Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.
Welcome to tonight's  "Gateway to the
Stars" program.  We have an exciting
schedule of events set up for you
tonight. Our first program is going to be
with Mr. Ken Porter, who is a retired
educator and reenactor with the Missouri
Department of Conservation, and he is
going to talk about "Finding Your Way
with Lewis and Clark," basically how Lewis
and Clark made their way to the Pacific
Ocean, the instruments and techniques
that they used to create their map and
make it all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
That will be followed by my presentation,
which is going to be a tour of the night
sky, "Virtual Stargazing at the Gateway
Arch," following Mr. Porter's presentation.
And then lastly we will have, hopefully,
live video footage of the moon taken by
an amateur astronomer with the St. Louis
Astronomical Society, so we hope you
enjoy tonight's event and we will get
started now.
>>Hello, I'm Ken Porter. Today I'm going to
be talking to you about the Lewis and
Clark expedition and their making of
maps to the western United States. I'm
dressed as an 1803 military private. The
weapon I have here with me is one of the
issue weapons for the expedition. This is
an 1803 Harper's Ferry rifle, 54 caliber.
This is the Lewis and Clark grocery
store. There were no McDonald's or
anything else between here and the
Pacific Oceanin 18-ought-3. If they didn't
trade for it or shoot it or catch it on
a hook, they didn't eat, so this was a
vital piece of equipment for them. This is
the standard military uniform of the day.
This, starting off here, is my class A
cover. This is what I would use for
parades and fancy occasions. Later in the
program I'll show you the fatigue cap.
You'll notice the jacket is nice and
colorful, but the rest of the uniform is
white, and nowadays everybody's uniform
is camouflaged, but back then the
country was so poor, they could not
afford to have color uniforms, so they
wore white uniforms. And this was not a
group of shaggy faced mountain men going west.
It was required everybody shave every
three days and you had to get a
haircut every month, even out in the
wilderness. We would divide up into
teams and because my brother was also on
the trip, we were a team. We would cut each other's hair and we would shave each
other. So you wanted to be very careful
shaving your partner, because if you were
a little rough with him, when it was his
turn to shave you, he might be rough with
you. Okay, so this was a very well organized
expedition and that's one of the reasons
they were able to do all the
mapping is because they had to be able
to coordinate with each other.
As I said, the Lewis and Clark expedition
was a military expedition headed by two
captains. They left from Fort Dubois,
which was at the confluence of the
Missouri and the Mississippi rivers. The
whole expedition was started by
President Thomas Jefferson. Thomas
Jefferson had been interested in in the
western United States for most of his
life. In fact, Thomas Jefferson had one of
the best libraries in the country and
many of his books were on the western
United States. Unfortunately at that time
there were some misconceptions about
what was in the western United States.
Jefferson actually believed that it
might be possible to find mastodons,
which were in the area. If you go just
south of here down Highway 55 you go
to Mastodon State Park, where we have the
bones of the mastodons that used to live
here. So they did used to live here,
but there were no live ones left for the
expedition. He also thought there might
be the giant ground sloth. The giant
ground sloth, they found bones but
that's it.  They thought there might be a
mountain of salt.
They didn't come close to finding a
mountain of salt, but that was one of the
things that was talked about. One of the
other major things Thomas Jefferson
thought they might run across were Welsh
Indians. Expeditions had gone out
previously looking for the blue-eyed
Welsh Indians and they never did find
any of those. Every time they got to a
new tribe on the Missouri River they'd ask
them about the Welsh Indians, and the
tribes would say, oh there beyond the
next tribe up the river, and they kept
going up the river and they never found
them. The other thing that Lewis and
Clark were supposed to be looking for,
and probably the most important part, was
an all water
route to the Pacific Ocean. From an
economic standpoint this would have been
fantastic. It's a long trip around South
America to get to the Pacific Ocean. It
was long before the Panama Canal, and so
it took a long time to get around there.
