Shortly after the purchase from France of the lands situated west of the Mississippi River (1803), President Jefferson chose Captain Meriwether Lewis as the leader of a ‘Corps of Discovery’ to explore the new and as yet uncharted northwest territories, describe the landscape, study the plants and animal life, establish diplomatic relations with the Indian tribes and – most importantly – find a direct waterway to the Pacific Ocean to facilitate expansion, trade and commerce. The prevailing belief among the promoters of the expedition within the Jefferson administration was that the Missouri and Oregan (or Columbia) rivers did necessarily ‘interconnect’ somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, providing an easy and continuous water route across the mountains to the western sea and the Orient.

Lewis was an experienced Army officer who had selected as his co-captain another Army officer, William Clark. From 14 May 1804 to 23 September 1806, from Saint Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back, the Corps of Discovery travelled nearly 8,000 miles. From a purely rational perspective and considering the net results of the enterprise as originally planned and prepared, the voyage was a failure: the message brought back to Jefferson by his special envoy into the wilderness was that there was no easy route from the headwaters of the Missouri to the Pacific basin. The famous interconnection simply did not exist except in the realm of illusion and mythic construction.