Lewis and Clark at UND

Hoping to have Granpa's contract here in Grand Forks, North Dakota extended, we signed up for a couple of OLLI courses through the University of North Dakota.  We are both taking a course on "Lewis and Clark."  They suggested we get a copy of "Undaunted Courage" by Stephen E. Ambrose and at least peruse it before classes started.  It's a pretty good book.

We have had two classes and learned a bit more than what we've gleaned over the years:

First, everyone agreed Thomas Jefferson was the most important part of the Corps of Discovery (the name given to Lewis and Clark's expedition) for obvious reasons.  But there are lots of reasons not so obvious - until a college professor (Dr. Kimberly Porter) puts them in some kind of order or context.

Jefferson's dad was a professor of math at William and Mary College, but he was also a surveyor.  He had a substantial library of books in a time when books were tremendously rare - over forty of those were about science.  Peter, his dad, instilled a love of learning in his oldest son.  Jefferson had an insatiable appetite for knowledge of just about everything, but he particularly loved America's west, possibly because it was the great unknown.  He even owned land on the other side of the Allegheny Mountains, though he never in his lifetime crossed those mountains.  (Land was a standard form of barter or payment in those days.  Most folks were land rich and money poor.)

By the time Thomas Jefferson was 40 years old, in 1783, he had made plans to send a survey party west, hoping one George Rogers Clark, a veteran of the American Revolution, would lead it.  This Clark declined, but years later his younger brother, William Clark, would accomplish that trip along with Meriwether Lewis.

Three years later, in 1786, while Jefferson was in Paris chatting with a man by the name of John Ledyard of Connecticut, the subject came up again.  This time Ledyard said HE would accomplish the deed, all by his boy lonesome, with nothing more than two dogs and a hatchet for firewood, only by going EAST from Paris, through Poland, across Russia to the Bering Strait, and walk down through what is now Alaska and the Yukon Territory, etc.  When he got to Russia, Catherine the Great had him arrested and tossed back into Poland.

Six years after THAT, in 1792, Jefferson was George Washington's Secretary of State and they together approached Benjamin Franklin's American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia to fund a trip out west.  A Frenchman by the name of Andre Michaux was chosen to be the leader only to be found out later as a SPY for France.  (Remember, France, England, Spain, and yes, even Russia were highly interested in acquiring a solid legal foothold on the North American continent.)  So ended Jefferson's plan #3...

Jefferson became president in 1801.  We'll call this next thing Plan #4:  In 1802, he sent a "For Your Eyes Only" to Congress requesting funding to send a small group of men tip-toeing out west, just for a look-see.  By 1803, Congress approved it and Jefferson asked his personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to put together a Corps.

Publicly, though, Jefferson was politely, diplomatically asking the various nations that felt they had a claim to certain lands out west, if they would officially agree to the trek.  They all said no, because there was this thing known as "Right of Discovery."  Basically, any country could lay claim to "unclaimed" land, but until someone actually walked across it - and could unequivocally prove it - it was all he said/she said.

In the meantime, on the other side of the world, Jefferson's Secretary of State, James Monroe, was on a mission to offer Napoleon $10 million for New Orleans so that citizens of the Ohio Territory could ship their goods down the Mississippi River to ocean-going vessels.  Napoleon's mouthpiece, Talleyrand, said, "No."  Monroe says, "How about a long-term lease for the same $10 million?"  Talleyrand said, "No."  But how about this for a come-back:  "We will SELL it to you, though, the entire Louisiana Territory, for $15 million."  Monroe struggled desperately with his conscience and the Constitution, and said, "Okay."  Three cents an acre sounds like a good deal - but that times 550,000,000 acres would add up to 2 1/2 times the Federal budget of the day!

The New England states wanted no part of the deal.  They said America had too little money and too much land already.  What they really meant was, we don't want America any bigger because we might lose all of our political power!  But, on December 20, 1803, Congress voted to accept the Monroe/Napoleon deal.  Lewis and Clark no longer had to tip-toe; America now owned everything they had hoped to explore!  This became the successful, historic Plan #5.  Thus, Jefferson's dream would come true after more than twenty years of trying.

See?  We don't always know all that we think we know.  It's kind of Paul Harvey's "The Rest of the Story," eh.