Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West

by Stephen E. Ambrose

Bring along a copy of the Journals of Lewis and Clark. Either the Biddle edition, or the Moulton edition, or De Voto’s one-volume abridgment, or any of the other abridgments. And at your campfire, whether on the Missouri River in Missouri or Kansas or Nebraska or Iowa or the Dakotas or Montana, or on Lemhi Pass, or in the Bitterroot Mountains in Idaho, or on the Columbia River in Washington and Oregon, read aloud from the journals.

A Virginia gentleman was expected to be hospitable and generous, courteous in his relations with his peers, chivalrous toward women, and kind to his inferiors. There was a high standard of politeness; Jefferson once remarked that politeness was artificial good humor, a valuable preservative of peace and tranquillity.

Tobacco wore out land so fast there could never be enough, but tobacco never brought in enough money to allow planters to get ahead. Their speculation in land was done on credit and promises and warrants, not cash, so they were always land-rich and cash-poor. Small wonder Jefferson was obsessed with securing an empire for the United States.

This was the other side of the coin of one of the proudest boasts of the Virginia gentry. They claimed that they knew how to lead, that command came naturally to them. Edmund Burke spoke to this point. Although he disapproved of slavery, he observed that slaveowners were among the foremost in asserting the rights of man precisely because they were slaveowners. “Where there is a vast multitude of slaves as in Virginia,” he observed, “those who are free, are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. . . . To the masters of slaves, the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortified it, and renders it invincible.”15 Thus the sting in Dr. Samuel Johnson’s embarrassing question: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”16

There was a certain irony in the Whiskey Rebellion. Washington, Hamilton, and the other heroes of the American Revolution who were determined to put down this rebellion were espousing a policy that they had once risked their lives to oppose—taxation without representation. For there was no question about the truth of the complaints from the frontier, that this excise tax on whiskey was specific to the westerners and that they were not properly represented in the general government that imposed the tax.

So the partnership of Lewis and Clark, destined to become the most famous in American history, began because General Wayne preferred to have his officers fight out their differences in a duel rather than in a court-martial and therefore found for the man who had issued the challenge rather than the one who had followed the law and brought charges.

Two-thirds of the people lived within fifty miles of tidewater. Only four roads crossed the Appalachian Mountains, one from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, another from the Potomac to the Monongahela River, a third through Virginia southwestward to Knoxville, Tennessee, and the fourth through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.

it seemed unlikely that one nation could govern an entire continent. The distances were just too great. A critical fact in the world of 1801 was that nothing moved faster than the speed of a horse. No human being, no manufactured item, no bushel of wheat, no side of beef (or any beef on the hoof, for that matter), no letter, no information, no idea, order, or instruction of any kind moved faster. Nothing ever had moved any faster, and, as far as Jefferson’s contemporaries were able to tell, nothing ever would.I

Since the birth of civilization, there had been almost no changes in commerce or transportation. Americans lived in a free and democratic society, the first in the world since ancient Greece, a society that read Shakespeare and had produced George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but a society whose technology was barely advanced over that of the Greeks. The Americans of 1801 had more gadgets, better weapons, a superior knowledge of geography, and other advantages over the ancients, but they could not move goods or themselves or information by land or water any faster than had the Greeks and Romans.

But only sixty years later, when Abraham Lincoln took the Oath of Office as the sixteenth president of the United States, Americans could move bulky items in great quantity farther in an hour than Americans of 1801 could do in a day, whether by land (twenty-five miles per hour on railroads) or water (ten miles an hour upstream on a steamboat). This great leap forward in transportation—a factor of twenty or more—in so short a space of time must be reckoned as the greatest and most unexpected revolution of all—except for another technological revolution, the transmitting of information. In Jefferson’s day, it took six weeks to move information from the Mississippi River to Washington, D.C. In Lincoln’s, information moved over the same route by telegraph all but instantaneously. Time and distance, mountains and rivers meant something entirely different to Thomas Jefferson from what they meant to Abraham Lincoln.

