The Lewis and Clark Expedition Across Missouri

The Lewis and Clark Expedition Across Missouri. .

"The Apple River extends a considerable distance back in the country say 40 or 50 miles and heads with the waters of the St. Francis's River. On this steam about 7 miles from it's mouth, is a settlement of Shawnees, which more than any other in this quarter deserves the name of a villiage I could not ascertain their number.", Merriwether Lewis, Nov. 25, 1803

, The crew of the future Lewis and Clark Expedition passed this point on Nov. 25, 1803. Four days earlier, the group broke camp at the month of the Ohio River and began to ascend the Mississippi River. On Nov. 24, 1803, the party traveled 20 miles up the Mississippi and made camp a mile downriver from Sheppard point, near the southern boundary of today's Trail of Tears State Park. Capt. Meriwether Lewis noted in his journal that while the Illinois side of this stretch of the Mississippi was low and floodprone, the Missouri side "has been generally bold…but here putts in some high clifts the summits of which are crowned with pitch-pine [actually shortleaf pine] and seader [eastern red cedar], these rocks are nearly perpendicular in many places sixty feet.", The next day, Nov. 25, the crew passed even higher bluffs on the Missouri shore: "the coast on the Lard. Qut [larboard quarter] was higher than yesterday, the rock rising perpendicularly from the water's edge in many places and in others reather projecting than otherwise.", A strikingly tall, projecting bluff is visible just upstream from this lookout, part of a 75-mile-long line of bluffs extending north from Cape Girardeau. Lewis described the rock a limestone embedded with smooth chunks of "flint" (chert)., After four hours of travel, the boat crews passed the mouth of a creek-today's Indian Creek, the park's northern boundary. Above this creek, Lewis noted Shawnee Indian huts and tents. , Shortly after passing Indian Creek, the boats passed Apple Creek, "the most considerable stream I have yet met with [on the Mississippi]," according to Lewis. Lewis knew of a Shawnee village seven miles up this stream (near today's Old Appleton)., That evening, the party camped opposite Grand Tower, now called Tower Rock, a Mississippi River landmark. , Shawnee Presence in Southeast Missouri , Writing in 1803, Nicolas de Finiels, a French military engineer, described the Shawnee villages along Apple Creek that Lewis mentioned. "These villages were more systemically and solidly constructed than the usual Indian villages. Around their villages the Indians soon cleared the land, which was securely fenced around in the American style in order to protect their harvests from animals. The first of these villages is located five or six leagues from Cape Girardeau along the road to Ste. Genevieve…" , Shawnee presence in the area was a matter of international politics. Shawnee and Delaware Indians from Ohio were invited to the Cape Girardeau district in the 1780s by Spain's district commandant Louis Lorimier, who had traded with those tribes in Ohio. Spain, which governed the Louisiana Territory then, welcomed the "Absentee Shawnee" with ulterior motives. It believed they would be a buffer against the Osage and against American ambitions to expand their borders. Coincidentally, Gen. George Rogers Clark, William Clark's older brother, had burned Lorimier's Ohio post because Lorimier sided with the British during the American Revolution.