University of Virginia Library

PREVIOUS EXPLORATIONS

Spain

SLOWLY pushing northward from Mexico, Spaniards
had by the close of the seventeenth century established
towns and Indian missions at many points in Texas,
New Mexico, and Arizona—a slender chain, stretching across
the continent from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific
Ocean. By the opening of our Revolutionary War,
their mission villages, with an aggregate population of over
thirteen thousand barbarian converts, extended upwards through
California to San Francisco and Monterey; Spanish mariners,
seeking vainly for a waterway through to the Atlantic, that
should furnish a short route between Spain and India, had by
this time become familiar with the coast as far north as the
modern Sitka, and developed a considerable trade with the
natives, chiefly at Nootka Sound, on Vancouver's Island;
while adventurous Spanish missionaries had contemporaneously
penetrated eastward to the Great Basin.

New France

The pioneers of New France, on their part seeking a transcontinental
waterway from the east, had throughout the first
two-thirds of the eighteenth century made several
costly attempts to discover and surmount the great
divide. Upon New Year's day, 1743, the Chevalier
de la Vérendrye, journeying overland from his fur-trading
post on the Assiniboin River, sighted the Wind River Range.
Affairs moved slowly, under the French régime; but yearly
the prospect was growing brighter of reaching the Pacific by
way of a chain of posts across the Canadian Rockies, via the
Assiniboin and Saskatchewan, when the victory of Wolfe cut
short these ambitious projects, and England succeeded both
to the responsibilities and the dreams of New France.

England

The Hudson's Bay Company, organized in London in
1667, had long held actual dominion over the sub-arctic regions
to the north of New France; and on paper
claimed the far-stretching lands to the south and
west, upon which the more adventurous French had actively
ranged from Lake Superior westward to the headwaters of the
Saskatchewan—a distance of twelve hundred miles. At first
disinclined to explore beyond the sphere of influence immediately
exerted by her profitable posts on Hudson and James
bays, "the old lady of Fenchurch Street" was early in the
eighteenth century forced by public opinion in England to
make a show of seeking from the East the waterway which
Sir Francis Drake, in the "Golden Hind," had sought from
the Pacific as early as 1579, and for which both Spain and
France were still vainly striving. The company's spasmodic,
apathetic, and fruitless searches for the "Northwest Passage"
extended through half a century.

When New France fell, both independent and organized
English and Scotch fur-traders, with headquarters at Montreal
and Mackinac, disregarding the claims of the Hudson's Bay
Company at once occupied the vast country through which
Vérendrye and his compatriots had so long conducted their
wilderness barter. The story of the rival trading corporations
—chiefly the Hudson's Bay Company on the one hand, and the
North West Company (1783) on the other—although with
occasional disruptions of the latter, and several kaleidoscopic
reshiftings and amalgamations—is a stirring and sometimes
bloody chapter in the history of the continental interior.

The situation cultivated mighty passions within strong men.
One of these, Samuel Hearne, in the employ of the Hudson's
Bay Company, stirred by great ambitions, descended the
Coppermine River in 1770, and reached the Arctic Ocean.
Nineteen years later (1789), Alexander Mackenzie, a "Nor'
Wester" in charge of the Athabasca department, reached the
Arctic Ocean by way of Mackenzie River; in 1793, after
almost incredible difficulties, he crossed the Canadian Rockies
and descended Fraser River to the Pacific, a feat preceding
Lewis and Clark's venture by a dozen years.

Missouri River Expeditions

While these various hardy enterprises were in progress in
the North, many deemed the Missouri River the most feasible
gateway to the Pacific. There long existed a tradition
among Indians living upon the Mississippi,
that the Missouri sprung from a low-lying watershed
that might easily be portaged to some stream flowing
into the Western Ocean. Joliet and Marquette (1673) had at
first hoped that the Mississippi might be found emptying into
the Pacific; but ascertaining that its flood was received by the
Gulf of Mexico, they looked upon the Missouri as the undoubted
highway to the Ocean of the West. Thirty years
later, charts were published in Europe which showed west-flowing
waters interlocking with the Missouri. Several French
expeditions were organized for exploring the Missouri and
some of its lower affluents—La Harpe and Du Tisné (1719),
De Bourgmont (1722), and Mallet (1739); but they accomplished
little more than obtaining a knowledge of the country
for a few hundred miles above the mouth, with side ventures
upon the South Fork of the Platte, the Arkansas, and the
plains southwestward to the Spanish seat of Santa Fé.