And the Northwest--
Oregon, Washington-- had a great fur
industry. Originally, Thomas Jefferson
approached George Rogers Clark-- Hannibal
of the West, hero of the American
Revolution-- to head an expedition to the
West, and this was before the Louisiana
Purchase. They were going to go on a
scientific expedition that would have
been theoretically all civilian, but
obviously with George Rogers Clark
leading it, that it wouldn't be civilian.
Strangely, George Rogers Clark is the
brother, the older brother, of Clark on
the expedition, and in fact Clark studied
his surveying techniques and map making
from his brother, George Rogers Clark.
There's in existence a textbook on
survey that has notes by both the Clark
brothers in it. Well, they were working on
getting an expedition put together and
not having a lot of luck. The strange
thing happened. The Louisiana territory
was originally French, but after the
French lost a major war back in 1763, the
Peace of Paris, gave the Louisiana
territory to Spain as reparations.
Well, after Napoleon got in there he
convinced the Spanish to repatriate the
Louisiana territory to France because he
was trying to set up a Western
Hemisphere empire. He was going to grow
sugar cane down in the Caribbean and
he was going to feed the slaves they
were using to harvest the sugar cane. He
was going to feed them with grain that
came from this country right here, what
they referred to at the time is the
Illinois country, and unfortunately the
whole exercise fell apart.  The
yellow fever went right through his
troops, the slaves revolted, his whole
sugar empire fell apart during this time.
When everything had fallen apart,
one of the Spanish officials, a
bureaucrat, closed down the United States
from using the Port of New Orleans to
store goods until a seagoing ship could
pick them up and take them where they were
going to go. They call that the right of
deposit, and they took away our right of
deposit. So Jefferson sent a deposition
to France to negotiate to buy the city
of New Orleans, so we would have the port.
Well, Napoleon knew he could not possibly
keep enough troops in the United States
to protect it from everybody, so each he
said, instead of just the Port of New
Orleans, I'll sell you the whole
Louisiana territory for fifteen million
dollars, which was a lot of money back
then and we didn't have any money. That's
why we didn't have any colorful uniforms--
didn't even have money for dye. But the
British loaned us the money, and you have
to remember, it was only 25 years after
the American Revolution. We didn't get
along all that well with England, but
England didn't want the French to have
it, they didn't want the Spanish to have
it.
They were busy themselves fighting
Napoleon.
So they loaned us the fifteen million
dollars to buy the Louisiana territory,
so when Lewis and Clark went forward
into the Louisiana territory, it was
American territory. Lewis was in St.
Louis for
the formal proceedings of raising the
flag. Lewis and Clark, Clark on the left
here and Lewis on the right,
they were co-captains on the trip and
they got along amazingly well. They
started off their trip. One of
their missions was to map from Fort
Dubois all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Now this is like taking off for the moon
without having any kind of map at all.
They did have some mapping already
available. More had gone on in the West
than most people realize at the time, as
far as mapping was concerned. Alexander
Mackenzie is a Canadian. He went from
Montreal to the Pacific Ocean in 1796,
and he wrote a book about it, which Lewis
read very closely. Now where he went
through obviously was all in Canada--it
wasn't in the United States. Also just a
few years before this ,1793, Captain
Robert Gray discovered the mouth of the
Columbia River. People had sailed right
by the Columbia River and did not notice
that there was a river there, but Captain
Gray sailed into the estuary there and
named the river after his ship, the
Columbia. And so that's how the Columbia
River got its name. And also while he was
there, he obviously took readings with
his sextants to determine the exact
position of the mouth of the Columbia.
Also there was an earlier expedition by
Mackay and Evans. Mackay was obviously a
Scotsman and Evans was a Welshman, and
they made maps going from St. Louis up
to the Mandan village in North Dakota. So
Lewis and Clark started off with a
little bit of information on the maps.
