Beyond the fur trade and other commerce, beyond the acquisition of knowledge, Jefferson and the subscribers wanted to tie the two coasts together, using the Missouri-Columbia waterway to form the knot, in order to create a continent-wide empire for the United States. It was a breathtaking vision.
It had, however, an anticlimactic ending. Michaux got started in June 1793, but he had scarcely reached Kentucky when Jefferson discovered that he was a secret agent of the French Republic whose chief aim was to raise a western force to attack Spanish possessions beyond the Mississippi. At Jefferson’s insistence, the French government recalled Michaux.
•
Over the following decade, Jefferson neither spoke nor wrote about the West. Partly this was because he was so busy with politics and his other duties, but it had also become obvious that the West could not be explored by private subscription, and that the federal government could not afford to sponsor an expedition. Further, conditions in the country to be explored were so totally unknown that there could be no agreement on how many men it would take, what they would need, how long it would last.
But there was no hurry, for, as long as Louisiana was in Spanish hands and Ohio River Valley pioneers had access to the wharves of New Orleans, the United States could afford to wait. Spain was old and decrepit, growing weaker each year. America was young and dynamic, growing stronger every day. The people who were going to transform the Mississippi Valley, from its source to New Orleans, into farms and villages would come from the United States, not from Spain. Time would come soon enough to take Louisiana from the hapless Spanish.
In the spring of 1801, however, Jefferson learned of the secret treaties between France (read Napoleon) and Spain (read Napoleon’s brother) that had transferred Louisiana from Spain back to France. It was called a retrocession.
Jefferson was greatly alarmed. As he put it in one of his more famous passages, “There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market.”
As long as the Spanish were in possession, the United States was willing to wait before asserting sovereignty. But revolutionary France? Napoleonic France? Expansionist France? Never. Often derided as a hopelessly romantic Francophile, Jefferson was a hardheaded practitioner of realpolitik on this one. “The day that France takes possession of New Orleans fixes the sentence which is to restrain her forever within her low water mark,” he warned, because “From that moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.”9
He let the French know of his resolve. He suggested that Napoleon cede Louisiana to the United States, to eliminate the possibility of war between the former allies, a war which Jefferson warned would “annihilate France on the ocean.” And he flatly declared that his government would consider any attempt to land French troops in Louisiana a cause for war.10
That was the kind of blunt talk Americans liked to have their president use when it came to America’s national interests in a clash with any foreign nation. Also persuasive was that it was based on facts. Napoleon’s expeditionary force was being devastated in Santo Domingo. It was obvious France could not reconquer that colony, much less send an army to New Orleans. The British and Americans in combination would have sunk the French navy and merchant fleet. Napoleon could not defend what he owned; he could only lose in Louisiana; why not give it to the United States and be done with the problem, and in the process re-establish the alliance between the two countries?
But Napoleon had not become emperor of France by giving things away. Though he agreed with the logic, he would rather sell than give.
The Spanish, still in command in New Orleans, waiting for the French to arrive and take possession, had meanwhile withdrawn the right of deposit.I The immediate effect was minor. Americans could still offload directly from raft or keelboat to ships in the port, or pay fees. And the Spanish gave a solid reason: smuggling had gotten completely out of hand. But decisions about Louisiana could only be made by Napoleon. Jefferson instructed the American minister in Paris, Robert Livingston, to negotiate for a tract of land on the lower Mississippi for use as a port or, failing this, to obtain an irrevocable guarantee of the right of deposit.
To reinforce Livingston, Jefferson began working on a plan to send James Monroe over to Paris as a minister plenipotentiary with specific instructions for the purchase of New Orleans for two million dollars. As he talked this up among Republican leaders, Jefferson indicated he would be willing to ask Congress for up to ten million for New Orleans. And why not? It would be cheaper than a war, and quicker. It would keep America out of an alliance with the British—the very thought of which to these Revolutionary War veterans was mortifying. It would certainly be constitutional—there was no other single thing the federal government could do that would more exactly meet its charge to improve commerce.
The thought that Napoleon might be willing to sell all of Louisiana had not occurred to anyone.
•
It was not the French who got Jefferson to start another project for an exploring expedition across the West—the retrocession had nothing to do with it—but the British.
Alexander Mackenzie was a young Scotsman in the fur trade out of Montreal, working for the North West Company. In 1787, he was posted to a wild trading post on the west end of Lake Athabaska, in what is now northern Alberta, at sixty degrees of latitude. Though he imported enough of the comforts of civilization to Fort Chipewyan so that it was called “the Athens of the North,” another part of him yearned not for what had been left behind but, rather, what lay ahead. In 1789, he led a small party to Great Slave Lake. On the river that now bears his name, he set out for the sea. But the river swung to the north, and Mackenzie made tidal water on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, not the Pacific.
