On the trail of Lewis and Clark

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, October 15th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: heading west.

The Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail follows the original path of their expedition. The Corps of Discovery set out from St. Louis on May 14th, 1804 and did not return home for more than two years.

REICHARD: WORLD reporter Jenny Rough recently hiked some of the trail and stopped in at one location along the route to learn what they discovered and what they didn’t.

JENNY ROUGH: Two hundred and twenty years ago, explorers Meriweather Lewis and William Clark led the Corps of Discovery, the group tasked with exploring the western continent.

NATE HESS: Alright, we’re going to head into the visitors’ center for the Lewis and Clark Trail…

Nate Hess is a historian at the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail in Omaha, Nebraska. He says President Thomas Jefferson gave the group several objectives. At the top of the list: to search for something...

NATE HESS: Something that other explorers, English, French, Spanish explorers had been searching for a very, very long time.

The Northwest Passage.

HESS: Specifically, he was very curious to whether or not there was a waterway that connected the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. Maybe some of the rivers that crisscrossed the United States might connect because then you can send boats and trade and all sorts of things up and down the waterways.

Lewis served as principal scientist, Clark as principal cartographer.

RYAN COOPER: Clark is known for making the map that’s so famous today. … Clark’s map of North America basically.

That’s Ryan Cooper, a geographer who works with Hess at trail headquarters.

COOPER: Clark didn't just have a blank canvas that he was filling in. He was armed with all of the maps from fur traders. They had all sorts of books that they took along.

But as the expedition moved westward, he had to fill in more and more.

The trail stretches 49-hundred miles from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where preparations began to the mouth of the Columbia River, which flows into the Pacific Ocean.

Hess says the party started with more than 40 members.

NATE HESS: If you’re familiar with a rocket ship when it takes off, there's booster rockets, right? And there was a portion of that crew that was kind of like a booster rocket.

The booster crew got the group to North Dakota, then turned back while the permanent party of 33 pressed on.

Seventy-five percent of the trail is water-based. The crew mainly traveled by a large keel boat and canoes. So finding a Northwest Passage looked promising at first.

HESS: They took it down the Ohio River and then up the Mississippi, and then up a good chunk of the Missouri River.

Those rivers all connect. Although geographer Cooper says the Missouri River looked very different back then.

COOPER: It was a large, wide, shallow body of water, much different from the kind of canal that it is today. And so they weren’t leisurely rowing on the water…

Historian Hess says, when they hit those shallow points—

HESS: Well, they got out and pulled. [Laughs]

… wearing linen trousers and wool coats.

The Corps only managed about 10 miles per day. The slow pace allowed designated hunters to walk alongside and gather food. They used a 1795 Springfield Musket. Hess holds a reproduction.

HESS: You have to pour black power down the muzzle of the barrel. And you have to use this thing called a ram rod to push the bullet all the way down. You just pull the trigger then. [Musket clicks]

They ate all kinds of different animals.

HESS: If they shot something, they generally ate it. Things that we wouldn't even think to eat today, things like hawks, eagles.

Hess also has a reproduction of their medical kit. Lewis and Clark weren’t doctors, but they were well-versed in survival medicine.

SOUND: [Digging through medical kit]
HESS: Here, let’s get a couple of…
ROUGH: Oh, yikes!
HESS: …the more impressive items…

The kit includes everything from a scary looking knife with a long, curved blade…

HESS: This is called a capital knife. And this is the type of amputation knife that would be used on something that’s curved, such as an arm or a leg.

… to forceps for extracting musket balls.

HESS: That’s is called a bullet probe. That’s your old time x-ray. That’s where you find out where the bullet is. And then you would use that to extract the bullet.

But the biggest challenge the Corps faced? The Rocky Mountains. They knew mountains were out there, but not how many, nor how high.

HESS: Thomas Jefferson didn't know that at that point. And none of the people living in the 13 colonies knew that at that point, the American Indians knew that.

The Corps began to get an inkling of what lay ahead after communicating with Indian tribes through interpreters and sign language.

Geographer Cooper says Lewis and Clark probably began to suspect the Northwest Passage didn’t exist when they reached the top of Lemhi Pass on the border of modern day Idaho and Montana.

COOPER: Lewis basically thinks, okay, up and over this ridge, we're going to be home free to the Pacific Ocean. And all he sees after that is just more and more massive mountains with snow on the top.

They followed already-established paths over the Bitterroot range. But the snowy, rugged mountains almost did them in.

COOPER: They had been eating their candles. They had been eating snow.

The group had crossed over the Continental Divide. Water that falls west of the divide reaches the Pacific. Water that falls east heads toward the Atlantic. Here’s Hess:

HESS: The primary objective of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was to try and find the Northwest passage. So in that sense, the expedition was kind of a failure. Because the Northwest passage doesn't exist.

But the detailed writings of Lewis, Clark, and the other explorers did pave the way for westward expansion. The journals noted everything from geology and plant life to animal species and tribe encounters.

Today, people can visit the trail and stand in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark imagining what the explorers might have learned and seen. Cooper says that enables us to give deeper thought to what’s changed and what hasn’t.

HESS: William Clark and Merriweather Lewis complimented each other so well. Where Lewis was maybe a little weaker, Clark was strong. And then of course, vice versa.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Rough in Omaha, Nebraska.

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