Captain Meriwether Lewis, 1803

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The pole in his hand is an espontoon — a half pike carried by eighteenth-century infantry officers, six and a half feet long by Washington's specification, with a foot of iron at t he head. By 1803 it was useless as a weapon and survived only as a badge of rank, the thing that told everyone which man was the officer. Lewis took his across the continent and it turned out to be the most useful object he owned. On 12 May 1805 he wrote that he walked out "armed with my rifle and espontoon," and found it "very serviceable to me in this way in the open plains" as a steady rest to fire from. On 7 June he went over the edge of a wet cliff and stopped himself with it: "but for a quick and fortunate recovery by means of my espontoon I should been precipitated into the river down a craggy pricipice of about ninety feet." On 14 June a grizzly came at him, and he "ran haistily into the water about waist deep, and faced about and presented the point of my espontoon" — at which the bear reconsidered and left. Along the way the same stick prodded a porcupine, killed a rattlesnake, and Clark used his to kill a wolf. The spellings are Lewis's own; he wrote fast and in the field. An officer's ornament went out as a symbol and came back as a walking staff, a gun rest, a snake stick and a bear pike. The figure is Lewis in 1803, the year everything was arranged rather than done: blue coat and red waistcoat, white overalls, boots, pack and knife, espontoon in hand. It is worth remembering what the expedition legally was. Lewis had joined the army in 1795 as an ensign — a rank since abolished, roughly a second lieutenant — was a captain by 1800, left the service in 1801 to be private secretary to the president, and was chosen to lead the venture when that president began planning it. The Corps of Discovery was a United States Army unit with enlisted soldiers under military discipline, which is why this figure is dressed as a soldier and not as a frontiersman. The president in question is Thomas Jefferson, and the Louisiana Purchase that year turned much of the intended route into American ground overnight. His co-commander is William Clark. And the man governing the territory they set out from, with his own ideas about what would happen to the country beyond it, was William Henry Harrison. Model: 10130 / W. Britain / 1/30 scale / matte finish / 1 piece set Show more