Meriwether Lewis and William Clark

American explorers

• Meriwether Lewis
• Born: August 18, 1774
• Birthplace: Albemarle County, Virginia
• Died: October 11, 1809
• Place of death: Grinder's Stand, Tennessee

• William Clark
• Born: August 1, 1770
• Birthplace: Caroline County, Virginia
• Died: September 1, 1838
• Place of death: St. Louis, Missouri

The Lewis and Clark expedition was the first organized exploratory expedition to cross the North American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast within the geographical limits of the present United States. After serving as coleader of the expedition, Clark was for three decades one of the most important administrators of Indian affairs in the nation’s history.

Early Lives

Meriwether Lewis was born on a Virginia plantation. His father was William Lewis, who married Lucy Meriwether, after whom the future explorer was named. Meriwether had an older sister and a younger brother. The first Lewises in America, who were Welsh, migrated to Virginia during the mid-seventeenth century, where the family became planters. Meriwether’s father was a lieutenant during the Revolutionary War, but he drowned while on leave in 1779. Six months later, Lucy married Captain John Marks. After the war, the Marks family moved to Georgia, but Meriwether soon went back to Virginia to live with his relatives. There he attended several small schools taught by parsons and received some tutoring, but his chief interest and delight was in rambling in the woods, hunting and observing nature. Although rather stiff and awkward as a child, Meriwether grew up to be a handsome young man.

When John Marks died in 1791, his widow returned to Virginia. She brought with her, besides Meriwether’s brother and sister, a son and daughter she had borne her second husband.

A short time after his mother’s return, Lewis became a soldier, as he was to remain most of his life. In 1794, he enlisted in the Virginia militia to help suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. Liking this taste of military life, Lewis stayed in the militia until May, 1795, when he became an ensign in the United States Army. A few months thereafter, he was assigned to the “Chosen Rifle Company” that William Clark commanded, and during the short time that the two men were together, they became fast friends. Later that year, Lewis joined the First Infantry Regiment, and for the next four years he was engaged in a number of noncombatant duties, mainly on the Western frontier. In December, 1800, he was promoted to captain and became regimental paymaster.

It was while he was thus occupied that, in February, 1801, President-elect Thomas Jefferson wrote to invite Lewis to become his private secretary, probably with a view to naming him to command a transcontinental exploring expedition. Jefferson had thought about, and even planned for, such an undertaking since the United States had won its independence in 1783. In 1792, Lewis, then only eighteen years old, had volunteered for the assignment. Jefferson chose someone else, however, who failed to go.

Soon after coming to Washington, Lewis, under the president’s direction, began to plan and prepare for the expedition. He obtained scientific and technical training from members of the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania; collected, with their advice, various kinds of equipment and supplies; and gathered information on his proposed route. Following congressional approval and funding of the mission and his formal designation as its commander, Lewis, early in 1803, with Jefferson’s concurrence, invited his friend William Clark, with whom he had maintained contact since they served together in the army, to be its coleader.

Clark was also born on his family’s plantation in Virginia. He was the youngest of six sons and the ninth of ten children of John and Ann (Rogers) Clark. The Clarks had emigrated from England some time in the seventeenth century and, like the Lewises, had become planters. When the Revolution came, the Clarks were staunch patriots, and all of William’s older brothers fought as officers in the War for Independence. The most famous was Brigadier General George Rogers Clark, who was the conqueror of the Illinois Country. William, who was too young to fight, stayed home. He received a little formal schooling and acquired the rudiments of learning, but mainly he developed the skills of a frontiersman: the ability to ride, hunt, and shoot.

When he was fourteen years old, Clark moved with his family to a new plantation near the falls of the Ohio at Louisville. As a young Kentucky frontiersman, Clark, a big, bluff redhead, served with the militia in several campaigns against the hostile Indian tribes living north of the Ohio River. In March, 1792, he was commissioned a lieutenant in the United States Army, and two years later he fought under General Anthony Wayne in the famous Battle of Fallen Timbers. In July, 1796, however, Clark resigned his commission and returned home, where for the next seven years he managed his aged parents’ plantation. It was there that, in July, 1803, he received Lewis’s invitation to join him in leading a transcontinental exploring expedition and quickly accepted it.