Undeterred, the next year Mackenzie tried again. He wintered at the North West Company’s westernmost post—Fort Fork, on the Peace River. From there, on May 9, 1793, he set out. Accompanying him was his fellow Scot Alexander Mackay, six French Canadian voyagers, and two Indians, plus a ton and a half of provisions. Within the month, he had crossed the Continental Divide at a place where it was just three thousand feet high, and easily portaged. Mackenzie reported to the governor general of Canada, “We carried over the height of Land (which is only 700 yards broad) that separates those Waters, the one empties into the Northern [Atlantic] Ocean, and the other into the Western.”
Mackenzie got onto the Fraser River, which he mistakenly thought was the northern tributary of the Columbia, but abandoned it when it became impassable, and struck out overland for the coast. Thirteen days later, he made it to saltwater, in the northern reaches of the Strait of Georgia. He camped that night atop a steep, overhanging rock. Using a makeshift paint of vermilion and hot grease, he inscribed on the rock: “Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three.” The British had their claim on the northwestern empire.
Mackenzie got the latitude and longitude of the place. He worked out the latitude using his sextant, which measured the height of the sun above the horizon. Knowing the moment the sun crossed the local meridian made it possible for him to compute how far north of the equator he was.
Longitude was much more difficult, although easy in theory. The earth turns 360 degrees every twenty-four hours, without variation, meaning that the passage of time is also a measure of distance from some arbitrary starting point. By 1793, Greenwich, England, down the Thames River from London, was becoming firmly established as a conventional marker for zero longitude. In four minutes, the turning earth moves one degree in longitude. It is relatively easy to calculate longitude if the explorer knows precisely when it is noon in Greenwich and what time it is where he is standing. But it is almost impossibly difficult to calculate longitude if you can’t tell the time, in either Greenwich or the wilderness. Englishman John Harrison had invented a clock t
hat was reliable and portable, making it possible to know both times. Captain James Cook had used the Harrison chronometer in the Pacific Ocean in 1775, proving its superiority. But the rigors of overland journeys were too much for such delicate instruments—they got banged around, they got dust in them—so land explorers relied on the telescope and astronomy.
Mackenzie picked out Jupiter with his telescope and noted the time when the moons Io and Ganymede disappeared behind the planet. From tables showing the times of the same events from Greenwich, Mackenzie computed a longitude of 128.2 degrees west, which was almost a degree, or sixty miles, off. He realized he had been “most fortunate. . . . a few cloudy days would have prevented me from ascertaining the final longitude of it.” Clouds were always the bane of the navigator.
Back at Fort Chipewyan, Mackenzie tried to prepare his journal for publication, but he fell into a depression. His biographer writes that this was his second attempt to find a practical commercial route to the Pacific, “and it was at least in part a failure. He had reached the Pacific, but he knew his route could not be used for trade.” He left Canada that year, and never came back.11
Mackenzie’s account was not published until 1801, in London. It was probably ghostwritten, for Mackenzie was not learned enough to have written the book in its published form.12 The title was Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Lawrence, Through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Ocean. Jefferson ordered a copy as soon as he heard of the book’s existence, but did not have one in his hands until the summer of 1802. He was at Monticello, Lewis was with him, and when the book finally arrived, they devoured it.
If the news that the British were exploring overland to the Pacific was a bit of a shock and most unwelcome, it was more than balanced by Mackenzie’s evidence that, although there was only a one-day portage over a low mountain pass to a westward-flowing river, that river was not navigable. But, then, Mackenzie had been five full degrees north of the Columbia when he struck the coast. If the mountains four hundred miles south were similar to those he crossed, the portage would also be similar.
In their minds Jefferson and Lewis saw the Rockies as resembling the Appalachians in height and breadth. That image was greatly reinforced by Mackenzie. Geographer-historian John Logan Allen, in his seminal work Passage Through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest, notes that Mackenzie said in effect that “The way to the Pacific lay open and easy.” According to Professor Allen, “It was this simple fact of imaginary geography that gave birth to the Lewis and Clark expedition.”13
Through those hot August days of 1802 at Monticello, Jefferson and Lewis read and talked about little else than Mackenzie. Although Mackenzie stressed that his had been a “long, painful and perilous journey,” and although things had turned out badly for Mackenzie, Lewis saw a competitive challenge and an opportunity to act out his life’s dream. Anything the British could do, he could do better.
It was easy to point to mistakes or shortcomings in the Mackenzie expedition. He had been on a strictly commercial venture with a single purpose only, to find a practicable route for the fur trade. He had collected few specimens, made few descriptions, in general did not advance knowledge of the plant, animal, mineral, or Indian life of the country.
Although nearly every sentence in the book was a magnet to Lewis, what struck hardest was the line: “Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land.” This raised the matter of national honor. The name painted on that rock on the Pacific Coast was a direct, open, irresistible challenge. It was also a warning that, if the United States did not get going, it would lose the western empire to the British before the game was well under way.
