The party consisted of twenty-eight men, and in the spring of 1804, started up the Missouri, following it until late in October, when they camped for the winter near the present site of Bismarck, North.  Dakota.  They resumed the journey early in the spring, and in May, caught their first glimpse of the Rocky Mountains.  Reaching the headwaters of the Columbia, at last, they floated down its current, and on the morning of November 7, 1806, after a journey of a year and a half, full of every sort of hardship and adventure, they saw ahead of them the blue expanse of the Pacific.  They spent the winter on the coast, and reached St. Louis again in September, 1807, having traversed over nine thousand miles of unbroken wilderness where no white man had ever before set foot.  It was largely because of this expedition that our government was able, forty years later, to claim and maintain a title to the state of Oregon.

Congress rewarded the members of the expedition with grants of land, and Lewis was appointed governor of Missouri.  But the strain of the expedition to the Pacific had undermined his health; he became subject to fits of depression, and on October 8, 1809, he put an end to his life in a lonely cabin near Nashville, Tennessee, where he had stopped for a night’s lodging.  Clark lived thirty years longer, serving as Indian agent, governor of Missouri, and superintendent of Indian affairs.

While Lewis and Clark were struggling across the continent, another young adventurer was conducting some explorations farther to the east.  Zebulon Pike, aged twenty-seven, a captain in the regular army, was, in 1805, appointed to lead an expedition to the source of the Mississippi.  He accomplished this, after a hard journey lasting nine months; and, a year later, leading another expedition to the southwest, discovered a great mountain which he named Pike’s Peak, and, continuing southward, came out on the Rio Grande.  He was in Spanish territory, and was held prisoner for a time, but was finally released upon representations from the government at Washington.  He rose steadily in the service, and in 1813, during the second war with England, led an assault upon Little York, now Toronto.  The town was captured, but the fleeing British exploded a powder magazine, and General Pike was crushed and killed beneath the flying fragments.  He died with his head on the British flag, which had been hauled down and brought to him.

The next step to be recorded in the growth of the United States is a step variously regarded as infamous or glorious—­but it was marked by one of the most heroic incidents in history, and dominated by the picturesque and remarkable personality of Sam Houston.