The Trail / Lewis & Clark by Air

Lewis & Clark by Air

By Jim WarkJoseph A. Mussulman

Sometime during 1804, the year the Lewis and Clark expedition began,[1]Today, most consider the start of the expedition to be during 1803, the year Lewis started down the Ohio River.—ed. an event of similarly far-reaching import occurred in Yorkshire, England. A young inventor named George Cayley, of about the same age as the two American explorers, launched the first successful tests of a small glider, initiating the science of aerodynamics and demonstrating the practicality of fixed-wing flight. Those two synchronous threads of history have together in this book of aerial photographs of selected places along the routed trace by Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Volunteers for North Western Discovery. It is my privilege to provide some commentary connecting these scenes with incidents from the history of the expeditions.

The book also rests on a fabric of less momentous experiences and coincidences. Over the year, having lived and traveled along the Lewis and Clark trail from childhood, I had developed an eye-level familiarity with much of its scenery. But it was not until the spring of 1999 that I saw much of it from a commercial airliner. Beginning on 14 May 1999, serving as a personal tour guide for Tom Arthur of Tampa, Florida, I studied the trail from St. Louis to the Rockies through the windows of his Pilatus Porter PC-6, cruising at a leisurely pace of eighty knots, a thousand feet or so above the Missouri, Jefferson, Beaverhead, and Bitterroot Rivers. The experience was exhilarating. In the span of four days I saw more than half of the official Lewis and Clark Trail[2]At the time of this writing, the trail as defined by National Historic Trails legislation began in St. Louis. Today, the start—in terms of the Lewis and Clark National Trail administered by the … Continue reading from an altitude that paralleled the geographical sensibility from which William Clark drew his remarkable maps.

 

Notes

Notes
1 Today, most consider the start of the expedition to be during 1803, the year Lewis started down the Ohio River.—ed.
2 At the time of this writing, the trail as defined by National Historic Trails legislation began in St. Louis. Today, the start—in terms of the Lewis and Clark National Trail administered by the U.S. National Park Service—begins in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.—ed.

Discover More

  • The Lewis and Clark Expedition: Day by Day by Gary E. Moulton (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). The story in prose, 14 May 1804–23 September 1806.
  • The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery (abridged) by Gary E. Moulton (University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Selected journal excerpts, 14 May 1804–23 September 1806.
  • The Lewis and Clark Journals. by Gary E. Moulton (University of Nebraska Press, 1983–2001). The complete story in 13 volumes.