Lewis and Clark and Jefferson

Before George Mahris and Martin Milner and Route 66; before Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy and On the Road; before Laura Ingalls Wilder and Little House on the Prairie; before Joseph Smith and his Mormons; before all these westward-ho wayfarers, seekers, and dreamers struck camp and hit the road there were a couple of guys by the name of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark who first followed the sun across this great land of ours. These brave, intrepid explorers were seeking the great Northwest Passage across our ever-expanding country, recently made larger by the Louisiana Purchase.

Of course it was all Thomas Jefferson's idea.

Jefferson, as we all know, was an avid gardener, and one of the objectives of the expedition was botanical exploration. As he wrote in a letter to Thomas Cooper, dated October 7, 1814 (which is part of the Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress); "Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences, whether we consider its subjects as furnishing the principal subsistence of life to man and beast, delicious varieties for our tables, refreshments from our orchards, the adornments of our flower borders, shade and perfume of our groves, materials for our buildings, or medicaments for our bodies." Wildflowers had a fan in Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson wanted his expedition lead by "a person who to courage, prudence, habits & health adapted to the woods, & some familiarity with the Indian character, joins a perfect knoledge of botany, natural history, mineralogy & astronomy" (from the 12 volumes ofThe Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, edited by G. E. Moulton, and published by University of Nebraska Press). Meriwether Lewis, being something of a Renaissance Man, filled the bill. His "field guide" on the trip was Elements of Botany, or Outlines of the Natural History of Vegetables, written by Dr. Benjamin S. Barton, who also tutored Lewis in preparation for his trip.

Lewis and his handpicked co-leader, William Clark, spent a year gathering equipment and supplies, as well picking and training other brave, intrepid explorers. On May 14, 1804 they set out from Camp Dubois, which sat on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, across the mouth of the Missouri River from St. Louis. They would arrive back in St. Louis on September 23, 1806.

In between, the party faced adventures, misadventures, close calls, near misses, scrapes, friendly faces, and not-so-friendly faces, boldly going, much like their futuristic Star Trek great-great-great-great-great grand progeny, where no man ... or perhaps no white man had ever gone before. And during it all Meriwether Lewis gathered botanical specimens, pressing them and drying them between sheets of blotting paper; attaching a tag or label describing when and where the specimen was gathered, often with a comment about the plant's habitat, or how it was used by Native Americans.

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