They copied all of Mackay and Evans' maps,
and two French boatman they hired,
the end gachet's, a lot of them had been
up and down the river quite often. But
mapping was a prime consideration,
because with maps of the area, Jefferson
felt this would give him justification
for claiming the western United States
for the US, because we had been there and
we'd mapped it. They were not dressed
quite like this at the time. They were in
uniforms like I'm in right now. To do the
mapping, they needed to have the
equipment of the day, and you'll notice
Captain Clark here on the left is in his
military uniform, and this is an
officer's uniform. My uniform is that of
a private. And Lewis was trained in
navigation back in Philadelphia. You'll
notice in this one, the red hair
here, that means this drawing here happens
to be of Clark. Clark was a redhead. He
even carried an umbrella with him on the
expedition, which was wiped away in a
flash flood. But he carried all the
cartographic equipment with him even
though they didn't have everything
they could have used. It was a long trip.
Here in the upper right hand corner, this
is an artificial horizon. This is a very
important piece of equipment .This is the
sextant. We can tell it it's a sextant
because it'sover a hundred and
twenty degrees on this scale down here.
But the most important piece of
equipment, strangely, is this watch here.
This watch is actually a chronometer, a
very highly accurate watch. that tells
you what time it is in Greenwich England.
Also they had compasses and as they
called them , spy glasses, telescopes, and
this is Clark's original compass that
went on the trip with them-- at least a
reproduction of it . You'll notice
on this style that they have everything
divided off into quadrants here, and the
quadrants will come into importance
a little later here. The other thing they
had with them was nautical almanacs and
inside the nautical almanac for the
objects they were tracking, this would
tell them exactly where it was, what
point on the earth it was over.
The basics of navigation are always
where am I,
and what is around me? Now to determine
our position on the planet Earth ,we need
at least two coordinates. One coordinate
is latitude-- that's the lines running
parallel to the bottom of the slide like
a ladder,
just like rungs in a ladder. Latitude is
easy to determine. Our problem gets to be
with longitude, the lines that run from
the North Pole to the South Pole.
With the latitude we have three
coordinates. If you go outside and you
stand out there, if you start
walking north,
if you walk long enough, you're walking
south. If you keep walking you pass the
equator. If you keep walking you pass
the South Pole. You have three points
where you can definitively say exactly
where you are. With longitude, you get out
front out there and you turn west and
you start walking, you walk west forever,
because there's no markers. Well, they
found you had to designate a point out
there to measure your longitude from.
Well everybody got in the act.
the British obviously got in the act
with Greenwich, Kyoto in Japan had a
prime meridian, Peking had a prime
meridian.
Everybody had prime meridians. In fact
they even made a movie of
one, the Paris meridian-- the Rose Line.
They had a movie,  "The DaVinci Code," which
was all based on this Rose Line, which
the French don't keep a secret--
there's little brass markers in
the middle of sidewalks showing you
where the Paris line is. Unfortunately,
with so many of them you couldn't tell
what was going on, so they finally got
together. The British were the power
at the time, so the line that went
through the British Observatory at
Greenwich England was picked as the
prime meridian, and everything is judged
east and west from that point. Time
equals angle. If we go back one slide
here, you'll notice all of these circles
are divided up into 360 degrees. The
Babylonians gave us the base 60s and 360
degrees in a circle, which worked out
perfectly fine, actually .The whole world
is divided up into 360 degrees, and the
problem with longitude is that we
have to be able to reference back to a
point. With latitude, we've got the North
Pole, the equator and the South Pole to
relate back to, but with the longitude we
only have a made up line out there that
everybody has agreed to. But we have to
relate back to this, and the way we have
to relate back to it is with time. If you
stand outside for 24 hours, the sun goes
completely around and comes back to
overhead again. In the sun's course doing
that, it goes through 360 degrees. So you
divide that by 24 hours, the sun has to
move at 15 degrees an hour. So this means
if you get a longitude reading of 15
degrees, you are one hour away from
Greenwich England, so you can tell where
you are. So time is equal to the angle. Thirty degrees is two hours, and your
chronometer,
if it gets off by a little bit, which
Lewis and Clark had some real
problems with, you can reset the clocks
by observing the moons of Jupiter, and
this is the main reason they had the spy
glasses, was to do the moons of Jupiter.
