December 28, 1806

Satisfying the Public Curiosity

WASHINGTON CITY.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 31

We have the high satisfaction of informing our readers of the arrival of Captain MERIWETHER LEWIS at this place; after an absence of nearly three years and a half, which have been exclusively and actively employed in exploring the western country under the direction of the President of the U. S.

Having already stated an outline the route pursued by Capt. Lewis and his party, we shall wave at present any further notices of the subject, under the expectation of being soon favored with an ampler detail of his labors. Few expeditions have been conducted with more patience, perseverance, of success; and we have no doubt but that the curiosity of the reader will be fully satisfied by the statements, which we understand, it is the purpose of captain Lewis to lay before the public at as early a day as is compatible with the necessary arrangements for a work of such importance. If we are correctly informed, the information of captain L. will not merely gratify literary curiosity, but open views of great and immediate objects of national utility; and it will be seen that he has rendered very important services to his country.^[1]Washington Intelligencer, 31 December 1806, page 2.

Traveling with Meriwether Lewis to Washington City is a Mandan delegation from the Knife River Villages—Chief Sheheke, his wife Yellow Corn, and their son. Speaking Mandan and French was interpreter René Jusseaume who brought one of his wives and two children. Expedition private François Labiche was included to translate between French and English. Finally, records indicate that expedition sergeant John Ordway was serving as Lewis’s assistant.

Foster

That Lewis and the Mandan delegates arrived this day is indicated by English envoy Augustus Foster:

It was on the evening of the 28th December, 1806, that Captain Lewis who performed the journey up the Missouri and down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, agreeably to the orders of Congress, arrived at Washington in company with the chiefs of the Mandan nation, a Frenchman acting as interpreter, who had lived for sixteen years among that tribe, the wife of the chief, the wife of the interpreter (otherwise an Indian squaw) and three children, two of them being a boy and girl belonging to the interpreter and the third a son of the chief.
—Augustus Foster^[3]Augustus John Foster, Jeffersonian America: Notes on the United States of America, ed. Richard Beale Davis, ed. (San (Marino, California: Huntington Library, 1954), 27–28, available at … Continue reading