Recounts their travels through country never before explored by white people. With new personnel including the Shoshone Indian woman Sacagawea, her husband Toussaint Charbonneau, and their baby, nicknamed Pomp, the party spent the rest of the spring and early summer toiling up the Missouri.
President Thomas Jefferson conceived the Corps of Discovery to travel up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and westward along possible river routes to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led the expedition of 1804-6. Along the way they filled hundreds of notebook pages with observations of the geography, Indian tribes, and natural history of the trans-Mississippi West.