Historic Replicas

Today I thought I’d write about one of my favorite adventures from early American colonial history:  the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803.  Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were the first Americans to make a land-based expedition to the Pacific Ocean, a journey that spanned three years and 8,000 miles!  Now America is a big place; the first time I traveled coast to coast, I was monumentally impressed by just how far one can travel within our borders, and I was driving, and you can’t go more than 60 or 70 miles without finding safety and civilization.  Picture, then, the sheer magnitude of a cross-country journey on foot, through what was then forbidding wilderness. What kind of men were these, who ventured so bravely into an uncharted landscape, teeming with wild animals and a potentially hostile native population?  What historical weapons did they carry? (to be continued…)