Meriwether Lewis, Big Bone to Louisville

Meriwether Lewis stopped his keelboat on the late summer journey down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh in 1803 to examine a remarkable collection of ancient bones at a salt marsh named Big Bone Lick.  He and President Jefferson both were intensely curious about discoveries of many fossils of apparent Mammoths and Mastodons, including prehistoric buffalo, that were uncovered alongside a smelly creek.  Years later William Clark also undertook some bone collections at the Kentucky site.  Leaving Big Bone, Lewis moved his crew and new recruits a couple hundred miles south to the planned rendezvous with Clark, designated co-captain of the Corps of Discovery, at the Falls of the Ohio just north of the modern city of Louisville.  (HDD, 17 mins.)