Meriwether Lewis, a captain in the army, was selected by Jefferson to lead the expedition.  Captain Lewis was a native of Virginia, and at that 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 which many are in existence, is without the final and superfluous vowel; and the family name, for generations past, does not show it.

As finally organized, the expedition was made up of the two captains (Lewis and Clark) and twenty-six men.  These were nine young men from Kentucky, who were used to life on the frontier among Indians; fourteen soldiers of the United States Army, selected