The Geopolitics of the Lewis & Clark Expedition

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Lewis and Clark

The vast majority of the American frontier, even east of the Mississippi, remained wilderness. Civilization's outposts were sparse and tenuous. The period of migration over the Wilderness Road through Martin's Station at the Cumberland Gap was still in full swing. By 1810, some 300,000 settlers would pass through its gates — a staggering number by the standards of the day, and a testament to the determination of the American people to carve a new civilization out of the unknown.

Yet what lay beyond the Mississippi River — the Louisiana Territory, newly purchased from France — was terra incognita. It had no roads, no towns, no forts, no supply lines, no telegraphs, no steamboats, not even a map. To call it wilderness is almost to understate the case. Save for a few fur traders and trappers, it might as well have been another planet.

The Louisiana Purchase, finalized just months earlier in 1803, had doubled the size of the United States overnight. But neither buyer nor seller had more than the vaguest understanding of what had been bought. There were estimates, guesses, and wild hopes, but no certainty, no surveys, and no practical understanding of the terrain, the peoples, or the prospects. Indeed, there was not even clarity on the Purchase's western boundary. The French had hardly exercised sovereign control over the interior, and Spain still claimed adjacent territories with disputed borders. Russia was beginning to nose down the Pacific Coast. And Britain — embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars but still stinging from its recent expulsion from its thirteen American colonies — was watching all of it with interest from their fortresses in Canada.

[mowens]

I read their journals.