Kids Cube/4_History.iso/jubilee/lcwin.dat

Text File | 1992-02-12 | 2KB | 36 lines

    The expedition spent the winter of 1804-5 in
Fort Mandan which it built near a population of 4000
Indians. Temperatures reached as low as 45 degrees F
below. The expedition , a unit of the Army, engaged
the services of Sacagewea, a Shoshoni girl who had
been captured by another tribe. When Lewis and Clark
discovered that she was a Snake Indian they
anticipated that she might be very useful in obtaining
horses from her people for passage over the Rockies.
She gave birth to a son, Baptiste, who travelled
with the expedition to the Pacific and back.
    The explorers traveled by keelboats,cottonwood
dugouts,and horses. Twenty thousand pounds of supplies
had to be poled, towed, and rowed up river.
    The expedition built winter quarters in 1805-1806
near what is the present city of Astoria. Only 12 days
were without rain during the four-month stay at Fort
Clatsop. On Christmas day,1805, the explorers ate
unsalted and spoiled elk meat, spoiled pounded fish,
and roots . "A bad Christmas dinner", wrote Clark. The
men received presents of silk handkerchiefs. "I
received a present of a fleece-lined hosiery shirt and
socks,a piar of moccasins..." wrote Clark. Among his
other presents on the wet day were a small Indian
basket and two dozen white ermine skins from Sacagewea.
The men laboriously boiled sea water to obtain 20
gallons of salt to be used on the return journey.
    By the spring of 1806, most Americans had given
the expedition up for lost. There was one conjecture
that they were slaves of the Spaniards in Mexico.
The expedition had to return by land because it did
not meet an American vessel at the mouth of the
Columbia River at the Pacific Ocean. Only one death
occurred during the dangers of the trip, a death
attributed to appendicitis.