Lewis and Clark Turn Home: Pacific Conquered

Lewis and Clark had spent the winter eating dog meat and whale blubber on the Oregon coast, and on March 23, 1806, the Corps of Discovery began the long journey home. They had reached the Pacific Ocean the previous November, fulfilling President Jefferson's directive to find an overland route to the western sea. Now they faced 4,000 miles of return travel through territory that had nearly killed them on the way out. Thomas Jefferson had dispatched the expedition in May 1804, less than a year after the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States. The primary mission was to find a navigable water route to the Pacific for trade purposes. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led 33 permanent members of the Corps up the Missouri River, across the Rocky Mountains, and down the Columbia River, guided for a critical stretch by Sacagawea, a teenage Shoshone woman carrying her infant son. The return journey split the Corps into two groups to explore more territory. Lewis took a northern route to investigate the Marias River, while Clark followed the Yellowstone River. The groups reunited in August 1806 near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers. Lewis was accidentally shot in the buttock by one of his own men during a hunting incident, an injury that slowed but did not stop the expedition. The Corps of Discovery reached St. Louis on September 23, 1806, having been given up for dead by many who had sent them off. They brought back detailed maps, descriptions of 178 plants and 122 animals unknown to Western science, and the unwelcome news that no easy water passage to the Pacific existed. The expedition's journals remain the most comprehensive firsthand account of the pre-settlement American West.