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

Meriwether Lewis was born in Virginia in 1774, in a place where both frontier exploration and city life were equally attainable. He learned crucial wilderness skills as well as politics, natural history, navigation and geography. An infant during the turmoil of the American Revolution, Lewis nonetheless grew up in a community that benefited from the earlier British domination of Indigenous peoples, who had been forced to cede hunting rights and access to the Ohio River in exchange for their survival. His parents, William Lewis and Lucy Meriwether, had owned land in Virginia since the beginning of the English-claimed colonies in the 1600s, and much of their wealth consisted of land and enslaved people. The Lewis family was intertwined through friendship and even marriage with the Virginian politicians who dominated the United States government at its inception. Their lands were in sight of Thomas Jefferson’s famed plantation, Monticello. Jefferson therefore knew Lewis and watched him grow up as a trusted neighbor’s son. However, Jefferson noted that the men of the Lewis family experienced “hypochondriac affections” (21), also called melancholia and now referred to as depression, a trait that did not skip Meriwether Lewis.

His father, William Lewis, fought alongside other Virginians when war broke out in 1775. He later died of pneumonia. His mother, perhaps on the advice of Lewis’s dying father, remarried to Captain John Marks within six months. Lewis remained close to his mother, who was admired in her community for “her culinary talents” (23), her herbal remedies, her horsemanship, and her hunting; she had even chased British officers from her land with a rifle. From her, as well as others in his community, Lewis developed a strong dislike of the British, who often sent raiding parties through his community during the war to take food and livestock. Lewis learned from his mother and extended family how to hunt and gather wild food from the forest to sustain his family. His relatives recalled that Lewis developed keen “self-possession in danger” (25), often reacting with coolheaded strategy during a crisis.

He desired an education, and finally found a teacher in 1787 at the age of 13, though his education appeared to have been spotty. He never attained fluency in Latin or any other foreign language, and his English spelling especially appeared to be less than “comfortable or proficient” (28) for the rest of his life. At 18, in 1792, he inherited his late father’s plantation in Virginia at Locust Hill along with more than twenty enslaved people. He moved his mother, his brother and his half-siblings back to Virginia and became the head of the household.

This chapter covers the unique circumstances and culture of Virginia “planters,” white tobacco farmers who used the unpaid labor of enslaved people to profit off huge swaths of land that grew the cash crop. Virginians depended on horses for mobility, and Lewis was a “fine, fearless rider” (31). His community of planters prided themselves on their “high standards of politeness” (31) towards strangers, guests, and women. However, Ambrose states that they were also culturally excessive drinkers, often inebriated from morning to night. They called themselves farmers, but they were effectively plantation managers, more focused on land speculation and expansion than the work of growing crops. None of them actually farmed and planted, instead leaving that labor to enslaved people. “The Virginia plantation of the day was incredibly wasteful” (32) since tobacco monoculture drained the soil of nutrients within three crop cycles. Though Lewis owned 2000 acres, this was considered vanishingly small by Virginia plantation standards. Even Jefferson’s 16,000 acre plantation was not considered large. Though tobacco was too profitable to stop growing, the cost of farming was great, and it required constant expansion as old land had to be left fallow to replenish itself. Profiting off of tobacco also required enslaved labor: paying for the labor would have instantly decimated the profit model. “Slavery worked through terror and violence—there was no other way to force men to work without compensation” (34).

Contemporaries of Lewis and Jefferson, most notably the English writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, often pointed out the irony of Virginia planters protesting for the constitutional preservation of their own liberty while enslaving others. Jefferson himself observed that no young man who witnessed the tyranny and cruelty necessary for enslaving human beings could truly be “undepraved” by the experience. Other writers observed that Virginia planters were obsessed with their own liberty, perhaps as a coping mechanism for the guilt that came with enslaving and torturing people. Virginian planters’ liberty also extended to sexual freedom in assaulting enslaved women, often resulting in biracial offspring who might be enslaved or freed depending on the attitudes of the planter who fathered them. Ambrose then addresses Sally Hemings, who was enslaved on Jefferson’s plantation and had children by him. He argues that no conclusive evidence exists that Jefferson fathered children by Hemings, which was true at the time of this book’s original publication in 1996. However, in 2000, DNA evidence confirmed that Hemings’ children were fathered by Jefferson, and the Monticello estate formally acknowledged the fact.

In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton instituted a new tax on whiskey, one of the principal products of Virginia and its surrounding territory. Virginians, land-rich but cash-poor, bristled at a tax on goods made by them, rather than goods purchased by them—they argued that this exact injustice had spurred the colonies to rebel against British rule just 15 years earlier. They complained also that the government collected money from them but did not provide any services in exchange, leaving them to build their own roads and canals. Indigenous people, in cooperation with the British, also attacked and raided the plantation settlements. Frontier farmers revolted against this new tax, attacking tax collectors in mobs. President Washington, a Virginia planter himself, called out 13,000 militiamen from Virginia to address the riots in 1794.