Jefferson’s attitude toward Indians was the exact opposite of his attitude toward Negroes. He thought of Indians as noble savages who could be civilized and brought into the body politic as full citizens. In 1785, he wrote, “I believe the Indian then to be in body and mind equal to the whiteman.” He thought the only difference between Indians and white men was religion and the savage behavior of the Indians, which was caused by the environment in which the Indian lived. Never did he say that the perceived shortcomings of the Negro—such as laziness or thievery—were caused by their condition as slaves. Keenly interested in Indian ethnology, an avid collector of Indian vocabularies, he had not the slightest interest in African ethnology or African vocabularies.10 When Jefferson or young Virginians like Lewis and Clark looked at an Indian, they saw a noble savage ready to be transformed into a civilized citizen. When they looked at a Negro, they saw something less than a human, something more than an animal. Never in their lives did they imagine the possibility of a black man’s becoming a full citizen. William Clark tried to adopt a part-Indian boy as his own son. He would not have dreamed of adopting a black boy as his own son.

But it was not just the largeness of his mind that made Jefferson an imperialist. One of his basic motives was land hunger. Jefferson and his fellow Virginia planters made their living through tobacco and slavery, and tobacco and slavery demanded the unending acquisition of new land.

The Spanish might have title to Louisiana, the French might have interests in Louisiana, the British might have designs on Louisiana; the Spanish and French and Russians and British might be contemplating exercising vague titles to or otherwise meddling in Oregon; but in Jefferson’s mind it would all be part of the United States, in due course.

A distinct difference is evident between Lewis’s writing before 1800 and after 1802. His sense of pace, his timing, his word choice, his rhythm, his similes and analogies all improved. He sharpened his descriptive powers. He learned how to catch a reader up in his own response to events and places, to express his emotions naturally and effectively. Though his sentences remained convoluted and cried out for punctuation, he managed to carry them off by retaining a flow of narrative interspersed with personal observations and reactions, all held together by using the right phrase at the precise moment in an arrangement of words that stands the ultimate test of being read aloud and making perfect sense while catching the sights and sounds and drama and emotion of the moment in a way that can be compared to the stream of consciousness of James Joyce or William Faulkner, or the run-on style of Gertrude Stein—only better, because he was not making anything up, but describing what he saw, heard, said, and did. Lewis was able, through his writing, to take us, two centuries later, to the unexplored Missouri River, Rocky Mountain, and Oregon wilderness country of 1804–6, to meet Indian tribes untouched by European influence, to paint their portraits in words that capture the economic, political, and social conditions of their lives, along with their vibrancy, savagery, beliefs, habits, manners, and customs in a way never since surpassed and seldom matched. The journals he wrote are a...

Later, Jefferson explained why he chose Lewis rather than a qualified scientist: “It was impossible to find a character who to a compleat science in botany, natural history, mineralogy & astronomy, joined the firmness of constitution & character, prudence, habits adapted to the woods, & a familiarity with the Indian manners & character, requisite for this undertaking. All the latter qualifications Capt. Lewis has.”15

It was a favorite saying of one of President Jefferson’s twentieth-century successors, Dwight Eisenhower, that in war, before the battle is joined, plans are everything, but once the shooting begins, plans are worthless. The same aphorism can be said about exploration. In battle, what cannot be predicted is the enemy’s reaction; in exploration, what cannot be predicted is what is around the next bend in the river or on the other side of the hill. The planning process, therefore, is as much guesswork as it is intelligent forecasting of the physical needs of the expedition. It tends to be frustrating, because the planner carries with him a nagging sense that he is making some simple mistakes that could be easily corrected in the planning stage, but may cause a dead loss when the mistake is discovered midway through the voyage.

In the end, Lewis spent $289.50 on 193 pounds of portable soup, by far the highest sum for any area of provisions. He spent as much for dried soup as he had originally estimated for his instruments, arms, and ammunition.10

“What Affinity between their religious Ceremonies & those of the Jews?” (Here Rush was looking for the fabled Lost Tribe of Israel.)

The journals are one of America’s literary treasures. Throughout, they tell their story in fascinating detail. They have a driving narrative that is compelling, yet they pause for little asides and anecdotes that make them a delight to read. Their images are so sharp they all but force the reader to put down the book, close the eyes, and see what the captains saw, hear what they heard. The journals never flash back or forward. From start to finish, they stick to the present. The more closely they are read, the greater the reward. Theodore Roosevelt, no stranger to adventure, said this about the journals: “Few explorers who saw and did so much that was absolutely new have written of their deeds with such quiet absence of boastfulness, and have drawn their descriptions with such complete freedom from exaggeration.”3

It was Jefferson’s notion that the land west of the Mississippi could be turned into a vast Indian reservation, where the Indians could learn to farm and become good citizens. That way there could be an orderly progression of the frontier, across Ohio and Indiana and on to Illinois, and a frontier free from Indian troubles, since all the Indians would be removed to the far shore. This absurd notion showed how little Jefferson knew about Americans living west of the Appalachians. With the Purchase, or even without the Purchase, there was no force on earth that could stop the flow of American pioneers westward. Good, cheap land was a magnet that reached all the way back to Europe. The pioneers were the cutting edge of an irresistible force. Rough and wild though they were, they were the advance agents of millions of Europeans, mostly peasants or younger sons of small farmers, who constituted the greatest mass migration in history.

Two years of study under Thomas Jefferson, followed by his crash course in Philadelphia, had made Lewis into exactly what Jefferson had hoped for in an explorer—a botanist with a good sense of what was known and what was unknown, a working vocabulary for description of flora and fauna, a mapmaker who could use celestial instruments properly, a scientist with keen powers of observation, all combined in a woodsman and an officer who could lead a party to the Pacific.

The animal was a coyote. Lewis and Clark were the first Americans to see one. The captains set a precedent; millions of Americans who came after have also failed in their attempt to kill the coyote.

Jefferson and Lewis had talked at length about these tribes, on the basis of near-complete ignorance. They speculated that the lost tribe of Israel could be out there on the Plains, but it was more likely, in their minds, that the Mandans were a wandering tribe of Welshmen.2 Because they subscribed to such odd ideas, Jefferson’s instructions to Lewis on how to deal with the tribes were, in most particulars, hopelessly naive and impossible to carry out.

the quality of what Lewis wrote that September. He walks you through his day and lets you see through his eyes; what he saw no American had ever seen before and only a few would see in the future. •

The soldiers, meanwhile, enjoyed the favors of the Arikara women, often encouraged to do so by the husbands, who believed that they would catch some of the power of the white men from such intercourse, transmitted to them through their wives. One warrior invited York to his lodge, offered him his wife, and guarded the entrance during the act. York was said to be “the big Medison.” Whether the Indians got white or black power from the intercourse cannot be said, but what they had gotten for sure from their hospitality to previous white traders was venereal disease, which was rampant in the villages and passed on to the men of the expedition.

The captains eagerly accepted Charbonneau’s offer to sign on as interpreter, not so much for his own sake as because his wives could speak the language of a mountain tribe. The wives could talk to Charbonneau in Hidatsa; he could then talk in French to Drouillard, who could pass it on to the captains in English. From their difficulties with the Sioux, the captains knew how hard it was to communicate with the Indians without a translator. So on the spot they signed up Charbonneau and one of his wives “to go on with us.” He chose Sacagawea, who was about fifteen years old and six months pregnant. MacKenzie got to know Charbonneau and was not much impressed. He noted that translation was more an art form than scientific at Fort Mandan. “Sacagawea spoke a little Hidatsa,” he wrote, “in which she had to converse with her husband, who was a Canadian and did not understand English. A mulatto [Jessaume], who spoke bad French and worse English, served as interpreter to the Captains, so that a single word to be understood by the party required to pass from the natives to the woman, from the woman to the husband, from the husband to the mulatto, from the mulatto to the captains.” That might not have been so bad, except that Charbonneau and Jessaume argued about the meaning of every French word they used.11

IV. Gary Moulton points out (vol. 3, p. 201, n. 5) that the presence of unusually light-complexioned and fair-haired persons among the Mandans led to speculations about their being the fabled Welsh Indians, or somehow otherwise of European origin. There was nothing to the story.

