The purchase was the easy part. The next step was figuring out just what we had bought.
For years, Americans had hoped that someone, somewhere would discover an inland water route to the Pacific, not the least of whom was Thomas Jefferson. As early as 1783 he asked George Rogers Clark to conduct an exploratory mission west of the Mississippi, but Clark refused. Now that Jefferson was President and actually held the deed to the place, he secretly asked Congress to commission his personal secretary, Army captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead an expedition. Lewis suggested pairing up with his old commander William Clark (George's younger brother) and after several months of preparation, the two of them departed on May 14, 1804, with a group known as the Corps of Discovery from Wood River just north of St. Louis, Missouri. They wouldn't return until some 28 months later after having made a journey of 8,000 miles through what was eventually to become eleven states.
Although Lewis and Clark failed to find the coveted water route, their explorations essentially opened up a whole new world. Over the next six decades tens of thousands of people followed, if not in Lewis and Clark's actual footsteps, then at least in their shadows as they sought a better life.
From the 1820s to the 1840s, the main explorers of the region were fur traders, who followed rivers deep up into the Rocky Mountains in search of beaver pelts, which at the time were used in making hats. Some, such as John Colter, returned with fantastic tales of thermal pools and hot water shooting spontaneously out of the earth. It was only when others ventured up into the area of the Yellowstone and saw such wonders for themselves that they realized Colter had been telling the truth.
From the 1840s until the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, hundreds of thousands of pioneers made arduous overland treks to Oregon, to Utah, and, after gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1849, to California. The paths they took - the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Pioneer Trail, and the California Trail - became the stuff of legend.
Following these trails today - as well as other well-known paths such as the Santa Fe and Pony Express Trails - can be almost as daunting a task as it was to tackle them originally. The Oregon and California Trails run for about two thousand miles each, and the Lewis and Clark Trail alone has over 50 interpretive centers along its 3700-mile course. Not only that, but portions of these trails run across private land and thus are not fully accessible to the public.
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