May of 1804 saw Captain Meriwether Lewis, formerly secretary to President
Jefferson, and Captain William Clark of Virginia launch out from Wood
River opposite St. Louis, where they had kept their men encamped all
winter on the east side of the Mississippi, waiting until the formal
transfer of Louisiana for the long journey of exploration to the sources
of the Missouri and the Columbia. Their escort consisted of twenty
soldiers, eleven _voyageurs_, and nine frontiersmen. The main craft was
a keel boat fifty-five feet long, of light draft, with square-rigged sail
and twenty-two oars, and tow-line fastened to the mast pole to track the
boat upstream through rapids. An American flag floated from the prow,
and behind the flag the universal types of progress everywhere--goods for
trade and a swivel-gun. Horses were led alongshore for hunting, and two
pirogues--sharp at prow, broad at stern, like a flat-iron or a
turtle--glided to the fore of the keel boat.
[Illustration: Captain Meriwether Lewis.]
The Missouri was at flood tide, turbid with crumbling clay banks and
great trees torn out by the roots, from which keel boat and pirogues
sheered safely off. For the first time in history the Missouri resounded
to the Fourth of July guns; and round camp-fire the men danced to the
strains of a _voyageur's_ fiddle. Usually, among forty men is one
traitor, and Liberte must desert on pretence of running back for a knife;
but perhaps the fellow took fright from the wild yarns told by the
lonely-eyed, shaggy-browed, ragged trappers who came floating down the
Platte, down the Osage, down the Missouri, with canoe loads of furs for
St.
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