The honor of being the first Americans to cross the western half of North America fell to the U.S. Army Corps of Discovery in an expedition led by Capt. Meriwether Lewis and Capt. William Clark.
Under the orders of Commander in Chief Thomas Jefferson, they started out 200 years ago, on May 14, 1804, to find a navigable waterway that would link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. They were instructed to claim the West and its wealth for the United States, expanding the power of the young country.
The party of about 30 men left the Mississippi River at St. Louis, launched their wooden boats and rowed upstream on the Missouri to its headwaters, traveling west through Indian country. The leader of the first Indians they met happened to be a brother to Sacajawea, the Indian woman who became their guide. Lewis and Clark hired Indian guides and horses and journeyed 300 miles over mountain trails to the headwaters of the Clearwater River.
Their expedition was actually a series of short runs end to end until they reached the Pacific Ocean. As the party traveled, members took time to observe their surroundings and make a record of what they found, from prairie dogs in their burrows to herds of buffalo grazing, from lights in the sky to seedlings in the soil. The journals they kept of their journey are largely the reason they are remembered and honored today. Their stirring tales of exploration caught the nation's imagination then, and they continue to do so.
During the first winter, they hired a French-Canadian fur trader and his wife, Sacajawea, to serve as guides and interpreters. William Clark helped the teenage Sacajawea give birth to a baby boy in the wintry fort. In return, she gave critical advice to the two army officers. She repaid Clark many times over by arranging with her Shoshone kinsmen for the expedition's safe passage over the Rockies.
At the headwaters of the Clearwater River, the company built canoes by hollowing out tree trunks. They used them to make their way down the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia rivers to the Pacific Ocean.
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Lewis and Clark — Walk with Them
The country that Lewis and Clark returned through was not the same country they had just crossed. Its rivers had been named, its plants and animals sketched and classified and its native people apprised of their new status as subjects of a distant government.
Only one man died on the trip. Even Sacajawea's son, only 2 months old when he became part of the trek, make the trip safely.
Having traveled 8,000 miles over a 28-month period, the corps returned to St. Louis on Sept. 23, 1806, to a hero's welcome.
Resources: www.time.com/time/2002/lewis_clark; "Rise of the American Nation," Harcourt, Brace's World Inc.