Indigenous students retrace Lewis and Clark’s historic journey: ‘We can’t protect what we cannot see’

Two centuries after the expedition, Indigenous students are conducting a new wildlife survey along the route In 1804, when Thomas Jefferson dispatched Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their Corps of Discovery to explore the newly acquired land west of the Mississippi, the president’s primary aim was political: Americans needed to establish presence, power and trade routes in these territories before the Europeans beat them to it.

But Jefferson, an ardent naturalist, had a secondary agenda. He ordered that the expedition also survey the flora and fauna of these landscapes. On their two-year jaunt across the western half of the country, Lewis…