Undaunted Courage: The Pioneering First Mission to Explore America's Wild Frontier

At the end of March, the men of the expedition had just survived the “coldest winter any of them had ever known” (202) and they were eager to keep moving. Meanwhile, Lewis and Clark worked for the last several weeks of winter camp to write as many detailed reports as they could to send back to Jefferson. Even their limited observations of the northern plains would constitute the “first systematic survey of the trans-Mississippi West” (203), which was priceless to the United States government. Their report was modeled on Jefferson’s earlier work, Notes on the State of Virginia, composed around 1775, and in the end, the final report was about 45,000 words. In the report, they emphasized the economic potential of the lands they surveyed, with Lewis aware that his reports would be read to Congress as an endorsement of the cost of the expedition. Crucially, Lewis left out of his report the necessity of Mandan corn supplies to their winter survival, implying that it was possible for white men to subsist only by hunting for an entire winter on the prairie. However, there was no way Lewis and his men could have survived without a lot of help from the Mandan.