The sentences that most struck Jefferson were in Mackenzie’s final “geographical review,” in which he urged Great Britain to develop a land passage to the Pacific for trade with Asia. He knew it could not be the Fraser, or any other river north of the Columbia, which was “the most Northern situation fit for colonization, and suitable to the residence of a civilized people. By opening this intercourse between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and forming regular establishments through the interior, and at both extremes, as well as along the coasts and islands, the entire command of the fur trade of North America might be obtained, from latitude 48. North to the pole, except that portion of it which the Russians have in the Pacific [in Alaska]. To this may be added the fishing in both seas, and the markets of the four quarters of the globe.”14
No wonder the North West Company liked Mackenzie. He thought big and he thought like a businessman. The fire he lit, however, was not under the company, or the British government, but under Jefferson.
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The news that the British were threatening to set up shop in the Northwest galvanized Jefferson into manic activity and changed Meriwether Lewis’s life overnight.
Sometime late that summer or in the fall of 1802—it is impossible to tell even what week, much less the moment—President Jefferson informed Captain Lewis that he would command an expedition to the Pacific. Or Captain Lewis talked President Jefferson into giving him the command. We don’t know when or how Jefferson made his decision that there would be an American answer to Mackenzie and that Lewis would lead it. Evidently he consulted no one, asked no one for advice, entertained no nominees or volunteers, other than Lewis. This was the most important and the most coveted command in the history of exploration of North America. Jefferson was confident that he had the right man under his roof.
Later, Jefferson explained why he chose Lewis rather than a qualified scientist: “It was impossible to find a character who to a compleat science in botany, natural history, mineralogy & astronomy, joined the firmness of constitution & character, prudence, habits adapted to the woods, & a familiarity with the Indian manners & character, requisite for this undertaking. All the latter qualifications Capt. Lewis has.”15
That was not to say Lewis was ignorant of science. Further, Lewis had demonstrated a remarkable ability to learn, especially with Jefferson as his teacher. Jefferson’s library at Monticello was the most extensive in the world on the subject of the geography of the North American continent. Lewis had the run of the library. He consulted maps and conferred with Jefferson over them. In Professor Allen’s words, “It must be assumed that he and the President talked at great length about the nature of the country west of the Mississippi and the possible character of the speculative passage to Pacific waters.”16
From his later journals, we know that Lewis read Captain James Cook’s A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (London, 1784), the account of Cook’s third voyage, to the Pacific Northwest. It almost certainly was at this time that he read it. He also read Antoine Simor Le Page du Pratz’s The History of Louisiana, or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina (London, 1763), and took it with him on his expedition. He read other books and consulted more maps.
He took botany lessons from Jefferson, who taught as they walked through the gardens at Monticello or, later in the season, along the banks of the Potomac. Jefferson once said no country gentleman should be without “what amuses every step he takes into his fields,” and he ranked botany with the most valuable of sciences, “whether we consider its subjects as furnishing the principal subsistence of life to man and beast, delicious varieties for our tables . . . the adornments of our flower borders . . . or medicaments for our bodies.”17 Jefferson introduced Lewis to the Linnaean system of affixing binomial Latin names, and taught him enough to use the system in the field. He taught Lewis how to use a sextant and tried to teach him the use of the equatorial theodolite.18
Lewis rightly believed that he had Jefferson’s complete confidence. They had a cipher so that they could communicate secretly, which might be necessary, since Jefferson had told Lewis, privately, that he would be sending the expedition into foreign territory. The Spanish might protest. They talked about the Indians along the Missouri, of their attachment to the British trading posts north of the Missouri and of the possibili
ty of bringing the tribes into the American orbit. They talked of finding the Welsh Indians on the Missouri. They talked flora and fauna, mountains and rivers. They talked about the size of the party, whether too many would alarm the Indians to the point of active war, whether too few would invite an Indian attack to seize the rifles and supplies. They agreed on the basic need to bring back accurate records, descriptions, and maps.
In short, between the time Mackenzie’s book arrived at Monticello and December 1802, Jefferson gave Lewis a college undergraduate’s introduction to the liberal arts, North American geography, botany, mineralogy, astronomy, and ethnology.
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In the fall of 1802, back in the President’s House, Jefferson and Lewis continued their preparations for the expedition. While Lewis drew up an estimate of expenses, to present to Congress as part of a request for an appropriation, Jefferson began to widen the circle of those who knew about the proposal.
The first outsider brought into the plan was Carlos Martínez de Yrujo, the Spanish minister to the United States. Martínez was married to the daughter of Governor Thomas McKean of Pennsylvania and was on friendly terms with Jefferson—in fact, had found a cook for the president. On December 2, Martínez reported to the minister of foreign affairs in Madrid that Jefferson had asked him, “in a frank and confident tone, if our Court would take it badly, that the congress decree the formation of a group of travelers, who would form a small caravan and go and explore the course of the Missouri River [with] no other view than the advancement of the geography.”
Jefferson, Martínez reported, had explained that, as a strict constructionist of the Constitution, he could not ask Congress for an appropriation for a mere literary expenditure, so he intended to lie to Congress and pass the expedition off as one designed to promote commerce—which was a power given Congress by the Constitution.