He struck the Mississippi River fifty miles below St. Louis, where the United States Army post of Kaskaskia faced the Province of Louisiana across the river. Here he enlisted four men more, selected from a score that eagerly volunteered. Word of the great expedition had travelled ahead of him, and he could have filled the ranks seven times over. But only the strongest, and those of clean reputation, could qualify for such a trip. These thought themselves fortunate.
Now up along the river, by military road, hastened Captain Lewis, for the old town of Cahokia, and crossed the river to St. Louis at last. He was in a hurry.
“We’ll winter at La Charette, Captain,” he had said to Captain Clark, “where Daniel Boone lives. Boone can give us valuable information, and we’ll be that far on our journey, ready for spring. Charette will be better for our men than St. Louis.”
Glad was Captain Clark to spend the months at La Charette. Daniel Boone had been his boyhood friend in Kentucky—had taught him much wood-craft. But when, in mid-December, Captain Clark, the redhead, anxious to push on to La Charette, seventy miles up the Missouri, before the ice closed, with York and his nine Kentuckians and five other recruits whom he had enlisted from Fort Massac at the mouth of the Ohio tied his keel-boat at the St. Louis levee, he was met by disagreeable information.
“We’ll have to winter here,” informed Captain Lewis. “The Spanish lieutenant-governor won’t pass us on. He claims that he has not been officially notified yet to transfer Upper Louisiana to the United States—or, for that matter, even to France. So all we can do is to make winter camp on United States soil, on the east side of the river, and wait. I’m sorry—I’ve engaged two more boats—but that’s the case.”
“All right,” assented Captain Clark. “Both sides of the river are ours, but I suppose we ought to avoid trouble.”
So the winter camp was placed near the mouth of Wood River, on the east bank of the Mississippi, about twenty miles above St. Louis. Log cabins were erected; and besides, the big keel-boat was decked fore and aft, and had a cabin and men’s quarters. Consequently nobody need suffer from the cold.
Captain Lewis stayed most of the time in St. Louis, arranging for supplies, studying medicine, astronomy, botany and other sciences, and learning much about the Indians up the Missouri. Captain Clark looked after the camp, and drilled the men almost every day.
St. Louis was then forty years old; it contained less than 200 houses, of stone and log, and about 1000 people, almost all French. The lieutenant-governor, who lived here in charge of Upper Louisiana of “the Illinois Country” (as all this section was called), was Don Carlos Dehault Delassus, also of French blood, but appointed by Spain.