At this point, Jefferson was into a third or fourth degree of indirection. Martínez cut him off: “I replied to him that making use of the same frankness with which he honored me, I would take the liberty of telling him, that . . . an expedition of this nature could not fail to give umbrage to our Government.”
Jefferson could not see why. The only subject would be to fill in the map, which would benefit everyone.
Martínez did not believe him, any more than Jefferson had believed the British in 1783 about the purposes of their proposed exploration, or Louis XVI about the purposes of the La Pérouse expedition of 1785. Martínez told his government, “The President has been all his life a man of letters, very speculative and a lover of glory, and it would be possible he might attempt to perpetuate the fame of his administration . . . by discovering . . . the way by which the Americans may some day extend their population and their influence up to the coasts of the South Sea [Pacific Ocean].”19 Martínez knew his man.
Undeterred by Martínez’s negative reaction (and his refusal to give Captain Lewis a passport), Jefferson plunged ahead. In the late winter of 1802–3, he got a passport for Lewis from the British minister, and another from the French. Simultaneously he moved forward with the Monroe project to purchase New Orleans from Napoleon.
Lewis meanwhile completed his estimate. He based it on the costs for a party of one officer and ten to twelve soldiers—surely reflecting a decision he and Jefferson had made together about the ideal size—and kept it as low as possible, to avoid congressional criticism. With $696 for “Indian presents” as the largest expenditure, and other large sums for provisions, mathematical instruments, arms, medicines, and a boat, it came to twenty-five hundred dollars on the nose.20
Jefferson put a request for that amount into his first draft of his annual message to Congress in December 1802. When Treasury Secretary Gallatin saw the draft, he suggested that the request be confined to a separate, later, confidential message, “as it contemplates an expedition out of our own territory.” Jefferson agreed and sent up a special, secret message to Congress on January 18, 1803. Even then he buried the request in a discourse on the Indian problem, couching it in terms of commerce.
“The river Missouri, & the Indians inhabiting it,” he said, “are not as well known as is rendered desireable by their connection with the Mississippi, & consequently with us. It is however understood that the country on that river is inhabited by numerous tribes, who furnish great supplies of furs & pelty to the trade of another nation carried on in a high latitude, through an infinite number of portages and lakes, shut up by ice through a long season.” The Missouri, traversing an area with a moderate climate, might offer a better source of transportation, “possibly with a single portage, from the Western ocean.” Those congressmen who were listening hard got the clear message: we can steal the fur trade from the British.
It would not cost much. One officer and a dozen soldiers, who would have to be paid regardless, could explore “the whole line, even to the Western ocean.” They could talk with the Indians, persuade them to accept American traders, agree on the sites for trading posts. They could do all of this in two summers, and for a pittance.
Jefferson concluded: “The interests of commerce place the principal object within the constitutional powers and care of Congress, and that it should incidentally advance the geographical knowledge of our own continent can not but be an additional gratification.” He then asked for an appropriation of twenty-five hundred dollars “for the purpose of extending the external commerce of the U.S.”21 There was some muttering from the Federalists, who always resented and resisted spending money on the West, but they were too badly outnumbered to be effective. Congress approved the whole package.
The twenty-five hundred went down easy, compared with Jefferson’s request the previous week, which had been for an open-ended (up to $9,375,000) appropriation for the purchase of New Orleans. The Federalists had protested, over the amount of money and because some of the High Federalists were clamoring for war against France. But the Republicans held firm, and the Congress made the appropriation. The president selected Monroe to go to Paris to join Livingston in the negotiations. If Jefferson saw the link between the January 12 and the January 18 appropriation bills, he never mentioned it to anyone, except perhaps Lewis.
•
As soon as the appropriation for western exploration passed, as Jefferson recalled it, “Captain Lewis immediately renewed his solicitations to have the direction of the party.” Perhaps command really was still an open question; more likely Jefferson was pretending that until Congress had authorized the expedition he had made no choice of a leader.
Whatever his reason for the remark, Jefferson never hesitated to confirm Lewis’s appointment. Jefferson by this time had spent two full years with Lewis on a daily basis, and had taught Lewis on an intense schedule for about four months. He later wrote that, by the beginning of 1803, “I had now had opportunities of knowing him intimately.”
Jefferson gave his reasons for picking Lewis to Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia: “Capt. Lewis is brave, prudent, habituated to the woods, & familiar with Indian manners & character. He is not regularly educated, but he possesses a great mass of accurate observation on all the subjects of nature which present themseles here, & will therefore readily select those only in his new route which shall be new. He has qualified himself for those observations of longitude & latitude necessary to fix the points of the line he will go over.”22
Lewis still had much to learn. To that end, Jefferson had plans for him to do graduate work in Philadelphia, with America’s leading scientists. That Lewis would benefit, Jefferson had no doubt. That Lewis could simultaneously plan the expedition and begin putting it together, Jefferson had no doubts. Some of his advisers did; they considered Lewis not well educated and perhaps too strongheaded and too much of a risk-taker. But Jefferson was sure he had the right man.
