nd, in 1783, at the close of the Revolution,
the United States obtained the lands west to the Mississippi River.
When beginning in 1805 the Shawnee Prophet, or Open Door, tried to
league the red people together, the Long Knife nation of the Thirteen
Fires had extended clear to the Rocky Mountains. There was no stopping
them. In the spring of 1803 President Thomas Jefferson, for the United
States, had succeeded in buying the great Louisiana Territory from
France. This Province of Louisiana covered from the Mississippi to the
summits of the Rocky Mountains, and from Texas to Canada.

The messengers sent out by Open Door traveled even to the Blackfeet
Indians of present Montana; but messengers sent out by President
Jefferson had traveled farther. Starting from near St. Louis, in June,
1804, they had carried the new flag and the new peace word clear up the
Missouri River, through Sioux country, through Blackfoot country and
through Snake country, and had explored on to the Pacific Ocean at the
mouth of the Columbia River in present Washington. They had beaten the
Open Door by several years.

These messengers of the United States were true Long Knives: young
Captain Meriwether Lewis of Virginia and Lieutenant William Clark, his
friend and a brother of the famed General George Rogers Clark, of
Kentucky. They were to report upon the nature of the northern
Louisiana Purchase, talk friendship with the strange Indians, and find
a way by water across the Oregon Country beyond, to the mouth of the
Columbia.

They took a company of thirty-one men enlisted as soldiers and boatmen
and interpreters. Among them there were nine of the Kentucky Long
Hunters. It is said that Lewis Wetzel joined, but he dropped out.
John Colter, of Maysville on the Ohio River at the mouth of Limestone
Creek, opposite West Virginia, was another. He went through.

Ten years before, Daniel Boone had moved west, into Louisiana Province
while it was owned by Spain. He had settled in central Missouri, on
the Missouri River above St. Louis; wanted "elbow room," he said--and
the Spanish governor gave him eight thousand five hundred acres of
land. Colonel Boone the Big Turtle was the first of the American
dead-shots in the new West. When the Lewis and Clark men toiled
up-river here he still was, living among the French in the very last
white settlement.

He was not to be alone long. Many another Kentuckian and Carolinan and
Tennesseean and Virgini