September 23, 1806
LEWIS AND CLARK: At noon, the party reaches St. Louis, shown on this trail map, concluding the journey. Clark writes: “we Suffered the party to fire off their pieces as a Salute to the Town. we were met by all the village and received a harty welcom from it’s inhabitants.” Sergeant Ordway writes in his diary: “much rejoiced that we have the Expedition Completed and now we look for boarding in Town and wait for our Settlement and then we entend to return to our native homes to See our parents once more as we have been So long from them.”
WHAT ELSE HAPPENED? About a year ago in New Orleans, a sixteen year old black male given the slave name “Adam” was sold [link temporarily unavailable] by Pierre Espinasse to Louis Lapause for 360 piastres (a piastre is a dollar equivalent).
AND SO WHAT? So the journey is now over. This is my last post.
The Lewis and Clark expedition is often considered in isolation from what was happening in the rest of the country; this weblog attempted to bring the two a little closer.
And as for the expedition itself, James Ronda, author of the classic Lewis and Clark Among The Indians, has been quoted as saying the story can seen in many ways. Among them: Lewis and Clark as white male heroes; Lewis and Clark as the triumph of manifest destiny--what was, had to be;Lewis and Clark as a Band of Brothers, the west as Omaha beach on D-Day (he considers this the Stephen Ambrose view); Lewis and Clark as imperialists subjugating the native people; Lewis and Clark as scientists, pioneering naturalists, botanists, ethnobiologists; Lewis and Clark as failures, who could never find Jefferson's northwest passage; and, finally, Lewis and Clark as a complex human community, making its way through the West by the grace of strangers.
However we see it, we probably can agree with author Larry McMurtry, who, in reviewing Gary Moulton’s edition of the Journals, writes: “Thanks to . . . [the Lewis and Clark expedition, as well as the artists who went into the wilderness soon after the expedition returned--George Catlin, Karl Bodmer, and Alfred Jacob Miller] we can now know what the West was like before the prairie was plowed, the buffaloes killed, the native people broken, and the mighty Missouri dammed.”
Source: The James Ronda section of this post is my paraphrase of notes apparently taken at one of his speaking engagements. The notes appear in the April 13, 2006, edition of “Standing By Words,” an occasional publication of BookPeople of Moscow, a bookstore in Moscow, Idaho; Afro-Louisiana History; Larry McMurtry, Sacajawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (New York: New York Review Of Books, 2001), 178.