Expedition place · September 6, 1803
Steubenville
1 journal entry · Recorded by Meriwether Lewis
Terrain360 · the place today
Steubenville in 360°
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What happened here
Fog held the boat until half past seven. In two and a half miles the crew met four riffles and dragged the boat over three of them with horses, for which the owner charged two dollars. Under sail they passed Steubenville at two in the afternoon, six miles below the night’s camp.
Lewis described the town as small, well built and thriving, with several respectable families, where five years earlier there had been wilderness. It had been laid out in 1797 or 1798 on the site of Fort Steuben, a federal blockhouse of the late 1780s that was gone years before Lewis passed. He does not mention the fort, and he does not say that he landed.
Two miles below the town a squall on a riffle broke the sprit of the mainsail, and with his men worn out Lewis again sent out for horses or oxen. The oxen drew badly but got the boat over two more riffles, and the party camped on the west bank about four miles below the town, having made ten miles.
In the journal
Stewbenville a small town situated on the Ohio in the State of Ohio about six miles above Charlestown in Virginia and 24 above Wheeling
is [a] small well built thriving place has several respectable families residing in it, five years since it was a wilderness
Read the full research
- Pittsburgh to Wheeling, 1803: Lewis’s First Ten Days on the Ohio August 31 to September 9, 1803: Lewis’s descent of the upper Ohio, riffle by riffle, from his own journal, with the places, the people he met, and what the record leaves open.
Sources
- Meriwether Lewis, journal, September 6, 1803, in Milo M. Quaife, ed., The Journals of Captain Meriwether Lewis and Sergeant John Ordway (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1916), 36-37, and Quaife’s note on the town, 37. (opens in a new tab)
- Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, vol. 2 (University of Nebraska Press), editor’s notes to the entry of September 6, 1803. (opens in a new tab)
- William Hawes, Ohio State Gazetteer (1860), Steubenville, transcribed by Jefferson County OHGenWeb. (opens in a new tab)
Updated October 13, 2026
The journal entries written here
September 1803
Nights the Corps camped here
- Sep 6, 1803 Wabash Bridge, west bank (Lewis’s party) Entries for Sep 6, 1803
NPS campsite reconstruction (Bergantino; Harlan where he is the only source). Source: National Park Service, Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Park Atlas.
