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    The Adventures of Lewis and Clark
    The Adventures of Lewis and Clark
    The Adventures of Lewis and Clark
    Ebook152 pages1 hour

    The Adventures of Lewis and Clark

    By John Bakeless

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    About this ebook

    In 1803, when the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France (for a scant $15 million), it doubled the size of the young country. Stretching north from New Orleans to the Canadian border and westward from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, the area contained over 800,000 square miles. That same year, President Thomas Jefferson designated two young men — Meriweather Lewis and William Clark — as leaders of an expedition to explore this vast new acquisition, as well as other lands of the West. In the spring of 1804, the two men and an intrepid band of hunters, carpenters, gunsmiths, and blacksmiths, known as the "Corps of Discovery," embarked on a perilous journey that would truly give meaning to the term "Wild West."
    In this exciting, action-packed young reader's edition, based on the author's acclaimed earlier study of the two great American explorers, historian John Bakeless chronicles the daily challenges these men faced — from encounters with indigenous people, snake-infested waterways, prairie fires, floods, heat, and thirst, to illness, famine, and frigid mountain passes.
    The result is a saga of epic proportions, an amazing story of courage and determination sure to delight readers with its authenticity and vivid, dramatic style. It's a "thrilling account of one of the most magnificent expeditions in all history . . . absorbing and inspirational from start to finish." — New York Times Book Review.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateJul 16, 2012
    ISBN9780486119854
    The Adventures of Lewis and Clark

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    • 4/5
      It was kinda choppy, jumping around from detail to detail but still enjoyable, had good photos and was a excellent source for my college essay. Learned a lot about Lewis. clark and the amazing advetnure they took from St. Louis- Portland Oregon where they found the Pacific and all of the help they recieved along the way with Sacewega and the Nez Pierce indians who saved the exbetition more than once!

    Book preview

    The Adventures of Lewis and Clark - John Bakeless

    1

    The Great Idea

    e9780486119854_i0005.jpg

    WHEN THOMAS JEFFERSON, the third President of the United States, entered the new White House in Washington, D.C., he was exultantly aware that now — at last! — he would be able to carry out the great idea that had been haunting him for more than twenty years.

    Between the broad Mississippi and the Pacific Coast lay — what? Wonder concerning the new lands, strange tribes and stranger animals, huge mountains, and enormous wealth that must be lying there, unknown, had obsessed him for most of his life.

    Three times Jefferson had tried to send explorers into the unknown American West. Three times he had failed: once, because the Revolutionary frontier hero General George Rogers Clark could not lead the expedition; again, because the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great, expelled from Siberia Mr. Jefferson’s daring Yankee explorer who had planned to travel eastward across the Pacific and then all alone across North America; and last of all, because the French scientist he had engaged turned out to be Napoleon’s secret agent.

    When Mr. Jefferson had made this third attempt, in 1792, a neighbor’s son came in to ask if he could go along. Mr. Jefferson knew the boy, whose family were among his friends, but he turned the applicant down because he was too young. His name was Meriwether Lewis.

    That expedition, like all the others, had never even started. Now nearly a decade had passed. And President Thomas Jefferson knew he had the power to send an exploring party across the continent. It would go up the wide Missouri River, over the plains, to the foothills of the Rockies. It would cross the Rocky Mountains (no one knew just how), find the upper waters of the Columbia River (no one knew just where), construct new canoes, and then float down the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean.

    Not even the Indians knew much about most of this country. For many hundreds of miles there was no Indian village, not even a temporary hunting camp. You could, at times, travel for months along the Missouri River, without seeing a human being, red or white. Here and there a few adventurous white men — traders, trappers, hunters, or explorers — had seen a little of these wild lands. Not all of them had returned to tell their story. Some were French or British, coming overland from Canada. Some were French or Spanish, venturing up the Mississippi, then a little way up the Missouri. A few Spaniards had come northward from Mexico.

