Jefferson also included detailed instructions on how the Corps should engage Native peoples. Lewis and Clark were to “treat them in the most friendly & conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit.” The goals were peace and friendship, watchwords emblazoned on peace medals the captains would bestow on selected Indian leaders they encountered. Peace and friendship, in Jefferson’s mind, were prerequisites for trade relationships, a principal symbol of government policy toward Missouri River Indians. Rather than acquire Indian lands as he had from tribes east of the Mississippi, Jefferson wanted to create an Indian territory in the recently purchased territory that would presage inclusion of western Indians into an expanded American republic. It was an expansive imperial agenda.
The president believed that developing strong trade and political alliances with Indian nations would lead seamlessly to converting tribal cultures to agricultural communities, as he later told tribal leaders in 1808:
When once you have property, you will want laws and magistrates to protect your property and persons [and]. . . . You will find that our laws are good for this purpose.
With these larger purposes in mind, the list of instructions detailed query upon query about Native cultures. Jefferson directed the captains to quiz Indians about the extent of their homelands, their relations with other tribes, their language, traditions, moral codes, and much more. In addition to being political representatives of their nation, the Expedition leaders would also be Jefferson's ethnographers.
Jefferson had handed Lewis and Clark a daunting list of tasks that required scientific and technical abilities, talent in diplomacy, political sagacity, backwoods adeptness, military adroitness, and literary and cartographic competence. The list of goals also posed challenges, a kind of test of Jefferson’s whole idea. Could a catalog of the West be collected in an expedition that embraced so many risks and spanned such a distance? Could Lewis and Clark find a route to the Pacific that had commercial value? Could the captains successfully engage Native peoples and construct economic and political alliances with them? Jefferson had laid out the challenges and understood the risks. At the end of his letter of instructions, the president requested:
To provide, on the accident of your death, against anarchy, dispersion, & the consequent danger to your party, and total failure of the enterprize, you are hereby authorised, by any instrument signed & written in your own hand, to name the person among them who shall succeed to the command on your decease.
The Corps of Discovery—an idea nurtured by Thomas Jefferson for more than two decades, infused with his dedication to Enlightenment science, and powered by his vision for western America—had its instructions, its mission, and its historical burden.
© William L. Lang, 2004
