Congress funded a continent crossing with only 2,324 dollars
After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to map a commercial water route west and plant an American presence before rivals did. Congress quietly appropriated just 2,324 dollars for supplies—left in Lewis's charge.
Clark left Camp Dubois, Illinois, on 14 May 1804 with about thirty companions, met Lewis and ten others at St. Charles, Missouri, then ascended the Missouri. The Corps crossed the Continental Divide near Lemhi Pass, reached the Columbia and the Pacific in 1805, wintered at Fort Clatsop, Oregon, and started home on 23 March 1806, arriving 23 September. Jefferson wanted practicable commerce across the continent, sovereignty gestures along the Missouri, and records of plants, animals, and geography—science mattered, but an all-water path for trade was the stated core mission.
Preparation was deliberate. Lewis studied medicines with Benjamin Rush, navigation with Andrew Ellicott, specimen work with Benjamin Smith Barton, and fossils with Caspar Wistar, while using Jefferson's Monticello geography library. A Pittsburgh keelboat finished 31 August 1803 carried gear plus Seaman, a Newfoundland dog who completed the entire trip. Peace medals bearing Jefferson's portrait, gift bundles, flintlocks, and an Austrian .46-caliber Girandoni air rifle with a 20-round magazine advertised both friendship and firepower. The supply list weighed in with 193 pounds of portable soup, 130 tobacco rolls of the pigtail kind, and 30 gallons of strong spirit of wine.
Accounts put membership as high as forty-five, including York, an African-American man enslaved by Clark. Sergeant Charles Floyd died of apparent appendicitis on 20 August 1804 near today's Sioux City—the only Corps fatality—and was buried on a riverside bluff. Help from roughly two dozen Native nations kept the party from starvation and getting lost in the Rockies, even as talks with the Lakota near the Missouri–Bad confluence stayed tense. Older travel warnings and a recent Sioux raid that killed 75 Omaha men framed the stakes of those meetings.
Source: Lewis and Clark Expedition
