Personelle
At River Dubois Camp
Organized as a military detachment, under the orders of
the
secretary of war—although President Jefferson remained
the moving
spirit—the party, when complete, consisted
of twenty-nine persons officially recognized on
the rolls; with
French and half-breed interpreters, Clark's
negro slave York, and the
Indian woman Sacajawea as super-numeraries
—forty-five in all, including the two captains.[18]
Lewis
—who had bidden good-bye to his friends at the White
House on the
morning of July 5th—embarked at Pittsburg
on the thirty-first of
August; but owing to shallows in the
Ohio River, and the necessity of
stopping at some of the forts
to obtain volunteers from their garrisons,
his passage was slow,
At Louisville he picked up Clark and several young
Kentucky
recruits. December was a third spent, before the
expedition
went into winter camp at River Dubois,
in Illinois, opposite the mouth of
the Missouri,
where the men were rigorously drilled both as soldiers and
frontiersmen. It had been Lewis's intention to camp at some
distance
up the Missouri; but the lateness of the season, the
technical objections
raised by Spanish officials, and Jefferson's
characteristic
suggestion[19]
that a camp on the east side, in
American territory, would save the
appropriation by allowing
the men
to draw their winter's rations from the War Department,
induced him to stop at River
Dubois.
The journals show that the winter was a busy one—Clark
being engaged at camp for the most part, in organizing and
disciplining the party, and accumulating stores and boats for
the
long up-river journey; while Lewis was often in St. Louis,
consulting with
French fur-traders and others who knew the
country. On March 9th and 10th,
1804, we find him the chief
official witness at the formal transfer of
Upper Louisiana—
at first from Spain to France, and then from
France to the
United States.
