 Hello from the National Archives Public Programs and Education staff. My name is Sarah Lyons Davis and I'm an education specialist at the National Archives. Welcome to the National Archives Comes Alive Young Learners Program. Today we meet the team of Maryweather Lewis and William Clark, who led the Corps of Discovery Expedition across the western portion of the United States 220 years ago this month. In 1803 the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France. President Jefferson sent co-captains Maryweather Lewis and William Clark to explore west of the Mississippi River in 1804. Today we meet Maryweather Lewis and William Clark to understand how they prepared for the expedition and what they learned about the land, rivers, and people they encountered along the journey. Maryweather Lewis is portrayed by Doug Thomas and William Clark is portrayed by Stephen Edambo of American Historical Theater. The National Archives has many records related to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the land and resources they identified, as well as maps of the expedition. On this slide for our education-specific resource, Doc's Teach, you can see a map of the Louisiana Purchase Territory. We outlined a mapping history activity where we show the Lewis and Clark route to the west in green. If you visit this activity it includes hints on how to use the map in understanding the complex expedition into the west. And in this image we have a map of Lewis and Clark's track across the western portion of North America from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean. The map dates from around 1806 and shows the route they took. This map was created by William Clark to help document every site they encountered along the way. And here you see the next slide, which includes a list of items. Referred to as Indian Presence, these items were purchased by Lewis in preparation for the expedition to the west. In a secret message to Congress on January 18, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson had asked for $2,500 to explore lands west to the Pacific. President Jefferson worked closely with Lewis, co-commander of the expedition, to ensure that he was well prepared to anticipate the party's needs. While the party ran out of such luxuries as whiskey, tobacco, and salt, they had plenty of rifles, powder, paper, and ink. And in this educational activity, which includes a full transcript of a three-page letter, President Thomas Jefferson sent this message to Congress, communicating the discoveries of the explorers Lewis and Clark on February 19, 1806. It reads, to the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States, in pursuance of a measure proposed to Congress by a message of January 18, 1803, and sanctioned by their appropriation for carrying it into execution, Captain Marywether Lewis of the First Regiment of Infantry was appointed with a party of men to explore the river Missouri from its mouth to its source and crossing the highlands by the shortest portage to seek the best water communication dense to the Pacific Ocean. And Lieutenant Clark was appointed second in command. They were to enter a conference with the Indian nations on their route with a view to the establishment of commerce with them. You can access the full letter and transcript at our docsteach.org resource. And today's program is brought to you from the National Archives Public Programs and Education Team and the National Archives Foundation. You can find information for free teacher and student programs on the National Archives website, archives.gov, under archives news, upcoming events. And if you follow the National Archives on social media. So now, let us meet Marywether Lewis and William Clark to tell us about their expedition. So, hello. So, can you, if you'd like to introduce yourselves quickly? Oh, that'd be a pleasure, Sal. Thank you for having us. I am Captain Marywether Lewis, pleased to make you all acquaintance. I am Captain William Clark. Pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much. Can you tell us the purpose of this expedition we've started hearing about? We had many goals that had been outlined by President Jefferson and others for the exploration of this brand new territory. Effectively, the size of the United States doubled with the Louisiana Purchase, but we didn't know what all was out there. So, we were interested in exploring this territory, finding new plants and animals, making contact with the Indians that lived there. And of course, there was that all-elusive goal that we had. To find the Northwest Passage, that was, that was ostensibly the main purpose of it, but it was an impossible goal. It turned out, I hate to break it to you if anybody was dependent on this for their business ventures. Go gently, sir. Go gently. There is no Northwest Passage. For that, we have to blame the Rocky Mountains. The Rocky Mountains. They're a lot bigger than we thought they were going to be. Indeed. Well, thank you. And I know your team made a number of discoveries along the way. Are there any animals you encountered and discovered? We discovered quite a number of animals. We discovered or documented 122 animal species that were unknown to Western science. And so, we could, we pick a few, I suppose, to speak of this day. We had, what was that one, the Barkin squirrel? One of the members of our expedition called it the prairie dog. We called them Barkin