Lives of the Explorers by Kathleen Krull

Author:Kathleen Krull
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

BORN IN IDAHO OR MONTANA, 1788(?); DIED IN FORT MANUEL, NORTH DAKOTA, 1812 (SACAJAWEA)

Two American explorers and their Shoshone Indian interpreter on an epic journey

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had much in common. Both were well-to-do Virginia planters, slaveholders, and army veterans. They were four years apart in age and got along well. So when President Thomas Jefferson asked Captain Lewis to explore the giant parcel of land known as the Louisiana Purchase, Lewis chose Clark to be his co-captain. They were to set out from St. Louis, Missouri, leaving the known United States behind, heading west with the nearly impossible goal of crossing the Rocky Mountains and reaching the Pacific Ocean.

Sacajawea had virtually nothing in common with either Lewis or Clark. But they could not have made their journey without her.

Lewis had grown up fast, taking care of his family and managing his plantation at a young age. He was a skilled hunter and well-educated, keenly interested in natural history and medicinal herbs. At least one of his neighbors admired him—President Jefferson, who praised his “luminous and discriminating intellect” and hired him as his secretary. Lewis mixed with big names in politics and the arts, polished his manners, and learned to dance.

But, despite actively trying, he never married. “His person was stiff and without grace,” said a cousin, “bow-legged, awkward, formal, and almost without flexibility.” Another man called him “an overgrown baby.” Some historians think Lewis suffered bouts of depression. Even James Madison’s bubbly wife, Dolley, couldn’t match him up. Lewis started referring to himself as “a musty, fusty, rusty, old bachelor.”

Redheaded Clark was more amiable and less moody than Lewis. He had little formal education—he spelled “Sioux” twenty-seven different ways—but was a big reader of geography and history as well as novels. After his journey with Lewis, he married twice, had eight children, and was a founding member of his local Episcopal church. But he treated slaves cruelly, and bragged that they remained with him even after they’d been offered freedom.

To prepare for their journey west, Lewis and Clark added thirty-eight members to their group, called the Corps of Discovery. The men had to be “stout” (healthier than the average American), good hunters or able to offer another necessary skill, unmarried, and able to withstand harsh conditions over two years. The youngest was seventeen; the oldest, thirty-five. All were white except Clark’s slave, York. Lewis’s Newfoundland dog, Seaman, went along. Their provisions included a vast assortment of gifts for the Indians they would encounter, 120 gallons of alcohol, and a great deal of medicine. (With 600 mercury capsules used as laxatives, it is said the Corps’s path can still be traced by way of mercury deposits in the soil.)

The day of departure in 1804 was among the happiest of Lewis’s life. In his journal he dared to compare himself to Columbus and Cook, and said, “We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine.

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