Lewis and Clark (10 page)

In 1811, John Jacob Astor sent his agents to the Pacific across the route the captains had pioneered. America’s first million-dollar fortune was built upon profits from Astoria, the fur-trading post they set up at the mouth of the Columbia.

Later, as the wagon trains began to roll down the Oregon Trail, farms sprang up farther inland along the Willamette River, which Clark had discovered.

By 1870, when Patrick Gass died at ninety-nine, the continental limits of the United States stood where they are today. Just the year before, a railroad to California had been completed. The journey from the Mississippi to the Pacific that had taken the expedition eighteen months could be made in a week or less.

Lewis and Clark were convinced that their trail up the Missouri and over the Rockies would become a valuable trading route, but later explorers discovered much easier ways of reaching the Pacific. The Oregon Trail cut directly across the plains and the mountains from Independence, Missouri, to Fort Vancouver, Washington. The Mormons with their handcarts, the gold rushers, the emigrants to California, all used the Trail and other routes farther south.

The expedition fell short of original expectations in other ways, too. Jefferson’s hopes of publishing the captains’ detailed notes on natural history and geography were not achieved until they had lost much of their scientific value. A distinguished mathematician, after struggling to make sense of Lewis’s painstaking celestial observations, abandoned the project in despair.

Nonetheless, the expedition’s contribution remains extraordinary. It brought back specific information about an area that had previously been a mystery to Americans, and specimens of animals and plants that were unknown to science at the time. The captains’ survey work helped establish America’s claim to the Oregon country, and Clark’s maps were the first to reasonably delineate the land that would add ten more states to the Union.

Most important, Lewis and Clark’s achievements inspired other explorers and settlers to follow and enlarge their discoveries. Covering their route today, it is hard to visualize the wilderness these two men first charted. Yet, no matter how much the landscape has changed or how swiftly and easily the journey can be made today, nothing can alter this truth: Lewis and Clark showed the way.