Meriwether Lewis left Pittsburgh on Aug. 30, 1803, in a 55-foot keelboat built for him there, and as low water slowed his trip down the Ohio River, he recruited men for the expedition and acquired two smaller vessels before William Clark joined him at Clarksville, Indiana, at the Falls of the Ohio. On Nov. 14, 1803, they reached the mouth of the Ohio and camped near present-day Cairo, Illinois, where during the next five days they made scientific observations with instruments including a sextant, surveyor's compass, and chronometer, while Clark measured the widths of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the first of hundreds of observations and measurements by the expedition's captains. On Nov. 16 and Nov. 18, Lewis and Clark also landed near what became known as Bird's Point on the west side of the Mississippi across from the mouth of the Ohio, the first time members of the expedition set foot on land that became Missouri and in the Louisiana Purchase Territory. There they encountered four or five Americans, many Shawnee Indians, and also Shawnee and Delaware Indians camped there, and traded for wild meats such as bear, venison, ducks, tongues, and beaver tails. Lewis wrote that on Nov. 16 a Shawnee man offered three beaver skins for his dog Seaman, a Newfoundland he valued highly and had bought for $20, and that on Nov. 18 they reached the huts of people established there to trade with Indians. One of those traders may have been Abraham Bird, for whom Bird's Point was named; he had received a Spanish grant in the area in 1798. The Shawnee and Delaware people encountered there were splinter groups that had moved to the west bank of the Mississippi with Louis Lorimier in the 1780s after supporting the British in the American Revolution, with about 1,200 Shawnee and 600 Delaware settling along several creeks between Ste. Genevieve and Lorimier's Cape Girardeau settlement.