Talk on the street in Clarksville and Louisville in July and August, 1803, was of the Louisiana Purchase and a plan to explore the new land.

Despite rumors that the unknown land was said to contain hostile peoples, erupting volcanoes and strange beasts, men were eager to join the "Corps of Discovery."

This would be the nation's first great scientific exploration to map and record the peoples, animals, and plants of what now is North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.

The Corps of Discovery not only survived but reached its goals -- an impressive accomplishment that Indiana and Kentucky helped realize.

The West had always fascinated Thomas Jefferson. In 1783 he asked George Rogers Clark if he would lead a party to explore the land from the Mississippi River to California.

As the military commander who had taken the Revolutionary War to the West and had captured Vincennes, General Clark was a logical choice to lead such an expedition. He wrote Jefferson, "I should take pleasure in lending all the aid in my power" to explore the western country.

Lack of funds doomed the project.

Twenty years later as president, Jefferson secured funding from Congress for a military expedition to explore the Missouri area "even to the Western ocean."

He hoped that the effort would gather information on natural history, aid the United States' claim to the Pacific Northwest, open trade with western Native Americans, and locate an all-water route to the Pacific.

He chose his private secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to command the military expedition; Lewis in turn asked George Rogers Clark's younger brother William to be his co-commander.

In the spring and summer of 1803 Lewis gathered everything he thought the expedition would need.