Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
About five Oclock this evening one of the wives of Charbono was delivered of a fine boy. it is
worthy of remark that this was the first child which this woman had boarn, and as is common in such
cases her labour was tedious and the pain violent; Mr. Jessome informed me that he had frequently
administered a small portion of the rattle of the rattle-snake, which he assured me had never failed
to produce the desired effect, that of hastening the birth of the child; having the rattle of a snake by
me I gave it to him and he administered two rings of it to the woman broken in small pieces with
the fingers and added to a small quantity of water. Whether this medicine was truly the cause or
not I shall not undertake to determine, but I was informed that she had not taken it more than ten
minutes before she brought forth perhaps this remedy may be worthy of future experiments, but I
must confess that I want faith as to it's efficacy.
The expedition of Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838) across a largely un-
known continent is one of America's great true adventure stories. Although President Thomas Jefferson
had been secretly planning such an expedition for some time in order to secure trading rights in this territ-
ory and prepare a defense against British attempts to take the land, the purchase of the Louisiana Territory
from Napoleon in 1803 gave it new urgency and legitimacy. Lewis and Clark had been given ambitious
directions by Jefferson. They were to attempt to find a waterway clear across the continent to the Pacific
Ocean, to map and catalog the plants and animals of the unknown American West, and to study the cus-
toms of native Indians while they were at it.
More than curiosity was at stake. The British had their own claims to America's Northwest. For reasons
of defense and commerce, Jefferson wanted to know exactly what the new territory meant to America.
With this purchase, Jefferson had doubled the size of the country. A great intellect and a brilliant politician,
Jefferson also had a practical side: he knew that there was great trading and commercial potential in this
new land, and he wanted to assure that Americans, not the British, French, Spanish, or Russians, would
profit from the land.
The new mother described by Lewis was Sacagawea, a teenaged Shoshoni Indian who had been cap-
tured by another tribe five years earlier and then either bought or won by Toussaint Charbonneau, a French
trapper. Lewis and Clark took on Charbonneau as a guide specifically because of Sacagawea's value as an
interpreter among the Indian tribes that the explorers anticipated meeting further west.
A valued member of the expedition, all the time carrying her newborn son on her back, Sacagawea
died in 1812 at age twenty-three. Her son, Jean Baptiste, nicknamed Pomp, was raised by Clark and later
traveled to Germany with a European prince. Pomp eventually returned to America and became a trapper
and guide.
Lewis and Clark completed this remarkable journey with the loss of only a single man, to appendicitis.
And they did it by establishing peaceful relations with the Indians, with the exception of one brief skirmish
after some horses were stolen. It is a tragic pity that Jefferson's humanistic orders for dealing with the Indi-
ans, and Lewis and Clark's success in carrying out Jefferson's peaceful directives, did not set the standard
for future relations between the federal government and the Indians.
When Lewis and Clark's description of the natural wonders and riches they had seen was made public,
it helped fuel an empire-building spirit that was eventually called Manifest Destiny and which changed the
course of American and world history.
What's So Bad About the Badlands?
