After leaving their first winter encampment at Camp Dubois across from St. Louis, Missouri on May 14, 1804, the Corps of Discovery under the direction of US Army Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark made their way slowly but surely up the Missouri River. Day after day they fought the relentless current to make progress upstream averaging ten miles per day. As the weather began to get colder, they looked for a sensible place to establish their winter quarters. The Corps first encountered the Arikara (uh-RICK-uh-ruh) tribe living in three villages close by the mouth of the Grand River near […]
The Lewis & Clark Expedition disproved the existence of an easy, river-based Northwest Passage through the middle latitudes of North America. In the decades to follow, the Oregon Trail, the Pony Express, and various stagecoach routes allowed for difficult, dangerous, and time consuming travel by land across the continent. Not until after the Civil War was safe, reliable, quick, and relatively inexpensive transcontinental travel available in the form of railroads. The first route through the central part of the country ran well south of the northern area near the Canadian border. Once the final spike was hammered down in the […]
After leaving their first winter encampment at Camp Dubois across from St. Louis, Missouri on May 14, 1804, the Corps of Discovery under the direction of US Army Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark made their way slowly but surely up the Missouri River. Day after day they fought the relentless current to make progress upstream averaging ten miles per day. As the weather began to get colder, they looked for a sensible place to establish their winter quarters. The Corps first encountered the Arikara (uh-RICK-uh-ruh) tribe living in three villages close by the mouth of the Grand River near […]