Implicit in this riot was another political issue: Many planters and farmers “out West,” or living west of the Appalachian mountain range, believed that they should secede from the East and create a second nation for themselves. England and Spain encouraged the rupture and met with the rebels to support their endeavor, leading Washington to take a personal interest in the militia raised to quell the rebellion. One of the militiamen was Meriwether Lewis. Lewis marched with the militia on Pittsburgh, a show of force that caused the rebels to flee to Louisiana, and no battle was ever fought. Lewis stayed on with the “small occupying force charged with patrolling and policing western Pennsylvania” (41) to discourage further uprisings and Indigenous incursions. He thrived in the highly regimented life of a soldier, but soon ran into politically motivated conflict. Most members of the militia raised in 1794 were Federalists, supporters of Alexander Hamilton’s vision of a powerful federal government. However, Jefferson and his supporters, including Lewis, were Republicans, who believed in smaller state-run governments. During this time, the French Revolution sparked up across the Atlantic, and the American Federalists and Republicans argued over it: the former against and the latter in support. Lewis grew so heated over the issue that he challenged Lieutenant Elliot, his superior, to a duel. The duel never came to pass, but Lewis was transferred to the Chosen Rifle Company instead to avoid further conflict. The Captain of that company was William Clark. They remained together for only six months, but became “great friends and admirers one of the other” (46).

Later, in the Army, Lewis became a paymaster, which “gave him a veritable carte blanche for rambling” (50). He traveled through the territories, meeting officers throughout the West and gathering more political acumen than he had before. The Federalists, who still constituted the majority in the Army, expressed concern in 1801 when Jefferson ran for President against Aaron Burr. Most Federalists loathed Jefferson to the point that they supported the underqualified Burr over the popular and educated Jefferson. However, Hamilton, Jefferson’s great political rival, endorsed him in a surprise upset that handed Jefferson the presidency. Jefferson then sent for Lewis to leave the army and join his administration.

When Jefferson took the helm of the United States, the nation’s population was just over 5 million, and almost one-fifth of them were enslaved people. The vast size of the land, even before expansion westward, was difficult to comprehend. In the early 1800s, “nothing moved faster than the speed of a horse”(52) and even then horses needed good roads to move quickly. It took three days to travel between Boston and New York, on the best maintained road in the country. Jefferson, an inventor, endeavored to create new and faster methods of travel. He was enchanted by the invention of the hot-air balloon and discussed the viability of a steam-powered carriage that could move faster than a horse. At the turn of the 19th century, this sounded like nonsense to his contemporaries. However, only 60 years later, the railroad and the telegraph revolutionized travel and communication.

In Jefferson’s era, the only way to reliably move heavy goods and livestock for trade was via water. Because of this limitation, he was determined to find water routes that could establish trade between cities on the East Coast and New Orleans, as well as a water route, if any existed, between the East Coast and the westernmost point of the American continent. While Jefferson was ahead of his time, he harbored many incorrect beliefs about the “terra incognita west of the Mississippi” (54). He required definite knowledge of the land, as well as its Indigenous peoples, to understand how to proceed in building an American Empire to rival the empires of Europe. Jefferson had a keen interest in Indigenous cultures and languages. He believed Indigenous peoples to be “in body and mind equal to the whiteman” (55) and believed that further contact could allow Indigenous people to fully and willingly integrate into white colonial society. Ambrose points out the contradiction between Jefferson’s attitudes toward Indigenous people and his attitude toward the Black people he enslaved. He saw no such potential in Black people, and took no interest in their cultures or languages.

Besides the hazards of wilderness and hostilities with Indigenous groups, any expedition to map and explore the land would have to contend with outposts and territories claimed by European nations like Spain and England. Though at the time of the expedition, the Louisiana Purchase would be official, news took a long time to spread, and the agents of other nations might see an expedition as a hostile act. However, these dangers didn’t dissuade Jefferson from the idea. His idea of a bright American future required cheap and plentiful land to produce crops for profit, cementing America’s role as an economic superpower. In order to do this, he needed to negotiate with Napoleon for Louisiana and put together an expedition to map out the lands.

Jefferson recruited Lewis from his current post as Army Paymaster to become his secretary and assistant. Lewis accepted with gratitude and traveled as quickly as he could to Washington. Although the offer was made via letter in February, delays in mail and roads kept Lewis from his post until April 1st, a frustrating reality that would foreshadow the logistical delays in Lewis’s later expedition through the country.

Jefferson used Lewis’s unique experience as a paymaster who met with many different officers to help him streamline and reform the army. Lewis was able to tell Jefferson who among his soldiers was a Federalist, and if so, how passionately they supported the cause and therefore opposed him. Though Jefferson removed the more rabid Federalists in the army, he took care not to ruffle too many feathers, and the Federalists still far outnumbered Jefferson’s supporters in the army.

