Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the Corps of Discovery from 1804 to 1806 to search the fresh territories of the Louisiana Purchase , with the aid of Sacagawea .
The Louisiana Purchase was made official on April 30 , 1803 . Statesmen James Monroe and Robert R. Livingstone led the negotiations with Comte Talleyrand for the property that Lewis and Clark would explore .
And what a property it was . The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States in one fell swoop . Read more about the the men in charge of the Corps of Discovery and their risky venture in the follow picture .
Meriwether Lewis was a veteran of the U.S. Army who also served as a secretary to President Thomas Jefferson . See William Clark in the next photo .
William Clark was also a militia and U.S. Army veteran . Clark ’s primary responsibilities were for mapmaking , supplies and hunt . He was also a skilled negotiator with local tribes .
The Corps ' journey start from Camp Dubois , Illinois on May 14 , 1804 , and survey the Missouri River due west . This illustration shows a distinctive Mandan tribal village that they came across later in the evenfall . The Mandans were agrarian rather than nomadic and built fortified villages .
Fort Mandan was built near a Mandan settlement and became the excursion ’s home base for the winter of 1804 - 05 . Lewis and Clark met Sacajawea and her husband that winter .
Sacajawea , a untried Shoshone indigen , was matrimonial to French Canadian fur monger Toussaint Charbonneau , who was to be the expedition ’s guide across the Rocky Mountains .
Before they reached the mountains , the expedition had to contend with challenge along the Great Plains and its river . In this engraving , a member of Lewis and Clark ’s explorative squad hides up in a tree diagram after shooting a bear .
A canoe carrying two men across a river strikes a tree and overturn during one wooden leg of the Lewis and Clark jaunt .
On Aug. 3 , 1804 , Lewis and Clark held the first prescribed council with Native Americans of the Omaha and Oto tribes at Council Bluffs , Iowa .
Captain Clark and his men shoot bear on the panoptic open plains of the American West . Soon they would make their way through mountains .
In August of 1805 , the junket cut across the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass on the present - 24-hour interval Montana / Idaho molding . This led them out of Louisiana Purchase territorial dominion and into the Oregon Country , the possession of which was quarrel at the meter .
Here , Sacagawea understand Lewis and Clark ’s intentions to the Chinook Indians of the northwest .
The Lewis and Clark expedition spent the winter of 1805 - 1806 near the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon , where it empty into the Pacific Ocean .
Re - enactors of the Lewis and Clark dispatch walking along the seashore of the Pacific Ocean in Oregon . Lewis and Clark met the Pacific on Nov. 20 , 1805 .
Sunset over the Pacific in Oregon , a view that Lewis and Clark in the end enjoy after more than two year of travelling .
Lewis and Clark bivouac at the mouth of the Columbia River in this scene . See the fort they make for wintertime in the surveil picture .
Captain Clark and his men are hard at work on a line of huts in this representative .
This reproduction of Fort Clatsop commemorates the site where Lewis and Clark lived out the miserable winter of 1805 - 06 .
Fort Clatsop , like the earlier Fort Mandan , was make after a aboriginal American kin group that endure in the field . The fort was completed on Christmas Day in 1805 .
The Corps of Discovery left Fort Clatsop on March 22 , 1806 to head back home .
Pompey ’s Pillar hold back the only remaining physical fall guy of Lewis and Clark ’s handing over . On the manner back home on July 25 , 1806 , Captain Clark carved his name on the case of the butte during his reappearance to the United States through the Yellowstone .
Here we see Meriwether Lewis , floor out for another adventure . Lewis would finally settle in St. Louis as regulator of the new Louisiana Territory . He died in 1809 .
After the expedition , William Clark held a number of C. W. Post in the new territories , notably in Indian Affairs and as regulator of the Missouri Territory . Clark die in 1838 . translate Lewis and Clark Worked .
