Essential Point, 1805 Page 1 of 2 Clark's Seminar at Fort Mandan
Pass cursor over image to read details he map assembled for
Lewis and Clark by Nicholas King in 1803, the one that
purportedly contained the most accurate information the best
cartographers had in 1802-3 concerning the Northwest, showed two
forks identified as the "Missesouri" and "Lesser Missesouri"
flowing more or less directly eastward out of a single range
"Shining Mountains" between the "Boar's Tooth," in the vicinity
of Helena, Montana, and Glacier National Park, near the present
Canadian border. That is, between the 45th and 50th parallels.
It showed most of the dozen or so headwaters as being known
within a short distance of the Rocky Mountain Front, but showed
them as conjectural from there almost to the Knife River
Villages. By the close of the winter of 1804-05, however, Clark
and Lewis had a different picture of where they and the Corps
were headed. Collating what they had learned from traders and
travelers in the vicinity of St. Lou