Lives’ Work

About the time Clark received his letter, Lewis, in the East, completed his preparations for the expedition and received final detailed directions from the president. The mission’s purpose, as stated by Jefferson, was to explore the Missouri River up to its source in the Rocky Mountains and descend the nearest westward-flowing stream to the Pacific in order to extend the American fur trade to the tribes inhabiting that vast area and to increase geographical knowledge of the continent. With these instructions, Lewis left Washington for Pittsburgh. Descending the Ohio River by boat, he picked up Clark at Louisville, in late summer 1803. Together with a few recruits for the expedition, the two men proceeded to Wood River, Illinois, opposite the mouth of the Missouri, where they encamped early in December. During the next five months, Lewis and Clark recruited and trained their party and finished their preparations for the journey.

With everything in readiness, the expedition set out on May 14, 1804, for the Pacific. Lewis, still a captain in the First Infantry, was the expedition’s official commander. Although commissioned only a second lieutenant of artillerists, on the expedition Clark was called “captain” and was treated in every way as Lewis’s equal. During the journey, Lewis, a rather intense, moody introvert, spent much of his time alone, walking on shore, hunting, and examining the country. Because Lewis was better trained scientifically and the more literate of the two officers, he wrote most of the scientific information recorded in the expedition’s journals. Clark, a friendly, gregarious individual, spent most of his time with the men in the boats. He was the expedition’s principal waterman and mapmaker, and he was better able to negotiate with the Indians. Together, the two officers’ dispositions, talents, and experience complemented each other superbly. Despite the differences in their personalities, they seem always to have enjoyed the best of personal relations.

In its first season’s travel, the expedition advanced some sixteen hundred miles up the Missouri and went into winter quarters in a small fort, named Mandan for the nearest Indian tribe, situated in modern North Dakota. The following spring the expedition proceeded to the headwaters of the Missouri, made a portage of the Rocky Mountains, and descended the nearest westward-flowing tributaries of the Columbia as well as the Columbia itself. Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific by mid-November, 1805. After wintering a few miles from the ocean, in a post they called Fort Clatsop, for a nearby tribe, in March, 1806, the explorers set out for home and arrived in St. Louis in September, having long since been given up for lost by virtually everyone but Jefferson.

As rewards for their great achievement, the president appointed Lewis governor of Louisiana Territory and Clark its principal Indian agent and brigadier general of the territorial militia. Detained in the East by business related to the expedition and other matters, Lewis did not actually assume the governorship of the territory until March, 1808. He soon proved to be unsuited for the office by temperament and experience and quickly ran into trouble. He quarreled with Frederick Bates, the territorial secretary, and became unpopular with many of the people of the territory. He seldom reported to his superiors in Washington and failed to consult them on his policies and plans. As a result, he fell under their severe criticism, and he probably would not have been appointed to a second term of office had he survived the first.

In September, 1809, after only about a year and a half in office, Lewis left St. Louis for Washington, in order to try to straighten out his affairs with the government and to renew his efforts to get the expedition’s journals published. On the way, while stopping at a tavern on the Natchez Trace, he was either murdered or committed suicide. Although the evidence is inconclusive, there is reason to believe, as did Clark and Jefferson, that Lewis died by his own hand. Thus at the age of thirty-five ended the life of this great pathfinder.

Clark, in the meantime, was mainly concerned with improving relations and promoting trading activities with the Indian tribes of the territory and protecting the white settlers against the tribes of the Upper Mississippi who were allied with the British in Canada. Following Lewis’s death, he was offered the governorship of Louisiana, but he declined it because he felt he lacked political experience. In June, 1813, however, the governorship of the Territory of Missouri, as the Louisiana Purchase was called after 1812, again became available, and this time Clark accepted it. During the War of 1812, which was then raging, Clark’s chief responsibility was to defend the territory against the hostile Indians of the Upper Mississippi. After the war, Indian relations and the economic and political needs of the white settlers pouring into Missouri absorbed his time and interest.