squirrels or the French trappers. I don't think that's going to catch on. No. Barkin squirrel sounds much better. I think they're going to end up calling it that. The French trappers and boatmen called them petit chi in. They made little yipping sounds and they poked their heads out of the burrows. We tried, we eventually did capture one. Yeah. It took us most of a day, though. We tried to smoke them out. We tried to foot them out. Finally, we had to dig down into the burrows. Turned out, those villages they lived in underground went on for miles. Miles and miles. There were thousands of them in there. But we finally got one of them. That was one we could send back to President Jefferson. See, what else did we come across? There was the pronghorn. Oh, right, right. We saw these pronghorn. They looked like, well, they were moving so fast that we don't know. We didn't know at that time exactly what they looked like, because there'd be a herd of these animals running, like you might see a herd of deer or something like that, running across the plains. Much faster than deer. Much faster than deer. They were going so fast that we couldn't catch a trap one. It just looked like, because they were sort of a grayish brown, so against the grasslands, it just looked like this gray wave going across, almost like it was made of water. They would move so quickly. And we couldn't catch one, but they could not outrun a bullet. So we did eventually bring down samples, and they were, if you looked at them, they had long, spindly legs, and they were essentially all lung. It was just a big rib cage. You know what they looked like? Like if a deer and a dashing were sort of friendly with one. Never seen anything quite like it in the eastern part of the United States. Now, there was another creature that came across. Now, when we say we discovered these creatures, there are other people who lived out there already knew about them, but we recorded them for science for the first time, or at least for the first time that was recorded for long-term. Now, there was one we'd heard a lot of stories about when we got to the Mandan and Ndotsa villages along that northern bend of the Missouri River that you showed in your purdy map that you showed there earlier before we came on here. The Indians referred to it as the great white bear, but it wasn't really white. No, they sometimes called it the grizzled bear because the reason they called it the great white bear is it had a tawny brown fur, but on its chest, the hares were sort of wider and twisted or grizzled. And so we heard stories about these, and the Indians... They told us they're going to be nearly impossible to kill. We didn't believe it. They spoke in words of reverence because they thought that these great bears were almost unkillable, and we thought, well, that's because you have bows and arrows and different firearms. We have the finest... You didn't even have a rifle to fire locks. They had smooth bores. So we thought we would have no problem bringing down these great big bears because I've been hunting bears since I was 12 years old. I've seen bears. I've hunted bears. Not a problem. Not that scary if you have a rifle. However, these bears were somewhat larger. Not being anything like it. The Indians would hunt them upon occasion, but they often would not use bow and arrow or these fire locks that they had. Instead, they would go with a tomahawk or war club because what they said is if the bear did not consent to give up its spirit, it didn't matter what weapon a man used, couldn't bring it down. Now, we thought that was ridiculous again. But after a few interactions with these critters, we found out that now I can see why they came up with that idea. They came to have a healthy respect for them. One of them took 10 shots to bring it down, turned through the lungs. One broke its shoulder blade. That just made it angry. And then it didn't die after 10 shots. It turned around and ran three miles before it finally collapsed in a hole and tried to dig into a... It was trying to cover itself up with some leaves because it was bleeding out. But that was dangerous. Now, I encountered one that almost had a very unfortunate... As a matter of fact, this is almost just the Ant-Clock expedition because I was hunting... Because I would do a lot of hunting. As the men were pulling the boat up, they would eat 9 pounds of buffalo meat a day. So I would be killing buffalo and leaving them for the men to take and butcher and then serve up that night because every man had to eat a lot because it was so much hard work going up the river against the current. But I was out hunting and I fired at a buffalo and he was expiring and I watched him expire and the thing that I forgot to do that no huntsman in the wild should ever do is I did not reload immediately. I did not reload my rifle. What I realized as well had been stalking that buffalo. There was a great grizzled white bear that was stalking me over here. And so I saw him out of the corner of my eye but my rifle was unloaded and I knew that it might take more than 10 shots to take him down anyway. So I started running. It's the only thing I could do. I ran and I ran until I was in the Missouri River up to my chest. Now these bears, they'll attack you up on their hind legs. They'll stand up like a man and attack and they can be 9 or 10 feet tall when they do that. They're just incredibly huge bears but