Lewis & Clark Exposition 1905

William Clark was born on August 1, 1770, near Charlottesville, Virginia, the sixth son of plantation owners John and Ann Rogers Clark.

After the Revolutionary War, the Clark family moved to Kentucky, which at the time was on the western edge of Euro American settlement.

William Clark spent his teenage years on the frontier, learning outdoor skills from his famous brother, Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark, and other frontiersmen.

At age 19 he joined the Kentucky militia to fight against the Indians of the Ohio Valley, then trying to prevent whites from settling their lands.

In 1792, Clark transferred to the regular army, where he furthered his frontier education and obtained valuable command experience.

Three years later he met a young officer by the name of Meriwether Lewis.

The two Virginian Republicans struck up a lasting friendship.

In 1803, while living in Indiana, Clark received a letter from his old friend Lewis, by then a captain in the army. In this historic document, Lewis invited Clark to help him lead an exploratory expedition across the continent.

Clark eagerly accepted the offer.

Although Clark, who had resigned his commission in 1796, was technically only reinstated at the rank of lieutenant, both he and Lewis shared leadership of the Corps of Discovery.

Clark was also the Expedition’s cartographer, producing dozens of maps of previously uncharted areas.

Upon the return of the Expedition to the United States, President Thomas Jefferson appointed Clark brigadier general of the militia and superintendent of Indian affairs for Louisiana Territory.

Clark spent his later years serving in various political offices—including governor of Missouri Territory—and speculating in fur trade enterprises.

He died of natural causes on September 1, 1838, and was interred on his nephew’s farm outside of St. Louis.

*2 Meriwether Lewis was born in Albemarle County, Virginia, on August 18, 1774, the son of wealthy plantation owners William and Lucy Lewis.

Meriwether never got to know his father, who died while in the service of the Revolutionary Army, but he remained quite close to his mother for the rest of his life.

As the oldest son, Lewis inherited the family plantation, almost 2,000 acres of land worked by two dozen slaves.

Historian Stephen Ambrose writes that although the youthful Lewis was good at running the family plantation, what he really wanted to do was “roam and explore.”

He would get his chance in 1794, when he joined the militia during the so-called Whiskey Rebellion, a failed tax revolt led by frontier farmers upset over excise taxes on whiskey.

The revolt was soon put down and shortly thereafter Lewis enlisted as a regular in the army.

In 1801, President Thomas Jefferson, a fellow Republican and Virginian, asked Lewis, by then a captain in the army, whether he would serve as his personal secretary.

Lewis eagerly accepted, setting the stage for what would be his life’s greatest achievement. Impressed with young Meriwether’s abilities and innate intelligence, in 1803 Jefferson chose him to lead the nation’s most important exploratory expedition to date.

From 1804 to 1806, Lewis and co-captain William Clark led almost three dozen men across half the continent, from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back again.

Lewis returned a hero and was appointed governor of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory.

He found find little pleasure in administering this vast territory, though. Moreover, his mental health began to deteriorate.

He died in Tennesee on October 11, 1809, while traveling to Washington, D.C., apparently the victim of his own hand.

Charged by Thomas Jefferson with recording the names of Native communities and estimating the size of their populations, Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark dutifully took note of the number of inhabitants in each of the Native settlements they passed on their way to the Pacific.

Lewis and Clark compiled these numbers during their long stay at Fort Clatsop into what scholars call the Codex 1 version of the Estimate of Western Indians.

This version was later modified and published in the 1905 Thwaites edition of the Lewis and Clark journals, reproduced here.

The two versions of the estimate—the Codex 1 version and the published version—differ widely in their estimates of the Indian population west of the Rocky Mountains. In the Codex 1 version, for example, Lewis and Clark estimate that 9,140 Native people lived along the Columbia River from Celilo Falls downstream to the Pacific Ocean, including the large communities on Sauvie Island.

In the published version shown here, however, the number given for the same area is 14,890, significantly larger than the Codex 1 version.

Anthropologists Robert Boyd and Yvonne Hajda argue that the Codex 1 estimate represents the winter population on the Columbia, while the published version represents the spring population.

When the Expedition made its way back up the Columbia in April 1806, river villages would have been swelled by inland visitors partaking in the spring salmon runs, warmly welcomed by people who had lived for months on dried foods.

While the Columbia River region was rich in natural resources, these resources were not present in all places at all times.

