Seventh in a series

The Corps of Discovery began to take shape. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark headed the command as co-captains. They established an easy working style and quickly realized their skills complimented one another. As they traveled westward on the Ohio they hired key personnel and learned how to handle the keelboat in the tricky river currents.

Their first attempt at serious scientific work occurred at Cairo, Illinois where the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers came together. The two men studied the currents, and on Nov. 19 turned the keelboat, north, into the current of the Mississippi. The voyagers stopped and climbed Tower Rock on an island in the middle of the great river and rowed into Ft. Kaskaskia on Nov. 25.

Kaskaskia was the northern and western most fort of the United States when the Captains docked at the settlement of 467 people. Six soldiers enlisted at Kaskaskia from Russell Bissell’s Company, 1st U.S. Infantry Regiment: Sgt. John Ordway and privates Peter M. Weiser, Richard Windsor, Patrick Gass, John Boley, and John Collins. In addition, John Dame, John Robertson, Ebeneezer Tuttle, Issac White, and Alexander Hamilton Willard of Capt. Amos Stoddard’s company, U.S. Corps of Artillery, enlisted for the journey. This important crop of men added immeasurably to the success of the expedition. Francois Labiche, another half-Indian, half-Frenchman, enlisted with the expedition on November 30.

Lewis remained at the fort while Clark and the new recruits pushed up stream. The presence of the military soldiers was not an accident. From the start the journey was to be organized and operated as a military expedition into the interior of the newly acquired territory. Clark’s job became the training of the men for the westward journey. Lewis remained away from the men and took care of the paperwork and handling of the local politics. The lands the Corps of Discovery were to travel on were just in the process of being transferred to the United States so delicate negotiations were critical.

The keelboat passed Sainte Genevieve, wealthy community of 1,000 primarily French inhabitants, and continued toward St. Louis, a fur-trading city of about the same size as Sainte Genevieve. Lewis left Kaskaskia and arrived at Cahokia, Illinois traveling overland. The two captains reunited again along the banks of the Mississippi River on December 7, 1803.

The men immediately went to work building log huts for their winter quarters and hunting parties searched for game further inland.