Lewis and Clark

Last month, we read some books we really liked – New Found Land (Allen Wolf), and Streams to the River, River to the Sea (Scott O’Dell). Both of them were about Lewis and Clark’s journey to the Pacific Ocean and about Sacajawea. We also read The Ledger Book of Thomas Blue Eagle, which has art in the style that Indians did when they went to white people’s schools.

Arjuna thought we should make a poster about Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea, so we did. Some of the drawings are in the style of the Ledger Book art.

Introduction: In 1804, Thomas Jefferson asked Meriwether Lewis to cross the country by boat, to try to find the Northwest Passage to the Pacific Ocean, and to see the lands the United States got in the Louisiana Purchase. So Lewis wrote to his friend William Clark, and they went on a great journey.

Here is our poster:






Here are some of the things that happened along the way:

Along the Ohio River, from Pittsburgh to St. Louis, Captains Lewis and Clark assembled their crew. In Pittsburgh, the crew contained 7 people and a couple of soldiers. By St. Louis, the crew consisted of 45 people.




Captain Lewis gave medals to all the chiefs they met along the way.



The meeting with the Teton Sioux did not go well. The Corps narrowly escaped an attack near the river.


Lewis and Clark were at a scalp dance. One of the crew was yipping and partying when he saw a slave woman and her child on her hip. She followed one scalp, one scalp only through the whole dance, as if it would grow back nto a man.




Lewis and Clark stayed at Fort Mandan and met a tribe of Indians called the Hidatsa. There they met a Shoshone girl named Sacajawea. She was married to a trader named Charbonneau. They would need her along the way. So a Shonshone girl was in the crew.





While the Corps was with the Mandan, they abandoned the keel boat and made six dougout cottonwood canoes. they would have to carry the men some two thousand miles.



Sacajawea was trying to give birth to her baby but she could not. Then Lewis gave her a cup of water with the rattles from a rattlesnake. And then there was the little baby, Jean Baptiste.


While they were with the Mandanas, the Corps went on a buffalo hunt. The Indians formed a circle around the herd and shot them. The crew did the same. There was plenty of meat, hide, and hump for everyone.



Seaman was swimming and chasing a beaver. He had almost caught it when the beaver bit him. Lewis could not stop the bleeding.He figured out that the beaver had bitten a vein. It took about two weeks to heal.



On the way to the Pacific Ocean, Sacajawea and the Corps needed more horses. They stopped at a Shoshone village. It was Sacajawea’s tribe. “There they were, my people, my people, my people. Now I can laugh, now I can smile, now I cry. Now I am me. Now I am home!”

At last they reached the Pacific Ocean! 

They stayed the winter at Fort Clatsop.

Pierre Cruzatte only had one good eye. One day on the journey home, he was hunting and thought Lewis was an elk and he shothim in the buttocks.

The next thing we're going to read about is early California history. Maybe we'll make another poster. Or maybe something else!