Leading Into the Unkown

April 7th, 1805

Our vessels consisted of six small canoes, and two large perogues. 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. we were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civillized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was the experiment yet to determine, and these little vessels contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves. When the immagination is suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one.

—Meriwether Lewis

Where the map ended, the real adventure began.

A year had passed since Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their band of 27 explorers left St. Louis. Now, 1,609 miles up the Missouri River in search of a water route across the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean, the map ended. Beyond their winter headquarters among Indian villages in what is now North Dakota no white man had ventured and returned.

On the eastern side of the mountains, British traders had contacted tribes at the northernmost point yet charted on the Missouri. On the western side, American Robert Gray had mapped the mouth of the Columbia River barely ten years earlier. But those were the only points on the map. Between lay the beckoning unknown.

Rumors of what the expedition would find abounded: volcanoes, wooly mammoths, blue-eyed Indians who spoke Welsh, the lost tribes of Israel, and a navigable waterway across this vast, uncharted territory that would open trade to Asia and make the nation that secured it great and wealthy. The stories mostly came from trappers who had heard tales from Indians.

For years Thomas Jefferson had been fascinated by the potential discoveries of animal and plant life in the region. Now as president of the United States, he wanted to seize the opportunity. Jefferson envisioned a single nation extending from ocean to ocean, although at the time of his presidency, two of every three citizens lived within 50 miles of the Atlantic.

As his secretary, Lewis shared the vision. Within a year of his commission by Jefferson, he set out. Paired with Clark, a frontiersman and commander in every way Lewis’s equal, the two names are now synonymous with leadership and discovery.

Lewis and Clark’s journey off the map offers valuable insight to contemporary leaders rowing into their own unknown.

Discovery 1: When you plan for the unknown Meriwether Lewis didn’t have much to go on—his instructions from the president, a small stipend from Congress, and the promise of reward if he succeeded.

As the son of a Virginia planter, Lewis had a spotty education. He knew little of botany and zoology, which he would need to document his findings in nature, even less of astronomy he would use to plot his course and cartography needed to map it. His writing skills, critical for journaling, were abysmal. He frequently misspelled the names of his own brother and sister.

Under Jefferson’s direction, Lewis pursued the needed skills. The president wanted an accurate picture of the massive land purchase he had negotiated with France. Lewis took the mandate seriously. He studied with the experts and quickly mastered the sciences. His first purchases for the expedition included compasses, quadrants, a telescope, and a chronometer for measuring longitude and latitude.

More important, Jefferson wanted Lewis and the team to come back alive. Lewis stocked guns and ammunition, clothing, and a vile beef paste called “portable soup.” Consulting with the leading physician of his day, Dr. Benjamin Rush, Lewis catalogued common illnesses and their treatments. Rush prescribed concoctions of all kinds. His specialty was a purgative guaranteed to work quickly and completely, “Rush’s Thunderbolt.” Lewis bought 600 tablets.

Jefferson wanted to establish diplomatic relations with the Indians along his new trade corridor. Lewis purchased items to give to the native peoples—mirrors, needles, kettles, medals, ribbon, tobacco, tomahawks, and face paint.

He carried everything his crew would need to survive for two years. Lewis doubled the size of his crew and stock between inception and launch. His plan was constantly changing. Any unforeseen discovery around the river’s bend could render his plans useless. Still, he planned. Relying more on encyclopedia than crystal ball, Lewis discerned the future by distilling the present. His preparations demonstrate that all we really foresee about tomorrow is what we understand about today. Lewis’s planning process reflects educated guesswork. That’s the best any plan is.

While the army shipped his 3,500-pound cargo to St. Louis, Lewis left for his rendezvous with Clark.

Discovery 2: When you can’t do it alone One of Lewis’s first letters upon receiving his commission was to his old friend. The men had served in the army together. Clark, four years older at 33, was the commanding officer.

“This is an undertaking fraited with many difeculties,” Lewis wrote, “but My friend I do assure you that no man lives with whome I would perfur to undertake Such a Trip &c. as yourself.”

Clark knew Lewis better than anyone, except perhaps Jefferson. He knew the younger man’s intelligence and leadership abilities. He also remembered Lewis’s episodic melancholy, which Jefferson described as “depressions of the mind.” Subsequent observers have assessed it as manic depression.

To their teaming Clark brought an excellent rapport with soldiers, experience on the frontier, and marksmanship credited in Lewis’s journals for feeding the troop on many occasions. His older brother, Revolutionary War general George Rogers Clark, had turned down an offer by Jefferson to lead such an expedition ten years earlier. William Clark eagerly accepted. “My friend,” he wrote to Lewis, “I join you with hand & Heart.”

