We stopped to catch up on the history of the Corps of Discovery at the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, Montana. This is another museum under the auspices of the National Forest Service like the National Historic Trails Interpretive Center (see the post).
It took Lewis and Clark and their crew a couple years to complete the journey of exploration. President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the journey to understand the extent of the Louisiana Purchase, its resources, and a potential Northwest Passage to the Pacific. They would have failed except for the intervention of two Indian women: Sacajawea (wife of a French trapper) and an old Indian woman who had been freed from her rival tribe captors by whites.
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- A 1998 sculpture portraying part of the party at Great Springs in 1805.
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- Portaging the Great Falls took weeks.
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- Mapping requires instruments.
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- At $250, the chronometer was the most expensive gear on the trip.
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- Octant.
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- Sextant.
