The route today · 360°
Phase 1: Planning, the Ohio, and Camp Dubois
January 18, 1803 – May 13, 1804
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson moved decisively on his long-held ambition to explore a route to the Pacific. 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. France had quietly reacquired the Louisiana Territory from Spain in the Treaty of San Ildefonso (1800); in April 1803 Napoleon 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; and specified the rifles and provisions. On June 19, 1803 he wrote to William Clark inviting him to share command, and Clark accepted in July. Clark brought York, the man he enslaved, who was the expedition’s only African American member.
Lewis departed Pittsburgh on August 31, 1803, with his Newfoundland dog Seaman, taking a 55-foot keelboat down the Ohio. Six weeks later he met Clark at Clarksville, Indiana Territory. Together they descended the Ohio to the Mississippi, ascended to Camp Dubois on the east bank opposite the Missouri’s mouth, and wintered there from December 1803 to May 1804, recruiting and drilling the party.
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(opens the 360° tour in a new tab)Explore Phase 1: the Ohio descent, planning documents, key figures & more
The route today · 360°
Phase 2: Up the Missouri and Over the Divide
May 14, 1804 – November 1805
The Corps of Discovery departed Camp Dubois on May 14, 1804: three sergeants (Charles Floyd, John Ordway, Nathaniel Pryor), the enlisted privates, interpreters, York, and Seaman, with French engagés and a return party along for the first season. They ascended the Missouri through the summer and fall, holding councils with the Oto and Missouri, the Yankton Sioux, the Teton Sioux, and the Arikara. Sergeant Floyd died on August 20, 1804, the expedition’s only fatality. The Corps wintered at Fort Mandan with the Mandan and Hidatsa from November 1804 to April 1805, engaging Toussaint Charbonneau and his Shoshone wife Sacagawea (with their newborn son Jean Baptiste) as interpreters for the westward leg.
From April 7 to November 1805, the permanent party ascended the upper Missouri past the Great Falls portage to Three Forks and the Beaverhead, where at Camp Fortunate Sacagawea was reunited with her brother Cameahwait of the Lemhi Shoshone. They crossed Lemhi Pass and the Bitterroot Mountains, then descended the Clearwater, the Snake, and the Columbia toward the sea.
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(opens the 360° tour in a new tab)Explore Phase 2: journal entries, cross-narrator analyses & more
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Phase 3: The Pacific and Winter at Fort Clatsop
November 1805 – March 23, 1806
On November 7, 1805, Clark recorded “Ocian in view! O! the joy” as the party entered the broad tidewater of the lower Columbia; storm-bound weeks followed before they stood on the open coast. In a recorded poll of the party, in which York’s vote and Sacagawea’s preference were both set down, the Corps chose to winter on the south side of the river, building Fort Clatsop among the Clatsop, Chinook, Tillamook, and Wahkiakum nations. The party spent the winter in near-continuous rain, recording natural history, mapping the coast, boiling salt, and trading for the provisions necessary for the return.
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(opens the 360° tour in a new tab)Explore Phase 3: journal entries, analyses, Pacific encounters & more
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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 was drawn into the expedition’s only deadly encounter, the Two Medicine fight with a party of Piegan Blackfeet on July 27, 1806. Clark descended the Yellowstone, naming Pompeys Pillar for Sacagawea’s son. The parties reunited on the Missouri on August 12, 1806, and the Corps reached St. Louis on September 23.
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The route today · 360°
Phase 5: After the Expedition
After September 23, 1806
Captain Lewis was appointed governor of Louisiana Territory in 1807. He died on October 11, 1809 at Grinder’s Stand on the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, under circumstances still debated. Captain Clark served the government’s Indian affairs at St. Louis for the rest of his life, as agent, as governor of Missouri Territory, and from 1822 as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, until his death in 1838. Patrick Gass’s account appeared in 1807; Robert Frazer announced a journal by prospectus in 1806, but it never appeared; the expedition’s journals, edited by Nicholas Biddle, were published in 1814. Coues’s annotated edition followed in 1893, Thwaites’s eight-volume documentary edition in 1904–1905, and Moulton’s modern Nebraska edition in thirteen volumes between 1983 and 2001.
Explore Phase 5: post-expedition documents, treaties, biographical memoirs & more
