By Dr. Rick Chromey
America the beautiful…and heroic.
In 19th-century schoolhouses, children learned our nation’s history through tales of heroes like George Washington’s Delaware crossing or Paul Revere’s midnight ride.
However, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark – America’s courageous explorers of the West – proved the greatest “rock stars” of their era.
They achieved the impossible – an accomplishment greater than developing an atomic bomb or landing on the moon. Lacking maps or guides, and receiving occasional help from native tribes, Lewis and Clark journeyed 8,000 miles, primarily through uncharted wilderness, to the Pacific Ocean and back.
In Confident Hope
Lewis and Clark pointed their noses West…in “confident hope.” 1
Thomas Jefferson named them the “Corps of Discovery,” though they could easily have been the “Corpse of Discovery.” Survival proved a daily battle for this party of young men who served as French interpreters, rivermen, military conscripts, and frontiersmen. Also among them were a teenage Shoshone wife with her newborn son, Clark’s Black servant, and Lewis’s Newfoundland dog.
Trials and Troubles
For nearly two and half years, the Corps of Discovery survived starvation, drownings, illness, and disease. They endured sub-zero temperatures, soaking rains, and flash floods. The Corps was plagued by mosquitoes, rattled by snakes, surprised by grizzlies, and charged by bison. Various members outlived falls off cliffs, gunshot accidents, wildfires, sandstorms, capsized canoes, and hostile encounters with the Teton and Blackfeet.
They endured weeks of grueling travel through the Bitterroot Mountains in Idaho’s panhandle. Almost every member of the Corps was either ill, frostbitten, or battling hypothermia. All of them were facing starvation.
Four months earlier, the party enjoyed ample meat, but now hunters returned with only a few grouse and squirrels, insufficient to satisfy their hunger. Sgt. Patrick Gass journaled that “without a miracle,” it would be “impossible” to feed their party.2 The term “miracle” appears only once in the journals despite several miraculous moments.
It was a miracle only one man (Sgt. Charles Floyd) died on the expedition, and from a death unrelated to the Trail’s perils.3 It was a miracle Lewis escaped a fall off a 300-foot cliff. Or Sacagawea was miraculously healed from her deathbed illness…by sulfur water coincidentally found nearby.
Divine Intervention
After their return, the captains were often asked how they accomplished it.
Clark finally gave his answer when he informed one adoring group that their achievement wasn’t fueled by luck, fate, or the captain’s “wisdom.” Rather, Clark credited God’s “singular interposition of Providence.” 4
The Almighty intervened, Clark believed, to rescue and heal, provide and protect their military mission.
Captains Lewis and Clark, Sergeants Ordway, Gass, Floyd, and Private Whitehouse documented this expedition in their journals. These military journals primarily focused on understanding geography, nature, people, and culture.
It’s why we know little about the party’s personal lives or their religious values, denominational loyalties, and spiritual behaviors. Such activities weren’t central to their mission. Nevertheless, the era’s cultural contexts and America’s religious dispositions are helpful, if we pay attention.
America the Religious
At the turn of the 19th century, America was deeply religious. Despite claims of Founding Father agnosticism, Deism, or atheism, evidence of nonbelief is scarce.
Americans weren’t divided by belief in God but rather by denominationalism.
Colonies were founded by religious groups, eventually giving each state a distinct denominational flavor (except Pennsylvania). The home state revealed religious loyalties. Lewis and Clark were Virginians from Anglican (Episcopalian) families. Sgt. Ordway, from New Hampshire, was probably Congregationalist, while Pennsylvanian Sgt. Gass was either Quaker, Mennonite, or Lutheran.
Great Awakenings
In the early 1800s, Americans embraced a “Second Great Awakening” that populated churches and packed revival camps. Lewis’s mother converted to a fiery form of Methodism that practiced extreme “holiness.” Thomas Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis were regular worshippers at the U.S. Capitol church.
In 1785, William Clark’s family relocated to Kentucky, a popular region for over 250,000 Scotch-Irish Presbyterians in the 1700s. Unlike Clark’s Anglican faith, which valued tolerance and liberty, these new settlers embraced a strong, energetic religious fervor, often walking miles to church “to become good Christians.” 5
After the expedition, Clark’s promotion of religion and Anglicanism became more apparent. In 1814, he invited a Roman Catholic priest to baptize his three oldest children and later helped build St. Louis’s first Protestant Episcopal church.
Despite Lewis’s infrequent church attendance after the expedition, he still professed belief in God, if only through his documented Masonic rituals. 6
No Substitute
Essentially, Lewis and Clark and their recruits were young American Protestants from various denominations. The rest of their hires were likely French Roman Catholics, including Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea. 7
Unlike today, there were few atheists, Muslims, or Jews in America. Consequently, in colonial and post-Revolutionary America, Christianity was the dominant faith, with each state legislating a denominational position.
Occasionally, challenges to the concept of a “Christian America” arose, including some cases to the highest court, but the evidence was clear. In 1854, a U.S. House judiciary committee conducted a thorough study to answer skepticism about the nation’s religious roots and concluded:
“In this age, there can be no substitute for Christianity…That was the religion of the founders of the republic and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants.” 8
This was the historical religious culture and context of Lewis and Clark.
With God’s help, they conquered a continent and became heroes.
Believe it or not.
Next issue: Faith and Religion on the Expedition to the Pacific
Sources:
1 Meriwether Lewis journaled as the party departed their Mandan winter camp: “…the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one…entertaining 〈now〉 as I do, the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which had formed a da[r]ling project of mine for the last ten years 〈of my life〉…” Gary Moulton, The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark (7-Volumes). Meriwether Lewis: April 7, 1805. Accessed online: https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-04-07
2 Moulton, Journals of Lewis and Clark, Patrick Gass: September 14, 1805. Accessed online: https://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/item/lc.jrn.1805-09-14#lc.jrn.1805-09-14.04
3 Sgt. Charles Floyd died August 20, 1804 “with a great deal of composure” (Clark), most likely due to a ruptured appendix. For more information: https://lewis-clark.org/day-by-day/20-aug-1804/
4“Clark to the Citizens of Fincastle,” January 8, 1807, Letters of the Lewis & Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783–1806, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 359–60.
5James H. Hutson, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1998): 22.
6 Meriwether Lewis joined the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons on January 28, 1797. He’d reach the third degree of “Master Mason” on his second night, literally “promoted ‘at sight’…by unanimous ballot.” Two and a half years later, he was “exalted” to the Royal Arch degree in the York Rite. Lewis’s Masonic apron is still viewable at Helena, Montana’s Grand Lodge. “Lewis as Master Mason” by Joseph A. Mussulman: https://lewis-clark.org/members/meriwether-lewis/lewis-as-master-mason/
7 It was not uncommon for American Indian wives of white European men to adopt their husbands’ religions. Native beliefs are openly tolerant and adaptable, which is why Western Indian tribes viewed Christianity as something that could enhance rather than replace their native religions. Both Charbonneau and Sacagawea’s Catholic beliefs were evident after the Expedition when they took their young son, Jean Baptiste, and baptized him Roman Catholic during their first visit to St. Louis.
8 Reports of Committees of the House of Representatives Made During the First Session of the Thirty-Third Congress (Washington: A. O. P. Nicholson, 1854), 6-9.
Dr. Rick Chromey is an author, historian and theologian who speaks and writes on matters of religion, culture, history, technology and leadership. He’s the founder and president of MANNA! Educational Services International. Rick and his wife Linda live in Star, ID. www.mannasolutions.org
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