French traders and trappers

Upon the eve of the downfall of New France, the crafty
Louis XV, in order to prevent England from obtaining them,
ceded to Spain (November, 1762) the town and
neighborhood of New Orleans and the broad possessions
of France west of the Mississippi. But the
Spaniards who came to New Orleans and St. Louis were in
the main only public officials. French habitans occupied their
little waterside villages, as of old; being joined in the closing
decade of the century by Kentuckians like Boone, who, weary
of the legal and social restraints of growing American settlements,
were willing to accept Spanish land grants with their
promise of a return to primitive conditions, in which farming
operations alternated with hunting. French trappers, many of
them blood relatives of the red men, and now released from
the tyranny of the fur-trade monopoly of New France freely
plied their nomadic calling upon the lower reaches of the
Missouri and its branches, and even up the Platte and
Arkansas to the bases of the Rockies. French and half-breed

fur-traders—either on their own account or, in the northern
regions, as agents of the warring British companies—wandered
far and near among the tribesmen, visiting them in their permanent
villages and accompanying them upon hunting-, fishing-,
and war-parties. Their long journeyings by land and
water occasionally carried them as far afield as the great northern
bend of the Missouri, where were the villages of the trade-loving
Mandans, who bartered indiscriminately with Gauls from
St. Louis and Britons from the Assiniboin.

Jefferson's dream

Such was the situation when the United States was born,
and when Thomas Jefferson—philosopher, seer, statesman—
always interested in the Middle West, first felt within
him yearnings for a more intimate knowledge of the
spacious territory of Louisiana, lying beyond the great
river. The country belonged to Spain, but this fact gave him
no pause; he felt that so long as British traders were profitably
exploiting the trans-Mississippi, Americans might be excused
for opening through it a trade route to the Pacific, and incidentally
extending the bounds of human knowledge, in geography
and the natural sciences.

Proposition to G. R. Clark

In 1783 he proposed to General George Rogers Clark, the
hero of Kaskaskia and Vincennes, to lead an expedition "for
exploring the country from the Missisipi to California;"
he intimated that a similar enterprise was
being broached in England—"they pretend it is
only to promote knoledge. I am afraid they have thoughts
of colonising into that quarter."[1] Nothing came of this suggestion
—possibly Clark did not reply; or very likely Jefferson,
just then in private life, thought that the necessary funds
could not be raised.

Ledyard's project

Three years later, when minister to Paris, Jefferson met
John Ledyard, a Connecticut adventurer who had been a petty
officer with Captain James Cook on the latter's third
voyage around the world (1778), and had written
a widely-read account of that enterprise. Ledyard
agreed to cross Europe and Asia to Kamchatka, thence embarking

on a Russian vessel trading to Nootka Sound, from
which he was to find his way to the sources of the Missouri,
whose current was to be descended to the American
settlements. But Ledyard, when within a few days of the
Kamchatka port, was arrested by imperial orders from St.
Petersburg, and ignominously carried back to Poland, where,
"disappointed, ragged, and penniless," he was dismissed.

Armstrong's attempt

In 1789, General Henry Knox, Washington's secretary
of war, ordered General Josiah Harmar, commanding the
Western frontier at Cincinnati, to "devise some
practicable plan for exploring that branch of the
Mississippi called the Messouri, up to its source,"
and possibly beyond to the Pacific. Captain John Armstrong,
then in command at Louisville, was despatched upon this adventure
in the spring of 1790. Entirely alone in a canoe, he
"proceeded up the Missouri some distance above St. Louis
. . . but, meeting with some French traders, was persuaded
to return in consequence of the hostility of the Missouri
bands to each other, as they were then at war, and he could
not safely pass from one nation to the other."

