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

by Stephen E. Ambrose

Jefferson also applied the principles of the Northwest Ordinance to the Louisiana Purchase territories—and later, by extension, to the Northwest Empire. Thus Jefferson, more than any other man, created an empire of liberty that stretched from sea to shining sea. The next-best thing Jefferson did as president was to organize, set the objectives, and write the orders for an exploring expedition across the country. He then picked Meriwether Lewis to command it, and, at Lewis’s insistence, William Clark became co-commander.

the British government, in the Quebec Act of 1774, moved to stem the flow of Virginians across the mountains, by extending the boundary of Canada south to the Ohio River. This cut off Virginia’s western claims, threatened to spoil the hopes and schemes of innumerable land speculators, including George Washington, and established a highly centralized crown-controlled government with special privileges for the Catholic Church, provoking fear that French Canadians, rather than Protestant Virginians, would rule in the Ohio Valley. This was one of the so-called Intolerable Acts that spurred the revolution.

Meriwether Lewis scarcely knew his father, for Lieutenant Lewis was away making war for most of the first five years of his son’s life.

People in the late eighteenth century were helpless in matters of health. They lived in constant dread of sudden death from disease, plague, epidemic, pneumonia, or accident. Their letters always begin and usually end with assurances of the good health of the letter writer and a query about the health of the recipient.

Known far and wide for her medicinal remedies, she grew a special crop of herbs which she dispensed to her children, her slaves, and her neighbors. She also knew the medicinal properties of wild plants. She took care to teach her son all that she had learned about herbal remedies.

As a child, Meriwether absorbed a strong anti-British sentiment. This came naturally to any son of a patriot growing up during the war; it was reinforced by seeing a British raiding party led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton sweep through Albemarle in 1781. Jefferson recorded: “He destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco, he burned all my barns containing the same articles of last year, having first taken what he wanted; he used, as was to be expected, all my stocks of cattle, sheep and hogs for the sustenance of his army, and carried off all the horses capable of service; of those too young for service he cut the throats, and he burned all the fences on the plantation, so as to leave it an absolute waste. He carried off also about 30 slaves.”

At age eighteen, he was the head of a small community of about two dozen slaves and nearly two thousand acres of land. His lessons from now on would be in management, in soils, crops, distillery, carpentry, blacksmithing, shoemaking, weaving, coopering, timbering, in killing, dressing, and skinning cattle and sheep, preserving vegetables and meats, repairing plows, harrows, saws, and rifles, caring for horses and dogs, treating the sick, and the myriad of other tasks that went into running a plantation.

At eighteen years, he was on his own. He had traveled extensively across the southern part of the United States. He had shown himself to be a self-reliant, self-contained, self-confident teen-ager, and was a young man who took great pride in his “persevereance and steadiness of purpose,” as Peachy Gilmer had put it. His health was excellent, his physical powers were outstanding, he was sensitive and caring about his mother and his family.

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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.

German immigrants, farming in the Shenandoah Valley, had a much different relationship with the land from that of the planters of English stock. The Germans had not received huge grants of land from the English king or the royal governor; they had bought their land, in relatively small holdings. Coming from a country with a tradition of keeping the farm in the same family for generations, even centuries, they were in it for the long haul, not for quick profit. They cleared their fields of all trees and stumps, plowed deep to arrest erosion, housed their cattle in great barns, used manure as fertilizer, and practiced a precise scheme of crop rotation. They worked with their own hands, and their help came from their sons and relatives. No overseer, indentured servant, or slave—men with little interest in the precious undertaking of making a family farm—was allowed near their fields.

No man did more for human liberty than Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and of Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom, among other gifts to mankind. Few men profited more from human slavery than Jefferson.

General Wayne transfered the twenty-one-year-old Lewis to the Chosen Rifle Company of elite riflemen-sharpshooters. The captain of that company had Albemarle ties—his family came from Charlottesville, although he had been born in Caroline County, Virginia, four years earlier than Lewis. His name was William Clark.

So intense was the partisanship of the day, so much did the Federalists hate and fear Jefferson, that they were ready to turn the country over to Aaron Burr. Had they succeeded and made Burr the president, there would almost certainly be no republic today. Fortunately for all, Hamilton was smart enough and honest enough to realize that Jefferson was the lesser evil. He used his influence to break the deadlock. On the thirty-sixth ballot, February 17, 1801, Jefferson was chosen president and Burr was elected vice-president. It was an age marked by a certain extravagance of language. What the alarmists among the Federalists feared, they said, was “the general ascendancy of the worthless, the dishonest, the rapacious, the vile, the merciless and the ungodly.”29 Such sentiments emboldened Adams to radical measures. On March 3, hours before Jefferon’s inaugural, Adams made his famous “midnight appointments,” stuffing the federal courts with Federalist judges. Not so well known but equally outrageous—at least to the Republicans—was his commissioning of eighty-seven men to fill vacancies in the six regiments of the permanent military establishment. Virtually all were Federalists, thus guaranteeing that the army—like the courts—would remain predominantly Federalist for years to come.