Lewis offered Clark co-captainship. The army refused his plan to share command. When the commission arrived, it read “Lieutenant Clark.” Lewis never told the crew. His friend was always “Captain Clark,” his equal in decision-making and equally to be obeyed. Theirs was an unusual command, but it worked.

Lewis willingly shared leadership with someone he knew would go with him to a place he could not go alone.

While Lewis finished his studies and his acquisitions, Clark began scouting for crew. Most were soldiers. “Stout, likely fellows,” he called them. Clark turned down planters’ sons and city boys. He wrote to Lewis that “a judicious choice of our party is of the greatest importance to the success of this vast enterprise.” The two men agreed on the candidates, taking no one unless he satisfied both leaders.

A swearing-in ceremony was held before Clark’s famous brother, and the Corps of Discovery, as Jefferson called it, was born.

The captains set out with 22 men, three sergeants, one hunter-trapper skilled in several languages, Clark’s slave and lifelong companion York, and Lewis’s Newfoundland dog Seaman.

Turning this ragtag assemblage into focused, purposeful explorers was not easy. An undisciplined lot, more than one man talked back to officers, two were absent without leave, and another deserted. Two broke into the whiskey supply. One was charged with sleeping on guard duty, a crime which could have cost the boatsmen their lives if Indians had attacked.

There were five courts martial that first summer, usually conducted by a sergeant and several crewmen. The captains heard only the most serious cases. Those found guilty received lashes. The deserter was whipped with willow switches and musket ramrods, 500 lashes, and discharged. By fall of 1804, no more serious infractions were reported.

Over the months these fractious crewmen became an efficient, cooperative unit.

But the team wasn’t complete until they met the Bird Woman.

Discovery 3: When you meet strange tribes in strange lands “Endeavor to make yourself acquainted,” Jefferson instructed Lewis of his encounters with native tribes, “as far as a diligent pursuit of your journey will allow.” Jefferson wanted to know everything about these peoples: hunting and farming skills, mating habits and moral codes, suitability as a trade market, and their tendencies toward peace or war.

Jefferson wanted the Indians to know that, with the Louisiana Purchase a year earlier, they were now subject to the U.S. government.

To that end, Lewis drafted a lengthy speech which he delivered at every meeting. “Children,” he would intone, then tell the chiefs that they had a new father in a distant city called Washington.

Clark was much more relaxed with the Indians. Adept at cataloguing languages, he engaged them in interviews. The crew, dressed in full uniform, marched. Lewis fired the cannon mounted on the front of the keelboat and passed out trinkets.

The first few meetings went well. But the captains heard repeated warnings about a tribe upriver, the Teton Sioux—the Lakotas.

That tribe only recently migrated to the Great Plains, but they held the region in a treacherous grip. News of their piracy on the river had reached Washington. Lewis wanted to wrest control of the waterway from them. What he met was a fierce struggle for survival.

Only two weeks before the explorers arrived, the Lakotas killed and scalped 65 Omaha warriors and captured 25 squaws. They were in no mood for a parade review or Lewis’s condescending speech. The Lakota chiefs demanded more than thimbles and flags. They wanted guns and whiskey. And they demanded that the corps proceed no farther.

At one point, three warriors grabbed the tow rope to Clark’s canoe. One chief fired a verbal assault at Clark, and the captain drew his sword. Warriors readied their arrows. Lewis ordered his soldiers to arms and swung the cannon in the chiefs’ direction.

Time stood still it seemed.

One shot, one rash move by anyone on either side, would launch a war, likely a massacre, and end the expedition. Their lives hung in the balance; possibly too the fate of the nation. If Lewis and Clark were stopped here, the British and Spanish might soon secure the west coast, and Jefferson’s vision of one nation bridging the continent would never be realized.

One chief spoke, breaking the tension. Clark seized the moment and agreed to stay on a few days for talks. Both sides lowered their weapons.

Clark reflected later that relations were not good and further action would be required. That, however, was not the right time, and the expedition was allowed to continue upriver.

The Mandan villages amounting to 4,500 people were more populous than the cities of St. Louis or Washington. The corps built a fort and prepared to brave subzero temperatures.

The Indians there were gracious and curious. They visited the fort frequently with news and food for trade.

The tidbits of information filled in blanks in Lewis and Clark’s vision of what lay ahead. In the mountains, they were told, another river a short journey from the Missouri would carry them to the Pacific. That thought sustained their imaginations for the winter, while Indian corn filled their stomachs.

