Fort Mandan - Preparations For The Spring

Preparations For The Spring

The Corps also spent a great deal of the winter preparing to travel again in the spring. On the journey up until Fort Mandan they had maps by previous explorers, but west of there they would enter unfamiliar territory. Therefore Clark gathered information from Sheheke about the route to the west to make a preliminary map. Also, not knowing whether they would survive to bring back the information they had gathered thus far, Lewis and Clark compiled their descriptions of tributaries of the Missouri River, their observations on Native nations, and their descriptions of plant and mineral specimens collected among many other details into a manuscript they called the Mandan Miscellany, which they sent back to St. Louis with their large keelboat in the spring.

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