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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

Lewis had the frontiersman’s faith in his rifle. As long as a man had his rifle, ammunition, and powder, he would take on anything the wilderness could throw at him.

But as a politician Lincoln knew that more justification was needed, to keep the Federalists from howling at the cost. He came up with a rationale that would appeal to the New England clergy: advertise the thing as a mission to elevate the religious beliefs of the heathen Indians. “If the enterprise appears to be, an attempt to advance them, it will by many people, on that account, be justified, however calamitous the issue.”

Americans only wished to trade with them. Lewis should invite a few chiefs to come to Washington for a visit, and arrange for some Indian children to come to the United States and be “brought up with us, & taught such arts as may be useful to them.”

second officer would be a help in enforcing discipline, and in fighting Indians if it came to that. There was no good reason not to take a second officer, except cost—and since Jefferson had just authorized spending millions of dollars for New Orleans, and he had his whole heart and mind invested in the Lewis expedition, he wasn’t going to let cost be a factor.

On June 19, Lewis had written to William Clark. The letter contained what Donald Jackson described as “one of the most famous invitations to greatness the nation’s archives can provide.”10

Lewis wanted Clark along, even if not as an official member of the party. He closed his letter by saying that, if personal or business or any other affairs prevented Clark from accepting, Lewis hoped that he could “accompany me as a friend part of the way up the Missouri. I should be extremely happy in your company.”

He knew what he was giving up and what the United States was getting—and the benefit to France, beyond the money: “The sale assures forever the power of the United States, and I have given England a rival who, sooner or later, will humble her pride.”

How anxious he was to get going he demonstrated on the morning of August 31. The last nail went into the planking at 7:00 a.m. By 10:00 a.m., Lewis had the boat loaded.

On January 22, Jefferson wrote Lewis to confirm that the transfer had happened in New Orleans on December 20, and to give him instructions on how to deal with the Indians now that the United States was sovereign throughout Louisiana. The instructions came down to: tell them they have a new father.

It was Mandan corn that got the expedition through the winter. Had the Mandans not been there, or had they had no corn to spare, or had they been hostile, the Lewis and Clark Expedition might not have survived its first winter.

“Our vessels consisted of six small canoes, and two large perogues. This little fleet altho’ not quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook, were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs; and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for their safety and preservation. we were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civillized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessells contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves. however, as this the state of mind in which we are, generally gives the colouring to events, when the immagination is suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one. entertaing as I do, the most confident hope of succeading in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten years, I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life.”

The men of the expedition were linked together by uncommon experiences and by the certain knowledge that they were making history, the realization that they were in the middle of what would without question be the most exciting and important time of their lives, and the obvious fact that they were in all this together, that every man—and the Indian woman—was dependent on all the others, and they on him or her. Together, under the leadership of the captains, they had become a family. They could recognize one another at night by a cough, or a gesture; they knew one another’s skills, and weaknesses, and habits, and background: who liked salt, who preferred liver; who shot true, got the cooking fires going quickest; where they came from, what their parents were like, what dreams they had. Lewis would have hated to break them apart. He decided to hold them together. They would triumph, or die, as one.

With Lewis’s last step to the top of the Divide went decades of theory about the nature of the Rocky Mountains, shattered by a single glance from a single man. Equally shattered were Lewis’s hopes for an easy portage to a major branch of the Columbia.

How, then, to cross those mountains? Cameahwait said he had never done it, but there was an old man in his band “who could probably give me some information of the country to the N.W.” He added that “he had understood from the persed nosed Indians who inhabit this river below the rocky mountains that it ran a great way toward the seting sun and finally lost itself in a great lake of water which was illy taisted.” That sentence linked the continent.

Scarcely had they begun the cumbersome process when Sacagawea began to stare at Cameahwait. Suddenly recognizing him as her brother,

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. •

The representatives of the Osage nation arrived on July 11—which chanced to be the day of the Burr-Hamilton duel at Weehawken.

He intended to win their loyalty through a combination of bribes and threats, the traditional American Indian policy.

Join us or get out of the way, the Americans said to the Indians, but in fact the Indians could do neither.

Americans had but one Indian policy—get out of the way or get killed—and it was nonnegotiable.