Now to get those angles to get that 15,
30 degrees-- whatever angle you happen to
have-- you need something to measure the
angles. Back in the olden days when I
worked with a lot of fourth-grade
students doing programs, we would have a
program where we worked on angles and
degrees, and we would make what I refer
to as a Porter's Quadrant, which has 90
degrees in it. This is nothing but
cardboard. They learned to use their
protractor.  To put on, all you really need
is is 90 degrees. You don't need the
whole set here. You just need 90 degrees,
and then on top of that you glue an
astronomical sighting device. Strangely,
the Subway sandwich shop gives away
these astronomical sighting devices. We
actually use them to drink their sodas
and such-- they're just a common straw. And then you put a hole in your cardboard to
hang a string from it
with a heavy weight of some kind.That
heavy weight will always point to the
center of the earth, given the chance, so
if you go out at night and you look
through one end of the straw at the star
Polaris, this will give you your latitude.
I'll draw a little diagram in a minute
here to show you that. Just an easy way
to get your latitude. Also on
this slide, you'll notice in the upper
left is a sextant, and a sextant has a
scale of at least 120 degrees on this
curved bar on the bottom, and an octant
which has at least 90 degrees. So this is
a quarter of a circle with at least
ninety.  One important mathematical
calculation which is well known to
fourth-graders is corresponding angles.
and this is important in our evaluations
here. That if you have two parallel lines
and you traverse them with another
straight line, the angles they formed are
matching.
You'll notice here two right angles--
number one and number five--these two
angles are exactly the same. Three and
seven are exactly the same. All of them
are equal and they're called corresponding
angles. Fourth graders pick right up on
this. They jump on that topic right
there. The sextant
is basically a fancy device for
measuring angles. You'll notice it has
two mirrors on it, and the mirror on the
bottom down here was normally a half
mirror, where you look through your eyepiece, and half the mirror you can see the
horizon. The other half the mirror you
see the picture coming from the sun or
star-- whatever you're observing up here--
and you move it back and forth with this
scale here. And this will tell you the
angle between the astronomical object
and the horizon. And this is the picture
in the upper right that you would see
looking through the scope here. On the
right-hand side you're going to see the sun.
The left-hand side, the horizon, you move
this back and forth until the sun comes
down and the bottom lamp just barely
hits the horizon. Then you take a reading
on here. And using a sextant, the sextant was obviously originally set up to be used
on the ocean.
In the upper left hand picture here you
can see the little boat here, and you get
the angle between the horizon and where
the astronomical object is. The dip
that's referred to here is the distance
you are above the horizon-- six feet plus
the height of the boat, whatever it is--
and you have to bring that into the calculation
because that that will change the angle.
On land, you can see from the picture on
the right, you don't have a horizon. Your
horizon isn't flat, it's mountains, it's
whatever is out there-- so we have to use
an artificial horizon such as in the
lower left here. You have to use an
artificial horizon. Lewis and Clark had
three different artificial horizons
depending on on the lighting conditions,
but you can see from the drawing on the
right that the light from the sun comes
in, and there is a fluid, usually water, in
this. And the artificial horizon not only
has sun shades on it, but it keeps the
wind from ruffling the surface of the
water.
Later explorers like Zebulon Pike use
mercury, which is pretty heavy all in
itself, so it doesn't get wrinkles on it
and you can just use a bowl of it if you
want. As an expedient in the field you
can take a pan full of water and use it.
I often use the birdbath in the backyard
as a reflecting surface. I live in the
Ozarks so I've got to shoot over the
trees. The only problem with doing it
this way is you end up doubling the
angle when you do this, and so you have
to divide by two. All fourth graders can
divide by two; they're very good at that.