The corps had eaten well thus far. When the hams and salted pork ran out, the men killed game. On the plains, they feasted on buffalo hump and tongue, up to nine pounds per day to fuel each of these human machines. Now, in their six-month stay among the Mandans, explorers grew to respect the natives and their ways, lessons that would mean their survival.

They also used all their energies to further the enterprise. No effort was wasted. One crewman, a blacksmith by trade, made pots and tools to exchange for the corn. And Lewis’s medical skills, this time as midwife, brought him into contact with Bird Woman.

Sacagawea was actually a teenager, maybe 16 at the time, one of two wives of a French trader. She was captured as a child in a raid on the Shoshone. Her language skills would be critically important later, but now she was in agony, suffering a horrible labor. The baby wouldn’t come.

Lewis gave her a potion of ground rattlesnake rings mixed with water, a pain killer the Indians had taught him, and within ten minutes she delivered. With the birth of Jean-Baptiste Charboneau, the Corps of Discovery was complete.

Discovery 4: When to listen to your team and when you shouldn’t As leaders, Lewis and Clark displayed rare insight on a key point in decision making: how large to draw the circle.

At the center of their process were Jefferson’s orders. Jefferson himself had penned the lengthy guidelines for the trip, down to the questions to ask the Indian tribes.

When Clark stood down from a fight with the Lakotas, it was because the mission given by the president was of greater importance. When Lewis spent hours every day drafting descriptions of plant life, it was to provide Jefferson a vivid and scientifically accurate picture of the West. When the crew spent half a day trying to flood a prairie dog out of its hole, it was because Jefferson wanted samples of animal life shipped back to Washington. (The prairie dog arrived alive.) Literally every decision was weighed against the mandate from the president.

The captains had also agreed that no action would be taken unless they both favored it. Neither man’s journal indicates he ever disagreed with a decision they put forth as a team. In every instance, one leader enforced the other’s orders.

Clark and Lewis exercised great discernment on when they included others in their decisions. Early in the trip, after a sergeant died from what was likely a ruptured appendix, the soldiers voted on his replacement. The men chose the soldier they wanted to follow. Much later, when choosing winter quarters prior to the return trip, the captains called the roll and each man voted. The French trader voted. York, the slave, voted, and so did Sacagawea. The fort was built at the site the whole unit selected.

On issues of “followship” and comfort, the captains encouraged and submitted to the group’s decisions. Where the mission itself was at stake, they did not.

Their tactic was tested at a fork in the river. The Indians had made no mention of it. The northern fork was as muddy as the route from St. Louis. The crew was convinced that was the true Missouri. Lewis and Clark favored the southern branch, the clearer one, which they expected of a mountain-born river.

The right choice should lead them to the Northwest Passage. The wrong choice could end the mission.

Lewis hiked forty miles up the muddy tributary to investigate his crew’s hunch. Returning, he was even more convinced that his and Clark’s choice was correct. The men were unmoved, but Lewis wrote, “They said very cheerfully that they were ready to follow us any where we thought proper to direct.”

The captains were right.

Soon the expedition heard the roaring of a falls which the Indians had predicted, today’s Great Falls, Montana.

At the fork Lewis and Clark showed they knew when to trust the team and when to trust themselves. And at the falls the Corps of Discovery entered the season of its greatest struggle.

Discovery 5: When the going gets tougher than planned Lewis heard the roaring from seven miles away. Rushing ahead with a scouting party, he found not one waterfall but five. The sight was breathtaking, “a sublimely grand specticle,” Lewis called the crashing waters. At the same time, his hopes for a half-day’s portage around the falls were dashed. It was the first of a string of disappointments.

Under the broiling sun, the men hoisted the canoes on their backs and carried the cargo across 18 miles of rocky ground infested with prickly pear needles. Soon their feet were but clubs of bloody, shredded flesh. The trip lasted more than two weeks.

Ocian in view! O! the joy. —William Clark

Lewis had invested much time and emotion in a boat he called “the experiment.” Leaving the two large pirogues on the lower side of the falls, Lewis had his men assemble the 36-foot iron frame he had designed. They covered it with hides and daubed the seams with beeswax. The boat floated like a cork, Lewis reported, for a few minutes. Then it sank. The crew built two new dugout canoes.

Sacagawea offered a glimmer of hope to the suffering corps. She recognized the terrain. They were nearing the people from whom she was taken as a child, and she said they were nearing the river that ran west and to the ocean.

Lewis, agitated by a southerly turn in the Missouri, took a small party overland to find the Shoshone. He needed to buy horses for the crossing to the Columbia. Spotting one young warrior at a distance, Lewis bared his forearm to show his white skin and waved. He shouted “ta-ba-bone!” Sacagawea said that was the word her people would use for “white man.” It meant “stranger.” The boy fled.

