How about a Saturday history lesson?
I feel I have been remiss in my educating my readers on history….so much to do about very little I return to historical postings….
Time for a look into our past……yep the old professor is going to teach you a thing or two….like it or not……
How many know who Meriwether Lewis is?
Maybe you will recognize the name when paired with his partner…..William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition fame…called the Corps of Discovery.
Corps of Discovery?
On February 28, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson won approval from Congress for a visionary project, an endeavor that would become one of America’s greatest stories of adventure.
Twenty-five hundred dollars were appropriated to fund a small expeditionary group, whose mission was to explore the uncharted West. Jefferson called the group the Corps of Discovery. It would be led by Jefferson’s secretary, Meriwether Lewis, and Lewis’ friend,William Clark.
Over the next four years, the Corps of Discovery would travel thousands of miles, experiencing lands, rivers and peoples that no Americans ever had before.
Inside the Corps has three sections: Circa 1803, To Equip an Expedition and the Corps.
The Corps gives biographical information about the members of the Corps of Discovery, from the most famous to the virtually unknown.
To Equip an Expedition provides a partial list of the supplies Lewis and Clark brought on the expedition.
Circa 1803 puts the expedition into a historical and political context, investigating popular misconceptions of the West, as well as Jefferson’s motivations for exploring it.
You remember them right? They went from New Orleans to the Pacific Ocean in the Oregon Territory…..(later named that)……
But did you know that he was later to become Jefferson’s governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory….where he died…..
Captain Meriwether Lewis—William Clark’s expedition partner on the Corps of Discovery’s historic trek to the Pacific, Thomas Jefferson’s confidante, governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory and all-around American hero—was only 35 when he died of gunshot wounds sustained along a perilous Tennessee trail called Natchez Trace. A broken column, symbol of a life cut short, marks his grave.
But exactly what transpired at a remote inn 200 years ago this Saturday? Most historians agree that he committed suicide; others are convinced he was murdered. Now Lewis’s descendants and some scholars are campaigning to exhume his body, which is buried on national parkland not far from Hohenwald, Tenn.
I do understand his relatives wanting the truth, but I feel he should be left in peace now.
Best wishes, Pete.
I think it is the stigma of suicide……more than anything else….chuq
Kids today may not think of these two as heroic or their journey a necessary milestone in history to learn – but just think of how strange and unknown that territory must have been back then.
A great name for the trip…Corps of Discovery….chuq
should be checked out for tomahawk marks –LOL
I think it was the old broad that own the inn….and her son….chuq