Lewis and Clark Expedition

I've been taking a community education class for the past couple weeks on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Our teacher was somewhat of a nutcase. I guess there is a little madness in all genius. He was very well informed. He's traveled up and down the Oregon Trail and has hundreds of books on the subject. He says the Lewis and Clark Expedition was the best documented and most successful military expedition in all of history. We learned much about the men and woman who went on the trip. On the second night, he dressed in costume as Patrick Gass - the carpenter/journalist who accompanied Lewis and Clark on the expedition - starting out as a private at $5/day and later promoted to Sergeant earning $8 a day. The class was good. The other students knew a lot about the expedition. I've read books about Sacajawea but most of the people had read Undaunted Courage by S. Ambrose. I'll put that on my list of books to read. I am inspired to read more about Thomas Jefferson as well because he had this expedition in mind for many years prior to the Louisanna Purchase. Jefferson seems like a good leader because he had varied yet specific goals for Lewis and Clark. He specified goals like studying the ethnicity of the Indian tribes, start and maintain a friendly relationship with those tribes, document the plants and animals, send back samples of what they found, draw maps of your travels, and find a water passage to the ocean. At the end of the second class our teacher gave us a slide show on the new bird species Lewis and Clark discovered. He read passages from their journals describing each bird species too. I really liked that part. Lewis and Clark found a new animal they called the barking squirrel. We know it as a prairie dog. The entire expedition spent an entire day pouring buckets of water down a prairie dog hole until they were finally able to grab one to send back to President Jefferson. Lewis and Clark sent 3 magpies and a prairie dog back to Washington DC. The little prairie dog survived in it's crate and was alive when Jefferson opened it up in the White House. This was a good class for me and has given me much to think about.