First edition, first issue, House of Congress printing, of the first printed account of the Lewis and Clark expedition. An exceptionally fine example, never bound, uncut and with the rare folding map, ‘Map of the Washita River in Louisiana from the Hot Springs to the Confluence of the Red River with the Mississippi Laid down from the Journal & Survey of W.m Dunbar Esq.r in the Year 1804 by Nicholas King’ (210 by 837mm to the neat line; sheet size: 250 by 890 mm, full margins showing the plate mark), loose and untrimmed with full margins, and unrecorded as such. “Read, and ordered to lie on the table” refers to the practice of leaving presidential communications out on the Speaker’s table “for promulgation by the Speaker” (Erickson).
From the library of Congressman Samuel Whittelsey Dana (1760- 1830), inscribed by him at the head of the title-page, and probably obtained by him in this ‘proof ’ format directly from the Congressional printers. Dana, a mostly reactionary politician, had a very keen interest in the expansion of the western frontier, largely as it might adversely affect New England. He opposed the Louisiana Purchase, and generally, against slavery, on moral grounds, “worried about disturbances to political harmony, he scorned the combined admission into the Union of Maine and Missouri in 1820 and urged a delay of statehood for the latter, noting “no occasion for haste” as long as “the people of Missouri were not in a state of suffering”” (ANB online).
Lewis’s report, sent from the temporary Fort Mandan, near the site of present-day Bismarck, North Dakota, found between pages 5 and 8, begins with an account of the geological and botanical specimens that the exploring expedition have gathered, and forwarded to Benjamin Smith Barton of the Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. He also explains that he will “dispatch a canoe with three, perhaps four persons from the extreme navigable point of the Missouri, or the portage between this river and the Columbia river, as either may first happen. By the return of this canoe, I shall send you my journal. He describes the non-military people in their party: “we have two interpreters, one negro man, servant to capt. Clark; one Indian woman [Sacagawea], wife to one of the interpreters, and a Manda man, whom we take with a view to restore peace between the Snake Indians, and those in this neighbourhood, amounting in total with ourselves to 33 persons”. He excuses himself for not having forwarded the accounts to the War Department in a timely manner… But most interestingly he makes an attempt to predict how the expedition will unfold in the coming months:
“As our vessels are now small, and the current of the river much more moderate, we calculate upon travelling at the rate of 20 or 25 miles per day, as far as the falls of the Missouri. Beyond this point, or the first range of rocky mountains, situated about 100 miles further, any calculations with respect to our daily progress, can be little more than bare conjecture.
At this point the expedition is still operating under the misapprehension that a direct water route to the Pacific coast existed, well within U.S. Territory, based on a manuscript map prepared by Nicholas King in 1803. That was the first of many maps of the trans-Mississippi West that King prepared between 1803 and 1806 at the direction of Jefferson and the War Department for distribution to Congress. “King, a native of England and Surveyor of the City of Washington from 1803 until his death in 1812, was one of the outstanding cartographic craftsmen at this time in the United States. In 1804 or 1805 he compiled [this] ‘Map of the Washita River…’, which was based on the journal and survey of William Dunbar” (Scwartz & Ehrenberg, page 223). The map was engraved by William Kneass in Philadelphia.
The other articles by Sibley and Dunbar, which are included with Lewis’s report, together provide the first detailed account of the southwestern portion of the Louisiana Purchase. The letters by Sibley are, according to Streeter, “the first accounts of Texas in book form”. The very rare map “illustrates the route of the expedition from the Mississippi into east Texas and is the first cartographical effort of any detail to show western Louisiana and northeast Texas.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was president of the United States from 1800-1809. His “greatest triumph, and greatest defeat” (Merill D. Peterson for ANB) was the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the acquisition of which would have brought him into direct conflict with the first owner of this ‘Message’, Samuel Dana. The Purchase breached the limits of the Constitution and Jefferson drafted an amendment to sanction the acquisition retroactively. “When it found no support in Congress, he buried his fears of making the Constitution a “blank paper by construction” (‘Jefferson Writings’, p. 1140) and proceeded with the treaty” (Peterson). The opportunity to properly explore the western regions of North American now became irresistible.
Jefferson involved his aide-de-camp and old Virginian neighbor Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) in planning for this ambitious undertaking. In turn Lewis chose William Clark (1770-1838), a military comrade, to join him in leading the expedition. Early in July of 1803 Lewis “left Washington for the West and in the winter of 1803–1804 camped near St. Louis, across the Mississippi from the mouth of the Missouri. The exploring party of less than fifty men set off up the Missouri on 14 May 1804. Progress was slower than expected, and, after reaching the Mandan Indian villages, they spent the winter of 1804–1805” (Reginald Horsman for DNB), and from where he sent this report. Exceptionally rare. Only 5 institutional examples with the map are known, at the LoC; the Newberry; the Missouri Historical Society; the Watkinson Library at Trinity College, CT; and the University of Pennsylvania. Only 4 examples have sold at auction in recent years: a damaged example was sold at PBA in 2007; the Siebert/Snider copy has appeared twice in 1999 and 2005; Mrs. Charles W. Engelhard’s copy sold at Christie’s in 1996, as part of a sammelband; and Streeter, 1966.