Meriwether Lewis to Thomas Jefferson, 1805

Captain Meriwether Lewis wrote this letter to President Thomas Jefferson in early April 1805 from Fort Mandan, near present-day Washburn, North Dakota. It was hand-copied and the spelling corrected in about 1901 by one of Lewis’s relatives for Eva Emery Dye, a writer in Oregon City who was doing research on the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Lewis begins his letter to the president with a description of the scientific samples he was sending, along with a map of the country the Corps had already traversed. Lewis hoped that information about the geography and natural history of the Missouri River country would be of value to the scientific community