Westward Expansion Lewis and Clark By Sage Duncan Goldstein
Table of contents Introduction................................pg 3 Who were Lewis and Clark.....pg 4 Interesting facts about them....pg 6 What they took with them........pg 7 What they ate.............................pg 12 The part of how it all started...pg 15 The journey back home...........pg 21 Conclusion..................................pg 24 How lewis died under misterious circumstances............................pg 26 Glossary.......................................pg 27
Introduction Lewis and Clark went on a expedition because the president, Thomas Jefferson told Lewis to. First they had to go up the Mississippi River that leaded to the western ocean. If they lived to return with great discoveries as the president Thomas Jefferson expected they would be rewarded with great treasures. The president Thomas Jefferson asked his key aid Lewis to lead the expedition. He was only twenty eight when he started out on the expedition. Lewis wanted another man to help him on the journey.
He asked his best friend, William Clark who was four years older and a expert on hunting, to go with him.
‣ Who were Lewis and Clark Who was Lewis Lewis was born on August 18, 1774 near Ivy Virginia. In 1801 he was asked by president Thomas Jefferson to lead a expedition into the lands north of the Mississippi river, and the expedition was called the Corps of Discovery. In 1795 Lewis served William Clark as a soldier in training, but little did he know what he and Clark would do in a few years. Lewis joined the army and achieved his dream of captain/leader of the army and in 1807 he was asked by president Thomas Jefferson to be his private secretary but he did not know what the world was holding out there and what he would discover.
Who was clark
Clark was born August 1, 1770 in Caroline Country Virginia. He had a older brother that was a war hero by the name George Rogers Clark. He entered "Militia" a smaller military that they train to help the regular big military in case something happens to the soldures in the military. Meriwether lewis
William Clark
In 1803, Clark received a letter from his old friend Lewis, inviting him to help him lead the expedition out to the wild west to make maps and to discover what they have to find in there new land that they bought. The journey began the following May in St. Louis was also an excellent mapmaker and helped to figure what routes the aexpedition should take.
These facts are all true!!!!!
Lewis and clark time line
Things you did not know about lewis and clark:
#1 Thomas Jefferson thought Lewis and Clark would find wooly mammo there expedition.
What they took with them Stuff for guns and protection : knives.
: 176 pounds of gunpowder packed in 52 lead canisters : 420 pounds of sheet lead for bullets.
Mathematical instruments : surveyor’s compass : hand compass : telescope : thermometers
Clothes : 45 Flannel shirts : 20 Coats : 15 Frocks : Shoes : Woolen pants
: 15 Blankets : Knapsacks
: 30 Stockings : 15 Pairs wool overalls
Presents for the indian tribes : 12 Dozen pocket mirrors : 4,600 Sewing needles : 144 Small scissors : 10 Pounds (4.5 kilograms) of sewing thread : Silk ribbons : Ivory combs : Handkerchief : Yards of bright-colored cloth : 130 Rolls of tobacco : Tomahawks that doubled as pipes : 288 Knives
Camping equipment : Oilskin bags : 25 Hatchets : Whetstones
: 30 Steels for striking or making fire : Iron corn mill : 2 Dozen tablespoons
: Mosquito curtains : 10.5 Pounds (5 kilograms) of fishing hooks and fishing lines : 12 Pounds (5.4 kilograms) of soap : 193 Pounds (87.5 kilograms) of "portable soup" (a thick paste concocted by boiling down beef, eggs, and vegetables, to be used if no other food was available on the trail) : 3 Bushels (106 liters) of salt
The food they ate  By the end of the journey, Lewis, Clark and the men of the expedition had eaten a wide variety of meat, fish, berries, vegetables, fruits and roots. They ate meat such as... Dear, Elk and Buffalo The men each consumed about 9 pounds of meat every day! It was the best thing to eat because they could get a lot of it by killing the animals mentioned at the top of this paragraph. It also filled them up more then any other food that they had access to. There was a limited amount of plants and fruits and vegetables that they could find and that they could eat. Many people got sick, very sick from eating fruits and vegetables that they thought were lettuce spinach or a carrot. There are some kinds of fruits that are deadly for every living animal, human and plant! Several men died on the journey from eating a poison plant that looked a lot like a carrot. Some times if you mess up on just eating a bite of a fruit of vegetable bad things can happen. When I found
out this fact I was amazed! Lewis and Clark ate overall 5 pounds of onions every few days! Including all the men that tagged along with them. It was funny how many onions they found. They put onions in almost all of there meals!
