Secretary of Treasury Albert Gallatin, One of Its Largest Proponents and Planners, Announces the Success of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Captain Meriwether Lewis

Lewis named rivers after Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin, and those rivers still bear their names; here Gallatin compares Lewis to Mungo Park, first Westerner known to have travelled to the central portion of Africa’s Niger River

 

He praises Thomas Jefferson’s “goodness of heart” and says he “is much above all those little squabbles”, and sums up how he measures the success of a public servant: “The great question in all those things is ‘Did you perform your duty and did you as far as you were able promote the public good?’”

 

An unpublished letter, offered for sale here for the first time, a Gallatin family treasure passed down through the generations

 

Note on rarity: our research discloses no other contemporary letter from a major public figure mentioning the return of the expedition having reached the market

The moving force behind the opening of the American West was President Thomas Jefferson. For twenty years he had thought about finding a water route to the Pacific Ocean and establishing an American presence beyond the western borders of the United States. That the West was foreign territory didn’t bother Jefferson; his initial efforts occurred while Louisiana belonged to Spain. Indeed, he set about preparing for an exploration even before the opportunity to purchase the Louisiana Territory came along. The consummation of that transaction on April 30, 1803 meant not that the explorers would remain on American soil their entire trip west, but that they would do so until they crossed the Rocky Mountains rather than the Mississippi River.

To head the expedition, Jefferson chose his young secretary, Capt. Meriwether Lewis. Lewis invited his friend Lt. William Clark to join him. Both were familiar with the frontier and with Indians through their service in the army. In commissioning Lewis, on June 20, 1803, Jefferson wrote to him as “Captain of the first regiment of Infantry of the United States of America,” and said “The Object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river & such principal stream of it as by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean, whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river, may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent for the purpose of commerce.”

However, the expedition’s objectives were broader; they were partly scientific, partly to open diplomatic relations with Indian tribes, and partly to evaluate the land for future settlement. Little was known about western America before Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. No one had yet blazed an overland trail. In preparation for the historic journey, Lewis studied map making and learned how to fix latitude and longitude. The route of the expedition was carefully planned. The party was to ascend the Missouri to its source, cross the Continental Divide, and descend the Columbia River to its mouth.

Lewis left Washington, D.C. on his historic western journey on July 5, 1803, but ahead lay almost a year’s worth of preparation. First he picked up arms at the government arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. Then he oversaw the construction of his specially-designed 55-foot keelboat and floated it down the Ohio River. Clark joined him at Clarksville, Ind., across from Louisville, Ky. In the winter of 1803-04 the expedition was assembled in Illinois, near St. Louis. The party consisted of the two leaders, Lewis and Clark; 14 soldiers; nine frontiersmen from Kentucky; two French boatmen; and Clark’s servant, York.

On May 14, 1804, the explorers started up the Missouri. On July 30 they held their first powwow, or meeting, with Indians at a place the explorers named Council Bluff. On October 26 they reached the camps of the Mandan Indians. On a site close to present-day Stanton, N.D., the explorers built Fort Mandan and spent the winter. It was here that they hired Toussaint Charbonneau, a French interpreter, and his Indian wife, Sacagawea, the sister of a Shoshone chief. As an Indian interpreter she proved invaluable.

After the winter layover, the party continued on up the Missouri. On April 26, 1805, it passed the mouth of the Yellowstone, and on May 26, Lewis was excited by his first glimpse of the distant Rocky Mountains. However, what they discovered west of the Rockies was radically different from what they had expected. First, the high, arid, and inhospitable Columbia Plateau. Then the awesome Cascade Range, dominated by lofty peaks later named Adams, Jefferson, St. Helens, and Hood, and penetrated by the precipitous Columbia Gorge. After crossing the Continental Divide late in September, they reached a point on the Clearwater River. From here they were able to proceed by water. They had looked forward to a relatively easy float from the Divide to the Pacific Ocean. On the contrary, they found the roughest water, that Clark called a “swelling, boiling & whorling in every direction.”

But then the payoff, they reached the Pacific Ocean, having gone from sea to shining sea. On the Pacific shore, near the mouth of the Columbia, they built a stockade, Fort Clatsop, and there spent the winter. On March 23, 1806, the entire party started back. On June 24, with 66 horses, they began to cross the mountains. On their way, Lewis saw so much game, including buffalo, elk, antelope, and wolves, that he found it “increditable” and resolved “to be silent on the subject further.” But the next day he couldn’t refrain from remarking on the “emence herds” he saw. Once he laid to for an hour to let buffalo cross the river. On August 3 he reached the Missouri.

His return through Montana from Travelers’ Rest, via the Yellowstone, took 32 days (the trip upriver between the same two points in 1805, via the Missouri River, had taken 134 days). The party reached St. Louis on Sept. 23, 1806, and there Lewis stopped recording in the journal he had been keeping for Jefferson, writing as the last entry, “In obedience to your orders we have penitrated the Continent of North America to the Pacific Ocean and sufficiently explored the interior of the country to affirm with confidence that we have discovered the most practicable rout which does exist across the continent by means of the navigable branches of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers.”