Fourth graders are more amazing than you
think at times. Now Polaris, on the far
right in this picture, its label is
Polaris the North Star ,is important
because it only varies a half a degree
on either side of being exactly on the
North Pole. Back in the times of Lewis
and Clark they used this Little Dipper
as a clock. If you look right down here
on the lower left where it says Beta Kochab, that's Kochab, and these other stars--
now back in those days before
we had all our light pollution, they
didn't show up as well as they could, but
you could still see them. Nowadays you
sometimes lose most of these stars, but
you can usually still see Kochab unless
you're too close to St. Louis, and then
there is a problem with the light
pollution. But everything here
amazingly moves at 15 degrees an hour so
if you're on a Night Watch and privates
like myself wouldn't have had a watch,
and you're supposed to be relieved at
midnight, how do you know what it's time
to wake up your relief? Well, you know
by watching this Kochab. It amazingly
moves at 15 degrees an hour just like
the sun, just like everything out outside
of the earth except our own solar system.
moves at 15 degrees an hour. Now this is
a quadrant. You can see it has a straw on
the top and a weight and the degrees
marked across the bottom. At night you
can take this out and sight Polaris and
pinch it there or have someone else read
it, and it will tell you in this case, it
would set right there at about 38
degrees. And that's that's our latitude
right here. And just in case someone ever
asked you exactly what's going on there,
that if Polaris is up here,
okay, all the light coming from Polaris
is parallel. It's so far away it's
parallel, so the light from Polaris the
North Star would just come right through
the earth like that. Okay now, if we are
right here the throw line through here,
this is our zenith. This is straight up,
this is the horizon.
Now right there where those two lines
cross, that's 90 degrees, okay, so we know
that's 90 degrees. We also have the light
from Polaris parallel to this line
coming through that point. We take our
angle measurer, which can be a simple
piece of cardboard or a sextant or an
octant--whatever you've got-- all we're
measuring is just the angle .This
takes no spherical trigonometry. This
is simple. We measure this distance, this
angle right here, which we call height,
and that is the height , angular height of
Polaris. We refer to this as the co-height.
And we know from that being 90
degrees, that co-height plus height
equals 90 degrees.
So we can always keep that straight.
That if we look, what we're after here is our
geographic latitude, and we look over
here atwhat angles we've got  We can
tell, to get this, it's the same as this
angle here. In fact it is that angle there
If we look up here, where is that angle
again? It's right here, so this is the co-
height here and the co-height plus the
height equals the geographic latitude. And
so  this has been determined by
ancient mariners for a long time. They
could always measure their latitude. Now
Lewis and Clark, in order to establish
their points, use the noon sight.
Now the noon sight sounds like it would
be very complicated. but it's not.
We start off with the
same earth here, and we're just going to
start off with part of it. We don't
need the whole thing. We have the equator
here.
We have north and south. We're over here.
There's our horizon and there's our
zenith. Now what this is going to give us
is our longitude.
The sunshine,
okay, we can throw this on the side
parallel just like Polaris. So far away,
it's all the same when it gets here,
but again we take our angle measuring
machine--sextant, octant-- whatever. And we can get this distance here. And what we
do, is we start off and we go out and we
take one measurement with this angle,
and note the time it is in Greenwich.
Okay, we take another angle and the angle
has increased. Take another angle and the
angle is increased. Take an angle and the
angle has decreased. This point here is
noon.The sun is at its highest point
right there, and so we take a take a look
at the time for that.
Over here, let's see--
with the space we've got right here, this
height of the sun above the equator is
known as declination. Declination, you
can get out of your almanac, or you can
get out of, if you just think about
things a little bit. In two days we're
going to reach the summer solstice. The
summer solstice is 23.5 degrees ,which is
the tilt of the earth. Then after
Saturday the sun is going to start
going down, so to get our geographic
latitude,
okay, we have the declination--
this distance here-- then we have this distance here. So we have to look up here
to get what this distance is, and the
distance is the height. So our geographic
latitude,
is this distance plus this distance,
because here's two parallel lines.
