University of Virginia Library

MERIWETHER LEWIS

Early years

Congress having proved complaisant, in secretly giving the
necessary authority and passing the modest appropriation,
Jefferson at once appointed his private secretary,
Captain Meriwether Lewis, as head of the proposed
expedition. Lewis was born near Charlottesville, Virginia,
August 18th, 1774, his people being prominent in colonial
and Revolutionary affairs. His father, William, died when
Meriwether, named for his mother's family, was a child. The
boy came under the guardianship of his uncle Nicholas, who
had in 1776 commanded a regiment in the campaign against
the Cherokees; but his education remained under the direction
of his mother, a woman of capacity and judgment. When
but eight years of age, the lad had established a local reputation
as a hunter; and until his thirteenth year, when he was sent to
a Latin school, had ample opportunity to satisfy his adventurous
cravings in this direction. After five years of tuition,
he returned to his mother's farm, where the succeeding two
years were spent in careful attention to the details of husbandry,
in the course of which he acquired some skill in botany, that
was to stand him well in stead during the great expedition of a
few years later.

Military experiences

In 1794, when Lewis was twenty years of age, the so-called
Whisky Rebellion, against a federal excise tax, broke out in
Western Pennsylvania, and threatened to spread
into Virginia and Maryland. President Washington
issued a requisition for some thirteen thousand
militia from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia,
and this force promptly marched towards the seat of

disturbance, thus speedily causing the subsidence of what was
practically an insurrection against the national government.
Lewis enlisted as a private in this little army, and at the close
of the disturbance was given employment in the regular service
— originally as ensign in the First Infantry (May 1, 1795),
later as first lieutenant, and then captain (1797) in the same
regiment. He served with distinction under General Wayne,
in the latter's Northwestern campaigns, and in the first year
of his captaincy was in charge of the infantry in Captain Isaac
Guion's expedition to take over the Spanish posts in Mississippi.[5]
He also was for several years the paymaster of his
regiment.[6]

Selected to command Expedition

Captain Lewis appears early to have won the esteem and
confidence of his distinguished neighbor, Thomas Jefferson;
and in the spring of 1801 the latter, as president of
the United States, appointed him as his private
secretary.[7] We have already seen that in 1783
Jefferson, not then in official life, suggested to George Rogers
Clark an exploration of the trans-Mississippi country, and that
his subsequent negotiations with Ledyard (1788) and Michaux
(1793) came to naught. The last-named mission had been
unsuccessfully sought by his adventurous young friend Lewis,
although but nineteen years old. When, apparently as early
as July, 1802, President Jefferson revived his long-considered
project, he offered the post of leader to his private secretary,

who, now having attained the age of twenty-eight, had again
pleaded for this honor. In his Memoir of Lewis,[8] the president
pays him this generous tribute:

I had now had opportunities of knowing him intimately. Of courage
undaunted; possessing a firmness and perseverance of purpose which
nothing but impossibilities could divert from its direction; careful as a
father of those committed to his charge, yet steady in the maintenance
of order and discipline; intimate with the Indian character, customs,
and principles; habituated to the hunting life; guarded, by exact observation
of the vegetables and animals of his own country, against losing
time in the description of objects already possessed; honest, disinterested,
liberal, of sound understanding, and a fidelity to truth so scrupulous that
whatever he should report would be as certain as if seen by ourselves—
with all these qualifications, as if selected and implanted by nature in one
body for this express purpose, I could have no hesitation in confiding the
enterprise to him.

The President had at first sought as commandant a scientist
who possessed, in addition to his scholarly attainments, the
necessary "courage, prudence, habits & health adapted to the
woods & some familiarity with the Indian character."[9] Failing
in this, Captain Lewis was chosen as being, in his chief's
opinion, "brave, prudent, habituated to the woods, & familiar
with Indian manners and character. He is not regularly educated,
but he possesses a great mass of accurate observation on
all the subjects of nature which present themselves here, & will
therefore readily select those only in his new route which shall
be new."[10]

In training

In order to acquire "a greater familiarity with the technical
language of the natural sciences, and readiness in the astronomical
observations necessary for the geography of
his route," Lewis proceeded to Philadelphia,[11] where
he received instruction in the rudiments of the sciences from

several eminent specialists—that city being the home of the
American Philosophical Society, and then the principal seat of
learning in the country. His correspondence with Jefferson
during this period, which is given in our Appendix, abounds
in allusions to scientific and practical details, showing him to
have been not only an apt pupil, but already possessed of a
large fund of information of the sort essential to the equipment
of an explorer.