Estimate of Western Indians

Charged by Pres. Thomas Jefferson with recording the names of Native communities and estimating the size of their populations, Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark took note of the number of inhabitants in each Native settlement they passed on their journey to the Pacific Ocean. They compiled that information during their long stay at Fort Clatsop, in the winter of 1805–1806, into what scholars call the Codex I (manuscript fragments attached to the journals) version of the Estimate of Western Indians. That version was later modified and published in the Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Journals, 1804–1806, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites and published by Dodd, Mead & Company in 1904–1905.