President Thomas Jefferson sent Captain Meriwether Lewis and Captain William Clark with a band of forty soldiers and boatmen, a "Corps of Discover," to explore the newly purchased Louisiana Territory and find a route to the Pacific. They set off from the Missippi a little north of St. Louis on May 14, 1804 and pushed up the Missouri River into the wilderness of Missouri.

They looked something like these two talking mannequins at the Lewis & Clark Interpretative Center a few miles upriver from Sgt. Floyd's monument. Those uniforms were wool. They could not have been very comfortable but then they probably didn't know any better.