And while Spain was a relatively docile neighbor, Jefferson feared that sending American explorers onto its soil might provoke a war. Much of the rest of what became the United States, including Louisiana, was controlled by Spain. In 1792, America was bordered to the west by the Mississippi River and to the south by Florida. In 1793, Thomas Jefferson commissioned the botanist to chart a route to the Pacific, and to "take notice of the country you pass through."īut there was a difficulty. This article is a selection from the July/August issue of Smithsonian magazine Buy Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $12 More important, he viewed uniting the ends of the continent as destiny-a prerequisite for creating an American “Empire of Liberty.” His library at Monticello had more books about it than anywhere else on earth, filling his head with visions of woolly mammoths and purple volcanoes. Jefferson’s obsession with the frontier west of the Mississippi River was well known. But he could clean up and turn on the charm when it suited his purposes, as it did when he paid a call on Benjamin Rush, the physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, and Rush’s colleague Benjamin Barton, a well-known naturalist.īoth men belonged to the American Philosophical Society, the nation’s foremost scientific organization, which had been founded 50 years earlier to promote “useful knowledge.” Michaux, the educated son of a farmer, told Barton that it would be useful for the United States to have “geographical knowledge of the country west of the Mississippi.” His words were dry, but the idea was explosive: He wanted to transform the American continent, and with it his own reputation, by becoming the first explorer to forge a path to the Pacific.īarton relayed Michaux’s idea to the society’s vice president, Thomas Jefferson, who also happened to be the U.S. Michaux had spent much of his adult life sloshing across muddy rivers and hacking through mosquito-infested forests.
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