they're not bipeds. They're not meant to walk that way. So I knew if I was in the Missouri River he wouldn't be able to wade out upright and I thought that might give me some sort of chance. Now I had another weapon on my person which was called Spontune. A Spontune looks like it's sometimes called a half pack. It's a long spear. Like a boar hunting spear is what it looks like. And so I ran into the Missouri River up to my chest. I turned my Spontune towards the bear and prepared to sell my life as dearly as I possibly knew how. And the bear there took one look at me and he turned tail and fled. Now I don't know why. I thought maybe he saw my reflection. The Missouri thought there was suddenly more of me or I had two heads or something. Now Captain Clark has an interesting theory about all this. I think the bear saw a mammoth behind Captain Lewis on the other side of the river. We never saw any. No, no. That's one of the things we were out there looking for. One of the animals we didn't discover. Mammoths, giant animals, President Jefferson found bones of I later after the expedition did a dig, let a dig at a big bone lick in Kentucky digging up a number of bones of these giant animals. Didn't see any of them on the expedition unfortunately. No. But the bear might have that date. So that mastodon might have saved my life. Wow. That's such an exciting story. Perhaps a less dangerous question or dangerous story. I'm also curious about what new plants you might have identified. If you can tell us about any of them. We found some dangerous plants as well. We did. We found some dangerous plants. We recorded what? 178? 178 new plants. And many of those we would, I would press samples. I had been trained in Philadelphia to take samples and pass them on so that they could be, I sent them to the American Philosophical Society originally. When we came across the, one kind of plant almost killed us and saved our, but it saved our lives at the same time. When we crossed over the Rocky Mountains, almost starved to death in our crossing in the Rockies because it turned out they're a little bigger than we thought they were going to be. We came down into the territory of the Nez Perce Indians. We called them the Nez Perce. The name seems to have stuck. They were, they were fishing people, but the time that we arrived, it was before the fish had been, it was after the fish had gone for the season. So they had some fish that wasn't very good anymore. And they had Quamish root, a kind of a tuber that was not, had not been recorded for science. You can picture, y'all know what a potato looks like. Well, imagine a potato that has turned evil. That's kind of what they look like. And they're very, very dense, like a potato might be. Well, much of their diet was based on these roots during the winter, and we arrived very late in the season. So we ate the food that was based on those roots. Tried telling the men to control themselves, but you try to tell a troop of starving men to control their appetites when they've just come into an area where they can get some food. They ate too much of it, and that almost killed us. We were all laid out and we were like, what happened to you if you'd just gone for weeks and weeks, eaten nine pounds of buffalo meat a day, then almost starved for two weeks, and then eaten nothing but roots and bad fish. Well, won't go into too much detail. It was unpleasant. We'll just say, leave it at that. It was unpleasant. We were indisposed, and the Nez Perce could have made quick work of us if they had decided to. But that was the first time that Quamish root had been recorded for science. So interesting all of these aspects that you're sharing with us about this expedition. And so I have a question for both of you. And what was your favorite part of the expedition? Mr. Lewis, would you like to answer first? Let's see. Well, my favorite part, truth be told, would be coming back and telling President Jefferson all about it over a bottle of wine. But I'm assuming that's not what you're looking for. There's so many experiences that are so unique. So here's one I don't talk about very often. This happened when we were on our way. We're still in map territory when this happened. We were on our way up to the Mandan village. So we had left St. Louis, and we were up that first leg of the Missouri towards the Mandan villages. And we saw this cloud coming up all the way across the Missouri River. Of course, we're going upstream. We're on our keel boat at this point. We're under sail. We're headed up towards this great cloud. Now what it was, was it a fog? And then when we encountered it, if you've ever walked through a fog, you know that your skin feels the moisture. You get wet and cold a little bit when you walk into a fog cloud. Likewise, if you happen to go up very tall mountains, as we did, you can step into a cloud and it feels the same way. But this was not. This was the same temperature as the air around it. And it was like being surrounded by little snowflakes. We had no idea what this was. And it went on for, I think, three miles, we figured. And when we finally come through the other side of it, what we saw was we saw thousands of pelicans raining. And what they were doing is they were plucking the little, little tiny bits of feather under their wings, the soft feather from the underside. And they were just sort of letting it go into the air. And it was being carried down in