Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (65 page)

After several years of rumors, plots, and threats of war, a group of American settlers in the summer of 1810 rebelled against what remained of Spanish rule in West Florida. Believing they were justified by Napoleon’s takeover of the Bourbon regime in Spain, the rebels marched on the fort at Baton Rouge, declared themselves to be the independent Republic of West Florida, and requested annexation by the United States. Despite protests from the European powers, the Madison administration
proclaimed the annexation of West Florida and then made the region part of the Territory of Orleans, defending its controversial actions as the delayed carrying out of the purchase of Louisiana. Three years later, in 1813, American troops occupied the last remaining piece of West Florida, the Mobile district that ran to the Perdido River.

From the outset Jefferson had had his eye on not only all the rest of the Floridas but also Cuba, Mexico’s provinces, and Canada. When all of these territories became part of the United States, he said, “we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation.” It was America’s destiny. He was “persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self government.”
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J
EFFERSON HAD BEEN FASCINATED
with expansion into the West from an early age. He had read everything he could about the region and was probably the best-informed American on the territory beyond the Mississippi. When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, he was already dreaming of explorations to the Pacific. In 1783 he asked the Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark to lead a privately sponsored expedition to explore the West, but Clark declined. When Jefferson was minister to France he encouraged the extravagant and ill-fated hopes of Connecticut-born John Ledyard to cross Siberia and reach the western coast of North America; from there Ledyard was supposed to travel east across the continent to the Atlantic. Ledyard reached Siberia but was arrested by Catherine the Great in 1788, brought back to Moscow, and expelled from the country. While in Egypt, he continued to write Jefferson about the value of travel in correcting the errors of historians; he died during a voyage up the Nile in 1789 at age thirty-seven.
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Later as secretary of state in the Washington administration Jefferson supported several plans for expeditions up the Missouri, including backing the plans of the French immigrant and naturalist André Michaux to journey to the Pacific; these went nowhere when Michaux got caught up in Citizen Genet’s shenanigans. In 1792 an American sea trader from Rhode Island, Captain Robert Gray, discovered and named the Columbia River, and after the Nootka Sound controversy Captain George Vancouver of the British navy and the Canadian trader Alexander Mackenzie
began staking British claims to the northwest portion of the continent and threatening to take complete control of the fur trade in the Columbia River area. In 1792–1793 Mackenzie in fact made the first crossing of the continent north of Mexico, at least by a white man.

Mackenzie’s account of his expedition published in 1801 was apparently what jogged President Jefferson into action. Well before he had any inkling that America would purchase the whole Louisiana Territory, the president laid plans for an ostensibly scientific but also a covert military and commercial expedition into the Spanish-held trans-Mississippi West. “The idea that you are going to explore the Mississippi has been generally given out,” Jefferson informed the leader of the expedition. “It satisfies public curiosity and masks sufficiently the real destination,” which was the Pacific.
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To lead this Western expedition, Jefferson in 1802 selected his private secretary, Meriwether Lewis, an army veteran. Lewis had volunteered for a Jefferson-planned expedition of 1793 that never came off and undoubtedly had conveyed to Jefferson in numerous conversations his desire to explore the West. It was an excellent choice. As Jefferson explained to Dr. Benjamin Rush, “Capt. Lewis is brave, prudent, habituated to the woods, & familiar with Indian manners & character.” Although Lewis was “not regularly educated,” he knew enough about nature to select and describe flora and fauna that were new. And what he did not know he could learn. Jefferson sent Lewis off to Philadelphia for crash courses in astronomy, natural history, medicine, map-making, lunar navigation, and ethnology with several scientific experts. He was told to learn all he could about the Indians, from their sexual habits to their feelings of melancholy and tendencies to suicide.
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Lewis wanted a co-commander and selected his old army friend William Clark, younger brother of the Indian fighter George Rogers Clark, who had declined Jefferson’s earlier request to lead an expedition. Clark was four years older than Lewis and had been Lewis’s immediate superior for a time, but in 1796 he had resigned his captain’s commission and was engaged in family business in the Ohio Valley when he received Lewis’s invitation. Since the army regulations for the expedition provided for only a lieutenant as the second officer, Clark did not get his captain’s commission back. But Lewis was determined that Clark be treated as
his equal and kept the lieutenancy a secret from the men of the expedition.
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Having co-commanders was an extraordinary experiment in cooperation, in violation of all army ideas of chain of command, but it worked. Lewis and Clark seem never to have quarreled and only rarely disagreed with one another. They complemented each other beautifully. Clark had been a company commander and had explored the Mississippi. He knew how to handle enlisted men and was a better surveyor, map-maker, and waterman than Lewis. Where Lewis was apt to be moody and sometimes wander off alone, Clark was always tough, steady, and reliable. Best of all, the two captains were writers: they wrote continually, describing in often vivid and sharp prose much of what they encountered—plants, animals, people, weather, geography, and unusual experiences.

So much about the land beyond the Mississippi remained unknown or wrongly understood that no one could prepare fully for what lay ahead. Although Jefferson had the most extensive library in the world on the geography, cartography, natural history, and ethnology of the American West, he nevertheless assumed in 1800 that the Rockies were no higher than the Blue Ridge Mountains, that mammoths and other prehistoric creatures still roamed along the upper Missouri among active volcanoes, that a huge mile-long mountain of pure salt lay somewhere on the Great Plains, that the Western Indians may have been the lost tribes of Israel or wandering Welshmen, and, most important, that there was a water route, linked by a low portage across the mountains, that led to the Pacific—the long-sought northwest passage.

