Rob Baker’s Reviews > Undaunted Courage: The Pioneering First Mission to Explore America's Wild Frontier > Status Update

5/26/1805: Lewis first sees the Rocky Mountains:

'When I reflected on the difficulties which the snowy barrier would probably throw in my way to the Pacific... it in some measure counterbalanced by the joy I felt in the first moments I gazed upon them.

As I have always held it a crime to anticipate evils I will believe it a good comfortable road until I am compelled to believe differently' (227).

On Nov. 4, 1804, at Fort Mandan (North Dakota), Lewis and Clark met a French-Canadian trader, Toussaint Charbonneau. He was hired by the Corps as a translator.

He had two wives. One was 15 and pregnant. She had been kidnapped by a Native American tribe and taken from her home near the Rocky Mountains, and made a slave, then lost in a card game to Charbonneau.

Her name was Sacagawea.

On Aug. 20, 1804, the only member of the Corps of Discovery to die on the journey succombed to appendicitis.

They held a ceremony for him and buried him at a site they named Sergeant Floyds Bluff in modern Sioux City, IA.

They also visited his gravesite nearly two years later on the return trip.

"On Aug. 12 (1804), at 5:00 p.m., what Clark called a 'Parrie Wolf' appeared on the bank and barked at the passing keelboat. The captains had not previsiously seen this animal, or read anything about it...

The animal was a coyote. Lewis and Clark were the first Americans to see one" (153).

Capt. Lewis "looked up to see a blanket of white coming down the (Missouri) river. He went to the bow to stare down into the water. The keelboat and the white whatever-it-was came together. It turned out to be a sea of white feathers, over three miles long and seventy yards wide".

The feathers came from a flock of white pelicans covering several acres on a sandbar, preening themsevles in their summer molt.

At 3:30 pm, on May 21, 1804, "to the cheers of crowds on the bank, the expedition set out. As the keelboat turned her bow into the stream, Lewis and his party cut themselves off from civilization. There would be no more incoming letters, no fresh supplies, no reinforcements, nothing reaching them until they returned.

The captains expected to be gone two years, perhaps more. Lewis and Clark were as free as Columbus"

To this day, there are Osage orange trees growing in Philadelphia (at 4th and Spruce Streets) and the Univ. of Virginia (at Morea, a guest house) that grew from cuttings Lewis sent to Jefferson.

These were the "first natural-history specimens from west of the Mississippi".

The Native Americans valued the wood of the Osage orange for making bows and would "travel many hundreds of miles in quest of it" (127).

"On the morning of September 13 (1803), Lewis saw another natural-history phenomenon: passenger pigeons flying over th eriver, north to south, on their migration. They flew in such great flocks they obscured the sun" (112).

In 1803, it was thought that mastadons might still inhabit the West.

"On June 19 (1803), Lewiss had written to William Clark, 'one of the most famous invitations to greatness the nation's archives can provide'.

It is a critical document. It launched one of the great friendships of all time and started the friends on one of the great adventures, and one of the great explorations of all time" (97).

In 1801, newly-elected President Jefferson made Lewis his secretary. Lewis lived in the president's house. Note: It started unofficially being called "The White House" around War of 1812 and was officially titled this in 1901 by T. Roosevelt.

"Lewis's quarters were in what became the East Room. It contained almost no furniture and was damp, cold, drafty, and depressing. Abigail Adams had hung her wash in it" (63).