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Historical Background

Lack of knowledge about the West

Meantime, the French, Spanish, and British had obtained some knowledge about the trans-Mississippi West, including the Missouri country, but most of it was wrapped in surmise and conjecture. The initial penetration of the Missouri area, as far north as present North Dakota, was accomplished by the French from the Mississippi and Canada in the period 1719-62. In the latter year, France ceded Western Louisiana to Spain.

Spanish strength in the New World, however, was beginning to wane, and her colonies in New Mexico and California were underpopulated. As a result, administration of Western Louisiana had to be entrusted to a handful of officials. They presided over a population consisting of tiny clusters of Frenchmen from present Canada and New Orleans who had settled at a few points along or near the Mississippi. Beyond, to the west lay a vast land inhabited mostly by unknown tribes. Into their midst, only a few traders, mostly Frenchmen operating under the Spanish flag, dared to venture.

During the first three decades of her control of Western Louisiana, Spain made virtually no advance up the Missouri, and not many traders passed the mouth of the Platte. She was finally prodded to act by aggressive British traders of the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company. Beginning in the mid-1780's, they pushed southward into Spanish territory from Canadian posts along the Assiniboine and its southern tributary, the Souris. From a base at the Mandan villages, near present Bismarck, N. Dak., they began to trade with the tribes in the area.

The Spaniards realized that they must either control the fur trade there or lose it permanently and with it possibly that part of the country. Indicative of their lack of geographical knowledge and the inadequacy of their intelligence gathering, they also feared the British would invade New Mexico by land or water. For all these reasons, plus interest in finding a route to the Pacific, in 1793 Spanish authorities subsidized and granted a monopoly of trade on the Upper Missouri, above the Ponca tribe, to a company of St. Louis entrepreneurs who already controlled trade along its lower stretches. [17] The first expedition, in 1794-95, was under Jean Baptiste Truteau, who reached the Arikara villages, in present South Dakota.

The company's most successful venture was that conducted in 1795-97 by James Mackay and John Evans, accompanied by about 30 men with four pirogues full of merchandise. [18] Among the Omaha tribe, they established a trading post, Fort Charles, intended as the first of a string extending to the Pacific coast. While seeking a route to the Pacific, Evans spent the winter of 1796-97 at the Mandan villages, where Jacques d'Eglise had preceded him on a solo venture in 1792. On his arrival, Evans took possession of a British "fort" and raised the Spanish flag.

In March, however, René Jessaume of the North West Company put in an appearance. Failing to persuade the Indians to do so, he tried to murder Evans, who was saved only by the quick action of his interpreter. In the spring Evans, unable to replenish his small— and inferior—stock of trade goods, trekked back to St. Louis, as had Mackay earlier. This ended the Spanish role along the Upper Missouri. After that, in the years before Lewis and Clark, trade from the St. Louis area was restricted almost entirely to the river's lower reaches.

Thus by 1803, when Jefferson launched the expedition, traders and explorers of other countries had gained a reasonably good knowledge of the Missouri as far as the Platte River, about 600 river miles from its mouth, and a lesser acquaintanceship with the next 1,000 miles, to the Mandan villages. Yet, almost nothing was known of the Upper Missouri and the river's major tributaries: the Yellowstone, Kansas, and Platte.

All along the stream, Indian opposition was strong, particularly from the Omahas, Teton Sioux, and Arikaras. These tribes and a few others pillaged, blackmailed, and killed traders at will; anyone who tried to ascend the river took his life in his hands. The idea that a dozen men could make the journey safely, as Jefferson and Lewis thought, hardly conformed to the facts. These were not well known in the East, and Lewis was not to learn of them until he reached St. Louis late in 1803.

Apart from some data obtained from the Indians, mainly the Minitaris at the Mandan villages, almost nothing reliable was known about the region to the west of them. It was a melange of rumor and speculation. Two rivers were known to exist on its western and eastern peripheries, the Columbia and Missouri. The former, the "Great River of the West" or "Oregon," had been a matter of myth and assumption until Capt. Robert Gray discovered and named it in 1792. Geographers speculated that it was a short coastal stream, and knew absolutely nothing about its tributaries.

It was believed that the Columbia and Missouri were navigable to their sources and that they possibly interlocked. They were probably separated only by a single, short portage of 20-100 miles, perhaps but a day's travel. This portage-divide was usually pictured as a pyramidal height of land, a level upland, or a high plateau that might be the source of many North American rivers.

The Rockies—the "Stoney Mountains" or "Shining Mountains"—were only mistily envisioned. In most quarters, their nature as a Continental Divide was not understood. Usually they were thought of as a single chain of ridges or hills fairly close to the Pacific that afforded no substantial barrier. Although intellectuals of the day knew that late in the 18th century Mackenzie had traversed the Rockies to the north and that the Spanish had crossed them to the south much earlier, the most common belief was that a gap divided the cordillera in the middle.

As far as the nature and resources of the trans-Mississippi West as a whole were concerned, only a few Americans held any sort of conception of them and these were conjectural.