A $20 Purchase in Pittsburgh
In August 1803, while waiting for the keelboat to be completed at Pittsburgh, Meriwether Lewis acquired a large Newfoundland dog for twenty dollars—a substantial sum reflecting both the breed’s reputation and Lewis’s deliberate choice. The dog, named Seaman (long misread in transcriptions as “Scannon”), would become the only animal to travel the full route of the expedition from the Ohio River to the Pacific Ocean and back to St. Louis. Newfoundlands were prized as working dogs: webbed feet, water-resistant double coats, immense strength, and a docile temperament. All of these qualities would be tested over the next three years.
Hunter and Retriever on the Ohio
Within weeks of Seaman’s purchase, Lewis was already recording the dog’s working capabilities. During the descent of the Ohio in September 1803, the party encountered the seasonal mass migration of gray squirrels swimming the river. Lewis described how Seaman seized the opportunity:
My dog was of the newfoundland breed very active strong and docile, he would take the squirels in the water kill them and swimming bring them in the boat.
Lewis noted that the squirrel meat, fried, made “a pleasant food.” From the outset, then, Seaman functioned not as a pet but as a contributing member of the party.
Across the Plains: A Working Dog
References to Seaman accumulate as the expedition pushed up the Missouri. On 25 August 1804, Clark’s overland march to the Spirit Mound included the dog, but the August heat proved too much: “at 7 ms. the dog gave out & we Sent him back to the Creek.” The episode is a small but humanizing detail—even a Newfoundland had limits on the open prairie.
Above Fort Mandan in spring 1805, Seaman wandered off overnight, and Lewis’s journal records genuine alarm followed by relief. On 25 April 1805 Clark wrote that “the Dog which was lost yesterday, joined us this morning,” while Lewis confessed:
my dog had been absent during the last night, and I was fearfull we had lost him altogether, however, much to my satisfaction he joined us at 8 Oclock this morning.
By 5 May 1805 Seaman was again working actively in the food economy of the expedition; throughout the upper Missouri Lewis repeatedly notes him catching geese that, mid-molt, could not fly. On 21 July 1805, ascending toward the Three Forks, Lewis wrote: “my dog caught several today, as he frequently dose.”
The Beaver Bite
One of the most dangerous moments of Seaman’s career occurred in May 1805 along the Missouri in present-day Montana, when the dog was bitten by a beaver. The bite severed an artery in his hind leg, and Lewis feared the dog would bleed to death. The men, and Lewis himself, tended the wound through the night; Seaman survived but limped for days afterward. The detail with which Lewis recorded the event reveals the depth of his attachment.
Sentinel at Camp: The Buffalo Stampede
Seaman’s most consequential service may have come on the night of 29 May 1805, when a buffalo bull charged through the sleeping camp, narrowly missing the men’s heads and crashing over the pirogue. Lewis credited the dog’s barking with rousing the party in time. Seaman then drove the buffalo away from camp, preventing a second pass through the bedrolls. It was, by any measure, a life-saving alarm.
Suffering on the Portage
The summer of 1805 brought torments shared equally by men and dog. During the eighteen-mile portage around the Great Falls, prickly pear thorns drove deep into Seaman’s paws as they did into the men’s moccasins. Then came the mosquitoes. On 25 July 1805 Lewis recorded one of his most poignant lines about the animal:
My dog even howls with the torture he experiences from them.
The remark, set against Lewis’s usual restraint, registers the cumulative misery of the upper Missouri summer.
Pacific Winter and the Whale Blubber Comparison
At Fort Clatsop, Seaman appears less directly in the journals, but the dog—singular, beloved—coexisted there with another reality of the winter: the Corps had become almost wholly dependent on dog flesh purchased from Columbia River nations. Lewis admitted on 3 January 1806:
our party from necessaty having been obliged to subsist some lenth of time on dogs have now become extreemly fond of their flesh … for my own part I have become so perfectly reconciled to the dog that I think it an agreeable food.
Two days later, tasting whale blubber for the first time, he compared it to “the beaver or the dog in flavour.” The juxtaposition is striking: Seaman, the cherished individual, traveled within a culture in which dogs as a class were food. The journals never bridge this contradiction.
The Theft on the Columbia
On the return up the Columbia in April 1806, a group of Native men took Seaman from camp. Lewis’s reaction—recorded by Ordway and reflected in the supplementary expedition tradition—was uncharacteristically violent: he dispatched three armed men with orders to recover the dog or destroy the village. Seaman was returned without bloodshed. Throughout the expedition, several nations had offered horses to purchase him, and Lewis had always refused. The theft incident clarified the limit of his patience.
Hunting Companion to the End
Seaman continued working into the homeward summer. On 8 May 1806 along the Clearwater, Lewis recorded that Collins “wounded another [deer] which my dog caught at a little distance from the camp.” On 23 May 1806 Sergeant Pryor wounded a deer near a lick: “my dog pursud it into the river,” Lewis wrote, and the deer was driven back to shore where Pryor killed it. Crossing the Bitterroots in mid-June, Lewis noted on 7 July 1806—amid the harsh marches and beaver-dam meadows—simply that “my dog much worried.” It is the last clear, intimate glimpse of Seaman in the journals as preserved in this set.
Diplomatic Curiosity
Throughout the journey Seaman drew the attention of Native peoples, many of whom had never seen a dog of his size. The synthesizing entries (18 April 1805) note that Shoshone, Nez Perce, and Plains nations expressed astonishment, and that some offered three horses for him—offers Lewis consistently refused. His presence alongside Sacagawea and her infant also signaled, however unintentionally, that the party was not a war expedition.
The Limits of the Record
The journal record of Seaman is uneven. Lewis is by far the most attentive narrator; Clark mentions the dog only in passing (notably the lost-and-found episode of 25 April 1805 and the deer chase of 23 May 1806). After mid-July 1806 Seaman effectively disappears from the surviving entries in this corpus—his ultimate fate is not documented in the journals included here. What the record does preserve is unmistakable: a working animal who hunted, guarded, suffered, and accompanied Meriwether Lewis from the Ohio to the Pacific and most of the way home, mentioned with an affection Lewis rarely extended in writing to anything else.
