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By Root 1539 0

consisted of sixteen states along the Atlantic Seaboard, three-quarters of whose area were still untrammeled wilderness, and a vast unmapped tract across the Appalachian Mountains—which would metamorphose, more quickly than anyone might have expected, into the likes of Cleveland and Detroit. In that same year, the new First Consul of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, sat in Paris wrestling with a question: what to conquer? France had recently acquired a million square miles of terrain in North America from Spain—Spain having gotten it originally from France—and the prospect of a huge colonial empire in the New World was tempting. On the other hand, here was Europe—settled, tamed, productive—waiting for civilized dominion by the French. For what would history remember him better—the conquest of Russia or the conquest of buffalo?

The new President of the United States was Thomas Jefferson, an ardent Francophile, but, above all, a practical man. Jefferson knew better than anyone that a French presence in the New World could only be considered a threat. Jefferson was also exceedingly clever, and he was not above a little ruse. “The day that France takes possession of Louisiana,” he wrote in a message to his ministers in Paris, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” Having said that, Jefferson, through the offices of a Franco-American gunpowder manufacturer named du Pont de Nemours, then inaugurated a hallowed presidential tradition known as the intentional leak. Reading the “intercepted” message, Napoleon lost his half-formed resolve to create an empire on two continents. The result was the Louisiana Purchase.

Napoleon had no idea what he had sold for $15 million, and Jefferson had no idea what he had bought. For fifteen years, however, he had been trying to send an expedition to the unknown country west of the Mississippi River, and now, for the first time, he was able to persuade Congress to put up the money. In 1804, Jefferson’s personal secretary, a private, moody, and sensitive young man named Meriwether Lewis, together with a bluff and uncomplicated army captain named William Clark, left St. Louis with a party of fifty men. Poling, tugging, and, at times, literally carrying a fifty-foot bateau up the whipsawing braided channels of the Missouri River, they arrived at the villages of the Mandan tribe, in what has come to be North Dakota, in the early winter. When the ice broke in the spring, some of the party returned to St. Louis with the boat. The thirty-one others, accompanied by a Shoshone Indian girl named Sacajawea, who had been captured and enslaved by the Mandans, and her newborn baby, continued westward on horseback and on foot. Guided by Sacajawea—whose usefulness as an interpreter was only a small part of the Lewis and Clark expedition’s fabulous luck—they pressed across the plains to the beginning of the true Missouri at Three Forks, Montana. From there, they struggled over the Continental Divide and found the Salmon River, whose alternative name, the River of No Return, is an indication of the experiences they had trying to follow it. In despair, the party gave up and turned northward, finding the Clearwater River, which offered them an easier path westward. The Clearwater led them to the Snake, and the Snake led them to the Columbia—a huge anomaly of a river in the pale desert east of the Cascades. Entering the Columbia gorge, they made an almost instantaneous transition from arid grasslands to rain forest as the river sliced through the Cascade Range—a type of transition utterly fantastic to an easterner. From there, it was a short hop to the Pacific, where the party spent the winter, fattening on seafood. In August of 1806, they were back in St. Louis.

The country Lewis and Clark saw amazed, appalled, and enchanted them. Above all, it bewildered them. They had seen the western plains at their wettest—in the springtime of an apparently wet year—but still there were few rivers, and full ones were fewer. The sky was so immense it swallowed the landscape, but the land swallowed up the provenance