Though such exploration was a goal long envisioned by Jefferson and others, the recent purchase of the Louisiana Territory had made the American public eager to learn about the resources of the newest addition to their nation. Other exploratory expeditions would follow, including Zebulon Pike’s two-year journey into the Southwest beginning in 1805, but Lewis and Clark were the first to venture into the Northwest.
The preparations for the Lewis and Clark expedition were varied and complex, requiring the leaders to recruit capable men, outfit the expedition with food and supplies for some indeterminate length of time, and become learned in several areas, as a vital part of the mission would be to gather information on the country they passed through. To the latter end Lewis spent some time in Philadelphia, home of the American Philosophical Society. Some of the society’s members, the leading scientists in the young republic, tutored Lewis in the natural sciences, celestial navigation, and other areas.
On July 5, 1803, Lewis left Washington for Pittsburgh, where he arrived eight days later and waited for his keelboat, a fifty-five-foot flat-bottomed boat, to be built. On August 30 Lewis and a party of eleven men moved down the Ohio River, at different points stopping to pick up volunteers for the expedition. Clark joined them at Louisville, and they made their way to the Missouri River. The expedition had wanted to camp for the winter high on the Missouri, but was prohibited from doing so. The territory of Louisiana had been ceded by Spain to France, whose minister issued a passport to provide the explorers with protection, but the Spanish head of the province had not yet received official word of the cession to France (and France’s subsequent cession to America), and as a matter of his government’s policy had to deny the foreigners permission to encamp there.
Looking for a new base, the expedition party in the fall set down a camp at the mouth of the Rivière Dubois, or Wood River, in Illinois, then part of the Indiana Territory. Here, across from the mouth of the Missouri River, they would wait for the cold weather to break and for the Louisiana Territory to officially pass from France to the United States before beginning their journey. In the interim, the men were put through military drills and disciplined when necessary for various military infractions such as drinking and fighting. Lewis spent much time in St. Louis, less than twenty miles away, where he gathered even more supplies, questioned local people about the Indians who lived along the Missouri, and witnessed in March 1804 the Louisiana Territory transfer. Finally spring arrived, and the expedition was ready to be launched.
On May 14, 1804, the Lewis and Clark expedition officially began at the mouth of Wood River. At 4:00 P.M., as local inhabitants looked on, some forty-five men in high spirits departed Camp Dubois on the keelboat and in two smaller pirogues, or dugout canoes. The craft were laden with food, weapons including flintlock rifles and an air-gun, medical supplies, scientific apparatus, gifts for the Indians, and many other accouterments and supplies—including, of course, journals, manuscript papers, and writing implements. The Corps of Discovery, as the explorers called themselves, crossed the Mississippi and then began their journey up the Missouri. Near the end of October they arrived at the country of the Mandan Indians (in what is now North Dakota), where they built Fort Mandan to spend the winter. The winter months were bitterly cold, and during this time several members of the expedition actively wrote about the land, its inhabitants, and their experiences there.
On the 7th of April 1805, sixteen men, the escorting party, returned east on the keelboat with a collection of material gathered on the expedition, including animal skins, stuffed animals, elk and ram horns, Indian clothing, plant specimens, and live animals, as well as some written records. The rest of the group, the permanent party, resumed their penetration into the western frontier. They continued climbing the Missouri (now with a young Shoshone woman, Sacagawea, the wife of their translator, Toussaint Charbonneau), crossed the Continental Divide and the Bitterroot Mountains, descended the Clearwater, and proceeded along the Snake and Columbia Rivers to the Pacific coast. In his entry for November 18, 1805, Clark wrote that his party sighted the Pacific Ocean with “estonishment.”
The Corps of Discovery built Fort Clatsop (near what is now Astoria, Oregon), where they camped for the winter before heading back east from the Pacific Northwest on March 23, 1806. In July the party decided to break into two groups so more information could be gathered. Taking different routes—Lewis’s group crossed the Rockies to the Missouri, Clark’s descended the Yellowstone—the factions converged in mid-August and proceeded down the Missouri to St. Louis, which they reached on September 23, 1806, officially bringing the eight-thousand-mile expedition to an end two years and four months after it began.
President Jefferson directed the mission’s leaders, Lewis and Clark, to record details of their journey. In his June 20, 1803, letter to Captain Lewis, Jefferson wrote:
Your observations are to be taken with great pains & accuracy, to be entered distinctly, & intelligibly for others as well as yourself, to comprehend all the elements necessary …
Solicitous of the need for other written records in the case of loss or damage to theirs and to have additional frameworks to draw upon, the commanders ordered their sergeants and encouraged others on the expedition “to keep a separate journal from day to day of all passing occurrences, and such other observations on the country & as shall appear to them worthy of notice.”
After returning to St. Louis at the end of September, Clark made his last journal entry. In an entry dated September 26, 1806, he wrote that it was “a fine morning we commenced wrighting &c.”
“Commenced wrighting”? Was he referring to their journals? If so, hadn’t Lewis and Clark been writing in their journals as they traveled across the country? A few editorial touch-ups would be reasonable and expected, but what was the need now to spend months “wrighting” if that was something they had been doing all along?