Pursuing him, Lewis followed a trail that led to the spring source of the Missouri. And just above that, the ridgeline of the Rocky Mountains. Lewis was at the Continental Divide, now Lehmi Pass in Idaho, the end of United States territory. Beyond this point, the rivers flowed west. Over this ridge he expected to see the Columbia and his quest for the Northwest Passage completed.

Lewis mounted the rise.

Reaching the top, he looked over into another vast mountain range—mountain peaks as far as he could see. Here, one historian says, the geography of hope clashed with the geography of reality. Here, Lewis’s dream was shattered. The vision of three hundred years, to find a water route to the Pacific, crushed. Lewis would not have counted himself among the great explorers Cook and Columbus at that moment. Jefferson was wrong. And Lewis had failed.

Given his tendency to depression, Lewis might have quit if the lives of his crew were not at stake. Winter was coming again, and he had to secure horses to scale this unending mountain range.

At the instant when all hope appeared lost, an incredible coincidence buoyed the corps. Lewis made contact with the Shoshone, a party of 60 in battle gear. Early negotiations were dicey, until Sacagawea recognized the chief. She ran to him, threw her blanket over him, and wept. The chief was her brother.

He sold Lewis horses and sent a guide. Confident that they could make it, the Corps of Discovery set out for the ocean.

Discovery 6: When you’re at the end of your resources The Lewis we see after Lehmi Pass is a little more sober and a lot more realistic than the idealistic adventurer who set out from Washington two-and-one-half years earlier. Lewis’s journal entry on his birthday, the day after purchasing the horses, shows an introspection uncharacteristic of his earlier writing.

The death of his dream has forged a new resolve.

He writes not about presidential commands but his own desire to better the human condition. His motivation is not fame or reward or even duty. Stripped of every inconsequential thing, Lewis has found that sometimes survival is reward enough. He has tapped a strength not normally his own. He has endured adversity and embraced serendipity.

Summer was over. The corps still had to brave what one sergeant called “the most terrible mountains that I ever beheld.” The mountain walls rose straight up in many places. Horses lost their footing and fell 20 or 30 feet among the rocks. Snow fell in September that year. The Indian guide lost the trail. Food ran short. They were reduced to scavaging for roots. One camp they named “Hungery Creek” because they had only water. And still, the mountains extended farther than they could see, much farther than anyone expected.

The corps emerged from the Bitterroot mountains, more dead than alive, and still no Columbia.

The Indian tribe that came to their aid first planned to kill the corps and throw their emaciated bodies off a cliff. Only later did the explorers learn that the intervention of an elderly squaw averted their slaughter. In their encounters only one tribe treated them badly. If not for the provisions and skills obtained from the native peoples on their route, the expedition surely would have failed, the men died, and their fate probably never known.

The Indian camps bore evidence that traders had come upriver—uniform coats and brass teakettles. The signs were familiar. Although they had never come this way before, others had. The captains knew they were headed in the right direction.

The first taste of brackish water promised the ocean soon. Clark’s most famous journal entry attests his exhilaration as a morning fog lifted from the channel they traveled and he saw nothing but water as far as the horizon. “O! the joy.”

But the Pacific was not yet in view.

They were in a bay, still more than 50 miles from the ocean. Fierce winter storms pounded the coast for three weeks, and the crew huddled, miserable, in camp a few miles from the ocean. In the end, only half the men hiking overland actually saw the great ocean they had travelled halfway across the continent to see—4,162 miles by Clark’s estimation.

Each man carved his initials in a tree. Lewis branded one, and Clark etched his name and the date: “By Land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805.”

President Jefferson estimated that it would take a hundred generations to inhabit the land explored by Lewis and Clark. It took less than five. By the end of the century, 16 million Americans would be living in the states along the expedition’s route, from Missouri to Oregon. And today, signs mark the federal highway “Lewis and Clark Trail” for those willing to come behind them.

For those wanting to explore uncharted territory, their discoveries in leadership, just as clearly, mark the way.

Eric Reed is associate editor of LEADERSHIP.

We are grateful to Dave Travis of the Dallas-based Leadership Network who drew our attention to the expedition and some of its parallels to pastoral leadership (see www.churchchamp.org)

For more information consult these sources:

“Lewis & Clark: A Film by Ken Burns,” (Turner, 1997),

Lewis & Clark: Journey of the Corps of Discovery by Dayton Duncan (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)

Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose (Simon and Schuster, 1996).

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.