3. Estimate of Western Indians

Charged by Thomas Jefferson with recording the names of Native communities and estimating the size of their populations, Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark dutifully took note of the number of inhabitants in each of the Native settlements they passed on their way to the Pacific.

Lewis and Clark compiled these numbers during their long stay at Fort Clatsop into what scholars call the Codex 1 version of the Estimate of Western Indians. This version was later modified and published in the 1905 Thwaites edition of the Lewis and Clark journals, reproduced here.