Louisiana in 1801—that part of North America lying between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains—was up for grabs. The contestants were the British coming out of Canada, the Spanish coming up from Texas and California, the French coming up the Mississippi-Missouri from New Orleans, the Russians coming down from the northwest, and the Americans coming from the east. And, of course, there were already inhabitants who possessed the land and were determined to hold on to it.

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.”

In an age of imperialism, he was the greatest empire builder of all. His mind encompassed the continent. From the beginning of the revolution, he thought of the United States as a nation stretching from sea to sea. More than any other man, he made that happen.

He rejected the thought of North America’s being divided up into nation-states on the European model. He wanted the principles of the American Revolution spread over the continent, shared equally by all. He was one of the principal authors of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, as revolutionary a document as his Declaration of Independence. The Ordinance provided for the admission into the Union of from three to five states from the territory east of the Mississippi and north of the Ohio, when the territories had a large enough population. These states would be fully equal to the original thirteen. Thanks to Thomas Jefferson, the United States would be an empire without colonies, an empire of equals. The Ordinance helped bind the trans-Appalachian region to the United States; what mountains and rivers threatened to drive asunder, Jefferson helped to overcome through a political act.

Jefferson ran the place with only eleven servants, brought up from Monticello. There were no more powdered wigs, much less ceremony. Washington and Adams, according to Republican critics, had kept up almost a royal court. Jefferson substituted Republican simplicity—to a point. He had a French chef, and French wines he personally selected. His salary was $25,000 per year—a princely sum, but the expenses were also great. In 1801 Jefferson spent $6,500 for provisions and groceries, $2,700 for servants (some of whom were liveried), $500 for Lewis’s salary, $3,000 for wine. And it turned out he had to buy his own horses; Congress, thinking it an outrage that the government should pay for the president’s horses, ordered that the ones Adams had turned over to Jefferson be sold. Adams was so mortified over this action that he left town before the inauguration.

In the spring of 1801, however, Jefferson learned of the secret treaties between France (read Napoleon) and Spain (read Napoleon’s brother) that had transferred Louisiana from Spain back to France. It was called a retrocession. Jefferson was greatly alarmed. As he put it in one of his more famous passages, “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market.”

He let the French know of his resolve. He suggested that Napoleon cede Louisiana to the United States, to eliminate the possibility of war between the former allies, a war which Jefferson warned would “annihilate France on the ocean.” And he flatly declared that his government would consider any attempt to land French troops in Louisiana a cause for war.10 That was the kind of blunt talk Americans liked to have their president use when it came to America’s national interests in a clash with any foreign nation. Also persuasive was that it was based on facts.

Sometime late that summer or in the fall of 1802—it is impossible to tell even what week, much less the moment—President Jefferson informed Captain Lewis that he would command an expedition to the Pacific. Or Captain Lewis talked President Jefferson into giving him the command. We don’t know when or how Jefferson made his decision that there would be an American answer to Mackenzie and that Lewis would lead it. Evidently he consulted no one, asked no one for advice, entertained no nominees or volunteers, other than Lewis. This was the most important and the most coveted command in the history of exploration of North America. Jefferson was confident that he had the right man under his roof. 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.”

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.

Taken all together, the instructions represented a culmination and a triumph of the American Enlightenment. The expedition authorized by the popularly elected Congress would combine scientific, commercial, and agricultural concerns with geographical discovery and nation-building. All the pillars of Enlightenment thought, summed up with the phrase “useful knowledge,” were gathering in the instructions.

until May 7 was he ready to go to Philadelphia. The ride from Lancaster to Philadelphia took him over the most modern highway in America, completed in 1795, made of broken-stone, the country’s first gravel road. Stage wagons were able to average five to seven miles per hour on it.12 Going that fast in a stage was a new experience for Lewis.

Then he set off for Washington. Probably foremost in Lewis’s mind was the size of the party, along with an inevitable need for a second officer. None had been mentioned, but Lewis wanted one. If Jefferson approved, Lewis had a candidate in mind, as well as a highly unusual command arrangement. The president and the captain also needed to go over the final instructions in detail. Jefferson needed to bring Lewis up-to-date on the status of the proposed purchase of New Orleans. The two men had a lot to talk about before Lewis headed west.