* * *
I. The right to offload goods at the piers in New Orleans, sell them, and then reload onto sailing vessels.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Preparing for the Expedition
January–June 1803
A week after Congress appropriated the funds for the expedition, Jefferson began writing his scientific friends. The message was the same in each case: the expedition has been authorized but is still confidential; I have chosen Captain Lewis to lead it; Lewis needs advice and instruction. The letters made it clear that Jefferson intended the recipients to provide advice and instruction without cost to the government.
Lewis’s schooling began during the period from New Year’s Day to the Ides of March. Lewis was still living in the President’s House, conferring with Jefferson as often and for as long as Jefferson’s schedule would allow. Beyond the conferences and the practical lessons in the use of the sextant and other measuring instruments, which took place on the lawn, Lewis studied maps in Jefferson’s collection.
He also conferred with Albert Gallatin, a serious map-collector. Gallatin had a special map made up for Lewis showing North America from the Pacific Coast to the Mississippi, with details on what was known of the Missouri River up to the Mandan villages in the Great Bend of the river (today’s Bismarck, North Dakota), and a few wild guesses as to what the Rockies might look like and the course of the Columbia. There were but three certain points on the map: the latitude and longitude of the mouth of the Columbia, of St. Louis, and of the Mandan villages (thanks to British fur traders).
By the time he finished studying with Jefferson and Gallatin, Lewis knew all that there was to know about the Missouri and what lay to the west of it.
The problem was that west of the Mandans nearly to the coast was terra incognita. And the best scientists in the world could not begin to fill in that map until someone had walked across the land, taking measurements, providing descriptions of the flora, fauna, rivers, mountains, and people, not failing to note the commercial and agricultural possibilities.
> To make that journey required a frontiersman’s expert knowledge combined with an understanding of technology and what it could do to make the passage easier and more fruitful. That was the positive side of Jefferson’s choice of Lewis, who was in fact the perfect choice. Indeed, Lewis’s career might almost have been dedicated to preparing him for this adventure. He knew the Old Northwest about as well as any man in the country, he knew lonely forest trails through Indian country, he knew hunting and fishing and canoes, he knew how to keep records, had adequate mathematical skills, and for two years had been privy to Mr. Jefferson’s hopes and dreams, his curiosity and knowledge.
Jefferson told Patterson that Lewis had the required frontier skills, to which “he joins a great stock of accurateI observation on the subjects of the three kingdoms. . . . He has been for some time qualifying himself for taking observations of longitude & latitude to fix the geographical points of the line he will pass over.” But he needed help, and it was Patterson’s and the other scientists in Philadelphia’s privilege and—not stated but clearly implied—duty to supply that help. Of course they were all delighted to do so anyway.1
•
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.
For this expedition, planning was going on at two levels. The president was working on the first draft of his instructions to Lewis. It was becoming a long, complex document, for Jefferson was making a list of the things he wanted to know about the West. Since there was so much he wanted to know, far more than a single expedition could answer, he had to make choices. There was no mention of looking for gold or silver in the draft Jefferson was circulating, for example, whereas soil conditions and climate were included. Trade possibilities were prominent.
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.
•
While Jefferson worked on the instructions, Lewis had his own planning to do. Jefferson would set the objectives, but it was Captain Lewis who would get the expedition there and back. The responsibility was his for deciding the size of the expedition, how it would proceed up the Missouri River, what it would need to cross the Rocky Mountains and descend the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean and return. The team would have to do this as a self-contained unit. Once the expedition left St. Louis, Lewis would be stuck with the decisions he had made during the planning process.
How many men? With what skills? How big a boat? What design? What type of rifle? How much powder and lead? How many cooking pots? What tools? How much dry or salted rations could be carried? What medicines, in what quantity? What scientific instruments? What books? How many fishing hooks? How much salt? Tobacco? Whiskey?
Lewis and Jefferson talked into the late evening about such questions. Jefferson thought it would be a good idea to carry some cast-iron corn mills to give the Indians as presents. Lewis agreed.2 They discussed the trade beads that were the currency of the western Indian tribes, and agreed that plenty would be needed. They made up lists of other items. Together, they concocted the idea of a collapsible iron-frame boat, one that could be carried past the falls of the Missouri, wherever that might be, and put together at the far end with animal skins to cover it, so that the expedition would be back in business on the water.
They talked about timing. Now that the appropriation was in hand, both men wanted to get started as soon as possible. With the coming of spring and the drying of the roads, Lewis wanted to be ready to go. He told Jefferson he hoped to be across the Appalachians by early summer. He intended to go to the post at South West Post, near present Kingston in eastern Tennessee, and there enlist his core group of soldier-explorers from the garrison. He planned to march them overland to Nashville, where he would pick up a previously ordered keelboat to float down the Cumberland River to its junction with the Ohio, not far above the Ohio’s junction with the Mississippi.