Most of the onions were sweet unions and you could Sweet onion
just pull them up out of the ground, wash them of and then you could eat it plain with out cooking it and with out any other ingredient like lettuce in a salad. Lewis and Clark needed at least 4 deer or an elk and 1 deer to last them and there group for 24 hours. They ate many fish because rivers were very common in that area.
Some times they ate fish for every meal like breakfast, lunch and dinner. There was more saltwater lakes and rivers then fresh water lakes and rivers. There was a limited amount of fresh water. At times they were only in possession of salt water so they needed to boil salt water to extract the salt out of the water so they could be able to drink it. Lewis and Clark found their food supply by hunting and gathering throughout the journey. Sometimes the group traded weapons and knifes to the Indians for food supplies such as fruits, berries, nuts and vegetables. They also traded the Mandan tribe of North Dakota for squash, beans and corn. The Chinook tribe gave them starchy Wapato. What is Wapato You ask? Wapato is a like a potato a radish and a onion put together. It is a root that comes out of the ground. It is normally white on the inside and brown on the outside. It gave Lewis and Clark a lot of energy through carbohydrates.
Difficulty's These days, you can fly across the United States in six hours. Even if you have to take a car, you can do it in six days.
But imagine what it would have been like two hundred years ago, when Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the other members of the Corps of Discovery traveled 3,700 miles from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean in non-motorized boats, on horseback, and on foot. Not only did they have no cars or airplanes to travel in, they also had to do it with no reliable map -- and they had to make their way through territory inhabited by Indian nations who couldn't necessarily be expected to smile upon a band of armed explorers.
Planing the expedition
In 1803, when the President of the United States, the U.S. purchased the Louisiana Territory from France. This was a huge tract of over 800,000 square miles, taking in nearly the entire mid-section of North America from present-day Texas and Louisiana up to Montana and North Dakota. This almost doubled the size of the new country.
Much of the new territory was unexplored. Jefferson decided to send an expedition up the Missouri River to its source in the western mountains and beyond to the Pacific Ocean. Jefferson hoped that the expedition would be able to find the elusive Northwest Passage, a water route across the country, which would be a great boon to commerce.
So in that same year, Jefferson commissioned the Corps of Discovery under the command of his trusted private secretary,
Meriwether
Lewis.
Besides
seeking
the
Northwest Passage, Lewis was to map the new territory, assess its natural resources, and make contact with its
inhabitants, befriending them if possible. Lewis recruited his friend William Clark to share equally in the command of the expedition, as well as a force of over 40 men. The members of the Corps of Discovery were soldiers, but their purpose was peaceful -- exploration, diplomacy, and science. Lewis was commissioned as a Captain of the Army of the United States, Clark as a Lieutenant (although this inferior rank was kept secret from the men, and Clark was always called "Captain").
Up the Missouri river
The expedition started from St. Louis, where the Missouri empties into the Mississippi, on May 14, 1804. Along the way, Clark oversaw the men and carefully mapped the route. Lewis made scientific observations and collected specimens of animals and plants. The trip was arduous -the men lived outdoors, hunted for food, and rowed the keelboat (along with two smaller boats) up the river, often towing the boat from the shore when the current got too heavy or the river became difficult to navigate. They fended off huge clouds of mosquitoes that swarmed around them. The party made only 12 or 14 miles on a good day. Along the way, the group made contact with Indian inhabitants of the land. During the first season of travel, they contacted the Missouris, the Omahas, the Yankton Sioux, the Teton Sioux (Lakota), and the Arikaras. The captains would offer gifts, meet with the chiefs, and make speeches encouraging the Indian nations to make peace with one another and with their new "great father," President Jefferson. All were friendly except the Lakota,
with whom the expedition had a confrontation that nearly became violent. By October, the Corps of Discovery had reached what is now North Dakota, but they were obviously nowhere near the Missouri's headwaters and winter was at hand. Since little was known about the route beyond the Mandan villages, Lewis and Clark decided to build a fort and winter with the Mandan's and their Hidatsa neighbors. These tribes, with a population of about 4,500 people, occupied five permanent villages along the Missouri River and were known for their friendliness and generosity.
