Lewis and Clark's List: Opium and 'Portable Soup'

By Deborah Zabarenko

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Before the going got tough, the tough went shopping: opium, inkstands, sealing wax and "portable soup" were all on the list of explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who launched an epic journey into the unknown American West exactly 200 years ago.

To mark Friday's anniversary, the National Archives offered a glimpse of documents that shed light on the careful planning and provisioning for the Lewis and Clark expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific and back.


"We were now about to penetrate a country of at least 2,000 miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden," Lewis wrote in his diary when they had been traveling nearly a year.


"The good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessels contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves."

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