A young man of ragged appearance trudges up a steep rise. A combination of stubble and badly worn hides and moccasins gives him a wild, almost savage appearance. Half-starved and sunburned, he nevertheless has a bounce in his step. Intense eyes look ahead eagerly, almost feverishly.
It has been a long journey, already well over a year heading west, always west, far off of his peoples’ maps. But, finally, he’s coming to the top of the continental divide, the place where the rivers start flowing west. He expects to find on the other side the same thing he found to the east, headwaters close by, allowing an easy portage for people to carry boats from one side to the other.
If he’s right it will change everything. He will have discovered the northwest passage, a navigable water route (with a short, manageable, portage at the divide) from one side of the American continent to the other. Such a passage would connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, providing the United States with direct access to the markets of Asia. It would knit the North American continent together, making possible the dream of a nation stretching from sea to sea.
It was a dream of explorers since the 1400s. And the young man, quickening his step, thought that he was finally going to discover it. His feelings must have been heady. It was an explorer’s dream, a culmination of years of work and sacrifice. It would make him, perhaps, the greatest explorer of all time.
He quickens his step, crests the final rise and looks out—the first person from his country to ever see the view down the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. If you’d been able to watch his eyes in that moment you would have seen two things in them: wonder . . . and crushing disappointment.
Stretched out before him was a mountain range hundreds of miles wide. There would be no easy portage. It would take many days on horseback to cross. The Northwest Passage did not exist. A dream that started with Christopher Columbus died in the eyes of Meriwether Lewis.
. . .
For more, listen to the Podcast episode and check out my book, History Stories for Everyone, where I dive deeper into this and some of history’s other most fascinating and relatable human stories:
