t
time was only twenty-nine years old. He had been Jefferson's private
secretary for two years and was, of course, familiar with the
President's plans and expectations as these regarded the wonder-land
which Lewis was to enter. It is pleasant to quote here Mr. Jefferson's
words concerning Captain Lewis. In a memoir of that distinguished young
officer, written after his death, Jefferson said: "Of courage undaunted;
possessing a firmness and perseverance of purpose which nothing but
impossibilities could divert from its direction; careful as a father of
those committed to his charge, yet steady in the maintenance of
order and discipline; intimate with the Indian character, customs
and principles; habituated to the hunting life; guarded, by exact
observation of the vegetables and animals of his own country, against
losing time in the description of objects already possessed; honest,
disinterested, liberal, of sound understanding, and a fidelity to truth
so scrupulous that whatever he should report would be as certain as if
seen by ourselves--with all these qualifications, as if selected and
implanted by nature in one body for this express purpose, I could have
no hesitation in confiding the enterprise to him."

Before we have finished the story of Meriwether Lewis and his
companions, we shall see that this high praise of the youthful commander
was well deserved.

For a coadjutor and comrade Captain Lewis chose William Clark,(1) also
a native of Virginia, and then about thirty-three years old. Clark, like
Lewis, held a commission in the military service of the United States,
and his appointment as one of the leaders of the expedition with which
his name and that of Lewis will ever be associated, made the two men
equal in rank. Exactly how there could be two captains commanding the
same expedition, both of the same military and actual rank, without jar
or quarrel, we cannot understand; but it is certain that the two young
men got on together harmoniously, and no hint or suspicion of any
serious disagreement between the two captains during their long and
arduous service has come down to us from those distant days.

(1) It is a little singular that Captain Clark's name has
been so persistently misspelled by historians and
biographers. Even in most of the published versions of the
story of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the name of one of
the captains is spelled Clarke. Clark's own signature, of