trousers, medals, flags, knives, colored
handkerchiefs, paints, small looking-glasses, beads and tomahawks were
believed to be so attractive to the simple-minded red man that he would
gladly do much and give much of his own to win such prizes. Of these
fine things there were fourteen large bales and one box. The stores of
the expedition were clothing, working tools, fire-arms, food supplies,
powder, ball, lead for bullets, and flints for the guns then in use, the
old-fashioned flint-lock rifle and musket being still in vogue in our
country; for all of this was at the beginning of the present century.

As the party was to begin their long journey by ascending the Missouri
River, their means of travel were provided in three boats. The largest,
a keel-boat, fifty-five feet long and drawing three feet of water,
carried a big square sail and twenty-two seats for oarsmen. On board
this craft was a small swivel gun. The other two boats were of that
variety of open craft known as pirogue, a craft shaped like a flat-iron,
square-sterned, flat-bottomed, roomy, of light draft, and usually
provided with four oars and a square sail which could be used when the
wind was aft, and which also served as a tent, or night shelter, on
shore. Two horses, for hunting or other occasional service, were led
along the banks of the river.

As we have seen, President Jefferson, whose master mind organized and
devised this expedition, had dwelt longingly on the prospect of crossing
the continent from the headwaters of the Missouri to the headwaters of
the then newly-discovered Columbia. The route thus explored was more
difficult than that which was later travelled by the first emigrants
across the continent to California. That route lies up the Platte River,
through what is known as the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains, by Great
Salt Lake and down the valley of the Humboldt into California, crossing
the Sierra Nevada at any one of several points leading into the valley
of the Sacramento. The route, which was opened by the gold-seekers, was
followed by the first railroads built across the continent. The route
that lay so firmly in Jefferson's mind, and which was followed up with
incredible hardships by the Lewis and Clark expedition, has since been
traversed by two railroads, built after the first transcontinental
rails were laid. If Jefferson had desired to find the shortest and most
feasible route across the continent, he would have pointed to th