Plant and animal foods were only available during certain times of the year, and Native peoples adjusted their seasonal schedule accordingly, following the resources as they became available.

This seasonal movement, Boyd and Hajda argue, explains the divergent numbers found in the two versions of the estimate.

Over the course of their two-year exploration of western North America, Lewis and Clark handed out several dozen medals to Indian leaders both as tokens of peace and as symbols of the expanding territorial claims of the American nation.

These medals came in three sizes—55mm, 75mm, and 105mm—and were handed out according to the perceived prestige of an Indian leader, larger medals going to more important chiefs and smaller medals going to secondary chiefs.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that the practice of handing out medals to prospective allies was “an ancient custom from time immemorial.”

The medals were “marks of friendship to those who come to see us, or who do us good offices, conciliatory of their good will towards us, and not designed to produce a contrary disposition towards others.”

In 1899, the newly formed Oregon Historical Society acquired one of the small medals Lewis and Clark had handed out nearly a century before.

Although in poor shape, the Jefferson peace medal was one of the few surviving material reminders that the Corps of Discovery had passed through the Pacific Northwest.

Soon after receiving the rare artifact, the Society adopted the design on the back of the medal as its seal, which is still in use today.

The provenance of the medal in the Society’s collection is unclear.

It was given to the Society by Winslow B. Ayer, a prominent Portland businessman who had received it from Major Edwin MacNeill.

MacNeill had worked in Oregon as a railroad executive in the 1890s.

The limited written evidence suggests that a railroad survey crew found the medal sometime in the 1880s, perhaps on an island near Wallula, Washington, though a conflicting account reports that the medal was found on Idaho’s Nez Perce Reservation.

The Indians to whom Lewis and Clark gave the medals had mixed reactions to the gifts.

In February 1806, for example, Clark wrote that when they gave a small medal to Tâh-cum, a Chinookan headman at the mouth of the Columbia, he “Seamed much pleased.”

A couple months later, the captains gave another medal to an unnamed Chinookan headman further upriver, but he was apparently unimpressed with the gift, which he “soon transfered to his wife.”

The Hidatsa of the northern Plains had an even more negative reaction to the medals.

Resentful of the strangers’ arrogant behavior, the Hidatsa gave the medals they had received to their enemies hoping that they would bring them bad luck.

*5 This image depicts James Monroe, Francois de Barbé-Marbois, and Robert Livingston signing the treaty for the purchase of Louisiana at Paris in 1803.

It is taken from Joseph Gaston’s 1912 Centennial History of Oregon.

During the 1780s and 1790s, settlers from the newly established United States began moving in ever increasing numbers into the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys.

They faced a major geographic problem, however.

The Americans needed access to the primary transportation conduit of the region, the Mississippi River, if their economy was to develop to its fullest potential.

A 1795 treaty between the United States and Spain recognized the American right to utilize the Mississippi for commercial purposes, but many Americans were aggravated by what they considered to be excessive Spanish regulation and taxation.

Although France was the first European power to settle the Louisiana Territory, a vaguely defined region roughly encompassing the Mississippi River Basin, they had ceded the area to the Spanish Empire in 1762.

It was under Spain’s rule that New Orleans, the gateway to the Mississippi, rose to dominance.

By 1800, the city exercised an unrivaled degree of control over the Mississippi trade.

American rhetoric became increasingly heated around 1800 as they debated what to do about the “Mississippi Question,” particularly after it became known that Spain had secretly ceded Louisiana back to France in 1802.

President Thomas Jefferson declared that any foreign nation that possessed New Orleans was the United States’ “natural and habitual enemy,” and in 1803, the U.S. Senate authorized the president to arm 80,000 militiamen to take the city by force if necessary.

Partly to head off this seemingly inevitable conflict, Jefferson sent an ambassador, Robert Livingston, to France to see if Napoleon would be willing to sell part of the Louisiana Territory.

To the Americans’ surprise, the French emperor’s negotiators offered to sell all of the massive territory for $15 million, a bargain even in those days.

Knowing Jefferson’s mind, Livingston and special envoy James Monroe eagerly accepted the offer.

Jefferson found out about the deal on July 3, 1803, and the next day it was announced to the public.

The territorial claims of the United States immediately doubled in size, though it would take decades of warfare with various Native groups before much of the region was finally brought under American control.