Lewis and Clark set out from St. Louis on May 14, 1804, with forty or so men, including Clark’s black slave, York. They traveled up the Missouri and by October reached the villages of the Mandan Indians, in present-day North Dakota, where they decided to spend the winter of 1804–1805.

Since fur traders had penetrated this far up the Missouri, the expedition had not yet covered completely unknown ground. Lewis and Clark spent time during this first stage of the journey dealing with some disciplinary problems and the death of a sergeant from appendicitis—the only member of the company to die on the journey. Although they had a nearly violent confrontation with the Teton Sioux in present-day South Dakota, most of the time the captains left the Indians they met more bewildered than angry.

The translation problems were immense. The Indians would speak to an Indian in the expedition who then spoke to someone who could only
speak French who then passed on what he heard to someone who understood French but also spoke English. Only then could Lewis and Clark finally find out what the Indians had originally said. Their reply, of course, had to repeat the process in reverse. Laborious as conversation with the Indians was, Lewis and Clark worked out an elaborate ceremony for all the Indian tribes they encountered, informing them that the United States had taken over the territory and that their new father, “the great Chief the President,” was “the only friend to whom you can now look for protection, or from whom you can ask favours, or receive good counciles, and he will take care to serve you, & and not deceive you.”
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After what became the standard speech to the Indians, the captains distributed presents—beads, brass buttons, tomahawks, axes, moccasin awls, scissors, and mirrors, as well as U.S. flags and medals with Jefferson’s visage.

The Corps of Discovery, as the expedition was called, spent the winter of 1804–1805 in a fort it constructed near the Mandan villages. In April 1805 Lewis and Clark sent back their heavy keelboat and some enlisted men to St. Louis along with a written report, a map, and some botanical, mineral, and animal specimens to be delivered to President Jefferson. Joining the party now was the Shoshone woman Sacagawea with her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, a French-Canadian river man, and their infant son. Sacagawea and Charbonneau were to prove invaluable as translators during the next stages of the journey. In addition, the presence of Sacagawea and her baby was a sign to the Indians met by the Corps that the explorers came in peace.

In six canoes and two pirogues the Corps of thirty-three set out on April 7, 1805, to proceed up the Missouri to the Rockies. Even though Lewis, as he wrote in his journal, was about “to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civillized man had never trodden, the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine,” he could not have been happier. “This little fleet,” he said, “altho’ not quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook, were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs; and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for their safety and preservation.”
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Despite his happiness in getting his expedition going once again in April 1805, Lewis scarcely realized how arduous the rest of the journey to the Pacific would be. It took the party four months just to get to the
Rockies, including a monthlong portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri. The men suffered badly from eating their virtually all-meat diet. Lewis tended to give the ailing soldiers some of the fifty dozen pills that Dr. Benjamin Rush had prescribed for the journey. Generally referred to as “Thunderclappers,” the pills were composed of a variety of drugs, each of which was a powerful purgative.

By the time the party reached the Continental Divide on the present Montana–Idaho border in August 1805, Lewis (who turned thirty-one on August 18) realized that there would be no simple portage to the waters of the Columbia. Although the commanders did not know it, they could scarcely have picked a more difficult place to cross the Rockies. From Sacagawea’s Shoshone tribe the expedition got guides and horses for the journey across what one sergeant called “the most terrible mountains I ever beheld.”
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The crossing of Lolo Pass in the Bitterroots was the expedition’s worst experience. Beset by snow and hail, exhausted and half-starved, the men killed their horses and drank melted snow for nourishment. Yet the expedition made 160 miles in eleven days, an incredible feat.

On September 22, 1805, the party finally reached the country of the Nez Percé Indians on the Clearwater River in Idaho, where it built canoes for the trip down the Clearwater, the Snake, and the Columbia to the Pacific. On November 7, 1805, though the group was still in the estuary of the Columbia, Clark described what he saw: “
Ocian in view
! O! the joy! . . . Ocian 4142 Miles from the Mouth of
Missouri
R.”
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The men built Fort Clatsop on the south side of the Columbia estuary, where the captains spent a long wet winter writing descriptions of nature and the Indians and making a map. In March 1806 they began their return, and spent a month with the Nez Percé waiting for the snow to melt in the Rockies. After crossing the mountains, Lewis and Clark separated. Lewis explored the Marias River in present Montana while Clark traveled down the Yellowstone River. On their trip Lewis and his men ran into a party of Blackfoot Indians, who tried to steal their horses. In the only real violence of the expedition, Lewis and his men killed two of the Indians and were lucky to escape with their lives.

Reunited in North Dakota, the captains revisited the Mandan villages where they had wintered in 1804–1805. They left Sacagawea and her husband and child with the Mandans and moved rapidly down the Missouri to St. Louis, arriving on September 23, 1806. From the time they had
originally set out from St. Louis, they had been gone two years and four months. Nearly everyone had given them up for lost—except Jefferson.

The Lewis and Clark expedition was the greatest adventure of exploration in American history. But it was more than that. In addition to opening up a fur-trading empire in the West and strengthening America’s claim to the Oregon Country, the explorers had brought back a wealth of scientific information. They had discovered and described 178 new plants and 122 species and subspecies of animals. By systematically recording all they had seen, they introduced new approaches to exploration that affected all future expeditions. Their marvelous journals influenced all subsequent writing on the American West.

Unfortunately, however, the explorers were unable to get their manuscripts ready for publication. Lewis, who was appointed governor of the Louisiana Territory, became involved in establishing a fur company and other get-rich schemes and apparently began drinking heavily, taking drugs, and running up debts. He was so deeply depressed that on a trip back from St. Louis to Washington in 1809 he committed suicide. He was thirty-five.