The Nez Percé had seen the white soldiers hungry and fed them; seen them cold and provided fuel; seen them without horses and put them on mounts; seen them confused and provided good advice; seen them make fools of themselves trying to cross mountains ten feet deep in snow and not snickered; seen them lost and guided them. They had ridden together, eaten together, slept together, played together, and crossed the Lolo Trail together. Although they could communicate only with the sign language, they had an abundance of shared experiences that drew them together. They had managed to cross communication and cultural barriers to become genuine friends.

Lewis’s exploration of the Marias was over. All in all, it had been a big mistake from the start. Many things went wrong, and nothing had been accomplished.

do not beleive that the fellow did it intentionally,” Lewis wrote, but neither did he believe Cruzatte’s denials. He had the bullet in his hand; it was a .54 caliber, from a U.S. Army Model 1803, not a weapon any Indian was likely to have. He conjectured that, after shooting his captain in the ass, Cruzatte decided to deny everything.

However much Jefferson might want to reserve Upper Louisiana for displaced Indians from east of the Mississippi, no power on earth, and certainly no laws written in Washington, could stop the American frontiersmen.

This was dreadful. The American peace policy had failed within days of the departure of Lewis and Clark.

Colter turned back upstream, back to the wilderness, back to the mountains, on his way into the history books as America’s first mountain man and the discoverer of Yellowstone National Park.

Lewis had planned and organized and with Clark’s help carried out a voyage of discovery that had been his dream for what seemed like all of his life. Indeed, it seemed he had been born for it, and had been training himself for it since childhood. His success was due to that training, and to his character, well suited to the challenge.

No commentary is necessary. Much of the evil of slavery is encapsuled in this little story—not least Jefferson’s realism about the effect of slavery on the morals and manners of the slaveholder. York had helped pole Clark’s keelboat, paddled his canoe, hunted for his meat, made his fire, had shown he was prepared to sacrifice his life to save Clark’s, crossed the continent and returned with his childhood companion, only to be beaten because he was insolent and sulky and denied not only his freedom but his wife and, we may suppose, children.

This went far beyond Jefferson’s recommendation that if the Arikaras tried to stop Big White they should be “punished.” It went far beyond burning their property or killing their horses. It called for nothing short of genocide.

“Be assured Sir, that my Country can never make ‘A Burr’ of me—She may reduce me to Poverty; but she can never sever my Attachment from her.”

Lewis uncovered his side and showed them the second wound. He said, “I am no coward; but I am so strong, [it is] so hard to die.” He said he had tried to kill himself to deprive his enemies of the pleasure and honor of doing it.

He begged the servants to take his rifle and blow out his brains, telling them not to be afraid, for he would not hurt them, and they could have all the money in his trunk. Shortly after sunrise, his great heart stopped beating.

Biddle was the perfect choice. He threw himself into the work and did it magnificently. George Shannon helped him, as did Clark, and finally a young man named Paul Allen did some copyediting (for five hundred dollars; Biddle took nothing for himself for more than two years of full-time labor).

And just when Biddle was ready to turn the narrative volume over to the printer, the War of 1812 began. Worse, the firm of C. and A. Conrad collapsed.

For the next ninety years, Biddle’s edition was the only printed account based on the journals. As a result, Lewis and Clark got no credit for most of their discoveries.

Plants, rivers, animals, birds that they had described and named were newly discovered by naturalists, and the names that these men gave them were the ones that stuck.

In 1904, on the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the expedition, Reuben Gold Thwaites of the Wisconsin State Historical Society published (Dodd, Meade) the complete journals, in eight volumes, including never-before-seen journals from two of the enlisted men. His editorial work was outstanding. Often reprinted, “Thwaites,” as the work is known among Lewis and Clark fans, is an American classic.

He was a good man in a crisis. If I was ever in a desperate situation—caught in a grass fire on the prairie, or sinking in a small boat in a big ocean, or the like—then I would want Meriwether Lewis for my leader.

But he was a great company commander, the greatest of all American explorers, and in the top rank of world explorers.

“Of courage undaunted, possessing a firmness & perseverance of purpose which nothing but impossibilities could divert from it’s direction, careful as a father of those committed to his charge, yet steady in the maintenance of order & discipline, intimate with the Indian character, customs & principles, habituated to the hunting life, guarded by exact observation of the vegetables & animals of his own country, against losing time in the description of objects already possessed, honest, disinterested, liberal, of sound understanding and a fidelity to truth so scrupulous that whatever he should report would be as certain as if seen by ourselves, with all these qualifications as if selected and implanted by nature in one body, for this express purpose, I could have no hesitation in confiding the enterprize to him.”