, but designed to decide how America could best take trade from the Canadian/British and French. Given the difficult Rocky crossing, the hostile Sioux tribe along the Missouri, and the abundance of furs west of the Rockies, Lewis advised trading with China. He was the scout and forerunner of American westward expansion.
On the way back, a friendly tribe told him not to attempt to cross the Rockies until late June, but Lewis didn’t want to wait. He made the attempt but had to turn back – the Indians were right. 12 feet of snow kept them from finding the trail they needed. They hired 5 teenaged Indians as guides who knew exactly where there would be grass for their horses, each step of the way, every day. Sacagawea as translator and guide – taken as a slave-wife to a French trader from a Western tribe – and such Indians get little credit in Lewis’ journals, but they would not have survived without them.
They fended off grizzly bears, wolves, and snakes, with nothing more than rifles with one shot per minute or two. One shot to a grizzly seldom took it down, and they had to run for their lives as the bear chased them.
The end of the story is the most fascinating. Getting back to civilization at St. Louis, they were heroes, treated to balls and dances as they made their way back to Washington. Everyone was eager for Lewis’ journal to be published, but he delayed and never got it done. (It wasn’t published until decades later.) Many of his actual samples of plants and animals he sent back to Jefferson were lost, but not all. He was made an honorary member of the Philadelphia naturalist society.
Jefferson as president appointed Lewis governor of the Louisiana territory, but he was a poor politician. Lewis got greedy, insisting only he publish journals of the expedition, but stalling in getting his published. He fell to heavy drinking and drug use. While Clark courted and married back in Virginia, Lewis caroused in Philadelphia, when he should have been governing in St. Louis. When he finally got to St. Louis, he was heavy handed with the hostile Indians, and insisted on government funds for a lot of things, which he had always gotten from Jefferson. When James Madison was elected president he started his way to Washington to report to him. Madison was far less willing to approve funds for Lewis’ projects.
Halfway to Washington in 1809, at the age of 35, Lewis committed suicide in a drug induced frenzy. He left many debts, personal and public, with his unpublished journal of the expedition in a corner of his room. Jefferson coined the phrase to describe Lewis at the end: “courage undaunted.” But Lewis’ expeditionary exploits and exertions definitely daunted him in the end.
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