Batman and Robin, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Pinky and the Brain—there are so many dynamic duos that American culture has bestowed upon us. Imagine all of these amazing duos combined: two guys (or mice) saving the day, exploring the West, and trying to take over the world—er, conducting scientific experiments, to boot. 

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark formed the Corps of Discovery, assembled by Thomas Jefferson. Their task was to explore the great unknown, at least as far as the Pacific Ocean, anyway. Here was America, a nation intent on moving out west and boldly going where no man—well, European man—had gone before. And Lewis and Clark were sent to blaze the trail.

The same year that Lewis and Clark began their massive hike, the Louisiana Purchase—a clear win for the U.S. and President Thomas Jefferson—hit the books. 

Louisiana had been owned by Spain since 1763, but the French had long dreamed of retaking the lost land. In 1800, French ruler Napoleon, struck a super secret deal, snagging the territory back from Spain (who France had given it to just 40 years earlier in another super secret deal).

But then, Napoleon failed to squash a slave revolution in Haiti. Wait, what? Yes, Haiti's independence movement was also a slave rebellion. Not only was this an incredible achievement for the people of Haiti, but France felt the blow of it. 40,000 French troops were killed, it was super costly, and losing Haiti meant keeping the nearby Port of New Orleans for supplies and military defense was no longer necessary. Napoleon's dream of his own New World empire quickly disappeared.

Basically, developments in Haiti had important effects on two fronts: they made France less willing and able to keep the Louisiana Territory itself and also more desperate to make a profit by selling it. So, the U.S. was able to purchase the Louisiana Territory at seriously below market price.

$15 million dollars for the entire Louisiana Territory? That's 3 cents an acre, guys. Not only was it a steal of a deal, but it doubled the size of our already growing nation. And all this new land needed to be explored, of course.

Back to the journey of Lewis and Clark: it was a true voyage of discovery. Jefferson's instructions to Meriwether Lewis were broad. Not only were they to map the unknown wilderness of the American West and establish friendly relations with the Native Americans who lived there, but they were also to conduct detailed observations of flora and fauna (plants and animals), of climate (weather), of soils and minerals, and even of fossils of extinct species.

Prior to the journey, Lewis received special training in scientific methods and in the use of instruments like the sextant, telescope, and chronometer. He brought with him on the journey an extensive—and heavy—library of scientific references, including books on botany (plants), mineralogy (rocks and minerals), and astronomy (space, the final frontier).

Lewis and Clark's journals were full of careful illustrations of newly discovered species. The explorers collected more than 300 specimens of plants and animals for shipment back to Washington, D.C. Three animals—two magpies and a prairie dog—even made it back alive.

And obviously, they were able to explore the newly-added Louisiana Territory as well as all the way into the Oregon Territory. At least until it rained so much they were forced to go home. 

Stupid weather.

Lewis and Clark's two-year expedition from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River and back—a pretty impressive feat if we do say so ourselves—solidified American claims not only to Louisiana but also to the Oregon Territory of the Pacific Northwest. 

But they weren't just exploring for exploring's sake—they were also doing sciencey things, in true Enlightenment fashion. Following detailed instructions from Thomas Jefferson himself, Lewis and Clark became diplomats, anthropologists, botanists, zoologists, meteorologists, and geologists, collecting tons of information on the land, people, plants, and animals they encountered, and writing it all down in their famous journals.

Taken together, the Louisiana Purchase and Voyage of Discovery are usually remembered as a total slam-dunk for the United States and for Thomas Jefferson: an incredible real estate purchase combined with a courageous feat of exploration to help make Jefferson's vision of a transcontinental American "empire of liberty" a reality. 

But if we look at the big picture, we can see that buying all that extra land, while awesome in many ways, also caused a lot of political problems for our little fledgling nation. Jefferson himself believed the purchase was unconstitutional (whoops), and yet he went through with it anyway. 

Kind of undermines his whole thing about keeping executive power small and not overreaching what the Constitution specifically spells out, huh?

Even more troubling in the long term, the Louisiana Purchase created half a century of sectional conflict, as Southern slave states and Northern free states fought to impose their respective labor systems on the new territories. The new states that eventually emerged from the purchase—thirteen of them, from Louisiana to Montana—would very delicately hold the balance of power between slave and free states. 

Not to be total downers on this slam-dunk of a purchase, but a lot of these big events that went down because of the Louisiana Purchase—like the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision—ended up pushing us down the road to Civil War.

We won't go into those ugly episodes now, but keep that thought in your back pocket as you travel along with Lewis and Clark, our dynamic duo. Actually, throw in Thomas Jefferson, too: there's our trifecta.