page_title: Engineer Cantonment
section_title: Up the Missouri
hierarchical_section_title: Engineer Cantonment / History / Up the Missouri
caption_attribution_description: English: Frontispiece from Reliquiae Baldwinianae: selections from the correspondece of the late William Balwin, M.D., compiled by William Darlington, M.D., Philadelphia, 1843.
context_page_description: Engineer Cantonment is an archaeological site in Washington County, in the state of Nebraska in the Midwestern United States. Located in the floodplain of the Missouri River near present-day Omaha, Nebraska, it was the temporary winter camp of the scientific party of the Yellowstone Expedition. From October 1819 to June 1820, the party studied the geology and biology of the vicinity, and met with the local indigenous peoples. Their eight-month study of the biota has been described as "the first biodiversity inventory undertaken in the United States".
  The site was not used again after the departure of the expedition, and its location was forgotten. In 2003, it was rediscovered, and investigated during the 2003–05 archaeological seasons. In 2015, it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
context_section_description: The Western Engineer, bearing the Long party, left Pittsburgh in the spring of 1819.  It descended the Ohio River and steamed up the Mississippi to St. Louis, near the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi.  In June 1819, the Long party started up the Missouri.
  Progress upstream was slow.  The river's strong current limited the vessel's average speed to less than three miles per hour (five kilometers per hour), and silt from the muddy waters clogged the steamboat's boiler.  The party also made a number of stops, including one of a week at Franklin in the present-day state of Missouri.
  The expedition lost one of its members in Franklin.  Baldwin, the surgeon and botanist, had long suffered from tuberculosis.  Failing health forced him to leave the expedition, and he died several weeks later in Franklin.
  The military expedition under Atkinson made no better progress.  Of the five steamboats hired to carry the force upstream, two apparently never reached the Missouri; another gave out and had to be left behind 30 miles (50 km) below Franklin; and the remaining two had to be abandoned a short distance above the mouth of the Kansas River.  The expedition was forced to carry out the last leg of the journey on keelboats, which the soldiers towed from the banks using long ropes.
caption: William Baldwin
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