    The thought of this vast, unknown land had tormented Thomas Jefferson for years. He longed to know what secrets the other half of North America might hold. Everyone knew there must be immense wealth in this new country. There were stories of great mountains of salt (a precious commodity in those days). There was no doubt the country abounded in beaver, mink, martin, otter. All were valuable — beaver skins most of all. There were immense profits to be made in trade with the Indians, who would pay almost any price (in skins and furs) for white man’s goods — rifles, gunpowder, steel knives and hatchets, steel arrow points, cloth, beads, tobacco. British merchants, operating from Canada, had long been growing rich in this way. Before the British, and the American colonists, drove them out, the French had been growing rich too. So prosperous was this trade that after America finally acquired possession of the country, one American fur-trading family was soon making half a million dollars a year.

    The queer thing is, no one had even guessed that this new western country was full of gold, as well as furs. The first Spanish explorers had come to North America mainly to find treasure. They found it, too, in Mexico; but after searching through the southeastern areas for gold, they soon gave up exploring the Great West for this precious metal. Strange to say, although the Spaniards had owned all the enormously rich gold country of California, Montana, and the Dakotas for centuries, they never discovered any of the immense deposits there. Then came the Americans, who in less than fifty years found the great treasure.

    Jefferson’s first difficulty in sending an expedition to explore this area was that for many years no part of it had belonged to the United States. From the Mississippi to the Rockies it was Spanish territory; and, beyond the Rockies, the southern part of the Pacific Coast, including California, was also Spanish.

    What would the King of Spain’s officials do if an American expedition entered Spanish territory and began to explore it?

    Thomas Jefferson had a talk with the Spanish minister in Washington, the Marqués de Casa Yrujo. This was in November, 1802, the year after Jefferson had become President. He asked the minister frankly whether it would be permissible to send an American expedition to explore the course of the Missouri River. If he made such a move, would Spain take it badly? The sole aim in sending out the expedition, Mr. Jefferson explained, would be the advancement of geography.

    The Spanish minister objected strongly. The Spanish government would deeply resent any such intrusion into its territory, he told the President. As a matter of fact, the Spaniards themselves had been trying to reach the Pacific Ocean by the same route President Jefferson had in mind. The minister quickly warned his superiors in Madrid, that the Americans may some day extend their population and their influence up to the coasts of the South Sea, as the Pacific was then called. The marqués was right. Within less than fifty years all of the present Pacific Coast had slipped from Spanish hands and was American.

    e9780486119854_i0006.jpge9780486119854_i0007.jpg

    But in spite of the Spanish attitude, President Jefferson was determined to launch that expedition. A few weeks after his talk with the minister, he sent Congress a secret message, asking for an appropriation of $2500 for extending the external commerce of the United States. This was a good safe title for the bill President Jefferson wanted Congress to pass, since it would attract no special public attention; but it was also a fairly accurate description of the President’s purpose.

    By bringing the Indian furs and peltry down the Missouri (out of Canadian and into American hands), the exploration really would immensely extend the external commerce of the United States, just as President Jefferson had hoped. When gold was later discovered the expansion was swifter. When, much later, modern farming and manufacturing spread west of the Mississippi, the expansion of American commerce was enormous.

    But to return to the Jefferson era. In the midst of his plans, some very disturbing news reached the President. The Spaniards had ceded all of Louisiana to France. The immediate threat to our young and still weak American republic was obvious. Spain had been a lax and inactive neighbor, troublesome at times, but never a danger to the United States. France was a real menace. Ruled by the Emperor Napoleon, she already dominated Europe. If Napoleon ever gained a foothold in the New World he would try to dominate this hemisphere too. Then the United States would face the greatest military power in the world along the whole western border, from New Orleans to Canada.

    Once established over here, Napoleon might try to reconquer Canada. To accomplish this he would have to make war on the British. Then, if Napoleon won, the United States would find herself boxed in with the powerful French empire on our western border, and on our northern border, too. If Napoleon lost, the situation would be almost as bad. The powerful British empire would hold these same northern and western borders. Either way, American expansion westward would be blocked for ever. The predicament, as President Jefferson wrote James Monroe, was

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