Such, in rapid view, were the essential facts in the long and curiously complicated finding of our River. We see that various nations bore each a part. We see the foundation of the subsequent contention between Great Britain and the United States. CHAPTER IV The First Steps across the Wilderness in Search of the River Jefferson and Ledyard--Verendrye--Montcachabe, the Indian--The Indians--The Canadians--Results of the Louisiana Purchase--Fitting out the Lewis and Clark Expedition--The Winter with the Mandans--Crossing of the Great Divide--Meeting of Sacajawea and Cameahwait--Descent from the Mountains to the Clearwater and Kimooenim--Canoe Journey Down the Snake and Columbia--First Sight of Mt. Hood--Clark in the Role of a Magician--The Timm or Great Falls--The Sunken Forests--First Appearances of the Tide--The Winter of 1805-06 at Fort Clatsop--The Beginning of the Return Trip--Faithfulness of the Indians--Reception of Lewis and Clark in the States--The Hunt Expedition--The _Voyageurs_ and Trappers--Slow Progress to the Snake River--Disasters and Distress along the "Accursed Mad River"--Starvation--New Year's Day of 1812--A Respite from Suffering in the Umatilla--First Sight of the Columbia and the Mid-winter Descent to Astoria--Melancholy Lot of Crooks and Day--Results of the Hunt Expedition. The Pacific North-west was discovered both by land and by sea. To Thomas Jefferson, the great apostle of Democracy, is due the gathering of American interests in the far West, and the opening of the road by which American sovereignty was to reach the Pacific. His great mind outran that of the ordinary statesman of his time, and, with what seems at first sight the strangest inconsistency in our political history, he was the State-rights theorist and at the same time the creator of nationality beyond any other one of our early statesmen. Away back in 1786, Jefferson met John Ledyard, one of Cook's associates in his great voyage to the Pacific Ocean, and grasped from the eager and energetic Yankee sailor, the idea of American destiny on the Pacific Coast. The fertile mind of Jefferson may justly be considered as the fountain of American exploration up the Missouri, across the crest of the Shining Mountains, as they then called the Rockies, and down the Columbia to the Pacific. Although Jefferson never himself took any steps beyond the Alleghanies, he was the inspiration of all the Americans who did take those steps.