If you stand at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers today, it may be tough to imagine what the Corps of Discovery saw exactly, but there they were at a spot now called Kaw Point.
Today, Lewis and Clark stand there at the end of a sidewalk that leads right down to the confluence of those two mighty and, back then, abundantly-traveled thoroughfares. It’s not the two of them, of course. Photography was hardly that developed in 1804. But fine sculpted representations of the two of them stand at a point where they and the corps made camp for four days and nights at the advent of their long trip west up the Missouri and into the far, far West.
Old Muddy lay their left, the Kansas River to their right. They'd been on the Missouri ("Its waters are heavier than the Kansas," they reported) since leaving the fur traders in a little French village named St. Louis—you may have heard of it. In a few days, they'd be turning straight north mostly, heading up into what they knew--and feared, in a way--was Indian country.
They'd be traveling on the Missouri, longest river on the continent--and, no, they didn't know that fact just then.
Their number one objective was to find a waterway that would get them all the way to the other side of the continent, a voyage very few white men had ever done, and most hadn't even tried to imagine. President Jefferson wanted to know what was all out there in the vast territory he'd just picked up from the French at the bargain basement price of $15 million.
The President let Lewis know the name of the game:
"The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, and such principal streams of it as by its course and communication with the waters of the Pacific Ocean whether the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across this continent for the purposes of commerce."
The Corps of Discovery they were named, since discovery was their directive.
To accomplish that, Lewis and Clark recruited 45 smart, tough guys, lean and young and gung-ho for real adventure. Two of them, right here at Kaw Point, got loaded on one of those four nights. A chap named John Collins, assigned to guard duty, tapped into the Corp's liquor (you couldn't run an army without grog) when he knew darn well he wasn't supposed to. He did anyway, got himself looped and convinced another corpsman, Hugh Hall, to join in the reverie.
The next day, right here at Kaw Point, a court-martial followed (the Corp was a military unit). Collins, who'd started the mess, took 100 lashes with a cat'o'nine tails, while drinking-buddy Hall got half that, given that Hall got himself drawn into the crime.
For the record, a cat 'o nine tails was no magic wand. That kind of whipping might well have made the next day's rowing more than a little difficult.
A big public flogging might seem heavy for tipping a few, but historians claim that punishment was standard fare.
Lesson learned, I guess, because such tomfoolery didn't happen again--or, if it did, L an C simply didn't record the petulance for posterity. All of that happened at Kaw Point, at the mouth of the Kansas River.
I can’t help saying that, even today, it's a thrill to stop by where the Kansas meets the Missouri. But it’s really impossible to imagine what it was like to stand there wonder what on earth they’d discover once they started up river. None of them had any idea and they knew it.
It must have been daunting, even humbling, which is to say thrilling, just to stand there. For some of us, all these years later, it still is.
