Lewis and Clark's observations and measurements of geomorphology and hydrology, and changes with time

Abstract

THE ROOTS of the U.S . Geological Survey still thrive in the soil prepared two centuries ago by Lewis and Clark. The Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1803-06 was, in the words of John Logan Allen (1975), " ... the first of what was to become a lengthy series of scientific explorations sponsored by the government of the United States ... [in which] trained and intelligent observers gathered and analyzed geographical information in what can only be described as a scientific method and documented the resulting geographical images fully in maps and regional descriptions." Notable successors to those first intrepid explorers were the railroad surveys that crossed the trans-Mississippi west at different latitudes before the Civil War. Then, after the war, came the western exploratory surveys led by Clarence King, Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, George Wheeler, and John Wesley Powell. Those four postwar surveys led directly to the creation in 1879 of a permanent government agency to continue to carry out the topographic, geologic, and hydrographic functions of those surveys of exploration-the U.S. Geological Survey.

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