When Thomas Jefferson concluded the Louisiana Purchase, it was one of the greatest land deals in history. For a relatively small sum, the young United States purchased a large part of the North American continent. However, there was a catch. The government had no clue what exactly was in the land that they had purchased. Much of it was unexplored. To address this problem, an expedition was formed to explore the new land, which would ultimately shape the future of the United States. Learn more about the Lewis and Clark expedition on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand. Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time. From startups to scale-ups online, in-person and on-the-go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. 500 orders a month was manageable. $5,000 is madness! Embrace intelligent order fulfillment with ShipStation. The only platform combining order management, warehouse workflows, inventory, returns and analytics in one place. What used to take five separate tools, ShipStation does in one. Go to ShipStation.com and use code START to try ShipStation 3 for 60 days. If you remember back to my episode on the Louisiana Purchase, a war in Europe and a successful slave insurrection in Haiti led Napoleon Bonaparte to abandon his North American holdings. President Thomas Jefferson secured the Louisiana Purchase for just $15 million, doubling the size of the United States at three cents an acre. Even adjusted for inflation, it was a really good deal. The deal contradicted Jefferson's mission to shrink the federal government, yet westward expansion was critical to his vision of the United States. Jefferson had been interested in the West ever since the American Revolution. Most Americans in the time of Thomas Jefferson lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. To Jefferson, the West represented possibility, potential and mystery. His focus on westward expansion was old news by the time that he was elected president in 1800. In fact, his fascination with the West began before he even wrote the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson was infactuated by the Mississippi and uncharted river systems west of it. He hoped that there would be a direct river system that would lead to the Pacific Ocean. The historian Stephen Ambrose put Jefferson's vision of the West in a perspective when he wrote, quote, in an age of imperialism, he was the greatest empire builder of them all. His mind encompassed the entire continent. The limited knowledge that he had of the region came from reports of fur traders. French explorers also brought news from the fur-bearing regions of the Great Lakes. However, these reports lack the scientific rigor that Jefferson sought. Jefferson secured funding for a western expedition as early as January 1803 before the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson asked Congress for a mere $2,500 to fund the mission. To keep cause slow, Jefferson paid the expedition members a soldier salary and drew on funds from the defense budget. He dubbed the expedition the core of discovery, a unit of the United States Army. Jefferson asked Mary Weather Lewis to lead the mission. He outlined his ambitions for westward expansion by noting, quote, the purpose of your mission is to explore the Missouri River and by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean. Although Lewis already held a captain's commission in the U.S. Army, he knew his military training wasn't sufficient. To meet Jefferson's ambitions, he had to become a scientist to fulfill the wide-ranging goals of Jefferson's mission. Jefferson wrote to Lewis in June of 1803 giving a lengthy description of his objectives and wrote, quote, your observations are to be taken with great pains and accuracy and to be entered distinctly and intelligibly for others as well as yourself. Lewis wasn't a scientist, so he needed to study to prepare to take the observations that Jefferson requested. He spent the summer of 1803 in Philadelphia and there he got a crash course in many areas of scientific study. He worked with experts in botany, geology, zoology, cartography, and astronomy. Benjamin Rush, a revolutionary era doctor, gave Lewis medical training for the expedition. Rush famously provided the expedition with 600 thunderbolt pills, a powerful laxative of his own design. He claimed that they would produce explosive bowel movements that would relieve any ailment. After training, Lewis went to Harper's Ferry, Virginia to gather supplies. Lewis shipped the supplies to Pennsylvania and traveled there to meet his former military commander, William Clark. Lewis and Clark were very different leaders. Jefferson selected Lewis for his bookish mind, but Lewis recruited Clark for his grit on the frontier. Clark was recruited to bolster the group's spirits, serving as a steadfast and dependable anchor for the entire expedition. Clark distinguished himself as an exceptional cartographer despite having no formal education in the field. His maps are still considered high quality by modern standards. Data from the National Park Service highlights that he was a highly skilled map maker who utilized tools such as a telescope, a quadrant, and a compass to achieve his results. In guiding the men on their journey, he had kept remarkable records of their distance. He was off by a mere 40 miles in his calculation of how far they had traveled from Camp Dubois outside of St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean. But Clark should be taken with a grain of salt. On the expedition, Clark brought his enslaved servant named York, who became the first African-American to cross the continent. York was indispensable, helping with river navigation and hunting through harsh winters. The expedition treated York as an equal on the trail, even granting him a vote during the brutal winter of 1805, widely considered to be the first vote cast by an African-American in U.S. history. York's equality ended upon his return. While every other man walked away with 320 acres on their promised double pay, York received nothing. When the expedition ended, York asked Clark for his freedom, and Clark refused. The expedition began from Fort Dubois upstream from St. Louis on the Mississippi, where they had spent the winter of 1803 and 1804. They spent that fall and winter recruiting, bringing the total size of the group to 40 people. Lewis and Clark handpicked every member of the expedition for a specific vital skill. Each man excelled in woodworking, hunting, sailing, or blacksmithing. After loading all the supplies into a 55-foot keel boat that Clark and the crew had constructed, the men set out on the Missouri River. Lewis and Clark began keeping detailed