6/30/2018

The thing about Thomas Jefferson’s plan for the Lewis & Clark expedition was how outrageous the whole plan was. The scheme was to send a military expedition across half the continent that didn’t even belong to the U.S.  All the drainage of the Missouri River belonged to Spain, and the Oregon Country was in dispute, claimed variously by Great Britain, France, Russia and Spain. The idea of the Louisiana Purchase had not even been thought of yet! When Jefferson broached the idea to Spain of sending a U.S. expedition to explore the lands drained by the Missouri River with “no other view than the advancement of the geography”, Spain vetoed the proposal. They would not allow it. From start to finish it was an expedition designed to scout out the usefulness of Louisiana to the United States as a target for national expansion. Jefferson, as well as other luminaries of the Revolution envisioned the U.S. becoming a continental power at least a decade before the expedition.¹

The problem was that, aside from the Native Americans’ limited knowledge, no one knew what lay west of the Mandan Villages, between what is now North Dakota and the Pacific Ocean – there were no maps. Capt Robert Gray discovered the mouth of the Columbia in 1792, but as has been often stated, more was known about the Moon before the Apollo missions than was known about what lay between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean.

Concurrent to scheming to send the Lewis on the expedition across the continent, Jefferson was also working on another plan to purchase New Orleans from the French. In fact Jefferson sent James Monroe to Paris to negotiate a purchase of New Orleans only for $2 million, and was willing to go up to $10 million. Due to lack of roads over the Appalachians, virtually all commerce from the Mississippi River Valley region went through New Orleans, hence it was Jefferson’s judgment that whoever controlled New Orleans would in effect control the entire Mississippi basin and its riches.

So it was a shock to almost everyone when Napoleon offered to sell the entire Louisiana Territory the U.S. for about $15 million, i.e. 60 million French francs, which Jefferson jumped at. By “Louisiana Territory” we mean the entire west half of the Mississippi Valley up to the Canadian border. And by the way, that was $15 million that the U.S. did not have – which is another story. Any way you slice it, it was the greatest real estate deal ever made that doubled the size of the United States.

Lewis was already traveling down the Ohio River 1803 on his way to St Louis before the Louisiana Purchase was finalized, which is one reason the expedition was forced to winter-over across the Mississippi River from St Louis at Camp River Dubois in what is now Illinois.  Camp River Dubois was in U.S. territory, whereas St Louis still belonged to Spain … i.e. until March 9, 1804 when the formal transfer to the U.S. took place.  Hence the expedition could not leave St Louis until the spring of 1804.

The 1804-1806 expedition of the “Corps of Discovery” was a journey into the unknown, fraught with obstacles and danger all the way. It was one of the greatest chapters of early American history, and a heck of an adventure story, beautifully captured by Stephen Ambrose in “Undaunted Courage” which I highly recommend.

The key players: Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Thomas Jefferson
(Source: study.com)

Route of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, 1804-1806
(Source: National Park Service)

 

1. Our source for this and most of our other information about the expedition we obtained from Stephen Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage”, which we re-read for this trip.  Also, we listened to “Undaunted Courage” as an audio book as we traveled through the lands while the book described them to us, which brought the story alive even more for us!