Lewis and Clark Expedition, Newspaper Article, 1805

In 1803, Congress appropriated money for an exploration of the Louisiana Purchase, the vast expanse of land the United States had purchased from France for $15 million. Americans had not yet explored much of the 828,000 square miles, and President Thomas Jefferson tapped his personal secretary Meriweather Lewis (1774–1809) to lead an expedition team. Lewis was born in Virginia not far from Monticello and studied at Liberty Hall (now Washington & Lee University). Lewis reached out to William Clark (1770–1838), another Virginia native, to serve as co-captain of the expedition. Although both men had served in the U.S. military on the frontier, neither had experience with an undertaking of this magnitude. They selected several dozen men for the expedition, including Clark’s enslaved manservant York (d. after 1815). Many in this crew, known as the "Corps of Discovery," had lived on the frontier, and some were men with Indigenous and French backgrounds, who had experience with trading in the west. 

The group had two overarching goals. One was to survey the land and bring back information about the flora and fauna of the region, and more importantly, about the Indigenous peoples who lived there. The other was to discern a water route that was navigable from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. In the winter of 1803–1804, the group gathered at the juncture of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and officially embarked west of the Mississippi on May 14, 1804.

As they traveled, the captains collected and described botanical, zoological, and mineral specimens, and made countless measurements and astronomical observations. They met with Indigenous peoples, but had difficulty communicating  as they did not know the languages and knew nothing of the cultures, rivalries, and connections between the tribes they encountered. This situation changed in the winter of 1804 when they met and settled for a few months with the Mandan people in what is now North Dakota. Here, they met French trader Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacajawea (ca. 1788–1812), a teen-aged Shoshone woman whom he had taken as his wife after she had been captured by a rival tribe. Sacajawea (who traveled with her newborn son) knew several Indigenous languages. When the group encountered the Shoshone in the Rocky Mountains, she convinced them to help the explorers with horses and other supplies. The explorers also found support with the Nez Perce, whom they met near what is today the Clearwater River, in 1805. The assistance from Indigenous tribes enabled the expedition to survive treacherous terrain and freezing temperatures while crossing the Rocky Mountains. With Sacajawea, Charbonneau, and York among the thirty members who went beyond the Rockies, Lewis and Clark navigated the Columbia River to the Pacific. After building a fort and spending the winter of 1805–1806 in what is now Astoria, Oregon, the group made an arduous journey back to St. Louis, returning in September 1806.   

The expedition lasted two years and four months and covered 8,000 miles of terrain largely unexplored by Americans. Only one man died on the journey, likely of appendicitis. Many of the white members of the “Corps of Discovery” returned to the west to seek their fortunes with varying degrees of success. Meriweather Lewis was named the governor of the Louisiana Territory. After he died in 1809, William Clark succeeded him as governor and became an extremely powerful official in the west. His enslaved man York petitioned Clark for his freedom for more than a decade before succeeding. Sacajawea, whose presence was intrinsic to the ultimate success of the expedition, had another child and died as a young woman.

The exploration was a success in many ways. Clark designed maps of the new territory that would prove useful to American settlers for decades to come. Lewis’s detailed descriptions of plant and animal life, as well as his narratives about the Indigenous peoples they encountered, added considerably to American scientific and ethnographic knowledge. But they were unsuccessful in finding a direct water passage to the west coast, and Indigenous people did not make lasting treaties with—or acknowledge the land claims of—the U.S. government, as Jefferson had originally hoped.

Americans could read about the expedition in newspapers. On July 19, 1805, the Norfolk Gazette reprinted this account that had been first published in the Kentucky Gazette containing information from letters written by members of the expedition. They described the route they took, Indigenous peoples whom they met, and the landscape and wildlife they saw.  

Citation: Norfolk Gazette and Public Ledger, July 19, 1805, Library of Virginia (available online at Virginia Chronicle). 

Learn more in the Lewis and Clark Expedition entry online at Encyclopedia Virginia.

Preview Activity

Scan It: Scan the article. What words stand out to you, and why? If you were reading this article at the time, what reaction would you have?

Post Activities

Social Media Spin: Imagine you are in the Corps of Discovery and are tasked with making an Instagram account for weekly posts. What images are you posting? How are you captioning your images? What kind of comments do you think people would write to you, and why?

Map It: Go to the Lewis and Clark entry online at Encyclopedia Virginia. Use the timeline to help your students create a GIS map of the paths taken by the Corps of Discovery. What kinds of geography did they traverse? How challenging a route do you think this would have been using just canoes, small boats, and horses for travel?