Certainly that was the impression the president had. In early January 1807, Lewis delivered the journals to Jefferson, who was anxious to read them. Jefferson wrote of the journals:
Ten or twelve such pocket volumes, Morocco bound … in which, in his own handwriting, he [Lewis] had journalised all occurrences, day by day, as he travelled. They were small 8vos and opened at the end for more convenient writing. Every one had been put into a separate tin case, cemented to prevent injury from wet. But on his return the cases, I presume, had been taken from them, as he delivered me the books uncased.
Indeed, Jefferson noted that the journal entries had been recorded on a daily basis. How later scholars came to analyze the journals and arrive at a different conclusion has to do with their provenance.
Jefferson rewarded Lewis and Clark for their successful mission by giving them public land and commissions; he appointed Lewis governor of the Louisiana Territory and Clark brigadier general of the Missouri militia and superintendent of Indian affairs for the Upper Louisiana Territory. But Lewis delayed taking office as governor so he could ready the journals for the printer’s shop. He spent four months in Philadelphia, and when it was incumbent upon him to return to the new territory in the autumn of 1807, he took the journals with him.
His sundry official responsibilities as governor left Lewis little time to further prepare the journals, and when he set out for Washington in the fall of 1809 for an inquiry into his expenditures, he brought with him the expedition journals and some unrelated government documents. Lewis was accompanied by an Indian agent, James Neelly, but unfortunately the trip turned out tragically. While the two were staying at an inn along a route called the Natchez Trace near Hohenwald, Tennessee, shots blasted early one morning, and Lewis was found with chest and head wounds. The celebrated thirty-five-year-old leader of the famous American expedition died on October 11. Lewis’s death appeared to be a suicide, but later speculation that he had been murdered surfaced.
Agent Neelly took Lewis’s two trunks containing the invaluable journals and conveyed them to Washington. William Clark and Presi
dent James Madison’s private secretary, Isaac Coles, pored over the contents of the trunks; Clark took possession of the journals and field books and brought them with him to Fincastle, Virginia.
In April 1810, Philadelphia litterateur Nicholas Biddle, whom Clark had recruited to put the journals in book form, joined him in Virginia, where he reviewed the documents, queried Clark about the journey, and made notes about their discussions in a notebook (American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia), which he later used to write his book. Biddle took nearly all the expedition journals back to Philadelphia with him, as well as Sgt. John Ordway’s 1804-1805 journal of the expedition (American Philosophical Society) that he and Captain Lewis had purchased from Ordway for $300 shortly after they returned to St. Louis. While he worked on the famous Lewis and Clark journals, Biddle, somewhat imprudently, made annotations in them in red ink.
Biddle was to write only a narrative of the expedition, and so he turned over some of the journals to Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton, an eminent physician, naturalist, and author, who was going to prepare a book on the scientific aspects of the expedition. Biddle finished writing in mid-1811. Some three years later, in 1814, Biddle’s History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to the Sources of the Missouri was published (three copper plates engraved with maps from the book are at the American Philosophical Society), essentially a pared-down and paraphrased narrative of Lewis and Clark’s journals, excluding the scientific aspects of the venture. Barton’s planned book was never published. He died at the end of 1815 with three journals in his possession, sparking the concern of former president Thomas Jefferson and prompting him to have a colleague retrieve them from Barton’s widow. This was accomplished, and the three journals were conveyed from Philadelphia to Washington.
About eighteen months after they arrived, Jefferson had the journals returned to Philadelphia again, where they were deposited at the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 to foster, as Benjamin Franklin noted, “the common stock of knowledge.” The Barton journals were soon joined by the Biddle journals to bring the majority of the epic Lewis and Clark journals under one roof.
For seventy-four years, from 1818, when the fourteen Biddle volumes plus another journal on celestial calculation were added to the three Barton volumes, until 1892, the Lewis and Clark journals languished more or less in obscurity in their Philadelphia sanctuary. But they were not totally forgotten. In 1837 the U.S. secretary of war, on behalf of artist John James Audubon, petitioned for the journals to be loaned to Audubon, who was then in Europe. But the society denied the request because of the potential perils of an ocean voyage. Then, in 1888, following the publication of the society’s minutes through 1838, which revealed the location of the Lewis and Clark journals, individuals began to inquire about using the journals for various scholarly pursuits.
In 1892 scholar Elliott Coues, who had been asked by a publisher to revise the 1814 History of the Expedition, turned his attention to the original journals and was granted his request to examine them at his home in Washington, D.C., their first time there since former President Jefferson had gathered them. Coues was a multitalented man who was a physician, anatomy professor, ornithologist, mammalogist, editor, and author of important books on animals. Coues perused the journals and arranged them chronologically by giving them codex identifications with letters of the alphabet. According to this system, Clark was the author of journals A, B, G, H, I, M, N, and P; Lewis the author of journals D, E, F, J, K, L, and O; and Lewis and Clark together of journals C, Q, and R.