He planned to be in St. Louis by August 1 and thought he might be able to proceed a good bit of the way up the Missouri before being forced into winter camp. In 1804, he expected to cross the mountains, reach the Pacific, make the return journey, and report back before winter set in.3
Lewis and Jefferson talked through January and February and on into March, trying to imagine what the trip was going to be like, so that they could be certain of what would be needed.
•
But that was only the half of it. The other half involved preparing Lewis for the scientific observations he would be responsible for making. That meant study. Hard, intensive study in a variety of disciplines under a severe time pressure.
On the Ides of March, Lewis left Washington for Harpers Ferry, site of the U.S. Army’s arsenal. Lewis’s purpose was to obtain arms and ammunition for his party. He could select from existing stock or order items made special for the expedition by the arsenal’s craftsmen. He carried a letter to the superintendent of the arsenal from Secretary of War Dearborn: “You will be pleased to make such arms & Iron work, as requested by the bearer Captain Meriwether Lewis and to have them completed with the least possible delay.”4 When he had what was needed, he would arrange for it to be shipped to Pittsburgh, then hurry on to Philadelphia for more schooling and shopping.
At Harpers Ferry, he got fifteen muzzle-loading, flintlock, long-barreled rifles, sometimes called “Kentucky” but more properly “Pennsylvania rifles.” They were the sine qua non of the expedition. On them depended the food supply and self-defense.
They were absolutely dependable—the U.S. Model 1803, the first rifle specifically designed for the U.S. Army, .54-caliber, with a thirty-three-inch barrel. Lewis referred to these weapons as short rifles, for they were considerably shorter than the civilian Pennsylvania rifle. The Model 1803 delivered a lead slug on target with sufficient velocity to kill a deer at a range of about a hundred yards. An expert could get off two aimed shots in one minute.5 Lewis also selected pipe tomahawks and ordered the artisans at Harpers Ferry to make three dozen. He picked up fish gigs, knives, and so on.
Mainly, however, he supervised the construction of the iron boat frame. It was so important to him that he stayed on at Harpers Ferry for a month, instead of the week he had planned. This was cutting into the time Jefferson had wanted him to spend in Philadelphia.
On April 22, having heard nothing from Lewis since March 7, Jefferson learned in reports from others about Lewis’s delay at Harpers Ferry. With Lewis gone, the president needed a secretary. He had selected a young man, Lewis Harvie of Virginia, but had put off announcing the appointment for reasons he explained in a letter to Harvie. Jefferson had been living “in the daily expectation that the stage of the day would bring back Capt. Lewis, and that then within a few days he would set out on his Missisipi expedition.”
Jefferson also said that he had put off writing “because my great regard for Capt. Lewis made me unwilling to show a haste to fill his place before he was gone, & to counteract also a malignant & unfounded report that I was parting with him from dissatisfaction, a thing impossible either from his con
duct or my dispositions towards him.”6
Washington will have its gossip. Jefferson was extremely sensitive to it. But far more important to him was Lewis’s delay. He was almost desperate because of it, but he subdued his feelings and wrote Lewis with some care in his word choices: “I have no doubt you have used every possible exertion to get off, and therefore we have only to lament what cannot be helped, as the delay of a month now may lose a year in the end.”7
Lewis might have read that as an expression of confidence, but on second reading wondered if it was a complaint. Most likely the former. In any case, he knew Jefferson would understand and would agree with his judgment on priorities. Jefferson’s letter of complaint crossed Lewis’s explanation for the delay, a frequent occurrence given the maddeningly slow mails.
Lewis described his activities. Besides arranging for the rifles, knives, and other equipment, he had written to the commander at South West Post to request help in getting suitable volunteers. The soldier volunteers could be promised their regular pay and a reward of land grants.
Lewis anticipated gathering his party as he made his way to St. Louis that summer, and strengthening it through personnel selection as the expedition proceeded, rejecting the weak, ignorant, and unmanageable for the strong, skilled, and eager volunteers. He told Jefferson he intended to be ruthless about it.
He had written to a congressman from Tennessee requesting that he find a boatbuilder in Nashville who could make a boat and a canoe for the expedition. These and other matters took longer than he had expected.
But by far the biggest cause of delay was Lewis’s experimenting with the boat he and Jefferson had dreamed up. Every day he was at the work site, because he was convinced that without his personal attention the workmen would never understand the design. He carried out some sophisticated experiments with two different designs, one curved, the other “simicilindrical,” the former for the stem and stern, the latter for the body of the boat. He triumphantly reported to Jefferson that the frame would weigh only forty-four pounds, whereas the boat when covered with hide would carry 1,770 pounds. Lewis told Jefferson, “I was induced from the result of this experiment to direct the iron frame of the canoe to be completed.”8
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