The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Volume 8 by Meriwether Lewis

Even Thomas Jefferson, who’d amassed a small library of books on the frontier, was convinced the explorers might have run-ins with mountains of salt, a race of Welsh-speaking Indians and even herds of wooly mammoths and giant ground sloths. (Credit: Royal BC Museum, Victoria, British Columbia)īefore Lewis and Clark completed their expedition, Americans could only speculate on what lurked in the uncharted territories beyond the Rocky Mountains. Thomas Jefferson believed the expedition might encounter wooly mammoths. To help the young secretary prepare, Jefferson gave him a crash course in the natural sciences and sent him to Philadelphia to study medicine, botany and celestial navigation. When Jefferson conceived of his grand expedition to the West in 1802, he immediately named the rugged, intellectually gifted Lewis as its commander. Lewis had known Jefferson since he was a boy-he’d grown up on a Virginia plantation only a few miles from Monticello-and the pair went on to forge a mentor-protégé relationship while working together in the White House. In 1801, Lewis left the army and accepted an invitation to serve as Thomas Jefferson’s presidential secretary. Lewis had served as Thomas Jefferson’s secretary. His new commander turned out to be William Clark-the man who would later join him on his journey to the West.

The 21-year-old was found not guilty of the charges, but his superiors decided to transfer him to a different rifle company to avoid any future incidents. While serving as a frontier army officer in 1795, a young Meriwether Lewis was court-martialed for allegedly challenging a lieutenant to a duel during a drunken dispute. (Credit: Jean-Erick PASQUIER/Getty Images)

The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Volume 8 by Meriwether Lewis