Day-by-Day

September 13, 1803

Marietta, Ohio

Memorial Archive Originally published at lewis-clark.org. Authored by Robert Heacock (1957–2025); preserved here with permission of his family. Read the original →

Marietta

Marrietta is at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio and chiefly on the east side of Muskingum . . . . There appears to be several good brick buildings in the town and near it and several very cleaver frame buildings . . . . The streets run parrellel one way with the Ohio and the other way with the Muskingum, crossing at right angles.
—Thomas Rodney (September 23, 1803)[1]Dwight L. Smith and Ray Swick, ed., A Journey Through the West: Thomas Rodney’s 1803 Journal from Delaware to the Mississippi Territory (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), 67-69.

Muskingum [mus KING gum] may be from the Shawnee (Algonquian) /məškeekwaaməčki/ meaning “where the land is swampy.”[2]William Bright, Native American Placenames of the United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 304.

Passenger Pigeons

Ectopistes migratorius

Scientific illustration of two birds

Watercolor by John James Audubon.

Lewis and Reubin Field lunched on a few passenger pigeons at Camp Disappointment on 25 July 1806. That they and our forebears could eat an entire species into extermination, was not conceivable then. For that matter, extinction as a scientific concept was not yet proven either. See Thoughts on Extinction.

Letter to Jefferson

On board my boat opposite Marietta
September 13th 1803.

I arrived here at 7. P.M. and shall pursue my journey early tomorrow. This place is one hundred miles distant from Wheeling, from whence in descending the water is reather more abundant than it is between that place and Pittsburgh, insomuch that I have been enabled to get on without the necessity employing oxen or horses to drag my boat over the ripples except in two instances . . . .

MERIWETHER LEWIS. Capt.
1st U.S. Regt. Infty.[3]Donald Jackson, ed. Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents: 1783-1854, 2nd ed., (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 124.

Related: Thomas Jefferson | Yokes: Instruments and Metaphors

Pigeons and Squirrels

observid many pigeons passing over us pursuing a south East course. The squirrels still continue to cross the river from N. W. to S. E.—
—Meriwether Lewis

Related: Birds of the Expedition | Eastern Gray Squirrels

 

Notes

Notes
↑1 Dwight L. Smith and Ray Swick, ed., A Journey Through the West: Thomas Rodney’s 1803 Journal from Delaware to the Mississippi Territory (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997), 67-69.
↑2 William Bright, Native American Placenames of the United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 304.
↑3 Donald Jackson, ed. Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents: 1783-1854, 2nd ed., (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 124.

About this archive. Robert Heacock contributed extensively to the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation's lewis-clark.org. After his passing in July 2025, this database has preserved his writings as a memorial archive. The original article remains the canonical source: https://lewis-clark.org/day-by-day/13-sep-1803/.

See more of Robert's work: Robert Heacock contributor page · All Heacock writings.

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