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A Journey into the Unknown
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| North Dakota State Historical Society |
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Here, in the heart of what is now North Dakota, Captain Meriwether Lewis records his anticipation:
“We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in
width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trod. The good or
evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine…the
picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one…I
could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of
my life. The party are in excellent health and spirits, zealously
attached to the enterprise, and anxious to proceed.” Captain Lewis - Fort Mandan, 7 April 1805
April 7, 1805. As the last chunks of ice float
away from the Missouri River shoreline, a gathering of Indian men and
women bids farewell to the curious band of light-skinned men who
wintered among them. The voyagers eagerly set forth upstream, in the
company of a young Indian woman whose husband was hired “with his wife,
as an interpreter through his wife” (Lewis’ journal). Carrying her
infant son in a cradleboard, she dreams of returning to the mountains
of her birth and to her family. For all but Sakakawea, the Indian
woman, it is a voyage into the vast unknown.
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