Members of The Corps of Discovery: characteristics and relevent actions

"A compléter car j'ai été coupée dans mon élan par les résultats d'écrit...
Il reste certainement beaucoup de fautes et d'imprécisions..."
Gemina

31 members as a permanent group

Meriwether Lewis:

29, issu d'une famille de planteurs (comme Jefferson), hostile envers les Anglais, admire Jefferson

April 1803:Jefferson sends Lewis to Lancaster and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to be tutored by some of the nation's leading scientists

Captain;

officially= the diplomatic and commercial thinker; medical abilities: in Fort Mandan, cut a young Indian’s frozen toes

William Clark:

33, red-headed, Lieutenant but were called “the Two Captains”;

officially= the negociator; but through journals, he appears as mediator, trader, engineer, surveyor;

They constantly operated as a team; medical abilities too pretending to be a magisian to win Indians’ good graces. Knows some Indians from 1795 wars

In instructions, Lewis was asked to recruit ten or twelve men on a voluntary basis

• Kentucky woodsmen
• soldiers
• French speaking boatmen: good knowledge of Indians, land and rivers

Lewis good relations with Chouteau brothers, a wealthy Creaole family from new orleans who has a monopoly on fur trade with the Ribodoux and the Vallé becaus of their influence on Osages

Others members

• Georges Drouillard: hunter-interpreter;
• York: Clark’s Black servant; called “the bid medicine”; dances  and tell the Indians he was a wild beast before being captured and tamed by Clark
• Seaman: Lewis’dog
• Toussaint Charbonneau, independant trader; blood sausage specialist ; join at Fort Mandan ; previously lived with the Hidatsas
• Sacagawea (“bird woman”), Shoshone; Charbonneau’s squaw

Dernière mise à jour le vendredi 7 avril, 2006