Members of the Lewis and Clark expedition ate enormous quantities of meat, supplemented by roots, dried fish, flour, and whatever else they could hunt, trade for, or forage along the way. At their peak consumption, each man ate roughly nine pounds of meat per day. The diet shifted dramatically depending on geography, season, and what Indigenous nations along the route were willing to trade.
What They Packed Before Leaving
Before the Corps of Discovery pushed off from Camp Dubois in May 1804, Meriwether Lewis had loaded the keelboat with thousands of pounds of provisions. The supply list included 3,705 pounds of salt pork, 3,400 pounds of flour, 1,200 pounds of parched corn, 1,650 pounds of hulled corn, 950 pounds of meal, and 560 pounds of biscuit. Lewis also packed teas, salt, spices, and spirits to keep morale up. Perhaps the most unusual item was 193 pounds of “portable soup,” a shelf-stable concentrate purchased in Philadelphia that could be reconstituted with water and whatever vegetables were available. It was essentially an 1800s version of bouillon, and the men would come to rely on it during the hungriest stretches of the journey.
These initial supplies were never meant to last the entire trip. They served as a buffer for the early months while the party learned to live off the land. By the time the expedition reached the Great Plains, hunting had become the primary source of calories.
Nine Pounds of Meat a Day
The figure sounds absurd by modern standards, but members of the Corps of Discovery averaged about nine pounds of meat per person per day. They were paddling canoes upstream, hauling heavy boats over rapids, and hiking through terrain with no trails. The physical demands were extraordinary, and lean wild game has far fewer calories per pound than the marbled beef or pork you’d find in a grocery store today. To get enough energy from elk or deer, you simply had to eat a lot of it.
The species they hunted changed with the landscape. Along the Missouri River, deer and elk were the mainstays. On the Great Plains, bison became the dominant protein source. The Teton Sioux presented the expedition with roughly 400 pounds of buffalo meat during a single diplomatic meeting in September 1804. When the party crossed the Rocky Mountains and game became scarce, they turned to less familiar options.
Dog Meat and Desperate Times
Dog was not strictly an emergency food. Several Indigenous nations considered it a delicacy and served it at important ceremonies. When the expedition met with the Teton Sioux, the hosts killed several dogs and cooked them as part of the feast. Lewis himself noted that the Sioux “killed Several fat dogs which they call the best meat that ever was.” Clark’s journal describes dog meat being served alongside the pipe of peace at a formal council.
As the expedition continued, the men began purchasing dogs from Native communities as a regular protein source, particularly during the return trip through present-day Idaho and eastern Washington. Lewis reportedly enjoyed the taste. Clark never warmed to it. Horse meat also entered the diet during the brutal crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains, when the party was starving and game was nearly impossible to find. Those mountain crossings in the fall of 1805 were the closest the expedition came to running out of food entirely, and the portable soup from Philadelphia finally earned its place on the supply list.
Salmon and Dried Fish on the Columbia
Once the expedition descended from the Rockies and reached the Columbia River basin, the diet shifted dramatically. Salmon and steelhead were the foundation of life for the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest, eaten fresh for as much as six months of the year and dried or smoked for the lean winter months. The Corps of Discovery traded for large quantities of dried fish as they traveled down the Columbia toward the Pacific coast.
The transition from a meat-heavy diet to one centered on dried fish was not a smooth one. Many of the men experienced digestive problems, likely from the combination of unfamiliar food and the oils in salmon. But fish remained a critical calorie source throughout the winter of 1805-1806 at Fort Clatsop, near the mouth of the Columbia in present-day Oregon.
Roots That Replaced Bread
Two root vegetables played an outsized role in keeping the expedition fed: camas and wapato.
Camas is a starchy bulb that the Nez Perce people cooked in small earthen kilns before making it into bread and other dishes. When the starving expedition stumbled out of the Bitterroot Mountains and into Nez Perce territory in September 1805, the Nez Perce fed them generously. The men ate so much camas that they got violently sick, their stomachs completely unprepared for the fibrous, carbohydrate-rich root after weeks of little food.
Wapato, sometimes called Indian potato, was the prized root of the lower Columbia River valley. William Clark wrote that it was “equal to the Irish potato, and is a tolerable Substitute for bread.” He described watching local women harvest it by wading into marshes, sometimes up to their necks, loosening the bulbs from the mud with their feet. The roots floated to the surface and were tossed into canoes. Once collected, the wapato was roasted in hot ashes like a potato, and the outer skin peeled off easily. Clark called it the most valuable of all the roots in the region, and it was a major trade item between inland and coastal communities. When the expedition voted on where to build their winter camp, Sacagawea specifically advocated for a location with plentiful wapato to ensure a reliable food supply.
Some Lower Chinook people sold wapato to the expedition, while others refused, considering the prices the explorers offered too low for such a valuable crop.
Salt for Survival
By the time the Corps of Discovery reached the Pacific coast, their salt supply was running low. Salt was essential not just for flavor but for preserving meat for the long return journey. In January 1806, Lewis sent a small detachment south along the coast to what is now Seaside, Oregon, to boil seawater and extract salt. The group operated the salt works for several weeks, producing 3.5 bushels (about 28 gallons) of what they described as “Excellent, fine, strong & white” salt before rejoining the main party at Fort Clatsop in late February. That salt would help preserve elk and fish for the thousands of miles still ahead.
How the Diet Changed Across the Journey
The easiest way to understand what Lewis and Clark ate is to follow the geography. In the first year, traveling up the Missouri, the diet was a mix of packed provisions and hunted game: deer, elk, bison, supplemented by flour, corn, and salt pork from the original supplies. On the Great Plains, bison dominated. In the mountains, food became desperately scarce, and the men relied on horse meat, portable soup, and whatever they could trade for. On the Columbia, salmon and dried fish took over, along with roots like camas and wapato. At Fort Clatsop on the Pacific coast, elk became the primary protein again, hunted in the rainy coastal forests and preserved with salt from the nearby salt works.
Throughout the entire journey, trade with Indigenous nations was not a backup plan. It was a survival strategy. The Mandan, Nez Perce, Chinook, and dozens of other peoples provided food that kept the expedition alive during its most vulnerable stretches. Without camas bread from the Nez Perce or wapato from the Columbia River communities, the Corps of Discovery’s story could have ended very differently.