The Adventures and Turmoils of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their Corps of Discovery through an 8000 mile trek across the North American western wilderness were expertly annotated in Stephen Ambrose's dictation, Undaunted Courage. Having not known myself what it took for these two bold and adventurous men to venture cross-country, I was hastily transported to a time where buffalo roamed the prairies and indigenous tribes freely remained in their lands. Captains Lewis and Clark led a troop of only a few volunteers called the Corps of Discovery from Fort DuBois, Missouri along the Mississippi River in search of an all water route to the Pacific Ocean at the orders of President Thomas Jefferson. Along they way they met tribes of many different languages and cultures which caused many problems and communication complications along the way. After a year and a half, the Corps of Discovery made it across the western plains to the Pacific Ocean but with the devastating disappointment of no all-water route access. It would take them another year and a half to deliver this news to the President. But all along the return journey, the Corps and its Captains made continuous discoveries in geography, biology, agriculture, tribal contacts and personal limits that to this day echo in our histories.
This map is a depiction of the route traveled by these brave men and the historic territories of the indigenous tribes they met along the way. Also depicted in the east are the state boundaries that existed in 1803 when the Corps began their journey.
Steven Manson, Jonathan Schroeder, David Van Riper, Tracy Kugler, and Steven Ruggles. IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 16.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS. 2021. http://doi.org/10.18128/D050.V16.0
IPUMS NHGIS, University of Minnesota, www.nhgis.org
https://native-land.ca/resources/api-docs/
https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=8a5d4ac482ee4b24baca6dbab5422dbc
Ambrose, S. E. (2016). Undaunted courage: The pioneering first mission to explore America's wild frontier. Simon & Schuster.