THE EXPEDITION

Hello everyone. This is Woody in the Woody Shop.

Being Friday and all, I thought I’d tell you another story.

And seeing as this is our sixth and final Frontier Story, I figured we ought to go out with a pretty good trip.

This one starts in St. Louis in 1804.

President Thomas Jefferson had a job for Meriwether Lewis and William Clark that sounded simple enough:

Go west.

See what’s out there.

Stick to the water if possible. Find the Pacific. Report back. 

So Lewis, Clark and a few dozen men gathered up boats, supplies, guns, tools, maps and whatever else they thought might come in handy and headed up the Missouri River.

They called themselves the Corps of Discovery.

Which was appropriate, because they were about to discover an awful lot of things.

Including just how big this country was.

Up the Missouri they went — against the current, through heat, cold, mosquitoes, hunger and country few Americans had ever seen.

For more than a year, the river was their road.

Until June 1805.

Lewis had gone ahead of the main party looking for the Great Falls of the Missouri.

He found them.

Then he found another waterfall.

And another.

And another.

And another.

Five great falls.

Nearly 12 miles of them.

What they had hoped would be a relatively short portage around the falls became an 18-mile detour hauling boats, supplies and equipment over rough prairie, ravines and enough prickly pear to make everybody reconsider their choice of footwear.

The river had stopped being the road.

So they made one.

And the Great Falls weren't the end of it.

Beyond them came the Rocky Mountains.

Horses.

Snow.

Hunger.

More rivers.

More mountains.

And eventually, the Columbia River carried them all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

They had made it.

Then they did something that seems particularly unreasonable after everything they'd just been through.

They turned around and came back.

By September 1806, the Corps of Discovery was back in St. Louis.

No highways.

No GPS.

No convenience stores.

No calling somebody to come get you when the canoe sprung a leak.

Just boats, horses, boots, maps still being drawn —

and whatever steel they could carry.

Which brings us to the knife.

THE EXPEDITION

When you think about a knife for Lewis & Clark, one thing seems pretty obvious.

It ought to be able to make the trip.

So we built The Expedition — a 10-inch frontier knife with a broad working blade forged in Alabama Buckshot Damascus.

For the handle, we used warm Antique White Oak scales, then added Old Glory red, white and blue liners, brass pins and lanyard tube, and our red, white and blue patriotic mosaic pin.

A little America 250 without getting too carried away.

And because a knife called The Expedition ought to be ready to go somewhere, it rides in a hand-stitched top-grain loop and ring leather sheath handmade by Lonnie Hyatt.

We don't know exactly what knives Lewis, Clark and the Corps of Discovery carried across the continent.

But we know they carried them.

For camp.

For rope.

For supper.

And for whatever was waiting around the next bend.

If Old Woody had been standing on the St. Louis riverfront when the Corps shoved off in 1804?

We reckon we'd have handed them this one.

The Expedition.

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ONE LAST WORD FROM THE WOODY SHOP

And with that, we've reached the end of our Bi-and-a-Half Frontier Stories.

Six knives.

Six stories.

And quite a few miles.

We've met mountain men, survivors, peacemakers, escape artists, road builders and explorers.

Some made roads.

Some followed rivers.

Some crossed mountains.

And at least one fellow had a particularly bad afternoon involving a grizzly bear.

We started these stories as our own little way of celebrating America's 250th birthday — by remembering a few of the people, places and stories that helped fill up those 250 years.

And somewhere along the way, we got to make some pretty good knives to remember them by.

So thanks for following along.

We hope you've enjoyed reading these stories as much as we've enjoyed telling them.

America 250 isn't over.

And Old Woody certainly isn't out of stories.

But for our little trip through the frontier, this seems like a pretty good place to pull the canoe ashore.

Until the next story worth telling comes along, keep your blade sharp, pack light —

and take the long way home.