Jan., 1916 PHILADELPHIA TO THE COAST IN EARLY DAYS 5 
This completes the summary of actual ornithological discovery on the 
coast prior to 1800. We must, however, remember that various species of 
west coast birds, or geographic races which were at that time and for half a 
century later regarded as identical with them, were already known from the 
eastern United States, Hudson’s Bay, or Mexico. When the western races 
of these birds were first found on the coast the discovery caused little or no 
comment as the early explorers thought they were the same as those of the 
east and often failed to preserve specimens. It is therefore difficult to say 
just when they were actually discovered. 
Up to the time of the publication of Wilson’s Ornithology, 1808-12, no less 
than 80 species of Californian land birds were thus known from identical or 
closely related races in the east although only one or two had been actually 
identified from the coast. While Wilson’s great work was in progress the first 
of the transcontinental expeditions was organized mainly through the efforts 
of Thomas Jefferson, then president of the United States. Philadelphia has 
no direct claim upon this expedition which was under the leadership of two 
Virginians, Meriweather Lewis, Jefferson’s private secretary, and Capt. Wil- 
liam Clarke. From the fact, however, that the few birds which they brought 
back were deposited in Peale’s “Philadelphia Museum”, while the manu- 
scripts of the expedition are still among the treasures of the American Philo- 
sophical Society in Philadelphia, the enterprise seems in a measure identified 
with our city. 
Had a naturalist been included in the Lewis and Clarke party there is no 
telling what discoveries would have ensued, but as it was, specimens of only 
three new species were brought back, which were named, figured and described 
by Wilson as Clarke’s Crow, Lewis’ Woodpecker, and the Louisiana Tanager. 
Twenty-six other land birds as well as a number of water birds are mentioned 
in the painstaking diaries that were kept- by the explorers, but these were 
mostly either well known eastern species or so vaguely described as not to be 
clearly recognizable. The Sharp-tailed and Franklin’s Grouse, the Sage Hen, 
and the Magpie are easily identified, as also the Whistling Swan which was 
named by Ord from Lewis and Clarke’s description. 
This expedition rendezvoused at the mouth of Wood River in Illinois oppo- 
site the Missouri and consisted, besides the commanders who were then 30 and 
34 years of age respectively, of nine young men from Kentucky, fourteen vol- 
unteers from the U. S. Army, two French watermen, an interpreter and hunter, 
and Capt. Clarke ’s negro servant, twenty-nine in all, with a detail of seven sol- 
diers and nine watermen to escort them up the Missouri as far as the Mandan 
Nation (now Bismark, North Dakota). They set out on May 14, 1804, reached 
Fort Clatsop (Vancouver, Washington) December, 1805, and returning March 
23, 1806, reached the Mississippi September 23. 
The discovery of Clarke’s Crow or Nutcracker, is thus described in Clarke’s 
original journal under date of August 22, 1805, from western Montana. “I 
saw today [a] Bird of the woodpecker kind which fed on Pine burs its Bill 
and tail white the wings black every other part of a light brown, and about 
the Size of a robin # . The identification of this bird as a woodpecker gives us 
some idea of the extent of his ornithological knowledge. The Lewis’s Wood- 
pecker was encountered on July 20 and in Lewis’s diary is the following: 
We encamped on the Lar d side [of the river] near a spring on a high 
*Thwait s Original Journal of the Lewis and Clarke Expedition, vol. Ill, p. 17 , 1905. 