this large crowd. And there were so many of them that it choked the valley of the Missouri River for three miles. That was an extraordinary experience. As far as for me, I'll say, I'll talk about, I think, the most beautiful thing I ever saw on the expedition. I wrote about this in my journals. We were on the western shore of the continent by that edge of that great western ocean. I will not call it Pacific, because we barely saw a peaceful day the entire time we spent that winter there at Fort Clatsup. Now, a whale, we had heard, a whale had beached itself a number of miles about a half a day's march from where we had our fort. So we decided we're going to travel there to try to get some of the blubber. There was a great promontory rock between us and the beach on which the whale had beached itself. So I climbed up to the top of that. And this day turned out to be one of the very few peaceful days that we came across. When I made my way to the top of that rock, I could look down on the beach where the whale was. And it was almost like giants were marching out to sea. These huge formations of rock jutting out of the ocean from the beach and going from the beach out into the water. Looking down from this viewpoint that I could see out in this one particular day, a peaceful ocean, I had never seen anything so beautiful a sight in my life. As I saw that beach in your day, you refer to that as Cannon Beach. I understand that it's much easier to visit than when we visited there. Maybe you could stay a little drier and keep the fleas away a little better if you ever decided to visit there. Thank you. And the other side of that question, I think it was the expedition. I could think of one. I could think of two would be, for me, these are pretty close calls here. I'll say with my, the hardest the man ever had to work was the portage around the falls of the Missouri. And I did comment that that was the most difficult challenge that we faced. However, we didn't almost die. And we almost died in the Rocky Mountains. In neither side did we have any idea when we were planning this expedition just how challenging. We thought that the falls of the Missouri were going to be one or two sets of falls, like all of the rivers. All the rivers that we were familiar with. We were familiar with. We had no idea that the Rocky Mountains were going to be nearly as large as they were. As a matter of fact, there's a theory, and you may have learned about it if you've ever studied art, a person's face, and you cut it in half this way. You got an ear on each side, eye on each side, nostril on each side. Roughly the same size on each side. We thought that the continent was the same way. So we have the coastal plain and then the Appalachian Mountains. We knew that there was a coastal plain because that had been mapped already by a fellow by the name of George Vancouver. And then we thought there'd be another gentle set of mountains, like the Appalachians. And it took us nearly a month just to get around the falls. Instead of one fall, they were five. And while we were doing it, we were cutting our feet on some of the other plants that we didn't mention earlier that we discovered. Prickly pear and needle grass. Because our shoes wore out, so we were making moccasins, which are not nearly as sturdy as good solid shoes. And so you step on all manner of things. Picture a pear that had been corrupted in its morality, like those potatoes. It had spikes jutting out of them, sometimes longer than a finger. Cutting into your feet. I had so many cuts in my feet. At that point, I had a swelling, a tumor on one leg. In your day, you'd understand them as infections. All the men's feet, they were just miserable. There's no way to avoid them after I'm pushing all the load around these falls. So it's hard to say crossing the Rockies or portaging the falls. I have another one. You would think coming back would be easier to go over the Rockies again, which was easier coming back because we knew which way to go. We had different guides coming back, so we used different passes. But on the return expedition, we actually split the party into at one point three different groups. And at one point, I was with a group that had gone to retrieve some of our items in caches that we had left buried for the return trip. So we were digging those up. We were hunting, because of course we had to hunt and one thing I will tell you, because remember, our clothing wore out, so we were making our own clothes by this point in the expedition. Again, we're on the way back. This is 1806. If you are going to go elk hunting, my advice would be if you are going hunting with a man that has one eye and is nearsighted and the eye that is working, don't wear elk skin pants. And don't walk out in front of him. Don't walk out in front of him. So I was shot by the extreme upper thigh or the rear of the upper thigh. The top of the thigh. Above the thigh really. So when we really reunited, I was in cable room sitting in a canoe and so right in the place, sit down. So we don't need to be graphic. There's a lot of lady folk listening to this. Have the children, our children, block their ears. Medical information is all I'm giving. My tummy. That sounds like a very a very hard way to return. Not the most glorious. Not as glorious as civilization as one would one would have preferred. I imagine. And you told us a little about the food you ate and the energy