journals, a practice that defined their expedition. Their journals offer vivid details of every stage of the journey. Historians access the digitized journals more frequently than almost any other set of primary materials in American history. The Daily Logs tell us about their discoveries, triumphs, and tragedies. One tragedy occurred on August 20, 1804, when Charles Floyd died of a rupture of appendix. Clark's journal entry from that day chronicles the tragedy. He wrote, quote, Yesterday Floyd was taken very bad. He died with a composure which justified his character as a man and a soldier. The journals revealed the changing geography, animal discoveries, and relationships with Native Americans. The journals also included sketches, maps, animal drawings, and recipes. They offer insight into the expedition members and their remarkable deeds. Perhaps the journal's most famous figure is Sacajawea. Sacajawea first appeared in the journals in November of 1804 as the expedition reached North Dakota. William Clark hired a French fur trader named Toussaint Charbonneau to help the expedition obtain horses and serve as a representative and translator in Native American relations. However, the only real reason they hired him was because of his wife, Sacajawea. The expedition was in desperate need of horses as they entered the Rocky Mountains. They also needed to negotiate and maintain peaceful relations with the Shoshone tribe. The negotiation was a pretty complicated endeavor, sort of a linguistic game of telephone. Lewis and Clark had to speak to a French speaking member of their expedition, who then spoke to Charbonneau, who then spoke to Sacajawea, who then spoke to the Shoshone, who sent the message back. The expedition held Charbonneau in fairly low regard. They derided him for his blunders, including nearly destroying all of their records when he panicked and nearly capsized the boat. Lewis wrote of Charbonneau, he is, quote, perhaps the most timid waterman in the world. Of his wife, their opinion was quite clear. They viewed her as resourceful and essential. In the same passage in which Lewis chastised her husband, he wrote of Sacajawea as possessing, quote, fortitude and resolution. It's no understatement to say that she was the one who saved the expedition. Her skill as a negotiator allowed the group not only to gain access to the much needed horses, but also to secure safe passage. The expedition also carried a secret weapon, the Ghiridani air rifle. Capable of firing 20 rounds in under a minute, the rifle stunned the native peoples that Lewis and Clark encountered during their formal negotiations. As they reached the three forks of the Missouri, Sacajawea recognized her childhood home. Lewis and Clark quickly arranged a meeting with the local Shoshone Band. As Sacajawea began interpreting, Providence intervened, and she realized that the chief was her long lost brother. The expedition benefited from her deep connections to the region. Her keen geographic instincts and understanding also guided the expedition through unfamiliar terrain. Her knowledge of the region's plants enabled her to forge for food after food stores ran out. And it should be noted that she did all of this while caring for an infant son, and as Lewis may have noted, also her husband. Clark had a unique relationship with Sacajawea and her infant son Jean Baptiste, to whom he called, Pomp and My Little Dancing Boy. His bond with Sacajawea was built on a profound platform of respect, while he had genuine paternal love for the boy. One of the most interesting side stories of the expedition was the future of Jean Baptiste. In 1806, upon returning from the expedition, Clark offered to raise the boy and even offered land and a farm to Charbonneau and Sacajawea if they would move the boy closer to him so he could provide the child with an education. The family took him up on the offer of a farm, but after realizing it wasn't for them, they left in 1811 to return to the fur trade, leaving Jean Baptiste in the care of William Clark. Clark became the legal guardian of Jean Baptiste and his younger sister after Sacajawea's death in 1813. While the expedition failed to find the mythical river passage to the Pacific, they succeeded in something far more important, proving that it didn't exist, and inspiring a never-ending passion for the American West. Jefferson had given the expedition the authority of asserting U.S. sovereignty over the lands of the Louisiana Purchase. Lewis presented the groups that they encountered with Sacajawea's help, statements asserting U.S. dominion in the area as a result of the Louisiana Purchase. Although the expedition faced friction, especially with the Sioux, it was successful in reaching the Pacific and establishing land claims for the United States. Jefferson also charged the expedition with a massive scientific mission to categorize every resource and animal that they encountered on their 8,000-mile journey. Their journal entries on plant and animal life may have been Lewis and Clark's greatest success. Lewis and Clark documented the discovery of 178 plants and 122 animal species previously unknown to American scientists. In their journals, they drew the animals and described their habits, behavior, and value. The journals characterized legendary Western animals from the grizzly bear to the bighorn sheep, and arguably their favorite discovery was the prairie dog. What was dubbed the Barking Squirrel halted the expedition for an entire day in Northeast Nebraska as they watched it and tried to catch one. After much effort, they caught and caged a live prairie dog which then was sent to President Jefferson, who was equally amazed by the creature. Despite keeping the prairie dog for several weeks, Jefferson ultimately sent it to the Peel Museum in Philadelphia where it became a star attraction. The Lewis and Clark expedition claims a prominent place in the American story. The members of the Corps of Discovery were the first U.S. citizens to see the grandeur of the Great Plains, to traverse the continental divide at the crest of the Rocky Mountains, and to see the Pacific Ocean. They're chronicles of plants, animals, and geological features fueled science and ignited a race to settle the West. The expedition represented the start of American westward expansion. For better and worse, the events of the next century in the American West can be directly linked to the Lewis and Clark expedition. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research and writing for this episode was provided by Joel Hermanson. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord, as this is where everything happens outside of the podcast. 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