f the
Missouri River to where the Columbia enters the Pacific, and dedicated
to civilization a new empire. Their names were Meriwether Lewis and
William Clark.

As a rule, one who tries to discover and to set down in order the
simple signs that spell the story of a large man's life is confused by
a chaos of data. No such trouble arises in this case. There is great
poverty of fact and circumstance in the records of the private lives of
these men; so careless were they of notoriety, so wholly did they merge
themselves in their work. Anything like ostentation was foreign to
their taste, and to the spirit of their time, which took plain, dutiful
heroism as a matter of course. No one knows any "characteristic
anecdotes" of Meriwether Lewis; and the best stories about Clark are
those preserved in the tribal histories of Western Indians. The
separate identity of the two men is practically lost to all except the
careful reader. Each had his baptismal name, to be sure; but even their
private names are fused, and they are best known to us under the joint
style of Lewis and Clark. In effect they were one and indivisible. For
evidence of their individuality we must look to the labors which they
performed in common.

When, several years after the conclusion of the great expedition, the
manuscript journals were being prepared for publication, the editor
could not find sufficient material out of which to make a memoir of
Captain Lewis, and was forced to appeal to Mr. Jefferson for aid; for
Jefferson had been an early neighbor and friend of the Lewis family,
and later, on becoming President, had made the lad Meriwether his
private secretary, and had afterwards appointed him to direct the
exploration. The sketch written by Mr. Jefferson is, like most of his
papers, appreciative and vital. It is to this document, dated at
Monticello, August 18, 1813, that every biographer must have recourse:--

"Meriwether Lewis, late governor of Louisiana, was born on the 18th
of August, 1774, near the town of Charlottesville, in the county of
Albemarle, in Virginia, of one of the distinguished families of
that State. John Lewis, one of his father's uncles, was a member of
the king's council before the Revolution. Another of them, Fielding
Lewis, married a sister of General Washington. His father, William
Lewis, was the youngest of five sons of Colonel Robert Lewis of
Albemarle, the fourth of whom, Charles, was one of