The Michaux plan

Jefferson was the next to make a venture in transcontinental
exploration. This time (1793) in his capacity as a vice
president of the American Philosophical Society at
Philadelphia, he made an arrangement therefor with
André Michaux, a distinguished French botanist
then herborizing in the United States. A small subscription
was raised by the society, to which many of the prominent
men of the day contributed, and detailed instructions for
Michaux were drafted by Jefferson.[2] The intending explorer
was to "cross the Mississippi and pass by land to the nearest
part of the Missouri above the Spanish settlements, that you
may avoid the risk of being stopped;" he was then to "pursue
such of the largest streams of that river as shall lead by
the shortest way and the lowest latitudes to the Pacific ocean."
The previous year, Captain Robert Gray, of Boston, had discovered
the mouth of the Columbia, and Jefferson hoped that
this stream might be found to interlock with the sources of

the Missouri. Just then, however, there had arrived in the
United States Charles Genet, minister of the French Republic,
who was charged with the secret mission of forming a fillbustering
army of American frontiersmen in the Carolinas,
Georgia, and Kentucky to attack Spanish possessions on the
Gulf of Mexico and beyond the Mississippi. Michaux was
selected by Genet as his agent to deal with the Kentuckians,
led by George Rogers Clark, who had proposed, under the
banner of France, to descend the Mississippi with fifteen
hundred borderers and attack New Orleans. Michaux tarried
in Kentucky to carry out these ill-fated plans, with the result
that his project of exploration was abandoned.[3]

On the Northwest Coast

Meanwhile, there had been important developments upon
our Northwest Coast. We have seen that by the opening of
the Revolutionary War the Spanish had explored
the whole extent of this shore, nearly up to the site
of the modern Sitka. In 1778 Captain Cook was
here, on behalf of England, searching for the Northwest Passage,
a movement which induced fresh zeal on the part of
Spanish navigators, and watchfulness on the part of the Russians
in Alaska. Eight years later, the French navigator and
scientist, Count de la Pérouse, visited these shores and gave
to the world its first definite knowledge of Spain's California
missions. English fur-trading vessels now appeared on the
scene, bartering with the natives for furs, which were carried
to China, to be there exchanged for teas, silks, spices, and
other Oriental wares. Friction between Spanish and English
trading interests at Nootka Sound—where the latter had
made small settlements—led to a spirited controversy that
might readily have precipitated war, but which ended peacefully
in the withdrawal of Spain (1795). By this time,
American trading craft were sharp competitors for the China-American
fur traffic of the Northwest Coast. Owing to the
monopoly of the East India Company in British trade on the
Pacific Ocean, most of the Englishmen gradually withdrew:

thus for some twenty years leaving New England navigators
almost complete masters of the situation.

When Thomas Jefferson became president of the United
States, perhaps two score American trading vessels were annually
visiting Nootka Sound and the mouth of the Columbia;
British overland traders were operating among the Mandans
and their neighbors, at and below the great bend of the Missouri;
French and half-breed trappers and traders, together
with a few expatriated Kentuckians, were familiar with the
Missouri and its lower affluents; upon St. Peter's River (near
the Minnesota), British free-traders were profitably operating
among the Sioux, a proximity which caused much uneasiness
among Americans in the West. As yet, few citizens of the
United States were operating in the vast territory of Louisiana,
which Napoleon, dreaming of another New France in North
America, had now (October 1, 1800) obliged Spain to retrocede
to him; but of which he had not thus far taken formal
possession.

Congressional aid secured

Amidst the manifold duties of his great office, Jefferson
had not forgotten his early scheme for exploring the trans-Mississippi.
Greater opportunity now presented itself
—he possessed influence to secure governmental
aid, and recognized the existence of a stronger public
spirit. The lapse in the winter of 1802–03 of an "act for
establishing trading houses with the Indian tribes," was made
the occasion for addressing (January 18) a secret message to
Congress,[4] in which he urged the importance of reaching out
for the trade of the Indians on the Missouri River, that
thus far had in large measure been absorbed by English companies;
and suggested an exploring party as the best means
of accomplishing this object. He recognized that the country
which he thus proposed to enter was the property of France,
although still governed by Spain; but thought that as the
latter nation's interests were now waning, she would not be
disposed to jealousy and would regard the enterprise merely
"as a literary pursuit." An estimate of the necessary expenses
was placed at only $2,500; but the correspondence which we

give in the Appendix, shows that Jefferson intended that the
exploring party should, while still in the United States, be
subsisted by the War Department; and in addition thereto
we shall see that he issued in their favor a general letter of
credit, which proved of no avail, but further demonstrates the
fact that the explorers were not expected to limit themselves
to the appropriation.