blackfoot-valley

the position of co-commander to William Clark, four years his senior (and un- der whom he had served in the army for six months in 1796). At almost the same time, July 4th, 1803, just the day before Lewis left Washington for Pitts- burgh, news arrived that France - that is, Napoleon - had unexpectedly sold the entire Louisiana country to the United States (instead of just the port of New Orleans sought by the American envoys), which included all the western drainage into the Mississippi. Although no one then knew its exact extent, at one stroke the purchase of Louisiana doubled the size of the Untited States and included the larger part of the unexplored territory Lewis would traverse, giving the expedition the added purpose of exploring the new American ac- quisition. (This included most of the land that would become Montana.) Lewis set out for Pittsburgh to claim the keelboat he had ordered built there. He would be joined initially by several recruits from the army post at Carlisle, Penn. Dur- ing interminable delays on account of a lackadaisical and often drunk boat builder, Lewis received Clark’s letter of acceptance. Lewis picked two more men at Pittsburgh, one was John Colter. The 55-foot boat, 8 feet wide with a capacity of 12 tons of cargo was finally finished August 31st,1803 and only three hours after the last nail was driven, the impatient and much-delayed party had loaded the boat and shoved off. Clark was then living downstream on the Indiana side of the Ohio opposite Louisville when Lewis arrived there in mid-October. It was here that the Lewis and Clark exp- edition, now swelled to three dozen able- bodied men, settled into winter quarters. The first real exploration would begin in the spring of 1804. The Lewis and Clark epic explorations up the Missouri River, across the Rockies, and down the Columbia to the Pacific with a return to St Louis - from mid-May 1804 to late September 1806 - have been well des- cribed so many times by so many good Meriwether Lewis William Clark 59