The Lewis and Clarke expedition was doomed if it could not travel by water. How the hell could they know that the Missouri was the one to follow and that there was something other than impassible mountains or trackless desert behind the mountain pass?
How could they have possibly known that?
Weren’t they looking for a water route to the Pacific?
Is this a debate?
Missed the edit window… If it’s just a question, I’d start with the wikipedia article, which notes that Jefferson had the largest library in the world of books about North American geography. And, of course, Lewis and Clarke relied on Indian guides for much of their trip.
First of all, the source of the Missouri and the source of the Columbia are rather far apart. The Lewis and Clark expedition joined the Columbia near the confluence of the Snake River, 100’s of miles south of the Columbia’s source up in Canada. Those mountains of western Montana and northern Idaho are mean, just plain mean … so no water route that way.
The Missouri River was known to be the largest tributary on the west side of the Mississippi, it would be logical to follow that river when looking for passage to the west.
So the answer to the OP is Jefferson hoped the sources were close, but they weren’t, so no water passage to the Pacific …
They’re not that close. The source of the Columbia River is up in British Columbia, about four hundred miles north of the Missouri. Lewis and Clark followed the Missouri up into the Rockies and then headed west. They found the Clearwater River and followed that downstream until it joined the Columbia and then followed that down to the Pacific.
The point is that rivers originate in mountain ranges. If you follow one river up the east side of the mountain range, there’s most likely another river not too far away heading down the west side.
They were aware of the existence of the Columbia River, and that its mouth was about the same latitude as the headwaters of the Missouri. As long as the drainage basins of the two rivers were contiguous, crossing the divide and following streams westward would eventually bring you to the Columbia.
Right. Colibri has the best answer. The OP is misled by the overblown notion of “THE source.” In fact, any major river has millions of “sources” – all those streams originating near the outer edge of its watershed. Adjacent watersheds will have hundreds of pairs of “nearest sources.”
The overblown idea of “THE source” comes from 18th-century notions of derring-do. It’s an artificially imposed restriction of “follow a river upstream, always choosing the largest branch, until you get to the last pretty lake.”
Google Earth?
Moved per request of the OP.
Yeah, you deserve to feel embarrassed—for posting a link to a one-and-a-half-hour long video, with no explanation.
Do you expect me to watch all of it, just because you posted it?
How ‘bout, ya know, tellin’ us a little bit about the content? Maybe even suggest jumping to a specific part of the clip that’s relevant?
Actually, that’ll be the best hour and a half you’ll spend today … maybe even this week … when you have the time, it’s TV worth watching.
Yeah, they make it back
Agreed, but in the poster’s defense the answer to his question comes in the first couple of minutes of the video. The Corps expected to find the headwaters close together. They discovered to their deep dismay that they weren’t. They immediately realized that their entire expedition was in deep jeopardy.
While there were significant “Here There Be Dragons” spaces left on the map there had been some exploration of the Pacific Northwest and what is now Canada, so the question was simply a matter of “how close” and as it turned out, a whole lot of wishful thinking. At the time the thinking went there was only a short days ride or so to the Pacific after crossing the divide.
Since in fact they could not travel by water for much of the trip, and yet they survived and made a full report of the results, they obviously weren’t “doomed”.
Lewis, Clark, and Jefferson were all disappointed that there was no easy portage between the Missouri and Columbia watersheds. Jefferson rather naively thought that it would be like going from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi–just carry your canoes for a few miles across what is now Chicago, and you’re good to go. That obviously wasn’t the case. The Rockies are a bit more formidable than Chicago–maybe not in baseball, but in geography.
Yes, it was a bugger of a portage both ways. Coming back they tried for the earliest window in late March and got stuck in heavy snow in Idaho. It would have been hopeless without the Indian guides. I’m always amazed at the tenacity of the Corps
And not even always that, as evidenced by the Mississippi, which has at least one and possibly two (depending on how you define size) “tributaries” larger than it.
Offhand, I’d say that even the best available books on North American geography at the time where woefully incomplete and inaccurate.
Seems to me that the logical thing to do is follow the Missouri west as far as possible and hope that crossing the mountains takes you to a river flowing to the Pacific.
And in fact this turned out to be a poor algorithm for finding the best land route across the Continental Divide. The easiest land route, as it turned out, was to break off from the Missouri early and follow the North Platte to the table-land of southern Wyoming, cross the Divide, pick up the Snake River valley, and then cut across to the Columbia. This was the route used by the Oregon Trail.
The Lewis and Clark route, by contrast, was completely impractical and few later parties attempted it before the automobile. Even today, it runs through some of the least populated parts of the United States. As Ian Frazier has remarked, Lewis and Clark were not so much the forerunners of a new civilization as the forerunners of future Lewis and Clark buffs.
None of which is to diminish their achievement, of course. They did a fantastic job given their instructions and the limited knowledge with which they started. And, the negative result that the Missouri route was impractical was as important as a positive result would have been.