That Lewis planned so thoroughly and budgeted so precisely reflects the commission he was given by his friend Thomas Jefferson. For a man who had just consummated the biggest land purchase in history, Jefferson knew remarkably little about what he had acquired for America. Neither he nor his trading partner, Napoleon, could say precisely where the western edge of the Louisiana Territory could be drawn, nor much about what it looked like beyond what we would now call the Middle West. (Spain had some strong opinions on the boundaries of the territory, but Jefferson wasn’t terribly concerned about those.)

Jefferson compensated for his uncertainties by providing Lewis with written instructions that are a model of clarity. He labored over them for months, settling finally on 21 paragraphs of crisp prose that somehow managed to cover most eventualities that Lewis might have faced. Those instructions remain, today, a template for good communication between a chief executive and a trusted manager.

After a few preliminaries, Jefferson gives Lewis his mission statement, which could not have been improved upon: “The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by its course & communications with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce.”

Let us think about that. Lewis’s primary task was to find a watery passage to the Pacific Ocean, and he failed to do it. Yet his mission was a success, partly because Jefferson was so clear about all the other things he hoped the Corps of Discovery might achieve. Condensed and paraphrased, they were:

.... Make maps of what you find, especially the waterways.
.... Learn about the native peoples: their names, numbers, possessions, languages, occupations, relations with other tribes, health, clothing, laws, customs, moral and physical characteristics, the ways they wage war and defend themselves, and articles of commerce they desire to buy or sell.
.... Note the soil’s potential to grow crops.
.... Note the animals you find.
.... Note any potential mineral production.
.... Watch for volcanic activity.
.... Observe the climate, the seasons, and their effect upon the plants and animals.

Then Jefferson listed a series of advisories, intended to cover the unforeseen. Teach the natives about us, he told Lewis. Treat them in “the most friendly & conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit.” Invite them to visit us in Washington.

Further, Jefferson advised Lewis that he prized the lives of the members of the Corps of Discovery above the goals of the expedition. “Your numbers,” he wrote, “will be sufficient to secure you against the unauthorised opposition of individuals, or of small parties; but if a superior force, authorized or not authorised, by a nation, should be arrayed against your further passage, & inflexibly determined to arrest it, you must decline its further pursuit, and return.”

And most of the rest of the letter concerned itself with helping Lewis find his way home by ship from the western coast, and to pay members of the expedition. It also authorized him to choose a second-in-command. Lewis chose William Clark. Armed with Jefferson’s instructions, and equipped with the items that they both deemed most necessary, Lewis had the authority to carry out his mission and the latitude to improvise within specified limits. A manager could ask for nothing more.

It’s worth taking a moment to contrast Lewis’s skills as a planner and project manager with those of others in comparable situations. Lewis, as we know, led a remarkable collection of people all the way across the mostly undiscovered western half of the continent and back. He represented a new nation to the native tribes, he recorded diverse species of plants and animals, and he mapped new paths to the Pacific Ocean. Even though Lewis’s life and career fell apart after he returned, his Corps of Discovery mission was an unalloyed success.

His success contrasts notably with the failures of some others who were charged with equally high profile missions. For example, the Burke-Wills expedition of 1860-61 — more than 50 years after the Corps of Discovery — was charged with exploring finding a route across inland Australia from Melbourne to the northern coast. It was blessed with every advantage the provincial government could confer, from camels laden with gear, Indian sepoy guides, and literally tons of food and equipment. It was led by a carefully selected leader and encouraged by a vast public sendoff. Further, Burke and Wills weren’t expected to face potentially hostile adversaries, nor were they commissioned to act as ambassadors to people of other races.

Yet the Australian mission remains one of the most celebrated disasters in exploring history. Explorers were fired, hired, refired; routes were ill-considered; supplies were dreadfully mismanaged. Almost everybody on the trek died. It was such a catastrophic failure that it failed to achieve the nobility of other famed-but-failed voyages, such as Ernest Shackleton’s doomed journey to the South Pole, or Captain Bligh’s modest mission to bring breadfruit from Tahiti to the Caribbean.

All the more remarkable, in this context of human exploration, that Meriwether Lewis, knowing so little about where he was going and what he would find, planned and managed his expedition so capably.