The expedition is usually said to have ended when the Corps of Discovery reached St. Louis on September 23, 1806 — but Lorna Hainesworth documents a little-known coda. Traveling east to brief President Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis went ahead of William Clark through the Cumberland Gap, the great pass where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee meet. There, on November 23, 1806, local gentlemen asked him to determine whether Dr. Thomas Walker’s old line — by then the Kentucky–Tennessee boundary — actually lay where it was supposed to.
The paper reconstructs the return party (Sheheke, or Big White, and his family; the Pierre Chouteau–led Osage delegation; Clark’s man York; privates Labiche and Frazier; and sergeants Gass and Ordway), the post roads they followed, and the long history of the Gap from Walker’s 1750 sighting through Daniel Boone’s Wilderness Road. It is a window onto Lewis the trained surveyor still at work, weeks after the journey west was over.
This summary is provided for reference on the Lewis and Clark Research archive; the full article by Lorna Hainesworth is available at the source link.
