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]
