What’s New

May 2026 — A research surface built for cross-referencing

Released: May 11–12, 2026

The core archive has been substantially extended into a cross-referenced research surface. Highlights:

• Named entity index — 600+ entities across 12 categories. Every person, tribal nation, place, animal, plant, weapon, food, tool, weather event, ailment, cultural reference, and trade good named across the 3,415 journal entries now has its own aggregator page. Each shows a chronological map of every mention with a date-range slider, phase-colored pins, and click-popups linking back to the source entry. Try Sacagawea (37 entries), deer (1,052 mentions), Camp Dubois, or rain (417 entries plotted along the route).
• Per-narrator profiles — six journalists, each profiled separately. Date ranges, total characters written, recurring themes, most-mentioned entities, and a sample of recent entries. See Meriwether Lewis (394 entries, 1.4M chars) or John Ordway (749 entries, the cleanest source).
• Tribal nations landing — all 54 sovereign Native nations recorded across the expedition, sorted by mention frequency, each linking to a profile with territory map, journal mentions, related treaties, and biographical synthesis where available. Mandan, Shoshone (Snake), Nez Perce (Chopunnish), Clatsop, Chinook, Hidatsa (Minetare), Yankton Sioux, Teton Sioux (Lakota), Crow (Apsáalooke), Blackfeet, and 44 others.
• 3,415 modernized-English translations sit alongside the original period-spelling transcriptions on every journal entry page. Original OCR’d spelling preserved; modern version aids first-time readers.
• 915 cross-narrator analyses synthesizing multiple journalists on the same date. Each carries an editorial disclosure footer + audit status indicating whether quoted passages appear verbatim in cited sources. Browse at /analyses/.
• 1,448 descriptive entry titles. “Lewis: February 5, 1806” became “Lost Indian Canoe Recovered; Reubin Field’s Elk Kill.” Brief and vivid for list browsing; the original date-stamp title is preserved at single-entry permalink level.
• Robert Heacock’s 738-feature river atlas for the Missouri and Columbia is fully integrated. Each feature has center-line mile, lat/lng, and (where available) the journal-date connection. Heacock’s own 50 published contributions (with his family’s permission) appear at /heacock-writings/.

May 2026 — Authoritative maps and search

Released: May 11–12, 2026

• Official NPS Lewis & Clark NHT trail layer is now the canonical base map on every map across the site (key-figure maps, entity detail maps, weapon maps, phase pages, single research articles, etc.). 62-segment GeoJSON sourced from NPS ArcGIS Online, simplified and self-hosted for performance.
• Phase-colored pin markers on every map. Five-phase color coding (Planning, Westward, Fort Clatsop, Return, Post-expedition) makes geographic chronology visible at a glance.
• Territory overlays for tribal nations — 23 tribes with territory_lat/lng coordinates show a soft circular polygon (~120 km radius) on their key-figure maps.
• Gap microcopy on figure maps. When a figure’s tagged appearances have a long unrepresented gap (≥ 90 days), the map page automatically notes it. Seaman’s map, for example, reads: “the longest gap between tagged appearances is about 11 months (Sep 11, 1803 → Aug 8, 1804). Seaman may have been present in the corps during that span but is not named in the journals.”
• Date-range slider on entity maps. On any /entity/X/Y/ detail page with multiple pins, a dual-handle slider below the map filters the visible pins by date range. Useful for “show me every mention of rain in May 1805” exploration.
• Global entity autocomplete. Type into any search input across the site and entity suggestions surface in a dropdown — searching “Sacagawea” anywhere shows direct links to her key-figure profile and her named-entity aggregator with mention counts.
• Smart cards on search results. Search the site and matched entities/figures/tribes appear as cards above the standard post results.
• Journal-archive pagination dropped the /journal/ page weight from 6.5 MB to 163 KB (40× reduction) with server-side filters for date range, author, and full-text search that work across pagination.

