In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson drafted his official instructions for a great expedition to explore the Louisiana Territory and asked his private secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead it. Once assembled, the Corps of Discovery would operate like a small frontier garrison with rigidly maintained discipline. In the end, the group went forward remarkably prepared for what they would encounter over the next few years, a testament to the thorough planning of President Jefferson.

The dream of finding an all water route across North America, the mythical Northwest Passage, had been imagined since the time of Christopher Columbus, but three hundred years after the Admiral of the Ocean Seas completed his epic voyages, the vast interior of the continent was still essentially unknown to Europeans. As early as 1783, Thomas Jefferson had wanted to send an expedition to explore and chart the great unknown west of the Mississippi, and over the next twenty years, Jefferson tried on several occasions to enlist the support of some brave adventurer to undertake the exploration but with no success.

The Wilderness Road, running from northeast Tennessee through the Cumberland Gap, was the main thoroughfare from 1775 to 1820 for Americans heading west into the new promised lands of Kentucky. The pathway, blazed by Daniel Boone, was our nation’s first migration highway, but the trip was not for the faint of heart.

American pioneers had a yearning to move west and discover new lands. Along the way, they had to overcome daunting natural barriers, including the Appalachian Mountains. Immigrants desiring the unclaimed lands to the west traveled from Pennsylvania through the Shenandoah Valley to western North Carolina.