After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, Thomas Jefferson sent his secretary Meriwether Lewis to study medicine with Benjamin Rush and celestial navigation with Andrew Ellicott, and Lewis recruited his former commander William Clark as co-leader. They built a keelboat in Pittsburgh and packed 193 pounds of portable soup, 130 rolls of tobacco, a Newfoundland dog named Seaman and a Girandoni air rifle that fired 20 shots in under a minute after about 1,500 pumps. The expedition left in May 1804, and Sergeant Charles Floyd died in August, likely of a ruptured appendix, the only death of the 882-day journey. In September, insulting gifts to the Lakota chief Black Buffalo nearly ended in a massacre until he called off his warriors.
At Fort Mandan they hired Toussaint Charbonneau because his teenage Shoshone wife Sacagawea could help buy horses, and her presence with a newborn signaled a peaceful party. York, enslaved by Clark, hauled boats and hunted. They reached the Pacific in November 1805, voted on a winter site and built Fort Clatsop, where it rained 94 of 106 days. Heading home they split up, Lewis’s party killed two Blackfeet men who tried to steal rifles and horses, and the Crow quietly took half of Clark’s horses. In August 1806 Lewis was shot in the thigh by his near-blind hunter Pierre Cruzatte, who mistook him for an elk. The full original journals were not published until Reuben Gold Thwaites’s edition of 1904.
- Lewis gave Sacagawea crushed rattlesnake rattle in water during labor, and Jean Baptiste was born within 10 minutes.
- Translation ran from a native language through Sacagawea, Charbonneau’s French and finally English.
- York and Sacagawea both voted on where to build the winter camp.
- After the Blackfeet clash Lewis’s men rode more than 100 miles in a day to escape.
- Clark refused York’s request for freedom and separated him from his enslaved wife in Kentucky, while Spain sent over 50 soldiers from Santa Fe who missed the expedition by days.
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