•
As the expedition got lower on the river, it entered country in which, Lewis wrote on September 14, “the fever and ague and bilious fevers commence their banefull oppression and continue through the whole course of the river with increasing violence as you approach it’s mouth.”
Lewis was referring to malaria, which was endemic in the Ohio, Mississippi, and lower Missouri Valleys. He knew it well from his experiences on the Ohio during his travels as paymaster, and anticipated it. Malaria was the most common disease in the country, especially on the frontier, where it was so inescapable that many refused to regard it as a disease: like hard work, it was just a part of life. Jefferson had it. It may have been the illness that forced Clark to resign his commission in 1796.8
No one knew what caused malaria. Dr. Rush’s opinion was bad air, rising from swamps. He was on the edge of seeing the mosquito as the culprit, but never quite got there. The good doctor was helping one of his University of Pennsylvania graduate students in his research. S. Ffirth was doing his thesis on causation of malaria. The general view was that epidemics resulted from “contagium,” meaning the fevers were transmitted by direct contact between people. Ffirth wanted to see whether this was true.
Ffirth’s research methods were crude, heroic, and reckless. They demonstrated the almost total ignorance that the best-trained specialists of the era wallowed in, with regard to disease; as in means of transportation, mankind had made virtually no progress in the previous two thousand years. Ffirth inhaled vapors from black vomit taken from malaria or yellow-fever patients. He injected the vomit into the stomachs and veins of cats and dogs, and into his own body. Neither the cats and dogs nor Ffirth got malaria. He completed his research in June 1804, and reported his conclusion: the “autumnal disease” (yet another name for malaria) was not contagious.9
Whether Lewis met Ffirth is unknown. That Lewis talked about malaria with Dr. Rush is apparent, because he spent one-third of his medical budget on the purchase of Peruvian bark for his “armamentarium.” For the thirty dollars, Lewis got fifteen pounds of the Peruvian bark. It came from a South American tree and contained many alkaloids, the most important being quinine and quinidine. Lewis had it in a powder form. It was considered sovereign for malaria, and rightly so; later in the nineteenth century, quinine became the drug of choice for the disease. One medical historian calls it “the drug that changed the destinies of nations,” because “it alone made possible the invasion and exploitation of tropical countries.”10
Quinine copes with rather than completely cures the disease. Recurrences are common to sufferers. The best preventive was to avoid getting bitten by infected mosquitoes—easier said than done, of course; even had he known that it was the mosquitoes transmitting the malaria, Lewis could have done little about it.
He had armed himself for the war against mosquitoes. In Philadelphia, he had purchased “Muscatoe Curtains” and “8 ps. Cat Gut for Mosquito Curtains,” and two hundred pounds of tallow mixed with fifty pounds of hog’s lard. The lard served a double purpose: insect repellent and a base for pemmican.11
Lewis took mosquitoes seriously, but his preparations were entirely defensive. Neither he nor anyone else alive in 1803 had the slightest idea how to take the offensive against them. Nor did anyone understand how serious was the battle against them. Lewis thought of the mosquitoes as a pest, not a threat.
Nor did he ever learn how to spell his enemies’ name. His usual spelling, repeated at least twenty-five times, was “musquetoe.” Clark was more inventive: he had at least twenty variations, ranging from “mesquetors” through “misqutr” to “musquetors.”12
•
In many ways, the trip down the Ohio was a shakedown voyage for the boat and pirogues. Getting the packing right, for example, was a constant learning process. On September 15, it rained hard for six hours. Lewis kept paddling, and made eighteen miles. The following day, it was nineteen miles, but by dusk “my men were very much fatigued.” The next morning, the expedition came to a long sandbar. It was “a handsome clean place,” so Lewis decided to spend the day opening and drying his goods, “which I had found were wet by the rain on the 15th,” even though he had wrapped them securely in oilcloths and had the canoes constantly bailed during the course of the day. The guns, tomahawks, and knives were rusting. Lewis had them oiled and exposed to the sun. Clothing of “every discription also was opened and aired.” All hands, including the captain’s, were kept busy in this enterprise from 10:00 a.m. to sunset, when Lewis had the canoes reloaded, this time paying more attention to getting vulnerable items up off the canoe bottom.
