The Lewis and Clark Research Database is a working scholarly archive of the Corps of Discovery — the first United States military exploration of the American West. It compiles primary-source journals, key-figure profiles, tribal histories, treaty records, wildlife and art collections, and an extensive cross-reference layer that ties every named person, place, animal, and artifact across the entire 1803–1806 record.
This site is maintained by the Lewis and Clark Trust, Inc. and combines transcribed primary sources, scholarly editions in the public domain, AI-assisted modernization and analysis (each clearly flagged), and the official trail data published by the National Park Service. Every AI-generated artifact is editor-reviewable.
What’s in the database right now
AI-modernized translations
Original spelling preserved alongside
How to explore
- Browse journal entries — filter by date, narrator, or search the text. Each entry shows the original OCR’d transcription alongside an AI-modernized version, with AI-extracted entities and (where available) cross-narrator analyses.
- Walk through a phase — each of the five expedition phases has a landing page with the relevant journal entries, AI analyses, river features, Heacock writings, tribes encountered, and the most-mentioned entities.
- Profile a key figure — Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, the sergeants, hunters, interpreters, and each of the 54 sovereign Native nations encountered. Profiles include geographic journey maps with the NPS National Historic Trail as base layer, journal mentions, related treaties, and scholarly bios.
- The Entity Index — AI-extracted names of every person, tribe, place, animal, plant, weapon, food, tool, weather event, ailment, cultural reference, and trade good named across all 3,415 entries, with mention counts and map+date filters per entity.
- Per-narrator profiles — voice, omissions, prose register, and recurring themes for each of the six journalists, with date ranges and most-mentioned entities.
- Tribal nations — the 54 nations recorded across the expedition, sorted by mention frequency, each linking to a profile with territory map and AI biographical synthesis.
- Trail Explorer map — the full NPS Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail with toggleable overlays for indigenous territories, tribal headquarters, treaty cessions, species discoveries, mound sites, and 360° panoramic captures.
Sources and methodology
Primary sources are transcribed from the public-domain Thwaites edition (1904–1905, eight volumes), Quaife’s edition of John Ordway (1916), Patrick Gass’s 1807 first edition, and Charles Floyd’s manuscript fragments. We do not reproduce the copyrighted Moulton/Nebraska scholarly edition; permission to cite has been requested.
Editorial Coues 1893 reprint — Elliott Coues’s History of the Expedition Under the Command of Lewis and Clark (Francis P. Harper, 1893, public domain) supplies Jefferson’s 1813 Memoir of Meriwether Lewis, Coues’s 1893 Supplement, and Coues’s Memoir of William Clark, all transcribed via modern OCR cleanup. Coues’s scholarly footnotes are surfaced as cross-references on the entity detail pages.
AI assistance — modernized English translations, plain-language summaries, and named-entity extraction (people / tribes / places / animals / plants / weapons / foods / tools / weather / medical / cultural / trade goods) are AI-generated and clearly disclosed. AI-drafted cross-narrator analyses synthesize multiple narrators on the same date and carry a footer disclosure plus an editor-reviewable audit flag indicating whether each quoted passage appears verbatim in a cited source. Six analyses with unmatched quotes have been demoted to draft pending editorial review.
Geographic data — the National Park Service’s Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail Congressionally Designated Route (62-segment GeoJSON) is the authoritative base layer on every map. Individual journal entry coordinates were transcribed from period sources where given, or inferred via AI from entry text and date when missing (each flagged with a geocode_confidence meta of high/medium/low).
Editorial governance — every AI artifact has at least one provenance meta key (model, generation date, source). An editor dashboard at /wp-admin/admin.php?page=lcr-editor-dashboard surfaces audit-flagged analyses for one-click approve/reject. The 213 partial-audit analyses (any quote that didn’t match its cited source verbatim) are queued for spot-check review.
Credits and acknowledgments
Robert Heacock — whose Columbia & Snake River Features centerline-mile atlas underpins our 738-feature river index, and whose 50 published contributions (with permission from his family and the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation) appear in the Heacock writings collection.
Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation (lewis-clark.org) — for canonical references and biographical scholarship; we link back to LCTHF as the authoritative source on individual contributors.
National Park Service Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail — for the public ArcGIS Online webmap and Congressionally Designated Route GeoJSON used as our canonical base layer.
University of Nebraska Center for Digital Research in the Humanities & University of Nebraska Press — whose Moulton edition is the gold standard for Lewis & Clark scholarship and is the canonical full-text reference. Until written-permission terms are settled we do not reproduce the Moulton transcriptions; we recommend lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu as the authoritative scholarly archive.
The Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma, the Mandan-Hidatsa Affiliated Tribes, the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the Crow Tribe, the Blackfeet Nation, and all 54 sovereign Native nations whose ancestors are recorded in this archive. Period spellings have been preserved in transcriptions; contemporary self-designations are surfaced in individual profile pages where known.
