Home >  Local News

Sunday, July 13, 2003

By Patricia Lowry, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

By 1803, when Meriwether Lewis needed a boat to take him down the Ohio and up the Mississippi and Missouri, Pittsburgh was a well-established jumping-off point for pioneers headed west via the most efficient superhighway system of the day: the western waters.

Meriwether Lewis made another local purchase for his journey - a dog. Seaman was a Newfoundland, a big, good-natured, bear-like working dog. Used in their namesake province to pull nets for fishermen, Newfoundlands have webbed feet that make them excellent swimmers - the perfect animal for a river expedition. Seaman helped the men procure food, served as a watchdog and saved Lewis by diverting a buffalo charging toward his tent. (Cover art by Paul Bachem from SeaMan (Peachtree Publishers)

Eight barge, boat and ship builders were producing an estimated $40,000 in flatboats, keelboats, canoes and schooners in 1802, making boat-building the town's third largest industry after iron and textiles. So says Zadok Cramer's "The Navigator," the little book that was earning a big reputation as the national authority on western river navigation.

Cramer, who published it from his bookbindery, bookstore and library on Market Street, packed it with essential information for the waterborne wayfarer, including descriptions of towns and curiosities (Indian mounds and rock carvings on the Monongahela, for example, and the Mississippi wild goose), and how to avoid sandbars in low water and poorly built boats.

In spring and fall, when the rivers were most reliable, Pittsburgh's population of about 2,000 swelled as travelers arrived and waited for flatboats and keelboats to be finished and the rivers to rise.

By 1803, and perhaps earlier, Pittsburgh also was building ships that floated down the Ohio and Mississippi and sailed through the Gulf of Mexico and across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, carrying Monongahela rye flour to far-flung markets.

But Pittsburgh, for all its virtues, wasn't Lewis' first choice.

"I have .... written to Dr. Dickson, at Nashville, and asked him to contract with a confidential boat-builder at that place, to prepare a boat for me as soon as possible, and to purchase a large light wooden canoe," Lewis wrote to President Thomas Jefferson from Lancaster on April 20, 1803.

Lewis planned to go to the Army post near what is now Kingston, Tenn., and recruit the core of the Corps of Discovery from the garrison there. They would travel overland to Nashville, where they would pick up the keelboat and canoe and float down the Cumberland River to the Ohio.

There were, however, a couple of hitches. For one thing, William Dickson, U.S. representative from Tennessee, didn't write back.

"I have written again to Dr. Dickson at Nashville, (from whom I have not yet heard) on the subject of my boat and canoe," Lewis wrote to Jefferson on May 29 from Philadelphia, where he was being schooled for the trip.

But he had heard from the commandant at Fort South West Point, who told him that of the 20 men who volunteered to accompany him, "not more than three or four do by any means possess the necessary qualifications for this expedition."

Twelve days later, on June 10, Lewis was asking a military agent to provide a "strong and effective team" with five horses to transport about 3,500 pounds of goods he had assembled for the expedition to Pittsburgh, a town he knew by more than reputation.

A soldier's life

As he planned to do in Nashville, Lewis may have relied on a third party to commission the keelboat, perhaps Lt. Moses Hooke, who about six months earlier had taken command of Fort Fayette. Lewis had a high opinion of Hooke, with whom he had served in the Army, and had chosen him to help lead the expedition if William Clark couldn't go.

The fort Hooke commanded, the fifth and last military stronghold at the Forks of the Ohio, was completed in 1792 after Fort Pitt fell into ruin. As a defense against the possibility of an Indian uprising, Fort Fayette was built along the Allegheny River and would have straddled Penn Avenue between Ninth Street and Garrison Way.

A stockade with four bastions, three of which held two-story log blockhouses, the fort also contained several two-story log buildings that housed the commandant and the barracks for 200 soldiers as well as a row of brick officers' quarters, where Lewis may have stayed during his Pittsburgh sojourn. The fort's landscaped surroundings were "handsomely laid out" and "an ornament to the eastern and principle approach to the town," an English traveler reported.

General Anthony Wayne assembled his troops there in 1792, and after his victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in northwest Ohio on Aug. 20, 1794, Indian resistance to white pioneers died down, opening the way to western settlement.

That fall, the restless gentleman farmer Meriwether Lewis, then 20, left his mother's Virginia plantation, within riding distance of Jefferson's Monticello, and signed on with the militia to answer President Washington's call to quell the Whiskey Insurrection in Western Pennsylvania. It was his first great adventure.

"Remember me to all the girls and tell them that they must give me joy today, as I am to be married to the heav[i]est musquit in the Magazun tomorrow," Lewis wrote to his mother.

He loved the soldier's life. After the rebellion over federal taxes on liquor was quashed and the other Virginia boys went home, Lewis received a commission as an ensign and signed up for a six-month enlistment, as part of the constabulary force patrolling Western Pennsylvania.

