Captain Lewis shooting an Indian.The expedition slowly ascended the Missouri River in a series of vessels ranging from small canoes to a larger keelboat. The written record has some ambiguity, but a total of fifty-one men (including Lewis and Clark) served in the expedition during this early stage. Several of these men had already made clear that they only planned to accompany the contingent part of the way. One member of the expedition, Sergeant Patrick Gass, eventually coined its most popular nickname: the Corps of Discovery.
During the ascent of the Missouri, most of the expedition’s members were engaged in the challenging task of rowing and occasionally towing their vessels against the river’s powerful current. Clark, an experienced river navigator, usually remained aboard one of the vessels. (He was also the expedition’s main cartographer.) Meanwhile, Lewis often went ashore to observe the landscape, gather plant and wildlife samples, and supervise a few men who hunted fo
By Editor | May 5, 2021
By MARK EVANS
mevans@stegenherald.com
Ste. Genevieve’s only indirect involvement in the American Revolution will be celebrated at the Centre For French Colonial Life (CFCL).
The center is opening an exhibition this weekend to bring to life the “Battle of Fort San Carlos,” sometimes called “The Battle of St. Louis,” and the Ste. Genevieve militia’s important role in it.
“Saving St. Louis: the Ste. Genevieve Militia at the Battle of Fort San Carlos,” will open to the public this Saturday.
In 1779, Spain declared war on Great Britain, which had been preoccupied with the American colonial revolution for five years. The British looked at it as a golden opportunity to plunder the large, but somewhat weakly defended Louisiana Territory Spain controlled west of the Mississippi River.
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The first Europeans to settle Upper Louisiana saw river bottoms with a diverse mix of flood-tolerant trees and lowland prairies. In the Bootheel, prairies on ancient sand deposits were sites of the earliest settlement.
Animals included bison, elk, and prairie chickens. These alternated with swamp forests of oaks, sweetgum, and cypress up to 1000 years old. The higher sites that native peoples had cultivated had grown up to dense giant cane. Forested river hills along the Mississippi gave way to open oak-hickory forests with grassy understory inland.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft described these uplands in 1818, “barrens and prairies, with occasional forest of oak, the soil poor, and covered with grass, with very little underbrush.” Elk, deer, black bear, and turkey were abundant. Open shortleaf pine forests covered south and west-facing slopes, with prairie grass between. Farther west, trees gave way to prairies covered by perennial grasses, which covered roughly half the state.