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BLACKFOOT184
MAPPING THE PAST
A Water Route to
the Pacific?
Fraser was unsuited for commercial navigation, Mackenzie
believed that a satisfactory route to the Pacific could be
found elsewhere. In 1801 he published a book advancing this
hypothesis and urged Great Britain to develop the route that
would ultimately join the Atlantic and the Pacific.
Jefferson, alarmed by British interest in the Northwest,
immediately ordered a copy of Mackenzie’s book. It arrived at
Monticello in the summer of 1802. Jefferson and Lewis
poured over the maps. They compared Mackenzie’s account
with a map compiled by Jedidiah Morse. Morse’s map, too,
suggested that the source of the Missouri nearly connected
with the River of the West (see Morse map). Lewis’s mission
was to find the easiest route to the Pacific.Lewis and Clark’s Expedition
During the winter of 1803–1804 Lewis and Clark gathered a
group of forty-eight men at St. Louis. In the spring they made
their way slowly up the Missouri in a fifty-five-foot keelboat
and two dugout canoes, called pirogues. By late fall they had
reached what is now North Dakota, where they built a small
station, Fort Mandan, and spent the winter. In April 1805, hav-
ing shipped back to the president more than thirty boxes of
plants, minerals, animal skins and bones, and Indian artifacts,
they struck out again toward the mountains, accompanied by
a Shoshone woman, Sacajawea, and her French-Canadian hus-
band, Toussaint Charbonneau, who acted as interpreters and
guides. In June they arrived at the Great Falls of the Missouri. It
took them a month to make the portage. Jagged mountains
loomed ominously in the distance.T
he all-water route that Columbus had envisioned—from
the Atlantic Ocean to China and the East Indies—was
blocked by the landmass of the Western Hemisphere. But
over the next few centuries, explorers dreamed of finding a
river-route across that landmass. The Missouri River, which
originated far to the west, seemed promising. In the fall of
1802, President Jefferson asked the Spanish minister whether
his government would take offense if a small group of
Americans explored the sources of the Missouri River. The
expedition, Jefferson assured the Spaniard, would have no
purpose other than “the advancement of geography.” The
minister coolly replied that such an adventure “could not fail
to give umbrage to our government.” After the meeting, the
diplomat promptly alerted his superiors in Madrid that
Jefferson,“a lover of glory,” sought to find a water route to the
Pacific, thus facilitating American settlement of the region.
The Spaniard was right. Several months after his meeting
with the Spanish minister, Jefferson sent a secret message to
Congress. In it he requested an appropriation of $2,500 for an
expedition to determine whether the Missouri River con-
nected,“possibly with a single portage,” to the Western
(Pacific) Ocean. Jefferson’s belief in a water route to the Pacific
via the Missouri was based on several sources.
In 1784 Peter Pond, an employee of the North West
Company, prepared a map based on reports by the com-
pany’s fur traders (see accompanying Pond map). They told
him that the Missouri River originated within the “Stony
(Rocky) Mountains.” Beyond them lay the Naberkistagen
River, which emptied into the South Sea (presumably the
Pacific Ocean). Inspired by such reports, Alexander Mackenzie,
a Scotsman in the fur trade, crossed the Continental Divide
farther north and, after an easy portage, came to the Fraser
River, which flowed into the Pacific. Although the raging