Lewis and Clark War Vessels, Then and Now

The United States Navy has named its newest ship in the Lewis and Clark class of underway resupply vessels, the  USNS Alan Shepard, honoring the first American in space, Rear Admiral Alan B. Shepard, Jr.  The Lewis and Clark class of navy ships are dry cargo ships, whose function is to transfer cargo while at sea to station ships and other naval warfare forces.  They carry ammunition, food, limited quantities of fuel, and various other items.  Two earlier ships were christened the USNS Lewis and Clark and the USNS Sacagawea. Twelve ships are planned, and all will be named for famous American explorers and pioneers. To learn more, visit the Wikipedia website.  A Lewis and Clark class vessel is 689 feet long and 106 feet across. By comparison, the Lewis and Clark keelboat is 55 feet long, and is based on the design of a galliot, or Spanish war vessel that kind of has a similiar profile.

The keelboat shown here is the creation of Butch Bouvier, who has custom made keelboats all across the country for Lewis and Clark interpretive centers.  This is one of his first creations, and the only one that floats for much of the year. It is based at Lewis and Clark State Park on Blue Lake at Onawa, Iowa about 80 miles north of Omaha, Nebraska and Council Bluffs, Iowa. Butch’s other Lewis and Clark keelboats are all on land or  inside buildings. To read more about the controversies regarding its design, visit his website--flat or round bottomed, keel or no keel? I am on Butch’s side on these issues.

We have had some Lewis and Clark Study  Group discussion of exactly what kind of boat Lewis and Clark had. It was called a "barge" or a "batteau" in the journals. The design is based on a drawing done by William Clark found in his journal.  But it really isn’t a traditional keelboat, as they were long and narrow, pointed at both ends, and with a cabin in the middle.  I remembered that I had seen an earlier sketch by William Clark of a Spanish War Vessel, that looked like this boat. His sketch is at the Missouri Historical Society. Landon Y. Jones refers to it in his excellent biography, William Clark and the Shaping of the West.   (If you buy the biography from the Lewis and Clark Road Trips website, or from this link, my Amazon Associate account will be credited.)

This drawing is from an out of print book, Spanish War Vessels on the Mississippi 1792-1798 by Abraham P. Nasatir (Yale University Press, 1968). William Clark as a young Lieutenant in the United States Army made two trips down the Mississippi, in 1793 and 1795. In 1795 he delivered a letter from General Anthony Wayne to the commanding general of the Spanish forces, Governor Gayosco de Lemos, demanding to know by what authority the Spanish had established a fort at Chickasaw Bluffs (Nashville, Tennessee) on the east side of the Mississippi River in US territory. Gayosco replied he had bought it from the Chickasaw Indians. When Clark returned to Fort Washington (Cincinnati, Ohio) he made a full report to General Wayne, including a sketch of the governor’s Spanish war vessel, or galliot, shown here in a later sketch from 1798.

Posted by on 12/07/2006 at 11:38 AM

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