Posted on 09/30/2004 1:30:58 PM PDT by Horatio Gates
Sept. 29, 2004 — If Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had set off on their historic expedition across what is now the northwestern United States a few years earlier, or a couple of years later, the dream of then-President Thomas Jefferson might have turned into a nightmare.
The success of that venture contributed to the expansion of the West, based largely on glowing reports of lush, fertile regions where wildlife was abundant. But according to new research, Lewis and Clark were extraordinarily lucky.
Unbeknownst to them, they had hit a narrow "window of opportunity" which created favorable images of the normally arid regions of the inland Northwest, according to geographer Paul A. Knapp of Georgia State University in Atlanta. The expedition, from 1804 to 1806, was sandwiched between two major droughts that could have left the explorers stranded and starving in a tragedy that could have had a profound impact on the young nation.
The explorers "traveled through the American Northwest during a climatically favorable period after one of the most severe droughts within the past several centuries, and they concluded their travel two years before the onset of another major drought," Knapp says in a report on his research in the current issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
They encountered the hail storms before reachint the Pacific NW.
BTW here's a terrific site complete with animations. Especially interesting is the air rifle page.
http://www.lewis-clark.org/
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