From Marietta it was about one hundred miles southwest to the point where Ohio, Virginia, and Kentucky joined, then another hundred or so to Cincinnati. The river was deep, the weather fine; Lewis covered the two hundred miles in two weeks without incident.
He stayed in the Cincinnati area for a week, to rest his men, take on provisions, do some research for Jefferson, and write two letters. The first was to Clark in Louisville, in reply to a letter of August 21 which Lewis had just picked up.
Clark reported that he had many applicants for the expedition “from stout likely fellows,” but he was putting them on hold until Lewis got to Louisville and could look them over. Clark pointed out what he knew Lewis already knew, that “a judicious choice of our party is of the greatest importance to the success of this vast enterprise.”
On a more general note, Clark concluded, “I am happy to here of the Session of Louisiana to the united States, this is an inestimable treasure to the Western People, who appear to feel its value.”13
Lewis responded by reporting his progress and discussing the selection of men for the voyage up the Missouri. He said he liked Clark’s ideas on the need for “a judicious selection,” and that he had two young men with him, “taken on trial, conditionally only, tho’ I think they will answer tolerably well.” Apparently he meant John Colter and George Shannon. Obviously he meant that Clark would have a veto over his choices, just as he would over Clark’s.14 Lewis and Clark had not been together in seven years, but even before they met their partnership was flourishing, their trust in each other’s judgment complete. There were no perils in divided command for this pair.
The second letter was to Jefferson. Lewis reported on his visit to Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, some twenty miles southwest of Cincinnati. Earlier in the year, Dr. William Goforth had discovered there the bones of a mammoth. Evidently Jefferson had urged Lewis to visit the site. Lewis did, and sent in a mammoth report on the mammoth, including 2,064 words to describe “a tusk of an immence size,” along with some specimens of bones.
Lewis asked the president to send him “some of the Vaxcine matter, as I have reason to believe from several experiments made with what I have, that it has lost it’s virtue.”15 He intended to use it to vaccinate against the smallpox. This too was a favorite subject of Jefferson’s, who had sponsored the use of the cowpox and had inoculated himself and his family. The wording of the letter indicates that it was Jefferson who had provided Lewis with cowpox to bring to the frontier and to the Indians, and instructed him in its use.16 The big problem, as Lewis’s request reflects, was keeping the vaccine alive. When no scab formed where Lewis scratched the cowpox vaccine into a patient’s arm, Lewis knew it was no longer virile.
Lewis concluded his letter to Jefferson with a statement of intentions. “As this Session of Congress has commenced,” he began, and as for a variety of reasons, his progress had been delayed, “and feeling as I do in the most anxious manner a wish to keep them [the politicians] in a good humour on the subject of the expedicion in which I am engaged, I have concluded to make a tour this winter on horseback of some hundred miles through the most interesting portion of the country adjoining my winter establishment.”
He said he would go up the Kansas River toward Santa Fe, and he proposed to have Clark make his own “excurtion throgh some other portion of the country.” That way, by the end of Febru
ary, he would be able to send Jefferson “such information relative to that Country which, if it does not produce a conviction of the utility of this project, will at least procure the further toleration of the expedition.”17
Here was the president’s aide at work, a zealot protecting his boss from the Federalist jackels in Congress. Here was the partisan politician, trying to give his party a winning issue in the upcoming (1804) presidential campaign. Here too was the young adventurer, resigned to having to build a winter camp near St. Louis rather than getting on up the Missouri a few hundred miles, his mind alive with possibilities during the brilliant fall afternoons on the Ohio, refusing to submit to the anticipated dullness of an army-camp life for five months. But, alive though his mind was, here was a young man who had not thought things through.
