For Lewis and Clark’s journey in search of a water route to the Pacific Ocean, President Jefferson wrote the following instructions to Capt. Meriwether Lewis of the Corps of Discovery on June 20, 1803:

“Beginning at the mouth of the Missouri, you will take [careful] observations of latitude & longitude, at all remarkeable points on the river, & especially at the mouths of rivers . . . & other places & objects . . .”

During their search for a water route to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark were instructed to be surveyors and cartographers. Much of the land known as present-day America was basically uncharted territory when the Corps of Discovery made their brief visit to Kansas in July 1804.

“Maps were not real accurate (in the early 1800s),” said Randy Thies, archeologist with the Kansas State Historical Society. Expeditions were intended to “see what was out here and to make maps,” Thies added.

More than a decade later, explorer Stephen Long led an expedition through the area. Long labeled the region a “great American desert.”

That description helped sway Euro-Americans to “not look toward settling here for many, many years until they realized that that was not an apt description of what we now know as Kansas,” Thies said.

Of the few Euro-Americans to make their way into the region in the early 1800s, one group was what has been called “mountain men.”

Such men, like Jedediah Smith, who traveled extensively in unknown territory, were essentially traders who were interested in sharing the life the Indians led, Thies said.

“(They would basically be) exploring, trading, talking with the Indians, living with the Indians, in some cases marrying Indians,” he said.

With Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 came the opening of the Santa Fe Trail and a new group of Euro-Americans, the settlers and traders who utilized the trail and travel through the area.

Unfortunately, the expeditions brought unforeseen and devastating consequences for the native inhabitants, such as smallpox, cholera, chicken pox, influenza and measles, said Dan Wildcat, American Indian Studies professor at Haskell Indian Nations University.

Demographers would call these “virgin soil epidemics” because the human population affected had no immunity against them, Wildcat said.

Next week, read about trails, trappers and missionaries and their impact on the native peoples in early 1800s eastern Kansas.