Lewis assisted Jefferson through many of his struggles as a new President, including downsizing the staff at the White House and helping Jefferson navigate and suppress partisan obstacles. Lewis learned much in his work with Jefferson, but most notably his writing improved between 1800 and 1802. “His sense of pace, his timing, his word choice, his rhythm, his similes and analogies all improved” (67) due to Jefferson’s mentorship. Later, Lewis’s writings in the form of his travel journals would “constitute a priceless gift to the American people” (67).

Jefferson’s interest in exploring the country stemmed from his father, who was granted land by the British in 1750. While minister to France in 1785, he observed the necessity of exploration even in settled European lands, since so much remained un-explored. He also learned that success depended on proper preparation in the form of supplies, including tools like sextants and compasses, ink and paper, ample provisions, and enough oilcloth to keep all this equipment dry. In Europe and America, he saw many expeditions founder because of their lack of supplies and reluctance to learn the newest navigation strategies. In 1793, Jefferson, as a member of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, proposed a funded expedition to lead an overland expedition to the Pacific. This expedition, led by French botanist Andre Michaux, selected by Jefferson for his professional experience despite Lewis volunteering for the same role. This venture was cut short when Jefferson discovered that Michaux was actually a French agent trying to raise a force to attack Spanish territories in America. This failure informed Jefferson’s next attempt, convincing him that a homegrown American would be the best option to lead an expedition and a military man would likely have the right skill set.

The surrender of Spain’s Louisiana territories back to France in 1801 spurred Jefferson to action. Spain could be trusted not to expand via hostile takeover: The new French republic, led by the military expansionist Napoleon Bonaparte, could not. Jefferson threatened France with an alliance between America and Britain if they tried it. Britain, meanwhile, offered friendship while allowing British and Scottish traders and explorers to encroach on American territory. Spurred on by the threats from two nations, Jefferson offered to buy Louisiana instead of seizing it. While the Louisiana Purchase wasn’t publicized until after Lewis left on his expedition, the purchase and the expedition were both years in the making before Lewis embarked in 1803.

Jefferson officially offered Lewis the position of head of the expedition in 1803. Lewis, thrilled, accepted, though both parties were aware that Lewis lacked the formal multifaceted education and experience that would be ideal for a surveyor of the unknown lands to the west. They began to prepare Lewis via a demanding schedule of mentorship with local scientists and academics. Although the expedition had presidential approval, Jefferson’s policies were still met with fervent opposition by the Federalists in the Senate. The Louisiana Purchase ignited a whole new level of partisan fury in the young American government, since Jefferson unilaterally decided to buy a huge piece of land and then survey it for commercial potential afterwards. Many senators and congressmen believed at the time that Napoleon had got the much better end of the deal.

Lewis agreed with Jefferson that he needed additional help with the expedition, and he decided to share command with William Clark, if Clark accepted the offer. The decision to share command was made by Lewis alone, and demonstrated his self-knowledge and his respect for Clark, even though they were only friendly acquaintances at this point. Clark accepted the offer with enthusiasm via letter, and they arranged to meet on the Ohio River after Lewis embarked on the expedition.

Jefferson and Lewis discussed the amount and nature of the supplies Lewis would bring: Gifts for the Indigenous people they would encounter were a necessity, as well as provisions and firearms. Speed and portability were the main concerns in designing the expedition, but additionally Jefferson insisted that Lewis bring state-of-the-art navigation tools, including sextants and a chronometer, in order to assist in mapmaking and observation. Lewis also acquired the recently invented Girandoni airgun, a cutting-edge pneumatic rifle that could put a lead ball through a wooden board at a hundred yards without smoke or noise. Crucially, Jefferson also provided a letter of credit that could be used to resupply at any trading post on the promise of repayment by the United States government. Ambrose notes that the modern observer can deduce how well-prepared the expedition was by how much equipment and supplies they had left over when they returned. When they came back, they still had enough powder, lead, and rifles to repeat the journey without resupplying. They also had plenty of ink left over. These two redundancies highlight the dual nature of the expedition, which had to survive in the wilderness as well as record the wonders encountered along the way.

Lewis and Jefferson collaborated on designing a groundbreaking new type of iron-ribbed boat that they called a keelboat, which would allow Lewis and his comrades to disassemble it into pieces, carry it overland, and rebuild it, covering it with pelts for waterproofing whenever necessary. Another boat was specially built for their expedition, a unique craft that resembled a small “galley, little resembling the classic keelboat of the West” (106). The necessity for careful design created a frustrating delay for Lewis as the boatbuilder could not complete it by the desired deadline. He had hoped to embark by July 20th, but the boat was not ready for travel until August 31st. In the meantime, Lewis “soothed himself some” by purchasing a Newfoundland dog, a breed known for its prowess in swimming and resiliency in frontier life. He named the dog Seaman. Summer lowered the water levels of the Ohio River, and by the time the new boat was ready, it threatened to get mired in the muddy riverbed due to its weight. Lewis took the risk and left on it anyway, starting his journey on August 31st, only three hours after hearing of the boat’s completion.