Born c. 1788, Lemhi River valley (in what is now Idaho)
Believed to have died April 9, 1884, Wyoming territory
In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, doubling the land area of the United States. The new nation now included all territories from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border. A short time later, Jefferson requested funds from Congress to send an exploring party to the West in search of an overland route to the Pacific Ocean. Captained by Meriwether Lewis (1774–1809) and William Clark (1770–1838), the party was called the Corps of Discovery, and consisted of forty-five men in three boats. They set out from St. Louis, Missouri, on May 14, 1804. About halfway through their journey, a number of the men would return to St. Louis with expedition reports. Twenty-nine members would continue on to the Pacific.
The first part of the journey was through well-traveled country, up the Missouri River. The expedition met Native American tribes along the way, and told them that their territory was now a part of the United States. As they pushed deeper into the West, into what would later become North Dakota, they encounted lands and tribes that no Americans had ever visited before.