Last updated 2026-05-12. Site maintained by the Lewis and Clark Trust, Inc. — lewisandclarktrust.org. Contact ryan@terrain360.com. The Lewis and Clark Trust, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Phase 1: Planning and Equipping for Exploration
January 18, 1803 – July 4, 1803
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson was no longer just providing verbal support with a Northwest Passage to the Pacific. He moved decisively. On January 18 he sent a confidential message to Congress requesting funds for an “intelligent officer with ten or twelve chosen men” to explore the Missouri to its source and on to the Pacific. Two months later, Spain ceded the Louisiana Territory to France; in April, France sold it to the United States for $15 million. Captain Meriwether Lewis, Jefferson’s personal secretary, was already preparing.
Lewis spent the spring with the nation’s leading scientists at Philadelphia, learning celestial navigation, botany, zoology, and frontier medicine; commissioned the iron-frame collapsible boat at Harpers Ferry; specified the rifles and provisions; recruited William Clark as co-captain on June 19, 1803, and Clark’s enslaved manservant York as the only African American on the expedition. By July, the master roster, scientific instruments, and trade goods were taking shape.
Explore Phase 1: 268 entries, planning documents, key figures & more
Phase 2: Down the Ohio and Up the Missouri
July 5, 1803 – October 31, 1805
Lewis departed Pittsburgh on August 31, 1803, with his Newfoundland dog Seaman in a 55-foot keelboat down the Ohio. Eleven weeks later he met Clark at Clarksville, Indiana Territory. Together they descended to the Mississippi, ascended to Camp Dubois on the east bank opposite the Missouri’s mouth, and wintered there from December 1803 to May 14, 1804.
The Corps of Discovery — three sergeants (Charles Floyd, John Ordway, Nathaniel Pryor), twenty-three privates, two interpreters, Clark’s manservant York, and Seaman — departed Camp Dubois on May 14, 1804. They ascended the Missouri through the summer and fall, holding councils with the Oto, Missouri, Omaha, Yankton Sioux, Teton Sioux, and Arikara nations. Sergeant Floyd died on August 20, 1804 (the only expedition fatality). The Corps wintered at Fort Mandan with the Mandan and Hidatsa from November 1804 to April 1805, hiring Toussaint Charbonneau and his Shoshone wife Sacagawea (with their newborn son Jean Baptiste) as interpreters for the westward leg.
From April 7 to October 31, 1805, the permanent party ascended the upper Missouri to Great Falls, Three Forks, Lemhi Pass (where Sacagawea reunited with her brother Cameahwait of the Lemhi Shoshone), the Bitterroot Mountains, the Clearwater River, the Snake, and the Columbia — reaching the Pacific Ocean in early November.
Explore Phase 2: 2,007 entries, 545 cross-narrator analyses, 24 river features & more
Phase 3: Winter at Fort Clatsop
November 7, 1805 – March 23, 1806
The expedition reached the Pacific on November 7, 1805. After a contested vote (in which Sacagawea and York’s voices were recorded as fully equal to those of the white soldiers), the Corps wintered at Fort Clatsop on the south bank of the Columbia among the Clatsop, Chinook, Tillamook, and Wahkiakum nations. The party spent five months in continuous rain, recording natural history, mapping the coast, trading for foodstuffs, and acquiring (through often-tense trade) the elk skins and provisions necessary for the return.
Phase 3 holds 426 journal entries, 128 cross-narrator analyses, and 481 entries tagged with this phase (when treaties and supplementary documents are included).
Phase 4: The Return Journey
March 23, 1806 – September 23, 1806
The Corps departed Fort Clatsop on March 23, 1806, returned up the Columbia and Snake, crossed the Bitterroots a second time (with the assistance of Nez Perce guides), and at Travelers Rest divided into two parties. Lewis ascended the Marias River to explore its northern reach and engaged in the only deadly skirmish of the expedition (the Two Medicine fight with eight Piegan Blackfeet on July 27, 1806). Clark descended the Yellowstone, naming Pompey’s Pillar after Sacagawea’s son. The parties reunited on the Missouri on August 12, 1806, and the Corps reached St. Louis on September 23.
Phase 5: After the Expedition
September 23, 1806 – ongoing
Captain Lewis was appointed Governor of Upper Louisiana in March 1807. He died on October 11, 1809 near the Natchez Trace in Tennessee under contested circumstances. Captain Clark became Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis and held that office for thirty years until his death in 1838, becoming the U.S. government’s most-trusted figure in tribal diplomacy of the early republic. The expedition’s journals were edited by Nicholas Biddle and published in 1814; Patrick Gass’s account had appeared in 1807; Robert Frazer published an early summary in 1807; Coues’s scholarly edition appeared in 1893; Thwaites’s eight-volume edition in 1904–1905; Moulton’s modern Nebraska edition appeared in 13 volumes between 1983 and 2001.
Explore Phase 5: Post-expedition documents, treaties, biographical memoirs & more
