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 analysis and entity extraction (each clearly flagged), Terrain360’s 360° imagery of the route today, 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
How to explore
- Browse journal entries — filter by date, narrator, or search the text. Each entry presents the primary-source transcription with AI-extracted entities, a location map, Terrain360 360° imagery of the place today where captured, and (where available) cross-narrator analyses.
- Follow the expedition on the Trail Explorer — a day-by-day scrubber across all 884 expedition days, every place the journals were written, Terrain360’s 360° trail captures, and overlays for indigenous territories, treaty cessions, species discoveries, and mound sites.
- Visit the places — 227 places where the journals were written, each gathering its entries, analyses, and 360° imagery of the site today.
- Walk through a phase — each of the five expedition phases has a landing page with the relevant journal entries, 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 3,124 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 biographical synthesis.
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 — named-entity extraction (people / tribes / places / animals / plants / weapons / foods / tools / weather / medical / cultural / trade goods) and the cross-narrator analyses are AI-assisted and clearly disclosed. Analyses synthesize multiple narrators on the same date, cite the published journal entries they draw on, and carry a footer disclosure; each was checked in an August 2026 editorial audit against its cited sources. Primary-source transcriptions are presented as transcribed, without AI rewording.
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 from entry text and date when missing; every coordinate was validated in August 2026 against the expedition’s day-by-day itinerary (narrator travel rates, same-day agreement between journalists, winter-quarters containment, and route-corridor checks), and corrections carry a coord_source provenance key. 360° imagery of the route today is provided by Terrain360.
Editorial governance — every AI artifact has at least one provenance meta key (model, generation date, source). Analyses were audited in August 2026 for date accuracy, source citations, and tagging; the geographic record was audited against the historical itinerary the same month. An editor dashboard surfaces flagged items for 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.
Terrain360 — whose 360° capture of the rivers and trails of the route (over 200,000 panoramas along the Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail) powers the imagery on journal entries, place pages, and the Trail Explorer.
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 2026-08-23. 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, 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 — 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.
Explore Phase 1: the Ohio descent, planning documents, key figures & more
Phase 2: Up the Missouri and Over the Divide
May 14, 1804 – November 1805
The Corps of Discovery — three sergeants (Charles Floyd, John Ordway, Nathaniel Pryor), the enlisted privates, interpreters, York, and Seaman, supported early on by French engagés and a return party — 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 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 — then crossed Lemhi Pass and the Bitterroot Mountains, and descended the Clearwater, the Snake, and the Columbia toward the sea.
Explore Phase 2: 1,998 entries, 599 cross-narrator analyses & more
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.
Explore Phase 3: 428 entries, 185 analyses, Pacific encounters & more
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.
Phase 5: After the Expedition
September 23, 1806 – ongoing
Captain Lewis was appointed Governor of Upper Louisiana 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, territorial governor, and from 1822 Superintendent of Indian Affairs — until his death in 1838. The expedition’s journals were edited by Nicholas Biddle and published in 1814; Patrick Gass’s account had appeared in 1807; Robert Frazer announced a journal by prospectus in 1806, but it never appeared; 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
