The two-year-long Lewis and Clark expedition on foot across western North America is one of the epic discovery journeys of all time. It was, in its day, as important as the first foot placed on the Moon. Although it may seem strange to us, the whole of western America was uncharted by Europeans. What Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out to do was to find out for President Jefferson what was there. Their discoveries would change the future of the United States. They would discover a mountain range that the Western World did not even know existed (the Rockies) and identify 300 new species including most of the animals that lived on the Great Plains.

Right down the eastern side of the United States there is a long range of mountains called the Appalachians. They are high, forested lands and, at the time our story begins, few Europeans had crossed them. Rivers flow east and west from them, but there are few natural routeways across them, and none that can be followed by boat. As a result travel through the forests was slow and difficult.

But the western lands were not uninhabited lands. They were places that many Native American nations called home, and the Lewis and Clark expedition were to meet many of them. But when our story starts at the beginning of the 17th century, the people who had come from Europe to set up the new American colonies had their hands full just surviving. So there was no time to explore the western frontier of the colonies.

During the time of the colonies, it was clear that the forests contained many animals that could be hunted for their furs and skins. The trading companies of the colonies would pay good money for any pelts and hides they could get, from beaver to deer. A few self-sufficient men went out into the forests to get the pelts. They lived rough, they made contact with the Native Americans and often lived with them. These people were called frontiersmen. They included such famous people as Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket. What is important to our story is that these people began to explore the frontier, which in those days was just west of the Appalachian Mountains.

The Revolutionary War ended in 1783, and America became an independent group of 13 former colonies along the east coast of North America. By 1787 they had finally formed into the United States, but they owned nothing west of the Appalachians. In fact, the vast area westward from the Appalachians that was drained by the mighty Mississippi River was owned by France and Spain.

The founding of the United States gave many politicians a sense of confidence. They began to think that, because they had become independent, the rest of the continent was something that was rightfully theirs. They began to think that the United States should someday reach from ‘sea to shining sea’. and that it was their ‘Manifest (obvious) Destiny (future)’ to control it all.

President Jefferson was among those who believed that the United States was a divinely favoured nation that ought to expand for the benefit of the world. This was made all the more clear because, after independence, more and more immigrants arrived. There was limited room for them to farm land in the east, so they began to follow trails marked out by Daniel Boone and others, west over the Appalachians to the wide plains beyond.

Just a few years after the War of Independence, the French government, who had helped the Patriots wrestle control of the colonies away from Britain, found that independence in America had made people in France feel that they should be independent too. This resulted in the French Revolution, in which the king was guillotined. After that revolution, France was much weakened, and the new United States seized the opportunity. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson, the second President of the United States, signed an agreement with the French government to purchase the land the French owned in America. With one stroke of the pen, the US had more than doubled in size. The only problem was that no one really knew what had been bought. The borders on the west, with the Spanish territory, and in the north, with Britain (Canada), had not been set or explored, and no one knew much about the land in between. That was what Lewis and Clark were sent to find out – and it nearly cost them their lives! The book below gives the full story.