But in his close inspections of the journals, Coues noticed that their condition belied books that could have served as diaries on such a long trek. “The covers are too fresh and bright,” he wrote, “the paper too clean and sound.” Coues noted the pristine legibility of the penmanship and concluded that the red morocco-bound journals “were certainly written after the return of the Expedition, and before Lewis’s death in October 1809— that is, in 1806-9.”
Such a conjecture was tantamount to blasphemy! To say that the renowned Lewis and Clark journals, supposedly day-by-day eyewitness accounts of actions and observations feverishly inscribed by the two explorers on their epic journey, had in fact been transcribed, edited, and rewritten from original documents was a tacit admission that they may have contained observations and comments whose accuracy had been distorted by the passage of time.
The main Lewis and Clark journals left Philadelphia one final time when Ruben Gold Thwaites of the Historical Society of Wisconsin needed the journals to prepare a comprehensive publication of them. From October 1902 through November 13, 1902, the journals were shipped a few at a time to Thwaites, who made his own discoveries and conclusions about the writing habits of Lewis and Clark. Simply stated, Thwaites believed that the co-commanders each day made rough notes in small field books and when encamped for an extended period developed their notes “into more formal records,” with both Lewis and Clark often borrowing “freely from the other’s notes,” although Clark “not infrequently copied Lewis practically verbatim.” “Upon returning to St. Louis,” Thwaites speculated, “these individual journals were for the most part transcribed into neat blank books—bound in red morocco and gilt-edged—with the thought of preparing them for early publication. After this process, the original field-books must have been cast aside and in large measure destroyed. … There have come down to us, however, several note-books which apparently were written up in the camps.”
In the introduction to his eleven-volume Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, scholar Gary Moulton refutes this notion and takes up the improbability of Lewis and Clark composing a massive amount of words in the red journals during their three-month stay in St. Louis. According to Moulton, Lewis and Clark were busily engaged at this time: “The captains were traveling; visiting relatives; seeing to other business; and attending public ceremonies, welcoming celebrations, and banquets. During that period Lewis was also escorting the Mandan chief Big White (Sheheke) to the capital.”
A page from one of Meriwether Lewis's journals. From an entry dated March 16, 1806, the page features a drawing of a white trout salmon.
An examination of the Lewis and Clark field notes and journals reveals certain things about their writing habits. The field notes may have been transcribed into formal journal entries soon after they were written, or after ample time had passed, perhaps as long as months later. Field notes may have been copied into the journals virtually verbatim or been revised and expanded, as the field notes and journals do not always match. Journal entries often contain material of which no mention is made in the field notes, indicating that the diarist had inserted information not originally set down in the field notes. Lewis and Clark did not always write field notes first; sometimes they wrote directly into their journals without first making rough notes. Torn pages were inserted into the journals. Clark makes mention of his “private journal,” but it is not clear whether this was his field notes or his formal journal. In the early part of the expedition, water damage may have occurred to some of the journals and other manuscripts when a boat had a mishap and took on water.
In addition to the question of whether the entries were written as the events were happening or after the fact, other mysteries attend the journals. Why are there large gaps in Lewis’s journals, particularly from the start of the journey on May 14, 1804, for almost a year—that is, until the following April—when he almost certainly would have kept a journal during that important time? After Lewis died his possessions were accounted for, and it was found that he had sixteen red morocco journals. He supposedly had all the journals—both his and Clark’s from the expedition—but why are there seventeen red journals in total that survive? Why are there blank spaces and numerous consecutive blank pages between journal entries? Why are there insertions in one or the other’s journals by the other co-leader?
Deciphering the daily and post-expedition field notes and journals is an endeavor that leaves
attempts to reconcile their composition unsatisfied. There are mysteries that may never be definitively solved but only intelligently approached by logical deductions. Indeed, the writing is very even and was obviously done under controlled circumstances and environments, not on bended knee examining a new plant species or being chased by a grizzly or toiling away in rain or snow. Through the years people have commonly assumed that the journals were rough notes, jotted down as the expedition moved from spot to spot. The general impression has been that the co-leaders kept these journals in their pockets or traveling bags, and as they made an observation would simply take them out and begin scribbling away. But the literal cleanliness of the writing suggests that Lewis and Clark wrote in their journals when they had a chunk of time on their hands, such as during the long, cold months they spent in their winter camps. Because of the voluminousness of the journals, it is hardly conceivable that they could have been written after Lewis and Clark returned to St. Louis and were waiting to go to Washington, although it is possible that some writing could have taken place during that time. Nevertheless, some scholars have postulated that Lewis and Clark wrote out all their journals in the window of three months that they spent in St. Louis.
In his Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, Gary Moulton concluded:
There is little reason to accept the theory that the red notebook journals were all written after the return from subsequently discarded field notes. Considering the great amount of extant material and the labor involved in writing it, we need not imagine extensive sets of field notes paralleling the notebooks when the existence of such notes is neither known nor required by the evidence. Whatever Clark’s “we commenced wrighting” in his last journal entry refers to, it was probably not the task of writing all the red books covering a year and a half of travel. Most of the material we now have was written by the captains in the course of the expedition.
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