Here's the intercepting line so the co-
heights here and the declination add up
to the geographical latitude. And what
this will do is it will give us a point
on a map. Now we're going to go back to
the slides and talk about the compass a
little bit. Compasses on the trip were
really very important.They not only just
point north, but they give you a
reference. First you have to have a point
where you know exactly where you are on
the earth-- latitude and longitude-- and we
can see with the sight and they had
nine stars that they tracked, to
determine their latitude and longitude,
so they knew the point at which they
were. The points don't make maps. What 
helps make maps back then was the
compass. Now compasses came wandering in
from China rather late, and by 1700 they
determined that they had a real little
court tool. Compasses point north, but
they point toward magnetic north, and
sometimes, as you can see by a large
amount, and with compasses they talk
about that as declination. but navigators
always use the term variation. Because
declination as you can see from the
previous section, declination is used for
the heights of celestial bodies above or
below the equator. So Lewis and Clark had
to compensate for the magnetic
declination, and from the previous map
you can see this is a declination map,
fairly recently here, you can see over
here where it says zero, zero is right
next to St. Louis. This is called the
agonic line.  The compass needle points to
the magnetic and geographic pole.
Unfortunately things are moving a little
quicker now than they used to, but Lewis
and Clark had to account for that, and
one of the ways of doing this-- and that's
most simple-- is by using Polaris. Polaris
is just about due north, so at night if
you get your compass out and see what
direction it's pointing and then compare
that to where Polaris is, the angular
difference between the two is your
declination. This little line right here,
that shows the declination-- the distance
between the two readings-- and what you
have to add to or subtract from your
compass reading, and so that this will
will help keep us track of what
direction north is-- which you'll see in
just a minute is very important for the
mapmaking part of this. Now just as a
point, the magnetic North Pole moves,
and in fact you can see from from this
table here, that in the past it's just
been kind of moving slowly up toward the
dateline, and then suddenly here just
recently, it's really jumped up. Some
scientists think we might be getting to
the point where we're going to reverse
poles again-- where the North Pole will
become the South Pole-- it's happened
before, so it's not like it's something
that's anybody's gonna panic over. Well,
let me take that back. Somebody might
panic over it, but it's just going to flip
your compass over. But Lewis and Clark
use the compass in their map making. It's
a system called compass transverse
mapping. In the journals you'll notice
quite often Clark will have to have a
section in there about where they went
for that day, and this is the form in
which he would put it in there.
He would note the miles, how far each
section was, and he would report the
direction in a way today we consider
unusual. he would put south or north if
it was due north or due south, but if it
was at an angle to north or south
he would say South 28 degrees to the west,
okay, South 10 degrees to the east, and he
would always state in there some type
of landmark he could use to check it if
he had to. They did a lot of back sighting
once they had gotten to a certain point,
they would shoot back the other
direction to check their readings.
Where it says starboard here, this is the
right side of the vessel. If you look at
the Bordeaux tapestry and other
paintings and drawings from the Middle
Ages, you'll notice the steering board is
on the right, and that's what this is--
starboard, steering board-- is the right
side of the boat.
Larboard in this case is the left side,
and larboard is now known as port,
because this is the side of the boat
that you put up next to the dock, because
if you put up the right side against the
dock, you'll break the steering board
which is just hanging over the edge. Okay,
Clark, at night he would sit around the
campfire and draw small maps, and he made
many of these small maps for every day.
He would take those readings he had
recorded and, as the river went down
this way, he had come on from here to
here
one-and-a-half miles, and on the larboard
side there was a rock like a tower.
This distance here, they were using graph
paper so he could scale that out. And the
direction of this, the first one, he said
it was south-- just pure south. The next
reading, who we're going to go two miles,
and our compass reading to get down here
to a pile of bushes was two miles, and
our compass reading was south.  And would be--
let's see-- 20 degrees west, and here at
this point of land, the river comes around
this way and the compass reading is
south 20 degrees east.
Whoop. I made a slight mistake here. It wasn't
west. It's coming back east.
And this is west.