Albert Gallatin played a major role in the launching of the expedition. Lewis named three rivers after major figures: Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin. Gallatin commissioned the creation of new maps that would aid in the expedition. And his help, as Secretary of the Treasury, was instrumental in securing the funding for the expedition. By the time he was ready to request funds for the enterprise, Jefferson’s relationship with the opposition in Congress was anything but friendly, so he tried to shield it from his political enemies. When the President suggested including expedition funding in his regular address to Congress, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin urged that the request be made in secret. The message purported to focus on the state of Indian trade and mentioned the proposed western expedition near the end of the document.

Although Lewis reached St. Louis on September 23, it was 31 days before his announcement of this fact reached Thomas Jefferson and Washington. On October 26, that news was published and Jefferson wrote Lewis back. The next day, Gallatin wrote to his sister-in-law.

This letter was passed down in the Gallatin family, and belonged to arctic explorer G.M. Dyott, who was a descendant. It comes with an envelope noting that, of all the letters of his ancestor Gallatin, this was his favorite. Mungo Park, to whom Gallatin compares Lewis, was a Scottish explorer of West Africa. He was the first Westerner known to have travelled to the central portion of the Niger River, and his account of his travels is still in print.

Autograph letter signed, Washington, October 27, 1806, to Maria Nicholson, his wife Hannah’s sister, praising Jefferson’s character, showering her with excellent advice and tender accolades, and then announcing the success of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

“My Dear Sister, I have not lately received as much pleasure as I felt on the receipt of your last letter. It again breathed kindness, and what is still better, affection: it was like old times, my own Dear sister Maria forgiving her brother and writing to him in her usual style. Why do we, in the course of this short existence where we meet with so few who love us and for whom we feel both love and respect, why do we so often neglect instead of cherishing the consolatory blessing? Well, I have taken the strongest resolution that if I lose you again, it will not be my fault: I am resolved to correct my faults & to be blind to yours. Indeed, at this moment, I do not recollect that you have any fault.

“And now let me ask you whether you have sincerely & finally determined not to [hide away] yourself this winter: for if such be your determination, both Hannah and I say that you must spend this winter with us. To her it will be charity: we mix too little with the follies of the place to render them disagreeable to you: Mr. Lowrie’s church is almost finished and you will have steady and good preaching all winter: to me I need not say how much pleasure your residence will give, and that will be much increased by the opinion I have that the journey and change of air will be very beneficial to your health. I think that Mamma is of the same opinion and will assent rather with pleasure than otherwise. As to Addison, you may rely upon it: she does not want you: I know what her feelings are; she is absorbed in one object and can think of nothing else. Nor, however entertaining for the parties concerned, do I perceive much amusement in seeing those two loves cooing all winter. I participate in her happiness, and my feelings are not alloyed by any other sensation. I think it as agreeable and prudent connection and will be proud of my brother in law. So you may tell Mamma; but I think two years courtship to be much too long, particularly if they remain together all the time: it is enough to give them a surfeit of love. I seriously think that the period should be shortened if practicable. I fear that it was anxiety on that subject which had an unfavorable effect on Mamma’s health; and heartily hope that now that she has made up her mind she will soon recover: she waited too long before she took advice; it is a kind of complaint more dangerous from being neglected than from any other cause: she must be very careful and take the best possible care of a health which is so precious to her children and to none more than to him who has no other mother. You do not know what blessing that mother’s love has been to me; for you had not like me felt the want of one for twenty years. And for the same reason you really do not know how much I love you, and value your love.

“I had seen the piece in the Enquirer to which you allude before I left New York. To be abused and misunderstood by political friends of worth is not pleasant; but the great question in all those things is ‘Did you perform your duty and did you as far as you were able promote the public good’? For, worldly as you think me, rest assured that however I may prize public opinion, it is not there that I seek for a reward. I suspect, but that is solely between ourselves, that some friends of John Randolph mortified at his conduct and perhaps still more at its effect on his consequence would wish to know the shame of his excesses on me; and that, on the other hand a weak friend of the President has felt hurt that my opinions had not in every particular coincided with the President’s. To those joint causes I ascribe the Virginia attack. Mr. Jefferson thinking that I might be hurt by it wrote me the enclosed letter which you may read to Mamma only & then return by next mail: it affords additional proof of the goodness of his heart & shows that he is much above all those little squabbles.

“You will see with pleasure by the National Intelligencer of this day that Cap. Lewis has safely returned from his perilous expedition. He has completely succeeded in the object of the voyage having penetrated to the Pacific & ascertained the communications across the mountains between the Missouri and the Columbia or long Doubted River of the West. His name will go down with those of Park & other eminent travellers.

“We are all well, Albert seems much better. As to news none but races this week & sales at auction of Mr. Merry’s superb furniture. We attend neither. We found as you expected that there was not paper enough for the cornices & have appropriated it to those of the back parlour; and purchased other for the front room.

“Give my best love to all the family, not forgetting Mr. Seney and Col. Few’s family. Your own brother, Albert Gallatin.”

His and President Jefferson’s dispute with John Randolph involved the latter’s accusation that a deal to acquire Florida was being done in secret and not subject to open debate. Catherine Nicholson, a sister of Hannah and Maria, married Col. William Few, who became president of City Bank of New York. Another sister in this large family was Frances, who married Congressman Joshua Seney. The elder Seney had died, so this doubtless refers to Joshua Seney, Jr., Gallatin’s nephew. All the women were daughters of James Nicholson, first commodore in the U.S. Navy.