That evening, Lewis wrote in his journal, “This man possesses more integrety, firmness, inteligence and perspicuety of mind than any indian I have met with in this quarter, and I think with a little management he may be made a usefull agent in furthering the views of our government.” A remarkable sentence. In the first half, Lewis obviously was speaking from the heart. Clearly he enjoyed being with and greatly respected Black Cat. Yet, in the second half of the sentence, he blandly discusses his plans to manage and manipulate his friend for the benefit of the United States. A further problem is this: what were the views of the Americans? On the one hand, peace. Lewis and Clark always preached peace to the Indians, giving them what the Americans thought of as overwhelmingly powerful reasons to avoid war. On the other hand, the Americans were arms merchants. As James Ronda puts it, “Typical of this dilemma was the request from a war chief who came to purchase an axe and obtain permission to attack Sioux and Arikara warriors. For the proper price in corn the axe was handed over but the request to use it was denied.” The Hidatsa chief must have wondered what sort of man would sell arms to a warrior and then tell him not to engage the enemy.10

As for the White Cliffs themselves, Lewis’s description is one of the classics of American travel literature: “The hills and river Clifts which we passed today exhibit a most romantic appearance,” he began. They were two to three hundred feet high, nearly perpendicular, shining pure white in the sun. “The water in the course of time in decending from those hills . . . has trickled down the soft sand clifts and woarn it into a thousand grotesque figures, which with the help of a little immagination and an oblique view . . . are made to represent eligant ranges of lofty freestone buildings . . . statuary . . . long galleries . . . the remains or ruins of eligant buildings . . . some collumns standing . . . others lying prostrate an broken . . . nitches and alcoves of various forms and sizes. . . . as we passed on it seemed as if those seens of visionary inchantment would never had and end . . . vast ranges of walls of tolerable workmanship, so perfect indeed that I should have thought that nature had attempted herre to rival the human art of masonry had I not recollected that she had first began her work.”IV

IV. It is today as Lewis saw it. The White Cliffs can be seen only from small boat or canoe. Put in at Fort Benton and take out three or four days later at Judith Landing. Missouri River Outfitters at Fort Benton, Montana, rents canoes or provides a guided tour by pontoon boat. Of all the historic and/or scenic sights we have visited in the world, this is number one. We have made the trip ten times.

he wasn’t looking for gold. His lack of interest in it was one of the things that distinguished his exploration from that of his Spanish predecessors (another was his lack of interest in converting Indians to Christianity).

The only Shoshone words Clark knew he had been taught by Sacagawea. He had asked her what was her people’s word for “white man.” “Tab-ba-bone,” she replied. Actually, the Shoshones had no word for “white man,” never having seen one. Scholars have guessed that tab-ba-bone might have meant “stranger,” or “enemy.”3

From the cliff Lewis stood on, the view today is still spectacular. There are modern intrusions—Interstate Highway 90, Montana Highway 287, and a few secondary roads run through it, and the little town of Three Forks is a few miles away—but the overall scene is as it was. There is a tremendous bowl, containing the linked valleys of the two rivers coming out of today’s Yellowstone Park to the south and east, and the valley of the river to the southwest, coming down from the Madisons. The rivers are crowded with fish and waterfowl; the banks are crowded with deer. The mountains surround the bowl in a nearly complete circle of up to a hundred miles in diameter and are just as Lewis saw them, lofty and snow-covered.

“I cannot discover that she shews any immotion of sorrow in recollecting this event,” Lewis concluded his journal entry relating Sacagawea’s story, “or of joy in being again restored to her native country; if she has enough to eat and a few trinkets to wear I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere.” One wonders if Lewis was comparing Sacagawea with the young black female slaves he had known, or with white women of his own class. One wonders too how the man who could be so observant about so many things, including the feelings and point of view of his men, could be so unobservant about Sacagawea’s situation. A slave, one of only two in the party, she was also the only Indian, the only mother, the only woman, the only teen-aged person. Small wonder she kept such a tight grip on her emotions.

Only a tiny number of people have ever had the experience of not knowing what they would see when they got to the top of the mountain or turned into the river or sailed around the tip of a continent. Lewis expected that, when he got up the mountain to the Divide, he would see something resembling the country he was traveling through—long, sweeping valleys dropping down to the broader valley of the Jefferson—only in this case the stream would be running to the south branch of the Columbia. Whatever he saw, he was either going to find horses on this trip, and get over the mountains and onto the Columbia, or die in the attempt.

“The man considers himself degraded if he is compelled to walk any distance,” Lewis noted. He did not add that in this they were very like Virginia gentlemen. The literal translation of Cameahwait, as best Lewis could make it out, was “One Who Never Walks.”

