National Geographic offers a Lewis and Clark Journey Log featuring photographs and records of the famous explorers as they treked across the now United States, discovering new territories, wildlife, and adventures. I’ve spent much of my life exploring a lot of the path they took, especially in the past few months.
Growing up in Washington State, at a time when the state was still mostly barely explored wilderness and countryside, to now, an over-explored, over-populated, and threatened ecosystem, I have dreamed about the rough and tumble traveling of these two fellows and their fellow travelers across the area I know as home. I’ve also been lucky enough to ride horseback and in wagon trains and buckboards, so I have a tail bone that reminds me of how difficult it was to travel across the rugged terrain.
“Great joy in camp we are in view of the Ocian… this great Pacific Octean which we been so long anxious to See. and the roreing or noise made by the waves brakeing on the rockey Shores (as I suppose) may be heard disti[n]ctly.”
William Clark, Journals, Thursday, November 7, 1805
While Lewis and Clark were probably seeing the mouth of the river’s bay and not the ocean, I feel the same wonder and excitement everytime my plane approaches SeaTac airport, soaring past the mighty snowcone mountain that towers over Seattle, Mt. Rainier, and then the sparkle of water from Elliott Bay in front of the huge city, knowing that the salty waters pour in a few hundred miles away from the Pacific Ocean, around the corner of the Olympic Mountains.
“We landed unloaded and drew up our Canoes. Some rain all day at intervals, we are all wet and disagreeable, as we have been for Several days past, and our present Situation a verry disagreeable one in as much, as we have not leavel land Sufficient for an encampment and for our baggage to lie cleare of the tide, the High hills jutting in so close and steep that we cannot retreat back, and the water of the river too Salt to be used, added to this the waves are increasing to Such a hight that we cannot move from this place, in this Situation we are compelled to form our camp between the hite of the ebb and flood tides, and rase our baggage on logs.”
William Clark, Journals, Thursday, November 8, 1805
Okay, so traveling hasn’t improved much. We still have to wait around for our luggage, and occassionally it never turns up, cast aside and abandoned by the floods of travelers and airline baggage handlers.
And yes, part of the joy of travel is finding the right things to wear for the various weather conditions you may encounter:
“The rain continues all day. all wet. the rain [etc.] which has continued without a longer intermition than 2 hours at a time for ten days past has destroyd the robes and rotted nearly one half of the fiew clothes the party has, perticularley the leather clothes fortunately for us we have no very cold weather as yet. and if we have cold weather before we can kill & Dress Skins for clothing the bulk of the party will Suffer verry much.”
William Clark, Journals, Thursday, November 14, 1805
Welcome to weather in the Pacific Northwest, Lewis and Clark. Still, this is my home and as I read through the words of these explorers who went out into the wilds, not knowing what they would encounter, I love it when I still see what they saw so many years before.
…that after the river reached this mountain it continued it’s rout to the North for many miles between high and perpendicular rocks, roling foaming and beating against innumerable rocks which crouded it’s channel; that then it penetrated the mountain through a narrow gap leaving a perpendicular rock on either side as high as the top of the mountain which he beheld. that the river here making a bend they could not see through the mountain, and as it was impossible to decend the river or clamber over that vast mountain covered with eternal snow, neither himself nor any of his nation had ever been lower in this direction, than in view of the place at which the river entered this mountain;…
Meriwether Lewis, Journals, August 23, 1805
Walking in the footsteps of our ancestors can mean putting ourselves in the mindset of our ancestors’ experiences. While some have an opportunity, like myself, to physically experience what it was like “way back then in the old days”, most people are left with their imagination, generated out of movies, television shows, and books.
If you would like to read the journals and stories of Lewis and Clark’s adventures, reprints are available for purchase, and free downloadable copies are also available from Gutenberg Press.
- History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I.
- Gutenberg.org – The Journals of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1806 by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis
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