Following Missouri’s admission to the Union in 1821, Clark (an unsuccessful candidate to be the state’s first governor) was appointed superintendent of Indian affairs at St. Louis and retained responsibility for the tribes of the Missouri and Upper Mississippi. Clark held this office until his death on September 1, 1838. As superintendent of Indian affairs, he played a major role in effecting the removal of Indians living east of the Mississippi and in Missouri to new lands in modern eastern Kansas.

Unlike Lewis, who never married, Clark was an affectionate family man. In 1808, he married Julia Hancock, with whom he had five children. Following Julia’s death, in 1821 he married her cousin Harriet Kennerly Radford, a widow, who bore him two sons. Four of his sons lived to adulthood.

Significance

Lewis and Clark’s fame rests almost entirely on the success of their great expedition, one of the most extensive explorations undertaken in their time. They and their companions were the first American citizens to cross the continent and the first white men to traverse it within the area of the modern United States. During a journey that lasted a little more than twenty-eight months, the expedition traveled more than eight thousand miles. On the entire trip, only one man, Sergeant Charles Floyd, lost his life, and he died from a cause almost certainly unrelated to his exploring activities.

In their contacts with thousands of Indians, Lewis and Clark had only one minor violent encounter, which cost the lives of two Indians. The total expense of the undertaking was a little less than forty thousand dollars. Although Lewis and Clark did not find a commercially feasible route across the continent, as Jefferson hoped they would, they did make a significant contribution to the existing knowledge of the geography of a great part of North America. They also took a historic step toward opening the Trans-Mississippi West to American trade and subsequently to American settlement, thus providing the basis for one of the strongest U.S. claims to the Oregon Country. Their great achievement stimulated the pride of the American people and served to make Americans aware of the vastness of the continent on which they lived.

Although Lewis’s career after the expedition was short and hardly noteworthy, Clark’s was long and eminently successful. In three decades of dealing with the tribes of the Upper Mississippi and the trans-Mississippi West, he carried out the policies of the federal government faithfully and effectively, helping to adjust relations peacefully between the Native Americans and the whites. In doing so, by the standards of his own time, he treated the American Indians fairly and sympathetically and, in return, had their respect and confidence.

Bibliography

Ambrose, Stephen E. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Best-selling account of the expedition by a prominent historian. Ambrose traveled along the expedition’s route to the Pacific and painstakingly re-creates the activities and discoveries of the journey. The book also chronicles Lewis’s tragic life in the years following the expedition.

Cutright, Paul Russell. Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969. This volume contains a wealth of detailed information on the scientific and technical aspects of the expedition, including fauna and flora discovered, topographic features discovered or named, and Native American tribes encountered.

Dillon, Richard. Meriwether Lewis: A Biography. New York: Coward-McCann, 1965. A noteworthy biography of Lewis, this somewhat sentimental and romantic work provides a relatively comprehensive treatment of the subject with emphasis on the expedition.

Jackson, Donald D., ed. Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents: 1783-1854. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962. A comprehensive collection of meticulously edited letters, memoranda, and other documents dealing with all aspects of the expedition, gathered from widely scattered sources.

Jones, Landon Y. William Clark and the Shaping of the West. New York: Hill & Wang, 2004. Focuses on Clark’s private life and public career in the thirty years following his expedition with Lewis. Includes discussions of Clark’s duties in the Kentucky militia, his service as governor of the Missouri Territory, and his role as superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis.

Lewis, Meriwether, and William Clark. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Edited by Bernard De Voto. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953. Based on the eight-volume Thwaites edition of The Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Edited by Rubengold Thwaites. 8 vols. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1904-1905. This single volume provides a good, readable narrative of that great enterprise that retains its flavor.

Ronda, James P. Lewis and Clark Among the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. An important, sophisticated, and engaging ethnohistorical study, this work chronicles the daily contact between the explorers and American Indians and shows that the expedition initiated important economic and diplomatic relations with them.

Slaughter, Thomas P. Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness. New York: Random House, 2003. A revisionist view of the expedition, with Slaughter attempting to correct the myths and legends that he believes have surrounded it.

Steffen, James O. William Clark: Jeffersonian Man on the Frontier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977. Steffen selectively and briefly sketches Clark’s life, making an occasional reference to the intellectual framework that he believes explains it.