July 4, 1803, the nation’s twenty-seventh birthday, was a great day for Meriwether Lewis. He completed his preparations and was ready to depart in the morning. He got his letter of credit in its final form from President Jefferson. And the National Intelligencer of Washington reported in that day’s issue that Napoleon had sold Louisiana to the United States. It was stunning news of the most fundamental importance. Henry Adams put it best: “The annexation of Louisiana was an event so portentous as to defy measurement; it gave a new face to politics, and ranked in historical importance next to the Declaration of Independence and the adoption of the Constitution—events of which it was the logical outcome; but as a matter of diplomacy it was unparallelled, because it cost almost nothing.”16

Napoleon was delighted, and rightly so. He had title to Louisiana, but no power to enforce it. The Americans were sure to overrun it long before he could get an army there—if he ever could. “Sixty million francs for an occupation that will not perhaps last a day!” he exulted. 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.”

One immediate effect of the Purchase was to change Lewis’s relationship with the Indian tribes he would encounter east of the Divide. The Indians were now on American territory. Lewis would be responsible for informing them that their Great Father was Jefferson rather than the Spanish and French rulers.

Jefferson wanted land. He wanted empire. He reached out to seize what he wanted, first of all by continually expanding the boundaries of Louisiana. Diplomatic historian Thomas Maitland Marshall describes it well: “Starting with the idea that the purchase was confined to the western waters of the Mississippi Valley, Jefferson’s conception had gradually expanded until [by 1808] it included West Florida, Texas, and the Oregon Country, a view which was to be the basis of a large part of American diplomacy for nearly half a century.”22

The boat could be propelled by four methods: rowing, sailing, pushing, and pulling. In pushing, the crew set long poles in the river bottom and pushed on them as they walked front to rear on the boat. Men or horses or ox used ropes for pulling, sometimes from the water, sometimes from the shore.

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.

If the captains wanted the Otos at peace, Big Horse pointed out, he could arrange it as long as he had something to give to his young men at home. Whiskey would be the most effective peacemaker.

Sergeant Floyd was the first U.S. soldier to die west of the Mississippi. The expedition carried his body to a high round hill overlooking an unnamed river. The captains had him buried with all the honors of war and fixed a red-cedar post over the grave with his name and title and the date. Captain Lewis read the funeral service over him. Clark provided a fitting epitaph in his journal: “This Man at all times gave us proofs of his firmness and Deturmined resolution to doe Service to his Countrey and honor to himself.” The captains concluded the proceedings by naming the river Floyds River and the bluff Sergeant Floyds Bluff.

Lewis recognized that patience was not just a virtue in dealing with Indians, it was a necessity, and handed out medals to five chiefs. He pronounced a chief named Weuche the first chief—by what authority, on what basis, cannot be said—and gave him a red-laced military coat, a military cocked hat, and an American flag. Lewis did all this with the utmost seriousness. It never occurred to him that his actions might be characterized as patronizing, dictatorial, ridiculous, and highly dangerous. From what he knew from old Dorion, these Yanktons were peaceable, at least compared with their neighbors and relatives, the Teton Sioux, farther upriver. But his idea of how to make them into allies was to give them worthless medals and wardrobe trappings rather than the guns and powder they needed. And to make one chief the big chief was to meddle in intertribal politics about which he knew nothing. In general, it would be impossible to say which side was more ignorant of the other.

The other chiefs then spoke. They suffered from stage fright. “I am young and Cant Speek,” Struck by the Pana confessed. “I am a young man and inexperienced, cannot say much,” White Crane Man explained. But they all managed to make it clear that what they wanted was powder and ball, and perhaps some whiskey. Clark and Lewis could not meet those needs. They could do one thing all the chiefs wanted: leave Mr. Dorion with them for the winter. He could arrange peace with other tribes and organize an expedition of chiefs to go to Washington in the spring.

Arcawechar spoke not only prophetically but bluntly. He said the captains had given the Indians five medals. “I wish you to give five kegs of powder with them.” The captains did not, could not comply. As Arcawechar had warned them, where they were going they would need all their powder.

Moving the keelboat and pirogues upriver required a tremendous effort from each man; consequently, they ate prodigiously. In comparison with beef, the venison and elk were lean, even at this season. Each soldier consumed up to nine pounds of meat per day, along with whatever fruit the area afforded and some cornmeal, and still felt hungry.

The first meeting between the Sioux and the Americans had gone badly. Certainly Lewis and Clark had failed to make the favorable impression on the Sioux that Jefferson had ordered them to do. But, short of giving away almost a fifth of their total stock, the contents of one pirogue, there was nothing the captains could do to make that favorable impression. At least no shots had rung out, no arrows had been launched.

