Those who led their expedition were Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, their expedition was to find the most direct and practicable communication of water in the container, for commercial purposes.
The Lewis and Clark expedition resonates because it’s not just a white man’s army, but rather a group of people from many different racial, ethnic, cultural and social backgrounds—a human community as diverse as any in America today. Consider York, William Clark’s slave and fellow adventurer, or Pierre Cruzatte, the one-eyed fiddle player, who was part French and part Omaha Indian. There was German-born Pvt. John Potts, a miller by trade and a soldier most likely by necessity. Here is Sacagawea, a Shoshone woman who spent formative years with the Hidatsa Indians, and Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, a child of mixed Shoshone-French ancestry. Imagine the sounds around the campfire: William Clark’s Virginia-Kentucky drawl, Sgt. John Ordway’s New Hampshire inflections, George Drouillard’s Shawnee-flavored French, and the cries and first words of Jean Baptiste, the baby born to Sacagawea on the trip. This is the crazy quilt that was and is America.
