Process Paper

The topic that we have chosen for our History Day project is the “Lewis and Clark Expedition; The Corps of Discovery”. To present our research we created a historical website.

We came upon this topic by looking through the History Day samples. Some of the other topics that we were considering were Braille, the Bubonic Plague, John Muir, and the Pony Express. Then we talked about the best topic and came up with Lewis and Clark. After we chose our topic we started our research at the Sonoma County Library. We decided on this topic because we felt it was the most interesting topic out of them all. This topic is important in history because the Lewis and Clark expedition opened the west to the United States of America. Lewis and Clark's expedition also helped scientists record many plants and animal species that lived during that period in history.

We found it very hard to find a primary source. The only thing we could think of was to use quotes from the actual journals of either Lewis or Clark. For the most part our sources are secondary sources like books, websites, a magazine and movies.

We chose to do a historical website to present our research because we believed it might help us later on in life if we decide to do anything with computers. We also both enjoy working on the computer. We used a program called Web Easy to develop our project. This program helped us create our website and publish it on the web.

This years History Day theme is “Communication in History: The Key to Understanding”. The title of our project is “Lewis and Clark: Communicating Their Way Into History”. There is a lot of ways that our project ties into the theme. The different ways that we talked about were communicating with the Indians, creating of the maps, communicating back to Jefferson, communicating with the people of the future with their journals and Sacagawea communicating with her tribe and other Indian tribes. When Jefferson thought about this expedition he didn’t want the Spanish to know that he wanted the land that they were on so he made sure that the expedition looked like it was just a scientific journey. The expedition, also known as the Corps of Discovery, was carried out basically to explore the west and to be-friend the Indians of the West Coast. It also gave President Jefferson and the American people a vast body of knowledge about the Louisiana Purchase. Our topic ties into the theme of key to understanding by the Corps of Discovery being the key to understanding the west and its inhabitants, the Indians. They were the communicators of their time and the key for America’s future.