Filters:
Group: Russell and Company
People: Meriwether Lewis
Topic: Lewis and Clark Expedition

Lewis and Clark Expedition

Years: 1804 - 1806

The Lewis and Clark Expedition, also known as the "Corps of Discovery Expedition" (1804–1806), is the first transcontinental expedition to the Pacific coast undertaken by the United States.

Commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson, it is led by two Virginia-born veterans of Indian wars in the Ohio Valley, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

Their objectives are both scientific and commercial – to study the area's plants, animal life, and geography, and to learn how the region can be exploited economically.

"{Readers} take infinitely more pleasure in knowing the variety of incidents that are contained in them, without ever thinking of imitating them, believing the imitation not only difficult, but impossible: as if heaven, the sun, the elements, and men should have changed the order of their motions and power, from what they were anciently"

― Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (1517)