Clark would draw this up, and he would have the miles in here, okay. And every
day they travel someplace that he could,
he would make up little maps like this.
Then at Fort Mandan and at Fort Clatsop,
he would put all of these little maps
together into a bigger map. And so
this is a very simple system, but you can
see he's really dependent upon his
compass readings, and so it was important
to keep those compasses working fine. So
he uses the latitude and longitude to
get a physical point and then he can,
from this map,
over here in this direction is a
huge mountain. Now you might not know how
far away that mountain is, but from here
he can get a reading of what's his
compass direction. Where is this mountain?
Then he can draw that mountain on there
even though he's a little unsure of what
this distance is. He's not sure. But he
would draw up all of these little maps
like this, and they would also, as you'll
see in just a minute,
they would use maps
from Indians and from everybody else.
This is actual types of equipment that
Lewis and Clark would have had on a trip.
Obviously the rifle I talked to you
about earlier, which was high-tech
for the time. It was, you know, a
 much shorter barreled rifle than what
was common in the day. This is the
sextant. You'll notice with the sextant,
this arm has a release down here. It
moves the arm back and forth, and if you
watch this mirror up here-- that mirror
moves back and forth. And all this does
is the very same thing this piece of
cardboard a fourth grader made does. It
measures angles. And it doesn't just
measure horizontal angles. If you hold
this on its side you can measure the
angular difference between two mountain
peaks or anything else that's out
there that you're looking at that you
need angles on, you can get it with this.
This works, too. All we're getting in
navigation is angles, but this is is the
basic piece of equipment. It has sun
shades on it that particularly when
taking noon sights, we have a real
problem. Back in the olden days they had
a condition called "Navigator's Eye."
Navigators would gradually go blind
in their right eye. No matter how many of
these shades you put down, no matter how
dark you made it, it impacted your right
eye and navigators would would soon lose
their ability to see out of that eye.
Nowadays we don't have that problem, but
back then that was a real problem with
navigators. We have much better sun
shades today. But this is your prime
piece of equipment is your sextant. It
gives you angles. The other big piece of
equipment is a chronometer. A chronometer
is nothing but a very, very fancy watch,
that in fact, this was the most expensive
piece of equipment on the trip. Two
hundred and fifty dollars and
seventy-five cents for the key to wind
it--which Lewis and Clark did not always
remember to do. This is important and
this had the time in Greenwich England--
not here. This is what you use to get
noon here. Like I did in the diagrams
earlier, you keep taking readings as the
sun goes up and up and up and up and up,
and when the angle comes down, you know
you've been through noon, so someone has
had to be there during each of these
sightings to write this down. The angle
and the time. And you always write the
time down first, because the angle is
recorded right here, so you can
always get that. But the time your watch
keeps right on going so you need to put
the time down first. This is an
artificial horizon. It's a very simple
piece of equipment. Lewis and Clark, as I
mentioned before, had three of these.
You would normally put water in them, and
the little container like this is to keep
the wind from ruffling the surface of
the water.
If you
try to sight through and the water's
going up and down or rippling back and
forth,  you can't get your
readings correctly. So this keeps the
wind off the water. If you need extra
help with the brightness of the subject,
you have pieces on there that are also
sun shades. Like I say,
Zebulon Pike used mercury. Lewis and
Clark used water, but this is the
artificial horizon, which was a very
important piece of equipment to them.
This is a reproduction of the elk skin
journal, which they made on the
trip. This is what they recorded the
information in. The information is no
good if you don't get it written down. You
write down everything, which was a little
confusing to some of the later people
going through Lewis and Clark notes. If
they did, they recorded everything, so
they have tons of stuff--not just a
series of booklets,
but many booklets, pieces of paper and
everything else. A very important
piece of equipment on the trip, the
compass, and this is a
reproduction of Lewis's compass. You will
notice on the compass that it doesn't
have 360 degrees around the edge of the compass here. From north and south they
have the numbers going up from both
directions, rather than just a series
going around with 360 degrees. They're
designed for the transverse mapping, and
so when Clark went out there he knew
that this is what he was going to do. So
this is the type of compass to use. 
