As a remedy to all this we determined to name a minister extraordinary to go immediately to Paris and Madrid to settle this matter. This measure being a visible one, and the person named peculiarly proper with the western country, crushed at once and put an end to all further attempts on the Legislature. From that moment all has become quiet; and the more readily in the western country, as the sudden alliance of these new federal friends had of itself already began to make them suspect the wisdom of their own course. The measure was moreover proposed from another cause. We must know at once whether we can acquire New Orleans or not. We are satisfied nothing else will secure us against a war at no distant period; and we cannot press this reason without beginning those arrangements which will be necessary if war is hereafter to result. For this purpose it was necessary that the negotiators should be fully possessed of every idea we have on the subject, so as to meet the propositions of the opposite party, in whatever form they may be offered; and give them a shape admissible by us without being obliged to await new instructions hence. With this view, we have joined Mr. Monroe to yourself at Paris, and to Mr. Pinckney at Madrid, although we believe it will be hardly necessary for him to go to this last place. The Lewis and Clark Expedition Exploring the Missouri River Valley and the Rocky Mountain area long had been a cherished project of President Jefferson. He had talked about it periodically since the Revolution, and when he became President he set about to make his dream come true. Even before the United States owned the Louisiana Territory, Capt. Meriwether Lewis, Jefferson’s secretary, and William Clark, younger brother of George Rogers Clark, had been picked to head an expedition to explore the West. The journey did not begin, however, until May, 1804, when the expedition left St. Louis. Capt. Lewis led his explorers up the Missouri River to what is now North Dakota, and before cold weather set in they built huts and a stockade for winter quarters. The next spring they moved on up the river in dugout canoes (pirogues) towards the mountains. The following selection from Capt. Lewis’ journal of the expedition was set down on April 13, 1805, when the party was at the junction of the Missouri and the Little Missouri rivers, still in North Dakota.