required when you mentioned the buffalo. There are other types of food that you ate along the trip. Well, when we got to the next person began our way down through the fishing villages all along the clear water and the snake and the Columbia. Making our way down we were after the season of the fish coming in before the new fish had come on the stream. So the only fish as we mentioned were ill-prepared. They had made some effort to smoke them so they would preserve but they had been around for a while. And the men didn't like the fish anyway they didn't like that quamish root they didn't like the evil potatoes. So one of the creatures that these tribes of Indians use for meat is dog. They keep herds of dog. So I kept track and on the expedition the men of the expedition ate 193 dogs. I never got used to the taste myself. A lot of the men tended to prefer it on the way back as we return them back up the Columbia River. A dog and we were from the Indians and a lot of the Indians didn't understand why we preferred dog to fish. The men wanted red meat. But that was something I never got used to and I don't think any of the men continued that habit once we returned to civilization. No. Can imagine that would take some getting used to. Had you had a dog with you on your trip as a companion? Yes I did bring a dog. Right before the expedition was about to set out. As I was getting the keel boat ready I purchased a big black dog a newfound land dog which I named Seaman. He was my faithful companion all the way along. He was there. He would be with me when I was hunting. He was there when we were one night because we would camp on islands in the Missouri River. That was the safest place for us to camp sometimes. And one time a buffalo swam across Buffalo for being as large a creature as they are. They are very docile generally. However they are still huge creatures. If one steps on you you are as good as dead. So this buffalo I don't know maybe he tripped on some coals from the fire I'm not sure what got his dander up but he began to run around our camp. You can imagine a thousand pound buffalo run around the camp and he started making his way straight towards the tent where Captain Clark and myself and some other members of our expedition were sleeping including the baby that we had brought with us. And what happened was Seaman he saw that happening. Now keep in mind he is a large dog he probably would stand about 14 inches to the shoulder I should think so relatively large dog but he started barking. He just planted himself in front of our tent and started barking and he got that buffalo to swear to the side otherwise he would have run right over our tent. We didn't know what had happened we just heard Seaman barking and all the buffalo prints and we saw he had done a pretty little dance around our camp and had managed to miss all the tents where the member was sleeping. Wow. You had mentioned about some help you had navigating the journey as well. Can you tell us about the role that Sacajawea played in the expedition? First thing that I should say is I'm going to say her name for you, Sacagawea. Thank you. It has a bass sound in the middle it's not a soft G with a G it's a G and the reason is we wrote down in our journals that it meant bird woman but technically we weren't as specific as we could have been it meant crow woman. And if you think of how crow sounds it doesn't sound G it sounds caga so it's a caga wea. And there were other tribes that came across we were given an assignment to write down the languages of the Indians that came across we made a graph on a page vocabulary. And other tribes had similar words for woman wea was a sound for a woman in a number of different languages and so Sacagawea that would be the crow and then wea woman. I couldn't pronounce it if you have trouble pronouncing it though don't worry I had trouble pronouncing it too and sometimes when I wrote her name and I couldn't spell it I can't spell really well so when I wrote her name in the journals I just wrote Janie. That works just as well she'd answer that. Now I first met her when we came to the the Mandana and Hadassah villages that first winter when that would be the winter of 04 and 05 this is maybe November I think that I first met her she was she was suffering from a medical malady and I won't you know doctor patient confidentiality I suppose I will disclose the particular malady she was suffering from but her husband who was a French trapper by the name of Trouson Charbonneau he brought her to me because I had a reputation for because we had brought modern medicines with us and we and I actually had medical journals with me so I could look up ailments and and do my best to help to cure them so we set up a lot of times when we would have a winter camp I would set up primarily and then later on you as well Captain we'd set up as essentially traveling physicians. Part of how we negotiated for some of the dog meat on the way back up to Columbia. I gained a reputation as a bit of a doctor because I'd given some eye drops and some liniment to one another. So I treated her and she was about six and a half months pregnant at that point as well. I treated her for this this ailment that we learned in our discussions with her husband that she was not even though they lived in the Hadatsa villages she was not a native Hadatsa she had been a member of the Shoshone tribe and we knew the Shoshone tribe lived