What the journal records: Pittsburgh to Marietta

Meriwether Lewis pushed off from Pittsburgh at ten in the morning on August 31, 1803, in a 55-foot keelboat built too late in a dry summer, with his Newfoundland dog Seaman aboard. His so-called Eastern Journal — first published in Milo Quaife’s 1916 edition, and transcribed among this site’s journal entries from August 30, 1803 onward — records the miserable first weeks: dragging the boat over riffle after riffle, hiring horses and oxen from riverbank farmers to haul it through, and losing his first experiments to leaky canoes. In the first week of September the party worked past Georgetown and Steubenville, and spent September 7–9 at Wheeling taking on a pirogue and supplies.

Steubenville, Ohio, today
Terrain360's Steubenville riverfront capture – 244 panoramas of the reach Lewis worked down in early September 1803.
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The silent stretch: September 19 – November 10

Lewis’s journal breaks off after September 18, 1803, and no daily record by any hand survives for the next seven and a half weeks. The party’s movements are known instead from letters and later documents. They certainly passed the mouth of the Big Sandy — today’s Ashland, Kentucky — and the mouth of the Scioto at Portsmouth, Ohio in the last week of September, because the river was the only road; Lewis was in Cincinnati by September 28, where his October 3 letter to President Jefferson survives, full of the fossil bones he had just examined at Big Bone Lick.

Ashland, Kentucky, today
The Ashland landing on the Ohio, captured by Terrain360 – the Big Sandy confluence the party passed in late September 1803.
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The Ohio at Portsmouth, today
Terrain360's 1,586-panorama capture of the Ohio past the Scioto mouth at Portsmouth and New Boston.
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The Falls of the Ohio: the Corps is born

Lewis reached the Falls of the Ohio on October 14, 1803, and there the expedition became a partnership: William Clark came aboard at Clarksville with York, the man he enslaved, and the recruits history remembers as the Nine Young Men from Kentucky — among them Charles Floyd and Nathaniel Pryor. On October 26 the enlarged party pushed off from the Falls into a stretch of river where, once again, no journal survives.

The first camp below the Falls: West Point, Kentucky

Where did the Corps of Discovery spend its first night together on the river? No journal records it. Local and trail-community tradition — consistent with a day’s travel from Clarksville — places that first camp of October 26, 1803 at the mouth of the Salt River, where the town of West Point, Kentucky stands today beneath the bluff later crowned by Civil War–era Fort Duffield. We present it as exactly that: a well-rooted tradition on an undocumented stretch, not a journal fact.

West Point, Kentucky, today
The Salt River confluence at West Point – the traditional first camp below the Falls, captured by Terrain360.
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Fort Duffield, above the Salt River
The bluff over the confluence, today preserved as Fort Duffield park.
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The record resumes: Fort Massac to the Mississippi

Lewis’s journal picks up again on November 11, 1803 at Fort Massac, where the party engaged George Drouillard — the hunter and sign-language interpreter who would become one of its most valuable members. From November 14 the captains spent days at the Ohio–Mississippi confluence taking celestial observations before turning upstream for Camp Dubois. From here forward, the record on this site runs nearly unbroken to St. Louis in 1806.

Sources and method

Documented statements above rest on Lewis’s Eastern Journal (published in Quaife, 1916; public domain), the surviving 1803 journal entries transcribed on this site, and Lewis’s correspondence of the descent. The Salt River first-camp attribution is identified in the text as tradition. Undated passages within September 19 – November 10 are inferred from the geography of the river and the documented endpoints, and are worded accordingly. The 360° imagery is Terrain360’s capture of the Ohio today — explore the full river on the Trail Explorer.

The post Down the Ohio: The Expedition’s Forgotten First Leg appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.

Source: Thwaites, Original Journals (1904–05), Floyd’s journal. Public domain. Floyd died two days later, 20 August 1804.

The post Charles Floyd: August 18, 1804 appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.

Passed two Islands on the S. S. and at first Bluff on the S S. Serjeant Floyd Died with a great deel of Composure, before his death he Said to me, “I am going away” “I want you to write me a letter”— We buried him on the top of the bluff ½ Miles below a Small river to which we Gave his name, he was buried with the Honors of War much lamented; a Seeder post with the Name Sergt. C. Floyd died here 20th of August 1804 was fixed at the head of his grave— This Man at all times gave us proofs of his firmness and Determined resolution to doe Service to his Countrey and honor to himself after paying all the honor to our Decesed brother we Camped in the mouth of floyds river about 30 yards wide, a butifull evening.—

Source: Thwaites, Original Journals (1904–05). Public domain.

The post William Clark: August 20, 1804 appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.

Additional Lewis and Clark documents are preserved in the Draper Collection, one of the most significant manuscript collections relating to frontier history in the United States.

The post Wisconsin Historical Society — Charles Floyd Journal appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.

The post Sergeant Floyd’s Journal appeared first on Lewis & Clark Research Database.