In late 1802, Jefferson decided to mount an expedition to the Pacific Ocean. He had long feared that Great Britain would try to colonize the Pacific Northwest, and his geopolitical concerns increased in the summer of 1802 when he read Voyages from Montreal, a report of Alexander Mackenzie’s transcontinental journey across Canada to the Pacific Ocean in 1792-1793. In addition, he worried that other nations might control the vast Trans-Mississippi region and compromise U.S. Jefferson had especial fascination with the Trans-Appalachian and Trans-Mississippi regions, where he expected scientific discoveries to advance human knowledge. These plans did not mature but once Jefferson became president in March 1801, he had the power of his office to propel his beloved project forward.
During the 1780s and 1790s, he approached American military hero George Rogers Clark and French scientist Andre Michaux to undertake a scientific expedition across the continent, and he offered to finance adventurer John Ledyard’s proposal to cross North America from west to east. Reflecting that interest, his library at Monticello included hundreds of volumes, maps, and scientific reports on North American subjects, places, and discovered species. Jefferson embraced Enlightenment-era science, especially the documentation of nature based on empirical investigation. He offered some hints at his intentions in Notes on the State of Virginia (1784), his extended work on North American environment and culture that highlighted how little was known about the continent. Beginning in the early 1780s, Jefferson imagined a scientific exploration of the interior of North America that would catalog flora and fauna and thoroughly map the vast reaches between the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean. More than any other person, President Thomas Jefferson was responsible for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. For these and other reasons, the Corps of Discovery is one of the most important episodes in the history of Oregon.
The presence of a Native woman among the expeditionary force- Sacagawea-made her one of the most recognized female historical figures in Oregon and U.S. Perhaps most important, the interactions between members of the Corps and Indigenous people left legacies that influenced subsequent relations between Natives and non-Natives in the Pacific Northwest. The Expedition also represented an international claim for the United States on the northern Pacific region west of the Continental Divide, a claim the nation used in negotiations over hegemony in the Pacific Northwest during the mid-nineteenth century. The maps, principally the work of William Clark, provided the first detailed topographic representations of the interior landscapes of the Oregon Country. The principal legacy of the Lewis and Clark Expedition is the accounts of the journey recorded in the Journals written by the Captains and five other members of the Corps. The origins and ambitions of the Expedition reached back more than two decades before the explorers crossed the Continental Divide in August 1805 but the nine months the Corps of Discovery spent in Oregon Country left a lasting imprint on the region, while their reports described it for the larger world. They also cataloged hundreds of new plant and animal species unknown to science of the day. They met hundreds of Native people from dozens of groups along the exploration route, mostly under friendly or conciliatory conditions, but not without conflict. The journey took just over twenty-eight months, and only one member of the Corps died, the result of disease.
The explorers traveled more than eight thousand miles, by water and land, in boats, on horseback, and by foot. The expeditionary force left the Mississippi River Valley in spring 1804, traveling up the Missouri River to the Continental Divide, then down the Snake and Columbia Rivers west to the Pacific Ocean, and returning east on the Columbia, Yellowstone, and Missouri Rivers to St.
Department of War, with presidential and congressional authorization. Officially called the Corps of Volunteers for North West Discovery, the Expedition was carried out under the auspices of the U.S. Historians and geographers judge the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which brought more than thirty overland travelers into the Columbia River Basin in 1805-1806, as the most successful North American land exploration in U.S. No exploration of the Oregon Country has greater historical significance than the Voyage of Discovery led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.
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