Prologue to Lewis and Clark: the Mackay and Evans Expedition

Abstract

Prologue to Lewis and Clark: The Mackay and Evans Expedition. By W. Raymond Wood. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. Pp. xvii, 234. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $34.95.)Amid the ongoing bicentennial celebrations of the justly famous Lewis and Clark expedition, it is wise to remember that other Euro-Americans preceded the Americans into the Missouri River Valley and farther west. Many of those travelers, especially French coureurs du bois, will remain forever obscure as they left little or no documentation while exploring, trading with Indians for furs, and living beyond the reach of Euro-American civilization. Other pre-Lewis and Clark explorers mounted organized ventures on behalf of France, Spain, or Britain and produced copious records, some of them familiar to the Americans sent west by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803. The Mackay and Evans expedition was one such official exploration, up the Missouri River on behalf of Spain from 1795 to 1797.W. Raymond Wood has published work on the Mandan and Hidatsa trading network on the upper Missouri River, and his expertise on the archeological and documentary sources for the region contributes to this well-researched study. The numerous maps and illustrations add to Prologue to Lewis and Clark's value as a reference work on the late eighteenth-century Missouri River Valley.Wood establishes the background of the Mackay and Evans expedition by discussing earlier explorations of the Missouri River and the river's importance as part of Spain's late eighteenth-century North American empire. Spam's claim to lands west of the Mississippi River, including the Missouri River region, stemmed from secret negotiations with France, which ceded Louisiana to Spain at the end of the Seven Years War in 1762. Spanish title remained in effect until secret negotiations in the Treaty of San Ildelfonso ceded the region back to Napoleon's France in 1800, shortly before Jefferson purchased the area from Napoleon for the United States. It was never entirely clear where the boundary between British and Spanish territory lay; the American Revolution and creation of the United States added to the confusion. Besides Britain and the United States, Spain also worried about Russian contacts with the northwest coast of North America as an intrusion on her territory. The international imperial context, the ever-present desire to find an all-water route to the Pacific Ocean, and the news that British and French fur traders maintained contact with Indian groups far up the Missouri, all pushed Spanish officials to mount more than one expedition up the Missouri River in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The first major Spanish venture up the river, under the direction of the Missouri Company, left St. Louis in June 1794 under the command of Jean Baptiste Truteau. He made it as far as the Ankara Indian villages near the mouth of the Grand River in present-day northern South Dakota before returning to St. Louis in 1796. In 1795 a second expedition, also under the auspices of the Missouri Company, did not make it as far as Truteau had before being plundered by Indians.Using tightly written narrative and excerpts from the documents produced by the expedition's leaders, Wood describes the Missouri Company's and Spain's third major expedition up the Missouri River. …