A month later, Lewis and Clark found the Shoshone Indians, who handed over the horses that were so critical to the subsequent success of their mission.ġ862 – Confederate steamer Planter, with her captain ashore in Charleston, was taken out of the harbor by an entirely Negro crew under Robert Smalls and turned over to U.S.S. By mid-July, however, the expedition was again moving ahead. The Great Portage, as it was later called, would take the men nearly a month to complete. They soon discovered that the portage around the Great Falls was not the easy half-mile jaunt reported by the Hidatsa, but rather a punishing 18-mile trek over rough terrain covered with spiky cactus.
However, the captains’ elation did not last long. Three days after finding the falls, Lewis rejoined Clark and told him the good news. Without horses, the crossing might well have failed. However, Lewis and Clark would not have found the Shoshone Indians nor obtained the horses. Had the explorers followed the Marias, they would have traveled up into the northern Rockies where a convenient pass led across the mountains into the Columbia River drainage. The mysterious northern fork was actually the Marias River. the grandest sight I had ever held.” Lewis and Clark had been correct–the south fork was the Missouri River. began to make a roaring too tremendous to be mistaken for any cause short of the great falls of the Missouri.” By noon, Lewis had reached the falls, where he stared in awe at “a sublimely grand specticle ….
On this day in 1805, four days after forging ahead of the main body of the expedition, Lewis was overjoyed to hear “the agreeable sound of a fall of water.” Soon after he “saw the spray arise above the plain like a column of smoke…. If Lewis did not soon encounter the big waterfall the Hidatsa had told them of, the party would return and the expedition would backtrack to the other river. To err on the side of caution, however, the captains decided that Lewis and a party of four would speed ahead on foot. Although all of their men disagreed, Lewis and Clark concluded they should proceed up the south fork. If the explorers chose the wrong river, they would not be able to find the Shoshone Indians from whom they planned to obtain horses for the portage over the Rockies. Lewis, however, reasoned that the water from the Missouri would have traveled only a short distance from the mountains and, therefore, would be clear and fast-running like the south fork. Since the river coming in from the north most resembled the Missouri in its muddy turbulence, most of the men believed it must be the Missouri. “Which of these rivers was the Missouri?” Lewis asked in his journal. On June 3, however, they came to a fork at which two equally large rivers converged. The expedition made good time, and by early June, the explorers were nearing the Rocky Mountains. Armed with this valuable information, Lewis and Clark resumed their journey up the Missouri accompanied by a party of 33 in April. The Hidatsa told Lewis and Clark they would come to a large impassable waterfall in the Missouri when they neared the Rocky Mountains, but they assured the captains that portage around the falls was less than half a mile. The Hidatsa Indians, who lived nearby, had traveled far to the West, and they proved an important source of information for Lewis and Clark. They spent the winter of 1804 with the Mandan Indians in present-day North Dakota. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had set out on their expedition to the Pacific the previous year. Army at the outbreak of the Civil War, is born on this day in 1786.ġ798 – Mission San Luis Rey was founded.ġ805 – Having hurried ahead of the main body of the expedition, Meriwether Lewis and four men arrive at the Great Falls of the Missouri River, confirming that the explorers are headed in the right direction. 1774 – Rhode Island became the 1st colony to prohibit importation of slaves.ġ777 – Marquis de Lafayette landed in the United States to assist the colonies in their war against England.ġ786 – Winfield Scott, a hero in the Mexican-American War and commander of the U.S. Oglethorpe deployed his batteries on the island of Santa Anastasia while a British naval squadron blockaded the port. Oglethorpe raised a mixed force of British regulars (the 42nd Regiment of Foot), colonial militia from the Province of Georgia and the Carolinas, and native American Creek and Chickasaw, or Uchees. 1740 – Georgia provincial governor James Oglethorpe begins an unsuccessful attempt to take Spanish Florida during the Siege of St.
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