Obviously this is not the real one, but
they do have the real one in a
museum. This is the class A cover. None of
them survived the trip. This cover here,
this is the fatigue cap, made in the
French style out of your old uniform
trousers.
These were their two hats,
and this one is meant to kind of
scare people off a little bit. Now
without my cover on the eyes I look
meek and mild mannered, but when I put
this on,
suddenly I'm taller and meaner and
hopefully everybody will leave the field
of battle because I scare them off
with my hat--
I would hope. And that's the
equipment that they carried on the trip.
Lewis and Clark when they first started
out, they knew where they were and they
knew where they were going, but they
didn't know what was in between. When we
went to the moon, we knew exactly what
was between us at the moon, and we had
everything down to an exact science of
exactly what was going to go on when.
Lewis and Clark knew the latitude and
longitude of Camp Dubois, so they knew
where they were starting. They knew the
latitude and longitude of the mouth of
the Columbia River, thanks to Robert Gray
and later explorations by Vancouver, so
they knew basically where they were
going.
They had maps that went up to North
Dakota,
thanks to Mackay and Evans, but even the
Native Americans really couldn't help
them much on the big bend in the
Missouri River up here at the top. When
the Mandans would go raiding out
west to capture other Indians and cause
general mayhem,
they didn't go by river-- they went by
horseback straight across from the
Mandan village to, you know, the area
around the Yellowstone in the Idaho area--
all in through there. So when Lewis and
Clark asked them about the river up here
the Indians really couldn't tell them
anything because they didn't go up
that way. Part of the reason they didn't
go up that way was because the Blackfeet
weren't up here, and the Blackfeet were
kind of like the Comanche. You just
didn't want to push them any. Or the
Pawnee, for that matter. So they knew
pretty much the first part of the
route, but the rest of the route they had
no idea. The Rocky Mountains, they were
thinking of them more in line with the
Appalachian Mountains and they thought
the Rocky Mountains were only one range.
And so the first time they got a look at
some Rocky Mountains, they were shocked.
The Native Americans didn't even cross
over them very often because,
unfortunately, where Lewis and Clark
chose to cross through the Bitterroots
is probably the hardest place in the
whole Rocky Mountains, from California to
Canada, that you could cross. But they did
have that information, so they knew about
where they had to go and how far, but
they had no idea of what was there. As
they went along with their maps,
they put notations on them for all kinds
of things to match their notes in the
journals. Is the soil good?  Is the soil
not good? You know here I talked about
short narrows where you're going to
have trouble navigating with a vessel.
They've recorded all the information
they possibly could and they recorded
them in these small maps using this
compass transverse method, to make the
smaller maps to put together into the
larger maps. This is a map of the falls--
the falls of the Missouri.
They're all covered up now by dams and
such, but that's their original drawing
of the Falls of the Missouri. But they
also used information from Indian groups.
This map here is of the Columbia River
Basin, and it notes the tribes along the
river. This is a map by Sitting Rabbit.
He was a Mandan. You can see that the
Indians, when they worked on maps, they
used lots of pictures. This picture up
here at the
top is not an airplane-- it's crossed
snowshoes. You have to remember when
Lewis and Clark were going through here,
this was at the end of the Little Ice Age.
It was much colder through here at that
time than it is today.
So they have crossed snowshoes up here,
but you can see all kinds of little
drawings of things all over the Indian
maps. On the way back from the trip, they
retracked all their calculations. Clark
dropped down to the Yellowstone River, and
went that way to get more information
and to see if it was a better route.
Actually, any route other than the one
they took through the Bitterroots was
was a better route. And they'd been gone
so long--you know two and a half years--
they met trappers coming up the river,
and their mapping and their
exploration, and particularly them
telling everybody of all the resources
they had found out there--all the beaver
and everything--they were the start of
the manifest destiny. They provided the
information and the impetus to settle
the western United States.