This was the first Jefferson knew that Lewis had abandoned hope of getting up the Missouri before winter. He accepted the decision—indeed, endorsed it heartily—because he wanted Lewis to spend the winter gathering information in St. Louis, not out on the Kansas prairie, and because the expedition could draw its rations from the U.S. Army posts on the Mississippi, thus not depleting the stores for the voyage. So, as commander-in-chief, Jefferson had said directly to Lewis, “I leave it to your own judgment” as to where to spend the winter.
Not that the president had a lot of choice. The mails moved so slowly there was not the slightest possibility of Jefferson’s giving Lewis orders that could arrive in time to be acted on. Jefferson did not receive Lewis’s letter until mid-November; his reply did not reach Lewis until January.
Still, Jefferson tried to take control, because he was so alarmed by Lewis’s proposal to set off on a midwinter exploration toward Santa Fe, into the part of the continent clearly Spanish and, because of its gold and silver mines, a part about which the Spanish were extremely sensitive. The great danger involved led Jefferson to issue a direct order, hoping it would arrive in time: “You must not undertake the winter excursion which you propose in yours of Oct. 3.”
Lewis’s proposal caused Jefferson great worry, not just about the dangers, but about Lewis’s judgment. Thus there is a note of suppressed alarm in his response. He could hardly remove Lewis from the command, but he could try to get Lewis to think of first things first. Jefferson wrote: “The object of your mission is single, the direct water communication from sea to sea formed by the bed of the Missouri & perhaps the Oregon.”
That was the most succinct statement about the purpose of the expedition Jefferson ever wrote.
He explained that the dangers of a Santa Fe trip would be greater than those Lewis would face on the Missouri, because the Spanish armed forces would be almost certain to arrest and detain him if he went southwest, but leave him alone on the Missouri, since that was now American territory. As to Clark’s proposed excursion, Jefferson wrote: “By having Mr. Clarke with you we consider the expedition double manned, & therefore the less liable to failure, for which reason neither of you should be exposed to risques by going off of your line.”
The Louisiana Purchase had another impact on the goals of the expedition. Jefferson described the boundaries of Louisiana as “the high lands inclosing all the waters which run into the Missisipi or Missouri directly or indirectly.” That was stretching the boundaries a bit, perhaps—no one really knew—but, as Jefferson explained, “it therefore becomes interesting to fix with precision by celestial observations the longitude & latitude of the sources of those rivers.”
What he meant, or hoped for, was that northern tributaries of the Missouri would extend well north of the forty-ninth parallel, deep into the fur-rich country of western Canada. If so, that territory wasn’t western Canada; it was the property of the United States.III Jefferson didn’t want to risk not finding out because his young captain had indulged himself in a joy ride. He concluded his letter by repeating his order that Lewis stick to his assigned missions, which were “not to be delayed or hazarded by any episodes whatever.”18
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On October 4 or 5, Lewis pushed his boat and pirogues back into the river and headed west for the falls of the Ohio, some one hundred miles downstream. On October 14, he was at the head of the falls, which were actually long rapids created by a twenty-four-foot drop of the river over a two-mile-long series of limestone ledges. At the foot of the rapids, on the north bank, was Clarksville, Indiana Territory. Louisville, Kentucky, was on the south bank. On October 15, Lewis hired local pilots, who took the boat and pirogues into the dangerous but passable passage on the north bank.19 Safely through, Lewis tied up at Clarksville and set off to meet his partner, who was living with his older brother, General George Rogers Clark.
•
When they shook hands, the Lewis and Clark Expedition began.
Each man was about six feet tall and broad-shouldered. Each was rugged in the face, Clark somewhat more so than Lewis, who had a certain delicacy to his profile. Their bodies were rawboned and muscled, with no fat. Their hands—sunburned, like their faces, even this late in the season—were big, rough, strong, capable, confident. Each man was long-legged. Just a glimpse of their stride across a porch, or at how they seated themselves, showed the physical coordination of an athlete. Each, probably, was dressed in fringed buckskin. And who can doubt that, as they stuck out their hands to each other, both men had smiles on their faces that were as broad as the Ohio River, as big as their ambitions and dreams.