As he habitually did with previously unknown Indians, Lewis made a vocabulary of the Salish language, taking special care in this instance because the Indians’ throaty, guttural speech led him to conjecture that they were descendants of Prince Madoc and the Welsh Indians. Like many others, Jefferson believed that this persistent myth might well be true, and had instructed Lewis to look for the tribe.

James Ronda points out that one reason for the overwhelmingly negative view the captains and their men had of the Indians near the mouth of the river was that the natives were “accustomed to hard bargaining with whites in the sea otter trade,” and therefore “expected to drive equally hard bargains with the hungry explorers.” Clark’s journal is full of complaints about the inflated prices charged for roots and fish.3

One longs for Lewis’s emotional reaction to the triumph of crossing the continent. He had been at it for two and a half years, ever since he left Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1803. One supposes that he shared that “Great Joy in camp” that Clark wrote of, but he never expressed it himself. He had not written in his journal since meeting the Nez Percé in September, and with minor exceptions would not again until the New Year. For the biographer, Lewis’s silence is a frustrating and tantalizing mystery. It was not that he didn’t have time, or example—every day he saw Clark writing in his journal. Yet he did not lift his quill. Except for his severe illness when he first met the Nez Percé, Lewis had been active, coping successfully with the various challenges the party had to face. There is no hint in Clark’s journal, or in the journals of the enlisted men, that he was depressed, downcast, muttering to himself, or otherwise showing symptoms of the melancholia Jefferson had observed in Lewis’s father and in Lewis when they lived together in the President’s House. He was in a world filled with people, bays, weather, flora and fauna all new to him, a situation that usually sent his quill flying over the pages, but he did not write. Was he depressed? Not so depressed as to neglect his duties, but enough to keep him from taking quill in hand to set down the day’s events? If so, what caused the depression? With manic-depressives, there is no agreement as to the cause of the di...

My guess is that he was a manic-depressive. The disorder ran in his family. If this is true, then it was his special triumph that he seldom let his emotional state take over, and then only momentarily. Whether he was high or low, his emotional state played no role in daily decision-making for two and a half years.

It is through Lewis’s eyes and words that we see the White Cliffs, the Great Falls before the dams, the Gates of the Mountains, Three Forks, the Shoshones. Wonderful portraits, all. Vivid. Immediate. Detailed. They set the standard. But we don’t have his description of what he saw and how he felt in this moment of triumph. •

The choices were to stay, to proceed to the falls, or to cross to and examine the other side before deciding. Naturally, the third alternative won, overwhelmingly—only Private John Shields voted against it. If the sites on the south side were unsatisfactory, about half the voters wanted to go up to the falls, half to stay at the mouth. York’s vote was counted and recorded. Using Sacagawea’s nickname, Clark noted, “Janey in favour of a place where there is plenty of Potas.”V This was the first vote ever held in the Pacific Northwest. It was the first time in American history that a black slave had voted, the first time a woman had voted.

No sailing vessel could possibly come to the Pacific Northwest from London or Boston in one year, which led Lewis to speculate that there had to be a trading post down the coast to the southwest, or perhaps on some island in the Pacific. He was wrong about the trading post, right about the island. Although he never knew of its existence, the trading base was Hawaii.

Lewis called them savages, even though they never threatened—much less committed—acts of violence, however great their numerical advantage. Their physical appearance disgusted him. He condemned their petty thievery and sexual morals, and their sharp trading practices. Except for their skill as canoe-builders, hatmakers, and woodworkers, he found nothing to admire in his winter neighbors. And yet the Clatsops and Chinooks, without rifles, managed to live much better than the Americans on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. They had mastered the environment far better than the men of the expedition managed to do. The resources they drew on were renewable, whereas the Americans had shot out all the elk in the vicinity in just three months. With the coming of spring, the Corps of Discovery had no choice but to move on. The natives stayed, living prosperous lives on the riches of the Pacific Northwest, until the white man’s diseases got them.

