and find out all about the region. Young Lewis had wished years before to explore that country and had been kept from going, so now he begged the President to let him take charge of the great hunt for facts. The President had good reasons for consenting. He knew that Captain Lewis was brave, firm, and persevering, and that nothing could turn him from his purpose. He was well acquainted with the character and customs of the Indians, and was used to the hunting life. He had carefully studied the plants and animals of his own country. Above all, he was honest, fair-minded, and truthful, so that whatever he might report would be sure to be true. For these reasons the President felt no hesitation in trusting Captain Lewis to do so important a task.
With fatherly pride ex-President Jefferson afterward wrote that young Lewis was not certain that he could do this great work right; so he attended a scientific school to learn more about plants, animals, minerals, physical geography and astronomy. He wanted all he should see to be of the highest value to his own country and to the other nations which claimed the great tracts next to the vast territory he had been appointed to explore. Besides, he went to a factory where firearms were made, so as to gain the working knowledge he might need some time to save the lives of his party.
He started down the Ohio by boat from Pittsburgh. At Louisville he picked up his former neighbor, William Clark, brother of George Rogers Clark. He had been a mighty hunter and Indian fighter, and had served his country under General Anthony Wayne. Captain Lewis thought it best that there should be two leaders, in case of any accident to himself. The two captains were real comrades and generous commanders, keeping the respect and friendship of their men through the many hardships of their wanderings in the wilderness.
They started out from St. Louis in May, 1804, with thirty-two experienced hunters, scouts, and woodsmen, on their great adventure. They had only a barge with sails and two smaller boats to go up the “Big Muddy,” as the Indians called the Missouri River. With the aid, later, of a few Indian canoes they were to find their way to the far-distant purple mountains and into the hazy regions of mystery beyond. The President had charged his two young neighbors: “Keep in peace and good-will with the savages,” so the wise partners and their picked men joined in councils and powwows with the various Indian tribes all the way up the long river. They had brought with them bright medals which the chiefs admired. Though the red men could not read the words printed on them, “Peace and Friendship,” they could understand the two clasped hands, one red and the other white, under the lettering, for that was the way they expressed the same thought in the Indian sign language. And the big chiefs hung the shining medals around their sturdy necks, and grasped the white captains’ hands in token of their lasting good-will.
The Indians were experts in signs. When a red scout came to invite the white travelers to join in a council with the chief men of his tribe, he would hold a folded blanket above his head, and, with a slow flourish, unfold it. Then he bent forward and spread it on the ground like a carpet, sat on it himself and motioned to the white “chiefs” to do the same. Then he would tell them, with signs, that his chief had invited them to come and join in a solemn “peace-smoke talk” at the Indian lodge. The city which stands on the place of one of these friendly powwows is called Council Bluffs.
Captains Lewis and Clark made careful records of the adventures they had and the strange things they saw and heard as they journeyed and camped across half the continent. Their diaries fill three thrilling volumes. During the first summer, Captain Clark jotted down in his journal: “The mosquitoes were so numerous that I could not keep them off my gun long enough to take sight, and by that means missed.” One morning Captain Lewis, who was away exploring by himself, awoke to find that he had a huge rattlesnake for a bedfellow. Another time they all lay down to sleep on a soft, dry sandbar, in the middle of the river. In the night the men on watch woke them. The strangest thing was happening. Whether they were lying on a quicksand or over an ancient volcano, their sandbar was sinking. It was so uncanny to feel the earth giving way under them that they trembled as they got into the boats—just in time to save their lives!
Of all the dwellers in those western wilds the grizzly bears seemed most to object to the white strangers who prowled about their country. Unlike the Indians, the grizzlies attacked the explorers. The great, angry brutes rushed up and stood on their hind legs, threatening the strangers with wicked eyes and red, wide-open jaws, and striking with their great clumsy paws. Some of the party brought back big bearskins as trophies of their hairbreadth escapes. The buffalo were almost as eager to look at their white visitors as the strangers were curious about them. A few of the awkward beasts would follow the travelers about as if fascinated. One night a blundering buffalo bull came into the camp, sniffing right and left, between the rows of sleepers. The travelers waked up and tried to teach that big bison better manners than to call on strange gentlemen at such unseemly hours.
The captains made several copies of the records of the trip and placed them in charge of different members of the party. One of these was carefully written on a kind of birch-bark paper which they believed would stand the hardest tests of time, dampness, and rough usage. They explored for a little distance up every river flowing into the Missouri and put down on their maps what they found out. They shot deer, antelope, and buffalo, and noted down what they could about all the small animals, and the birds, trees, fruits, flowers, soil, and minerals they found.
It took the explorers nearly six months to examine sixteen hundred miles of the Missouri Valley. They went into winter quarters among the Mandan tribe of Indians, building a stockade like a high picket-fence of logs, with cabins inside, near where Bismarck, North Dakota, now stands, and naming it Fort Mandan.