Patrick Gass, a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, is shown in this photograph, the original of which was probably taken around 1860.

Gass’ left eye, which he lost in the 1810s, has probably been modified by the photographer.

Patrick Gass was born in Falling Springs, Pennsylvania, on June 12, 1771.

He spent his early adulthood on the frontier, serving time in the militia and the regular army, and working as a carpenter’s apprentice.

In the summer of 1803 Gass was serving in the U.S. Army in Kaskaskia, Illinois Territory, where he met a young captain by the name of Meriwether Lewis.

The captain, impressed with Gass’ abilities, offered him a position on an exploratory expedition he was leading. Gass eagerly accepted the offer.

Three months into the Expedition Sergeant Charles Floyd died suddenly, probably of appendicitis.

Gass was promoted to the rank of sergeant after the men elected him to replace Floyd.

Noted for his carpentry skills, Gass probably supervised the construction of the Expedition’s three winter quarters, Fort Dubois, Fort Mandan, and Fort Clatsop.

He also made dugout canoes at several points during the Expedition and constructed wagons to help portage equipment around the Great Falls of the Missouri.

Gass was one of only six or seven Expedition members to keep a journal, leaving a terse but useful record of his experiences.

Soon after returning from the Expedition, Gass contacted Philadelphia bookseller David McKeehan and arranged to have his journal published, much to the chagrin of Lewis, who was busy editing the official account of the journey.

A heavily edited version of Gass’ account, the original of which has been lost, was published in 1807, the first publicly available record of the Expedition.

This work was responsible for popularizing the term “Corps of Discovery,” which appeared on the title page.

Gass is also noteworthy for being one of only two Expedition members to have their photograph taken.

At the age of 98, he was also the last living member of the Corps of Discovery.

He died in April 1870 near Wellsburg, West Virginia, a few months before his ninety-ninth birthday.

 Little is known about York’s early life.

He was probably born in Virginia in the early 1770s, the son of Old York and Rose, both of whom were slaves owned by planter John Clark.

The Clark family moved to Kentucky in 1784, taking with them twelve slaves, including young York.

York was about the same age as the youngest Clark son, William, and was selected as his companion and later as his manservant.

William inherited York when John Clark died in 1799.

Black studies scholar Darrell Millner argues that William Clark’s 1803 decision to include York in the Corps of Discovery was not made lightly.

He notes that many prospective candidates were rejected and that only “robust (Young Back Woodsmen of character) helthy hardy young men,” as Clark expressed it, were chosen for the Expedition.

York’s contributions to the Expedition are noted throughout the Lewis and Clark journals.

He helped prepare shelters, hunted game, portaged around rapids, scouted travel routes, carried meat back to camp, and otherwise participated in all of the other daily activities required of Corps members.

York also made important contributions to the diplomatic efforts of the Corps.

On a number of occasions Lewis and Clark refer to the Indians’ fascination with York, the first person of African descent most of them had encountered.

Historians once believed Clark freed York shortly after the Expedition concluded in the fall of 1806, but documents discovered in 1988 tell another story.

York was still enslaved in May 1809, when Clark wrote that he had given him a “severe trouncing” for his insolence and sulkiness, possibly stemming from York’s forced separation from his wife the previous year.

Clark had York incarcerated, then hired him out to a severe master in Kentucky.

Clark did eventually free York sometime in the 1810s, after which the former slave almost completely disappears from the historical record.

In 1832, Clark recalled that York had become a wagoneer and had died of cholera, but another tradition has York returning West to live with the Crow Indians, where he supposedly became a village headman, living well into old age.

Related Historical References: Thanks to PBS.org for their use of much of this material.

Ambrose, Stephen E. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Steffen, Jerome O. William Clark: Jeffersonian Man on the Frontier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977.

Lifelong Learning Online, The Lewis & Clark Rediscovery Project

Meinig, D.W. The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Vol. 2: Continental America, 1800-1867. New Haven, Conn, 1993.

Rodriguez, Junius P., ed. The Louisiana Purchase: A Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, Calif., 2002.

Moulton, Gary, ed. The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition: The Journal of Patrick Gass, May 14, 1804-September 23, 1806. Lincoln, Nebr., 1996.

Taranik, Jeanette D. “The Patrick Gass Photographs and Portraits: A Sequel.” We Proceeded On 6, 1980: 16-19.