Oh! To have been able to hear the talk on the porch that afternoon, and on into the evening, and through the night. There would have been whiskey—General Clark was the host, and General Clark was a heavy drinker. There would have been tables groaning under the weight of pork, beef, venison, duck, goose, fish, fresh bread, apples, fresh milk, and more.
There were the two would-be heroes with the authentic older hero, all three Virginians, all three soldiers, all three Republicans, all three great talkers, full of ideas and images and memories and practical matters and grand philosophy, of Indians and bears and mountains never before seen. Excitement and joy ran through their questions and answers, words coming out in a tumble.
Unfortunately, we don’t have a single word of description of the meeting of Lewis and Clark.
•
Over the next two weeks, the captains selected the first enlisted members of the expedition. They did not lack for volunteers. Word had spread up and down the Ohio, and inland, and young men longing for adventure and ambitious for a piece of land of their own set out for Clarksville to sign up. Lewis and Clark sized them up, making judgments on their general hardiness, their shooting and hunting ability, their physical strength and general character, their suitability for a long journey in the wilderness. How many applied is not known, but one of those eventually selected, Private Alexander Willard, boasted in his old age that “his fine physique enable[d] him to pass the inspection for enlistment in the expedition” that more than one hundred others failed.20
Seven of the men the captains picked had previously been conditionally approved by Clark, two by Lewis. They made Charles Floyd and Nathaniel Pryor sergeants. Floyd was the son of Captain Charles Floyd, who had soldiered with George Rogers Clark.21 When these nine men were sworn into the army, in solemn ceremony, in the presence of General Clark, the Corps of Discovery was born.
In addition to the enlisted men, the corps consisted of the captains—and Clark’s slave, York. York was big, very dark, strong, agile, a natural athlete. About Clark’s age or a bit younger, he had been Clark’s lifelong companion, bequeathed to him by his father, whose companion had in turn been York’s father.
Certainly the captains discussed the size of the expedition. Secretary of War Dearborn had authorized twelve enlisted men and an interpreter, but Jefferson had orally given Lewis authorization to engage “any other men not soldiers that I may think useful.” Back in 1783, General Clark had advised Jefferson that, if the American Philosophical Society did send out an expedition to explore the Missouri country, they should keep it small—
a dozen at most—because any larger party would arouse the Indians to hostile acts. In 1803, he may have repeated that advice to his younger brother and Captain Lewis, but if he did, they ignored it. They intended a much larger party. According to a locally written newspaper story, it was said around Louisville that “about 60 men will compose the party.” How many of them would be soldiers attached to the Corps of Discovery, how many soldiers who would go only as far as the first winter camp, how many civilians hired to power the keelboat, was to be determined.22
In any event, the core of the Corps of Discovery had been formed, and the captains were pleased with the stout young fellows they had picked.
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The keelboat and pirogues set off from Clarksville on October 26. There was plenty of water, and no obstacles. On November 11, the party arrived at Fort Massac, built ten years earlier on the Illinois bank of the Ohio, about thirty-five miles upstream from the junction of the Ohio and the Mississippi. There Lewis expected to find eight soldiers who had volunteered from the army camp at South West Post, Tennessee, but they hadn’t been seen. Lewis immediately hired George Drouillard, a locally renowned woodsman, to go to Tennessee, pick up the missing soldiers, and bring them on to winter quarters, which he should look for on the east bank of the Mississippi, near St. Louis.
Although he never learned how to spell Drouillard’s name—it usually came out “Drewyer”—Lewis was impressed by him from the start. Son of a French Canadian father and a Shawnee mother, Drouillard was a skilled frontiersman, hunter-trapper, and scout. He was an expert in Indian ways, fluent in a couple of Indian languages and in French and English, and master of the sign language. He exuded a calm confidence, giving the strong impression that, no matter what happened, he could handle it. Lewis signed him to a contract to serve as interpreter at twenty-five dollars per month, and arranged for the paymaster at Massac to advance him thirty dollars in coin.