The village Lewis visited was a classic nomadic town, based on a buffalo-and-horse economy, numbering about a hundred tepees with a population of around nine hundred. These were the Brule band of the Tetons, and they were in high spirits, having only two weeks previously won a great battle against the Omahas. The Sioux had killed seventy-five Omaha warriors and taken forty-eight women and children prisoners. Cruzatte, who was with Lewis, could speak Omaha fluently; Lewis told him to find out what he could from the prisoners.

The expedition left breathing hard and breathing fire. Clark hollered out to a young Indian ashore to pass the word, “if they were for war or were Deturmined to Stop us we were ready to defend our Selves.” But behind the bravado there was no sense of triumph. The captains had not made a favorable impression, they had just barely avoided a disastrous exchange of fire, they were exhausted and still nervous.

Given the hot tempers on both sides, it was just as well. No matter how long Lewis and Clark stayed with the Sioux, they were not going to make them into friends except by giving more than they could afford. Lewis and Clark had not initiated hostilities, but their insistence on standing their ground might well have led to bullets and arrows flying through the air.

Beginning in October, as the expedition made its way through present northern South Dakota, it passed numerous abandoned villages, composed of earth-lodge dwellings and cultivated fields. Some of the fields, although unattended, still had squash and corn growing in them. These had once been home to the mighty Arikara tribe. About thirty thousand persons strong in the year the United States won its independence, the tribe had been reduced by smallpox epidemics in the 1780s to not much more than one-fifth that size. Another epidemic swept through in 1803–4, devastating the tribe. What had been eighteen villages the previous year had been reduced to three by the time Lewis arrived.

James Ronda comments that Lewis and Clark shared “a naive optimism typical of so much Euro-American frontier diplomacy. [They] believed they could easily reshape upper Missouri realities to fit their expectations. . . . [But] to the surprise of the explorer-diplomats, virtually all Indian parties proved resistant to change and suspicious of American motives.”

The terms “peace” and “war” as understood by the Americans had no meaning to the Indians. Hostilities could break out at any time, for no apparent cause other than the restlessness of the young warriors, spurred by their desire for honor and glory, which could only be won on raids, which always brought on revenge raids, in a regular cycle. The captains were hopelessly naïve on this point. Lewis was sure he had created a peace in the face of overwhelming evidence that his words were carried away by the wind.

It recorded a somewhat colder winter than the norm during the thirty-year period 1951–80, when December, January, and February temperatures averaged 12.3 degrees above zero. In 1804–5, it averaged 4 degrees above zero for December, 3.4 degrees below for January, and 11.3 degrees above for February, or an average for the winter of 4 degrees above zero.1 The Indians could take it. On various occasions, the Americans would hear of or meet Indians who had spent the night out on the prairie, without a fire and with only a buffalo robe to cover them, and only thin moccasins and antelope leggings and shirt to wear, and hardly suffer from it. On January 10, 1805, Clark reported two such incidents and commented, “Customs & the habits of those people has ancered to beare more Cold than I thought it possible for man to indure.”

Encounters with the Mandans were altogether different. The neighbors got along just fine. The chiefs and captains, warriors and men called on one another, went hunting together, traded extensively, enjoyed sexual relations with the same women on a regular basis, joked, and talked—as best they could through the language barrier—about what they knew. They managed to describe wonders to one another, using their hands to illustrate their points, drawing maps, mountains, or wooden houses on the dirt floor of the lodge, educating one another. The Mandans and the Hidatsas knew something of the country to the west and were glad to share their knowledge with the captains; the Americans knew the country to the east of the Mississippi River and were eager to induce some Mandan and Hidatsa chiefs to make the journey to Washington. Holidays and special occasions brought the red and white men closer together. On New Year’s Day, 1805, half the detachment went to the lower Mandan village, at the particular request of the chief, to dance to the music of a tambourine, a sounding horn, and Private Cruzatte’s fiddle. The Indians enjoyed the music and the dancing, especially the Frenchman, who danced on his hands.

Supplies were adequate, Lewis said, thanks to the skills of the hunters, whose efforts made it possible to live on a diet of meat, thus saving the parched corn, portable soup, flour, and salt pork for the mountains. He put in not a word about Mandan corn, a glaring omission that left Jefferson with the entirely wrong impression that it was possible for white men to winter on the Plains without help from the Indians.

A week later, the party saw a grizzly swim the river. He disappeared before an attack could be made on him. Lewis wrote, “I find that the curiossity of our party is pretty well satisfyed with rispect to this anamal.” The size of the beast, and the difficulty in killing the bear, “has staggered the resolution [of] several of them,

Lewis packed his “happerst,” or knapsack, and had it ready to swing on his back at dawn. He commented that this was “the first time in my life that I had ever prepared a burthen of this kind” (meaning, apparently, that since his childhood a slave, later an enlisted man or a servant, had carried his backpack), “and I am fully convinced that it will not be the last.”