Lewis and Clark Expedition leaves Fort Mandan and heads home

Painting created by Split Rock Studios, for Southern Hills Mall, Sioux City, Iowa. Original in the collection of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation and photographed by Kristopher Townsend.

CREDIT: Splt Rock Studios

Sunday, April 7, 1805 was a “double departure day” in the timeline of the Corps of Discovery.

First, around four o’clock in the afternoon, the keelboat, manned by six soldiers under the command of Corporal Richard Warfington, shoved off downstream for St. Louis with its precious cargo for President Jefferson and the secretary of war. Also traveling back on the barge was an Arikara tribal member who was to depart at the Arikara village down river. Two Frenchmen are mentioned traveling in a canoe, and possibly two other French engagés were aboard the keelboat.

The cargo consisted of four large boxes and a large trunk. One box was filled with goods from Tribes, mostly from the Mandan people – a bow with a quiver of arrows, an earthen pot, samples of native tobacco seed, an ear of corn, various articles of clothing, and several buffalo robes. Another box held 67 specimens of “earths, salts, and minerals” and 60 pressed specimens of plants. The other boxes contained horns of a bighorn sheep and of an elk, the skins and sometimes skeletons of antelopes, jack rabbits, badgers, a coyote, a grizzly bear, and 12 red foxes.

Warfington was also responsible for keeping three cages of animals alive during the long return journey – a live prairie dog, a sharp-tailed grouse, and four magpies.

For the secretary of war, Henry Dearborn, the captains sent a map created by William Clark of the Missouri up to the Mandan village. While it held no remarkable new information, its detail and precision made all previous maps nearly obsolete. The captains also sent back a large chart outlining all the information they had collected to date on 53 Native Tribes.

Soon after the keelboat departed, the primary party in six small canoes and the two pirogues “set out on our voyage up the river,” as written by Clark. He also included the names of everyone traveling “into the unknown” – 28 members of the U.S Army, two interpreters, Sacagawea and Jean Baptiste, York, and a Mandan man “who had promised us to accompany us as far as the Snake Indians…” (Seaman, Lewis’ dog, was not mentioned.)

Lewis wrote one of his most eloquent journal entries on this date, which began: “This little fleet altho' not quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs; and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for their safety and preservation.”