What landforms did Lewis and Clark encounter?

While serving as a frontier army officer in 1795, a young Meriwether Lewis was court-martialed for challenging a lieutenant to a duel during a drunken dispute.The 21-year-old was found not guilty of the charges, but his superiors decided to transfer him to a different rifle company to avoid any future incidents.William Clark was the man who would join him on his journey to the West.

After leaving the army, Lewis was invited to serve as Thomas Jefferson's secretary.While working in the White House, Lewis forged a mentor-protégé relationship with Jefferson, whom he had known since he was a boy.Lewis was named the commander of Jefferson's grand expedition to the West in 1802.To help the young secretary prepare, Jefferson gave him a crash course in the natural sciences and sent him to Philadelphia to study.

Americans were only able to speculate on what was hidden in the unexplored territories beyond the Rockies before Lewis and Clark arrived.Even Thomas Jefferson, who had amassed a small library of books on the frontier, was convinced the explorers might have run-ins with mountains of salt, a race of Welsh-speaking Indians and giant ground sloths.Lewis described 178 previously unknown species of plants and 122 new animals, but the expedition didn't see any of the long- extinct creatures.

The central goal of Lewis and Clark's expedition was to find a water route to the Pacific, which would increase trade opportunities and help solidify an American claim on the far Northwest.The Spanish were worried that the expedition might lead to the seizure of their gold-rich territories in the Southwest.The governor of New Mexico dispatched four different groups of Spanish soldiers to intercept the explorers and bring them back in chains.The hostile search parties were unable to locate Lewis and Clark.

Along with more than two-dozen enlisted men and officers, the Corps of Discovery also included Clark's personal slave, York.The tall manservant was a hit with frontier tribes, many of whom had never seen a person with dark skin.York was referred to as Big Medicine by the Arikara people of North Dakota.York became a valued member of the expedition due to his skills as a hunter.He and the Shoshone interpreter Sacagawea were allowed to participate in the winter camp vote.Stephen E. Ambrose noted that this may have been the first time in American history that a black man and a woman were given the vote.

The largest arsenals ever taken west of the Mississippi were carried by the Corps of Discovery.It included an assortment of pikes, tomahawk and knives as well as several rifles and muskets and over 400 pounds of lead for bullets.Lewis used to impress Indian tribes with his pneumatic rifle.He was able to fire 20 shots after pumping compressed air into the gun.Most explorers never had to use their weapons in combat despite being armed to the teeth.During the return journey, Lewis and three of his soldiers engaged in a gun battle with Blackfeet Indians that left two natives dead.

There is a mural in the lobby of the Montana House of Representatives.The person is Edgar Samuel Paxson.

Sacagawea, a teenaged Shoshone Indian who had been kidnapped from her tribe as an adolescent, was a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition.Sacagawea, her husband and her newborn son first joined up with the explorers as they wintered at a Hidatsa-Mandan settlement in 1804, and she later served as an interpreter and occasional guide on their journey to the Pacific.During a run-in with a band of Shoshone in the summer of 1805, she famously discovered the tribe's chief was none other than her long lost brother, whom she had not seen since her abduction five years earlier.Lewis was able to procure horses for his trek over the Rockies because of the peaceful relations between the explorers and the Shoshone.

Sergeant Charles Floyd was the first casualty of the Lewis and Clark expedition.He was diagnosed withbilious colic by Lewis, but historians now think he had a burst appendix.The expedition went through a lot over the next two years, but no one died before they returned to St. Louis in 1806.Lewis was accidentally shot in the buttocks by an enlisted man after he mistook him for an animal.The explorer had to spend a few weeks lying on his belly in a canoe because he wasn't seriously wounded.