About noon on September 23, 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark brought their party into sight of St. Louis. The men fired three rounds from the canoes. People gathered on the shore and answered with three cheers. Clark wrote that they were met by all the village and received a hearty welcome. The Corps of Discovery was home.
That same day Lewis sat down to write President Thomas Jefferson. He detained the post to get the letter off. “It is with pleasure that I anounce to you the safe arrival of myself and party,” he began, and then the news Jefferson had waited more than two years to hear: in obedience to the president’s orders, they had penetrated the continent to the Pacific Ocean. They had found what Lewis judged the most practicable route across by the navigable branches of the Missouri and the Columbia. He praised Clark as his equal in the work. Nearly the whole party that had left the Mandan country with him, he added, had returned in good health.
The orders had been written at the city of Washington on June 20, 1803. Jefferson, then living in the President’s House, addressed them to Captain Meriwether Lewis of the First Regiment of Infantry, his own private secretary. The object was plain: explore the Missouri and find the most direct water communication across the continent to the Pacific for the purposes of commerce. Lewis was to note the rivers, the people, the plants and animals, the climate. Treat the nations along the way in a friendly manner. Come home safe with the information.
Lewis chose Clark as co-leader. They left the Wood River camp opposite St. Louis in May 1804, wintered with the Mandan, crossed the Rockies with help from Sacagawea’s Shoshone kin, and reached the Pacific in November 1805. They spent that winter at Fort Clatsop near the mouth of the Columbia, then turned east again. On September 23, 1806, the circle closed at the same river town where the journey had begun. The letter Lewis wrote that afternoon still survives among Jefferson’s papers.
Our Jefferson Memorial National Treasures Heritage Collection ornament honors the president who sent them. Brass with a Rhodium Silver finish, with a history card in the box.