The Wilderness Gallery at the Old State House Museum
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After 1803 Jefferson launched several expeditions to explore the newly acquired lands. Because of its spectacular accomplishments, the expedition headed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark has tended to eclipse all the others. Elliott West argues that this tends to distort the relative weight initially given to each.
"From Jefferson's perspective the exploration of the southern boundary of the Purchase was at least as important as the northern," West tells us. "In fact the Hunter-Dunbar and Freeman expeditions suggest that the president's efforts here were if anything greater than the energy spent on the far more celebrated Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific Coast. Details from those forays along the Red River and into present day Arkansas show some of the reasons for Jefferson's concern. At the time of the Purchase this region was home to a vigorous commerce in furs and a dynamic shuffling of power among Native American groups. What was now the nation's southwestern frontier was also its touchiest border, with the United States concerned with the Spanish presence and Spain even more worried about its new, aggressive neighbor. In fact the lower Mississippi and Arkansas valleys were at the geopolitical crosshairs of North America's most vigorous contest of empires. While the Lewis and Clark expedition inevitably focuses attention on national ambitions and rivalries on the northern plains, northern Rockies, and the Pacific Northwest, …American interests were at least as vital, and arguably much more pressing, in the area of what is now Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Oklahoma."
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"To procure a knowledge of an interesting branch of the [Red] river called the Washita."
From the Mission of the Hunter-Dunbar expedition
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NEXT: The Middle of Nowhere »
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