"I am situated on the Mongahale," he wrote to his mother in the fall of 1794, "about 15 miles above Pittsburg where we shall be forted in this winter." He spent much of his time with an ax in his hands, "building huts to secure us from the [in]clemency of the approaching season."

Just as the western frontier had been the proving ground for the young George Washington, so too was it for the young Meriwether Lewis, who, between 1795 and 1800, traveled throughout the Ohio country on horseback and boat, delivering dispatches and Army paychecks between Detroit and Pittsburgh as he rose up the ranks.

He was stationed in Pittsburgh, in fact, in February 1801, when Jefferson tapped him to be his secretary, because of their personal acquaintance and because Lewis' "knolege of the Western country, of the army and it's situation, might sometimes aid us with informations of interest."

Six weeks of worry

On July 15, 1803, Lewis was once again in Pittsburgh, eager to expand his knowledge of the western country. His boat would be ready in five days and he would be in St. Louis to meet Clark, should he accept, by Sept. 1. That, he figured, would give them two months to travel about 700 or 800 miles up the Missouri before going into winter camp.

But the Ohio was low and falling, and, as Lewis soon discovered, that wasn't his only problem.

"I arrived here at 2 o'clock," he wrote to Jefferson an hour later. "I have not yet seen Lieut. Hook[e] nor made enquiry relative to my boat...."

By July 22, he was complaining in a letter to Jefferson that the "person who contracted to build my boat" by July 20 "has failed; he pleads his having been disappointed in procuring timber, but says he has now supplied himself with the necessary materials, and that she shall be completed by the last of this month; however in this I am by no means sanguine, nor do I believe from the progress he makes that she will be ready before the 5th of August; I visit him every day, and endeavor by every means in my power to hasten the completion of the work: I have prevailed on him to engage more hands, and he tells me that two others will join him in the morning, if so he may probably finish the boat by the time he mentioned; I shall embark immediately the boat is in readiness...."

Lewis never identified the keelboat builder by name. Several historical sources report that two of the boats were built in Elizabeth, in the shipyard of Captain John Walker. But David Halaas, museum division director for the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, is convinced the keelboat was built in a Pittsburgh shipyard.

On Aug. 3, Lewis wrote that the builder promised the boat would be ready by the end of the following week.

Instead, as Lewis later wrote to Jefferson, "according to his usual custom he got drunk; quarreled with his workmen and several of them left him, nor could they be prevailed on to return..."

Although few people drank to excess, drinking was as much a part of Western Pennsylvania's frontier culture as boat-building, and rye whiskey almost as big a part of its economy. There were, in the 1790s, about 600 stills in Western Pennsylvania; Cramer ranked liquor production Pittsburgh's sixth largest industry in 1802, with about $32,100 in sales.

Lewis' boat, which resembled a military galley, was more refined than a traditional keelboat and more challenging to build. "Lewis probably had been on a similar keelboat on the Ohio when he was paymaster," writes Stephen Ambrose in "Undaunted Courage." "The complexity of the thing must have been some part of the cause of the delay."

Unlike flatboats, which were strictly downstream transportation, keelboats were designed for upriver travel as well, built on a central keel with curved ribs covered with planks. They ranged from 40 to 80 feet long and from 10 to 15 feet wide, with a cabin -- the "cargo-box" -- extending almost the length of the boat, with shelter for passengers and 20 to 40 tons of freight. Running boards allowed the crew to pole the craft if necessary; steering was done with an oar, sometimes by the captain. Some keelboats had masts and sails, and if all else failed, the boats could be towed by men, horses or oxen with ropes.

Lewis' boat was 55 feet long and 8 feet wide, with a 32-foot mast (jointed, so it could be lowered) that supported a large square sail and foresail. At the bow was a 10-foot-long deck; at the stern was an elevated, cloth-covered deck above a cabin.

Across the main deck were 11 benches, accommodating 22 muscle-bound oarsmen. Below the deck, the 31-foot-long hold could carry a cargo of about 12 tons, in built-in storage lockers.

At 7 a.m. on Aug. 31, the keelboat was ready to be loaded. Three hours later it was launched, piloted by a man named T. Moore.

In early December, the men reached their winter camp near St. Louis. Come May, they headed up the Missouri, finding adventure all along it, then spent their second winter at Fort Mandan in North Dakota.

Five months later, on April 7, 1805, Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery headed northwest in two pirogues and six canoes. The keelboat headed downriver, under the command of Cpl. Richard Warfington, who was bringing back to Jefferson the co-captains' reports, maps and letters, along with plant and animal specimens -- including a live prairie dog, grouse and four magpies.

In the summer of 1805, it reached St. Louis. It had traveled almost 6,000 miles, and it had been, after all, a very good boat.