Sacagawea
During the winter, Lewis and Clark hired Toussaint Charbonneau, a French fur trader, and his wife, a Shoshone woman named Sacagawea, realizing that this
woman could help them by acting as interpreter with her people, who lived near the Missouri's headwaters. In the spring, the captains sent the keelboat back down the river with a few men and many items for Jefferson, including an interim report of the expedition, samples of soil, minerals, and plants, Indian items, and even some live birds and a prairie dog, which had never been heard of in the East. Most of the expedition continued up the river in canoes, taking along Sacagawea, her husband, and their newborn baby, Jean-Baptiste.The group spent the next months making their way west up the river
into
territory
unknown
to
white
men.
They
encountered a great profusion of wildlife, including buffalo, wolves, bighorn sheep, and ferocious grizzly bears. They made their way into present-day Montana, and found the river becoming increasingly impassable, with fierce rapids and waterfalls.
When they finally reached the area of the Missouri's headwaters, they sought out the Shoshones.
The journey back home!
On March 23, 1806, the Corps of Discovery started on the long journey back the way they had come. They had some conflicts with some of the Indians on the lower Columbia, bay, they accused of charging high prices for food, trying to steal from the travelers, and interfering with their progress. But when they reached the friendly Nez PercĂŠs, they found their horses alive and cared-for, though scattered on open range.
The group was back across the mountains by June and decided to split up into smaller parties for a while so as to explore some of the territory more thoroughly. Lewis took a more northerly route, and it was during this trip that the explorers had their first and only violent conflict with Indians. A group of Blackfeet apparently tried to captured horses and guns, and Lewis's party killed two of them.
At about that same time, Clark, on a southerly route, discovered an unusual, large stone formation on the Yellowstone River. He named it "Pompy's Tower," after the nickname of Sacagawea's son, now in his second year
(certainly one of the most remarkable childhoods in American history). There on that formation, Clark left an inscription, "Wm. Clark July 25th 1806," which can still be seen today.
The separate parties rejoined in August back on the Missouri River, at the mouth of the Yellowstone. They continued on down the river, dropping off Charbonneau, Sacagawea, and little Jean-Baptiste at the Mandan villages. Traveling quickly, they reached St. Louis on September 23, 1806.
The men of the expedition were welcomed as heroes. They had been gone so long that the nation feared they were dead. Remarkably, only one member of the group died. This was Sergeant Charles Floyd, who probably died of a ruptured appendix as the Corps of Discovery traveled up the Missouri River on its way to the Mandan villages.
Conclusion So I hoped you enjoyed my presentation about Lewis and Clark! I put much of my personal time and work in to this project so it would be good for viewers like you to read! I got most of this information from kidrex.org and some from wikipedia.com. Those web sites are found on google, and probably other places but I don't know about them. This is the most interesting topic I have ever written about and I think if you are going to do a report soon you should do it about Lewis and Clark. Some of these topics interested me sooo much! I never thought that i would be soo interested in this topic but apparently i am. If you ever think of the westward expansion then you should think of Lewis and Clark because of what they did for our country. Just think if they did not travel west we would not have more than half of our country now. It would be like only having 13 colonies again and that would mean no California, or Oregon, or
Montana, or Texas. We our very lucky that we have very brave and courageous ancestors that helped us create a wonderful country that has so many amazing things in it. I am so glad myself that i can look back and see al the amazing people that helped our nation grow and expand out west to more than half of our country. When i was young, I wanted to explore the world like a adventurous person and I still do. When i found out how Lewis and Clark traveled all across America to explore the west I was so amazed and it makes me want to explore more and find out what i could do if only I tried!
How Lewis died under misterious circumstances How lewis died Captain Meriwether Lewis—William Clarkʼs expedition partner on the Corps of Discoveryʼs
historic trek to the Pacific, Thomas Jeffersonʟs confidante, governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory and all-around American hero—was only 35 when he died of gunshot wounds sustained along a perilous Tennessee trail called Natchez, Trace. A broken column, symbol of a life cut short, marks his grave. But exactly what transpired at a remote inn 200 years ago this Saturday? Most historians agree that he committed suicide; others are convinced he was murdered. Now Lewisʟs descendants and some scholars are campaigning to exhume his body, which is buried on national parkland not far from Hohenwald, Tenn
Glossary Remarkably:
notably or conspicuously unusual;
extraordinary: remarkable change.worthy of notice or attention.
Ancestors: a person from whom one is descended. Nation:
A large aggregate of people united by
common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.
Fended:
look after and provide for oneself, without
any help from others.
Hatchet: a small ax with a short handle for use in one hand.
Conflicts:
a serious disagreement or argument.
The End