Leading Into the Unkown
Eric Reed
October 1, 1999
April 7th, 1805
Our vessels consisted of six small canoes, and two large perogues. This little
fleet altho' not quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt.
Cook, were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed
adventurers ever beheld theirs; and I dare say with quite as much anxiety
for their safety and preservation. we were now about to penetrate a country
at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civillized man
had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was the experiment
yet to determine, and these little vessels contained every article by which
we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves. When the immagination is
suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself
to me was a most pleasing one.
—Meriwether Lewis
Where the map ended, the real adventure began.
A year had passed since Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their band of
27 explorers left St. Louis. Now, 1,609 miles up the Missouri River in search
of a water route across the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean,
the map ended. Beyond their winter headquarters among Indian villages in
what is now North Dakota no white man had ventured and returned.
On the eastern side of the mountains, British traders had contacted tribes
at the northernmost point yet charted on the Missouri. On the western side,
American Robert Gray had mapped the mouth of the Columbia River barely ten
years earlier. But those were the only points on the map. Between lay the
beckoning unknown.
Rumors of what the expedition would find abounded: volcanoes, wooly mammoths,
blue-eyed Indians who spoke Welsh, the lost tribes of Israel, and a navigable
waterway ...
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