May 2026 — Scholarly transcriptions added

Released: May 11, 2026

• Jefferson’s 1813 Memoir of Meriwether Lewis — transcribed and published in full at /research/jefferson-memoir-meriwether-lewis-1813/. Source: the public-domain Coues 1893 reprint (vol. I). This is Jefferson’s first-hand biographical account of Lewis, written at Paul Allen’s request for the 1814 Biddle edition.
• Coues’s 1893 Supplement to Jefferson’s Memoir — /research/coues-supplement-jefferson-memoir-lewis/. Coues’s expansion on Lewis’s post-expedition life, death along the Natchez Trace, and the suicide-vs-murder question.
• Coues’s 1893 Memoir of William Clark — /research/coues-memoir-william-clark/. Coues’s biographical sketch drawn from family records, Clark’s brothers’ Revolutionary War service, his military career, and his post-expedition tenure as Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St. Louis.

May 2026 — Tagging coverage transformed

Released: May 11, 2026

Before this round, individual figure profiles surfaced only the entries that had been hand-tagged. The Drouillard profile, for example, showed 0 entries even though “Drewyer” appears in 398 journal entries. We fixed that with a content-match + synonym pass.

• 2,209 new key-figure tags added across 39 figures and tribes using word-boundary REGEXP matching against post content. Top gains: William Clark (1,108→1,301), Meriwether Lewis (859→1,029), Patrick Gass (97→324), George Drouillard (288→405), John Ordway (66→212), John Collins (1→167), George Gibson (1→96), Alexander Willard (1→85), Mandan tribe (164→277), Sioux Tribe/Nation (37→112).
• Individual chief profiles — Sheheke/Big White, Twisted Hair, Posecopsahe/Black Cat, Le Borgne (One Eye), Coboway, Black Buffalo, and The Partisan auto-tagged from period-spelling variants in journal content.
• Corps-member coverage — Robert Frazer (4→49), Peter Weiser (1→40), William Werner (1→26), Pierre Cruzatte (31→44), Francois Labiche (28→40), William Bratton (76→86), Silas Goodrich (34→42), Hugh McNeal (40→45), Jean Baptiste Lepage (1→6) plus the Field brothers properly disambiguated.

May 2026 — Editorial governance + audit infrastructure

Released: May 11, 2026

• Editor Dashboard at /wp-admin/admin.php?page=lcr-editor-dashboard — counts panel (published/drafts/audit pass/partial/fail/reviewed), filter UI (kind/audit/status/review), table with per-analysis audit status + unmatched quotes + one-click action buttons (Edit / Publish-or-Draft toggle / Approve).
• Hallucination audit on all 921 analyses. Each analysis is stamped with audit_quote_status meta: pass / partial / fail / no-quotes. Result: 684 pass, 203 partial, 6 fail, 28 no-quotes. The 6 fails are demoted to draft pending editorial review.
• NER cross-references on every /entity/ page. When you visit, e.g., Lewis, a “Also discussed in Coues 1893” panel surfaces 19 mentions across the 4-volume edition with links to the published Coues memoirs.
• Schema.org JSON-LD on every entity and narrator detail page (Person, EthnicGroup, Place, Thing, MedicalCondition) for richer search-engine discovery.
• Custom sitemap at /lcr-aggregator-sitemap.xml exposing 609 entity/narrator landing URLs to search engines.

Earlier — Foundation work (February–April 2026)

2026-02 to 2026-04

• Domain migration from research.lewisandclarktrust.org to lewisandclarkresearch.org (May 4, 2026). Old URLs 301-redirect; both certs auto-renew.
• 1,520 journal entries imported from Project Gutenberg Thwaites edition, parsed and auto-tagged by date, narrator, location, and trail segment.
• Six narrators imported: William Clark (806 entries, existing), Meriwether Lewis (394), John Ordway (750 from Quaife 1916), Joseph Whitehouse (242 from Thwaites Vol 7), Patrick Gass (166 from his 1807 first edition), Charles Floyd (73).
• 183 treaty records imported with location, parties, summary, and external links.
• 266 wildlife species from NPS intern data dump with images, scientific names, and journal-mention cross-references.
• Trail Explorer with 9 toggleable map overlays (historic trail, bike route, auto tour, tribal territories, treaty cessions, tribal HQ, place names, species discoveries, mound sites).
• Robert Heacock memorial integration (May 4, 2026) — 50 mirrored published writings + 738-feature river atlas, with canonical-URL link-back to lewis-clark.org per family permission.