at the base of the Rocky Mountains and they were known as wonderful horsemen and so we knew that we were going to have to negotiate we knew we need horses we thought that Rocky Mountains weren't as bad as that but we knew we needed to bring the horses with us from the Mandan and Hadatsa villages to the Rocky Mountains so we needed to trade for them so we needed somebody who spoke the language and she spoke the language of the Shoshone because that was her people she had been kidnapped when she was a young girl but she hadn't forgotten the way if you were kidnapped at the age of say 12 years old you wouldn't forget how to speak your first language and you'd learn how to speak the language that you were adopted to so she spoke Hadatsa as did her husband but she also spoke this language Shoshone so we didn't hire her we hired a husband well we don't and her husband brought her along women don't have jobs obviously not exactly right we hired a husband to come along and bring his wife he wanted to bring both his wives we won't get into all that right but we said just the as it turned out to make a long story long when we got to the Shoshone to the Shoshone villages and the Rockies what we found out was that after negotiating a little while going through a very long translation chain was that it turned out that Chicago way up was the long lost sister of the chief of the Shoshone Indians and they didn't recognize each other at first because they'd been separated as children but once they recognized each other well we had just returned the chief's sister back to him again so needless to say we got the horses she also helped out with augmenting the men's diets finding routes and plans along the way nine pounds of buffalo meat a day will work about as well for soldiers on land as for sailors on the sea you need something to augment it she helped guide us once we got into the area where she grew up noticing landmarks and the right direction for instance finding a creek that can lead us up to where we could find her people on the way back when the expedition split up she came with my segment of the expedition and she helped me find a pass you and your day called Bozeman's Pass to cross over the Rockies eastbound because my section of the expedition when we split up I explored the Yellowstone River and she came with me on that so she didn't show the guide there she did the whole journey the same journey that the men did and she had a baby strapped to her back because she had a baby I said she was pregnant when I first met her well I delivered her son Jean Baptiste the following February just before a couple months before we set out he's a cute little baby too I just call him Pompey because again names easier to spell than Jean Baptiste right what an amazing story thank you so much for sharing about the core of discovery I know I've learned quite a bit and I do have one final question for the day what advice do both of you have for young people today one of the things you will not spend much time hearing about in conversations like this or perhaps even when you learn about our expedition it's very different than the adventures that we talk about or that might bring young people to want to read about us all the fun things or dangers exciting things but one of the reasons one of the most important reasons why we succeeded was because of all the boring stuff we did in preparation for the expedition we planned we studied we packed we repacked our p-rogues and our our keel boat the packing and repacking took weeks and weeks and then we would even stop for an entire day to stop and reorganize things in the boat the study that Captain Lewis did for months and months prior to the expedition the amount of time we spent training the man finding the right man then training them all the preparation and planning and study and care that went into the expedition had more to do with the success of the expedition I think than any of the lucky episodes or moments that we might have in that in those stories you might hear of any of the exciting stories that we tell only possible because of the preparation we had done I think you mentioned that we had enough although we ran out of some items like whiskey coffee we ran out of that as well but we had enough iron ink and enough shot and powder to do the entire expedition another time had we had we needed to I would say adding to the preparation I'd say if there's one thing that young people can take away from this it's perseverance and endurance because at no point during this expedition was the chance that we could walk away from it and I think that what a lot of people face in the challenges of life is they decide that they don't want to go on with it well I'm here to tell you if you persevere you will be successful if you have enough preparation and you persevere you will be successful well thank you again both of you this has been fascinating and educational and enjoyable and I really appreciate both of your time with us today thank you so much thank you so now one last look at the map of the Lewis and Clark track across the western portion of North America from the Mississippi Pacific Ocean and I hope you can join next month for our young learners program with sojourner truth to learn about her life as an enslaved person in New York who became an evangelist abolitionist and seeker for the rights of women thank you for participating in our program today