Jefferson didn’t mind the expense of courting the Indians. As he later explained to Congress, good relations with the tribes on the Missouri were “indispensable to the policy of governing those Indians by commerce rather than by arms,” and the cost of the former was much less than the cost of the latter.13

The frontier would move forward at a regular pace, but only after the Indians had been civilized or removed. Pioneers would have to purchase regular deeds and titles to the land they farmed, rather than just squatting on it. Frontier clashes between red and white men would be reduced if not eliminated. There would be law and order, bureaucratic regularity, taxes collected, and a reduced need for the U.S. Army. But it was all a pipe dream. As well try to stop an avalanche as to stop the moving frontier. American immigrants and emigrants wanted their share of land—free land—a farm in the family—the dream of European peasants for hundreds of years—the New World’s great gift to the old. Moving west with the tide were the hucksters, the lawyers, merchants, and other men on the make looking for the main chance, men who could manufacture a land warrant in the wink of an eye. This had been the experience in Virginia, and it was currently being acted out in Indiana Territory. And within a year of the day Lewis and Clark set out up the Missouri River on their expedition, it was taking place in Upper Louisiana.

Jefferson was as responsible for this mad rush west as any man. He had purchased Louisiana. He had sent out his “beloved man” Lewis to explore and publicize it. He had printed and widely distributed the captains’ glowing descriptions of the land along the lower Missouri. He was thus encouraging what he said he wanted to restrain. Hypocrisy ran through his Indian policy, as it did through the policies of his predecessors and successors. Join us or get out of the way, the Americans said to the Indians, but in fact the Indians could do neither. By pushing them ever west, the Americans made it impossible for the Indians to become civilized as they meant the term, and it turned out there was almost no place where the Indians would be out of the way of the onrushing pioneers. Jefferson said he believed the Indian was almost as capable as the European, and although not ready for assimilation soon would be (in contrast, blacks would never be ready). In this he differed from other presidents, yet only in theory, not in action. In fact, he stole all the land he could from Indians east of the Mississippi while preparing those west of the river for the same fate, after the beaver were trapped out. How could the greatest champion of human rights in American history do such a thing? Jefferson (and his contemporaries) would not have regarded the question as valid. In their view, Indian ideas about land ownership were a lot of foolishness. As one historian observed, “A band of Sauks, say,...

Jefferson had charged him with numerous nonmilitary goals. He had carried them out faithfully. He was certain he had accomplished the number-one objective of the expedition, to find the most direct and convenient route across the continent. He had brought back a treasure of scientific information. His discoveries in the fields of zoology, botany, ethnology, and geography were beyond any value.III He introduced new approaches to exploration and established a model for future expeditions by systematically recording abundant data on what he had seen, from weather to rocks to people. On the more personal side, he had seen wonderful things. He had traveled through a hunter’s paradise beyond anything any American had ever before known. He had crossed mountains that were greater than had ever before been seen by any American, save the handful who had visited the Alps. He had seen falls and cataracts and raging rivers, thunderstorms all but beyond belief, trees of a size never before conceived of, Indian tribes uncorrupted by contact with white men, canyons and cliffs and other scenes of visionary enchantment. A brave new world. And he had been first. Everyone who has ever paddled a canoe on the Missouri, or the Columbia, does so in the wake of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Everyone who crosses the Lolo Trail walks in their footsteps. Furthermore, the journals of Lewis and Clark provided the introduction to and serve as the model for all subsequent writing on the American West.

Ridiculing the expedition became a tradition with the Federalists and their progeny. Nine decades later, Adams’s grandson Henry Adams wrote a classic history of the Jefferson administration in which he scarcely found room for the expedition. He characterized it as “creditable to American energy and enterprise,” but dismissed it as adding “little to the stock of science or wealth. . . . The crossing of the continent was a great feat, but was nothing more.” The real news from the period 1804–6, Adams wrote, wasn’t Lewis struggling against the current but Robert Fulton beginning to construct the hull of his new steamboat.III, 5 East versus West, technology versus human endeavor, partisanship versus patriotism. These are permanent themes in American politics. Lewis had been private secretary to the president, a Washington insider. He should have protected Jefferson, and his expedition, by providing information that could build anticipation and justify the costs.

Arlen Large has captured the essence of oral reporting and its influence: “This kind of unrecorded talk—campfire bull sessions, barroom yarns, refined after dinner conversation over cognac and cigars . . . sparked the initial exploitation of the expedition’s findings. The first follow-up wave of fur-business exploration that spread across the west was due more to post-expedition gossip and gab than any written documents.”12