Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday - August 14, 15, 16, 2018 

Due to my Aunt Ruth Groenewal DeVries' death and Monday funeral, we delayed our trip to Tuesday.  We drove 228 miles to our Campsite in Embreeville, PA, in a western suburb of Philadelphia.  On Wednesday, we visited the Independence Mall viewing Independence Hall, the American Philosophical Society building (picture) and the American Philosophical Society Library (housing Lewis' journals), the First Bank of the US (1797), Charles Wilson Peale's Portrait Gallery in the the Second Bank of the US, Christ Church (est. 1695) and adjacent Christ Church Burial Grounds, ate lunch in the City Tavern (1771) and Benjamin Franklin's grave site in the Arch Street Burial Ground. We also toured the Museum of the American Revolution.  NOTE: Inside Christs Church's Burial Ground stands an Osage Orange tree (picture), said to be a graft from the seven trees Lewis sent Thomas Jefferson while on the trail.

BACKGROUND: Lewis left Washington DC in March 1803 for Harpers Ferry in order to obtain rifles, powder and lead. He then went to Frederick, MD and Lancaster PA,


(visiting Andrew Ellicot, America's leading astronomer and mathematician) as well as for more provisions. He then went to Philadelphia, PA. In addition to the lessons in science, botany and biology from President Thomas Jefferson while his personal Secretary in the White House, Meriwether Lewis spent time with Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin reviewing his extensive map collection and two months in Philadelphia in 1803 to study under the greatest scientific minds of the age: Dr. Benjamin Rush (medicine, herbs, pharmacology), Dr Benjamin Smith Barton (botany; Historical Marker picture), Dr. Caspar Wistar (anatomy and fossils) and Robert Patterson.

Thomas Jefferson's letters of instruction stated, "The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri River & such princpal stream of it, as, by it's course and communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean, wether the Columbia, Oregan, Colorado or any other river may offer the most direct and practicable water communication across the continent for the purposes of commerce."

When Lewis invited William Clark to join the Expedition, he wrote, "My plan is to descend the Ohio in a keeled boat thence up the Mississippi to the mouth of the Missourie, and up that river as far as it's navigation is practicable with a keeled boat, there to prepare canoes of bark or raw-hides and proceed to it's source, and if practicable pass over to the waters of the Columbia or Origan River and by descending it reach the Western Ocean."