Electrical Aptitude Practice Test 11

Up the Missouri and Back: The Route of Lewis and Clark

¹In 1803 the United States bought the Louisiana Territory from France, a vast region west of the Mississippi River. President Thomas Jefferson soon commissioned an expedition to explore it. He chose Meriwether Lewis to lead it, and Lewis asked William Clark to share the command. One central goal was to find an all-water route to the Pacific Ocean. That same year Lewis set off down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh. Counting that first leg, the route from Pittsburgh to the Pacific covered about 4,900 miles one way, most of it on rivers.

²The main party, known as the Corps of Discovery, left Camp Dubois in Illinois on May 14, 1804, with Clark in charge. Lewis joined the group six days later at St. Charles, Missouri. Pushing boats upstream against the Missouri River was slow, exhausting work. On August 20, 1804, Sergeant Charles Floyd died, apparently of acute appendicitis. He was the only member of the expedition to die during the journey.

³Near the Mandan villages, close to present-day Washburn, North Dakota, the explorers built Fort Mandan and spent the winter of 1804–1805 there. At the villages they met Toussaint Charbonneau, a fur trader who became an interpreter, and his wife, Sacagawea, a Shoshone woman. On February 11, 1805, she gave birth to a son. The party left Fort Mandan on April 7, 1805, and continued west, later crossing the Bitterroot Mountains on horseback at Lolo Pass.

⁴After following rivers down toward the Columbia, the party first sighted the Pacific on November 7, 1805, and reached the coast about two weeks later. On November 24 the members voted on where to spend the winter. They chose a site on the south side of the Columbia River and built Fort Clatsop, which they left on March 23, 1806.

⁵On the way home, on July 3, 1806, before recrossing the Continental Divide, the Corps split up so that Lewis could explore the Marias River while Clark led others toward the Yellowstone River. The two groups reunited on the Missouri on August 12, well below the mouth of the Yellowstone. They reached St. Louis on September 23, 1806, 862 days after leaving Camp Dubois. Along the way they had crossed the lands of dozens of tribes.