Reliving Lewis and Clark: Surviving Winter Camp

Anthony Brandt
for National Geographic News

February 3, 2004

"The Object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river & such
principal stream of it as by it's course and communication with the
waters of the Pacific ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado
or any other river may offer the most direct & practicable water
communication across this continent for the purpose of
commerce."—President Thomas Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis,
leader of the "Corps of Discovery," June 20, 1803.

These words
launched one of the greatest explorations in history. Now, on the
200th anniversary of the expedition to open up the U.S. West, author
Anthony Brandt follows the trail of Lewis and Clark. In this article
he looks at what's being reenacted in 2004 at the same spot where the
expedition was exactly two centuries ago, and recounts what happened
all those years ago.

Some of the men who are reenacting the expedition of Lewis and Clark are living now in the replica of the camp that Lewis and Clark and their men set up at the mouth of the Wood River in Illinois, 200 years ago.

The contemporary Camp Dubois is located about two miles (three kilometers) from the original because the Mississippi River has moved east by three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) in the last 200 years. In the process it wiped out the original site.

Scott Mandrell, a teacher who lives and works in St. Louis, has taken a three-year leave of absence from his job to play the role of Meriwether Lewis on the trip and he reports that they have a firing range at the camp, just as Lewis and Clark did, and they engage in target practice several times a week.

They also conduct video conferences with schools around the country, and the men keep a journal on the Internet. Mandrell says that they're having a good time. "Camp Dubois," he says, "was the most civilized of the expedition's winter camps. They had glass in the windows of the cabins they built for themselves." They're eating venison and salt pork, just as Lewis and Clark's men did, but Mandrell says that people will often stop by at six in the morning with a couple of dozen donuts, or late at night with pizza. Lewis and Clark definitely did not eat pizza.

Giant Catfish

Lewis and Clark ate venison and rabbit, turkeys, possum, and sometimes catfish—and lots of turnips, a staple of their diet there. One species of catfish in the Mississippi grew to weigh nearly 200 pounds (90 kilograms), more than enough to feed the entire camp and bring in the neighbors as well.

They had neighbors at Camp Dubois. Nearby was a small settlement of frontier families. Local people sometimes came to the camp for shooting contests with expedition members. Because the members took target practice every day, they were excellent marksmen. These were betting contests, and the locals almost always walked away with empty pockets. At one point in his journal, William Clark describes the members of the expedition as "robust young backwoodsmen of character, healthy hardy young men."

They were healthy, they were hardy, and they were also difficult to control. Lewis and Clark were often away in St. Louis or other nearby towns taking care of the expedition's business—buying supplies for the long tough journey up the Missouri River, looking for information about the river from men who had been partway up it before them, and dealing with agents of the Spanish government, which was still in charge in St. Louis.

While they were gone they placed one of their most reliable men, Sgt. John Ordway, in charge, but some of the men refused to obey him from time to time, usually when they were drunk.

Drunkenness

Drunkenness, in fact, was a real problem that winter. Men would get permission to go hunting, then go off to a nearby tavern instead and get drunk. One man loaded his gun and threatened to kill Ordway. Other men got into fistfights. Some men were demoted from higher ranks because of their behavior and others were kicked out of the expedition entirely. They had to beg their way back into the Corps of Discovery, as it was known.

Although there were small settlements nearby, much of the surrounding land was still wilderness. The men hunted for most of their food. Men were assigned to hunt nearly every day, even in bad weather. During much of January the weather was bad, with temperatures sometimes dropping below zero degrees Fahrenheit (minus 17 degrees Celsius).

Once in a while somebody would get lost in the woods and have to spend the night outdoors. They were backwoodsmen, however, so they knew how to do that without freezing to death or even coming to harm. Clark fell through the surface of a small pond one day and got his feet wet. On his way back to camp he noticed that his shoes had frozen to his feet.

Men did get sick under these circumstances. Clark was sick several times that winter, possibly with malaria, a disease which, once you get it, you never quite get rid of it. They had no doctors and medical science was in its infancy in any case, so they had no way of diagnosing their illness. The usual treatment was laxatives—either the famous Rush's pills, a mixture of calomel and jalap, a Mexican root; or Lewis's favorite, walnut bark. Lewis' mother was an herbal healer and knew what roots and plants helped in different cases, and Lewis used what he had learned from her on the expedition.

A considerable number of Indians lived in the area and they sometimes came by the camp to sell food, usually deer they had killed, or to ask for food. The Kickapoo had decided to cross the Mississippi in March and attack the Osage, and one thing Lewis and Clark did that winter was to try—successfully—to keep that from happening.

But in general the two captains spent the winter preparing for the trip to come that would start in the spring.

Scott Mandrell is doing the same. He spends about the same amount of time at the new Camp Dubois that Lewis spent at the old. His aim, he says, is "to walk the walk that Meriwether Lewis walked as faithfully as possible over the next couple of years."

The Corps of Discovery left Camp Dubois on May 14, 1804, and so will the reenactors. It should be fun to follow their progress.

Editor's note: Anthony Brandt will be sending us regular articles that follow the progress of the Corps of Discovery reenactors. You can follow their progress—and read Brandt's lively accounts of what the real Corps of Discovery did and encountered 200 years ago—right here on National Geographic News.