Editor's note: This article is tenth in a series. The author is following the trail of the Lewis and Clark expedition across the North American West. Along the way, he's reporting on 200th- anniversary events at pivotal locations, and on what happened all those years ago.
The Lewis and Clark expedition left Fort Mandan in what is now North Dakota on April 7, 1805. The expedition had waited out the winter in the Native American settlement before resuming their westward journey. For the first time Meriwether Lewis began making daily entries in his journal, while Capt. William Clark's entries tended thereafter simply to reflect or repeat what Lewis wrote.
Lewis clearly regarded their departure as a historic occasion. "Our vessels," he writes, "consisted of six small canoes, and two large pirogues. This little fleet, although not quite so respectable as those of Columbus or Captain Cook, were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs."
The keelboat, loaded with reports and mineral and animal specimens, left the same day for St. Louis, with Corporal Warfington in charge. He had four privates with him, plus the disgraced Moses Reed and John Newman, who had been discharged on the trip upriver. Reed had tried to desert the expedition, and Newman had begun to encourage a mutiny. Most of the French engages—hired boatmen—went back east with them.
The so-called permanent party—all those who were going to the Pacific—now numbered 32, not including Sacagawea's baby and Lewis's dog.
Lewis was proud of his little group, and thrilled to be on his way. "Entertaining … the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten years of my life," he writes, "I could but esteem this moment of our departure as among the most happy of my life."
"The party," he added, "are in excellent health and spirits, zealously attached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed; not a whisper of murmur or discontent to be heard among them, but all act in unison, and with the most perfect harmony."
They would need to act in harmony as the voyage proceeded. "We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden, " Lewis writes.
All knowledge of it, indeed, was pure conjecture. The geographers of the time believed that the Rocky Mountains consisted of a single ridgeline, easily crossed. Nobody knew that Lewis and Clark would have to cross nearly 200 miles (320 kilometers) of the most rugged terrain in North America to reach the Pacific.
But never mind the mountains; their first enemy was the wind. All through April and into May the explorers labored through North Dakota and into eastern Montana, making 20 miles (32 kilometers) or so on good days, only 6 miles (10 kilometers), sometimes less, on bad.
Whether the days were good or bad depended entirely on the wind. Spring is the season of wind on the High Plains. There are no trees or mountains to obstruct the wind, and it mostly blows from the west and north, making waves on the Missouri River sometimes 2 or 3 feet (0.6 to 0.9 meter) high, flooding the dugout canoes.
It was the hardest of work to make headway against it. Some days the wind blew so hard the explorers simply had to stay where they were, in camp.
|
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES
|
