LEWIS AND CLARK EXPEDITION

On 18 January 1803, President Thomas Jefferson delivered a secret message to both houses of Congress. "As the continuance of the act for establishing trading houses with the Indian tribes will be under the consideration of the Legislature," he advised, "I think it my duty to communicate the views which have guided me in the execution of that act." Jefferson complained that Indian tribes increasingly grew "uneasy at the constant dimunition of the territory they occupy" and that they refused "all further sale, on any conditions." To peaceably "counteract this policy of theirs," Jefferson wrote, "and to provide an extension of territory which the rapid increase of our numbers will call for, two measures are deemed expedient." First, he advised Congress to "encourage them [the Indians] to abandon hunting" and to take up the plow "and thereby prove to themselves that less land and labor will maintain them." Second, toward this end he urged Congress "to multiply trading houses among them, and place within their reach those things which will contribute more to their domestic comfort, than the possession of extensive, but uncultivated wilds." The government should operate these trading posts to "undersell private traders, foreign and domestic."

Later that year Jefferson revealed his full intentions when he instructed William Henry Harrison, territorial governor of Indiana, to "push our trading uses" upon the Indians, "because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals [Indians] can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands." In the secret message of January, Jefferson revealed even larger aims when he suggested this policy for "the river Missouri, and the Indians inhabiting it" since it afforded "a moderate climate, offering, according to the best accounts, a continued navigation from its source, and possibly with a single portage from the Western Ocean … to the Atlantic." He requested that twenty-five hundred dollars be appropriated "for the purpose of extending the external commerce of the United States" by sending a military expedition to "explore the whole line, even to the Western Ocean, have conferences with the natives on the subject of commercial intercourse, get admission among them for our traders … agree on convenient deposits for the interchange of articles, and return with the information acquired, in the course of two summers." This was all part of Jefferson's plan to make the United States into an "Empire of Liberty." Indians would be acculturated to white ways and together with whites would secure the property necessary for republican citizenship. He planned imperialism through absorption rather than colonization, ending in citizenship instead of subjection.

Three months after the January message, Jefferson shocked Congress with the Louisiana Purchase from France, doubling the size of the nation with the acquisition of the entire Missouri River watershed for pennies an acre. Indians could now "lop off their debts" by selling land in the territories between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River; then they would move to Louisiana, where government traders and missionaries would have the time to inure the natives to white ways and ideas while facilitating America's international commerce via a transcontinental water route.

Meanwhile, Jefferson's plan for an exploration party called the Corps of Discovery was already well under way. He had chosen his personal secretary, a fellow Virginian and veteran soldier Meriwether Lewis, to lead the expedition. Captain Lewis chose William Clark as his "co-Captain," and together they led more than thirty soldiers, a French interpreter and his teenage Shoshone wife, Sacagawea (a guide),

and Clark's black slave, York, in an expedition along the Missouri and Columbia Rivers to the Pacific and back between 1803 and 1806. They pursued Jefferson's instructions of 20 June 1803 to "explore the Missouri … for the purposes of commerce" while taking "observations of latitude & longitude, at all remarkable points on the river." They were to gather knowledge of all the Indian tribes along the way, as "the commerce which may be carried on with the people inhabiting the line you will pursue, renders a knowledge of those people important." Jefferson also instructed them to collect knowledge of the flora and fauna, to explore the Missouri's tributaries and the land they drained, to treat the natives "in the most friendly and conciliatory manner" to convince them to sign peace treaties with their enemies and with the United States, and finally to report on the feasibility of the fur trade at the Pacific. The president charged Lewis with recording all of this information in a journal to be published at the mission's conclusion.

The Corps of Discovery failed to find an all-water route to the Pacific. The explorers also failed at conciliatory diplomacy among the Indians. The Lakota never made peace with their Mandan or Arikara neighbors, and the U.S. Army would war with them for the rest of the century, eventually subjugating and herding them onto reservations. The Corps did succeed in coming home alive, with only one exception. It also brought back valuable maps; discovered new species of animals and plants, such as prairie dogs, the white-rumped shrike, and "prickly-pears"; and obtained valuable information about the richness of the land and Indian ethnography. But here too it actually failed. Lewis never published his journals. He committed suicide a few years after returning, and the journals remained unpublished and in unusable form for almost a century. This failed expedition cost the nation's taxpayers $38,722.25, more than fifteen times the original congressional allocation. The Corps of Discovery did succeed in capturing the imagination of the American people, who eagerly read reports in newspapers and awaited the explorers' return. They feted Lewis and Clark with balls and toasts in 1806 as trappers, traders, and settlers rushed up the Missouri River, settling the territory, clashing with Indians, and gradually dispossessing them of their hunting grounds and homes. Instead of using absorption methods, the U.S. Army and state militias conquered and colonized the West. For the Indians, the Lewis and Clark Expedition foreshadowed old-fashioned imperialism, not an "Empire of Liberty."

See alsoLouisiana Purchase; American Indian Policy, 1787–1830; American Indian Relations, 1763–1815; American Indian Removal; Presidency, The: Thomas Jefferson .

bibliography

Ambrose, Stephen E. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

Barth, Gunther, ed. The Lewis and Clark Expedition: Selections from the Journals, Arranged by Topic. Boston: Bedford, 1998.

DeVoto, Bernard, ed. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Ronda, James P. Lewis and Clark among the Indians. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Paul Douglas Newman