On Nov. 25, 1803, the crew of the future Lewis and Clark Expedition passed this point while ascending the Mississippi River after breaking camp at the mouth of the Ohio River four days earlier. On Nov. 24, the party traveled 20 miles up the river and camped a mile downriver from Sheppard Point, near the southern boundary of today's Trail of Tears State Park. Meriwether Lewis recorded that the Illinois side of this stretch was low and prone to flooding, while the Missouri side was generally bold, with high cliffs crowned with pitch pine and cedar and rocks in many places nearly perpendicular and sixty feet high. The next day the crew passed even higher bluffs on the Missouri shore, including part of a 75-mile line of bluffs extending north from Cape Girardeau, and Lewis described the rock as limestone embedded with smooth chunks of chert. After four hours of travel, the boats passed the mouth of today's Indian Creek, above which Lewis noted Shawnee huts and tents, and soon afterward passed Apple Creek, which he called the most considerable stream he had yet encountered on the Mississippi. Lewis knew of a Shawnee village seven miles up Apple Creek near today's Old Appleton, and that evening the party camped opposite Grand Tower, now called Tower Rock. In 1803, French military engineer Nicolas de Finiels wrote that the Shawnee villages along Apple Creek were more systematically and solidly constructed than usual Indian villages, with cleared land securely fenced in the American style to protect harvests. Shawnee and Delaware people from Ohio had been invited to the Cape Girardeau district in the 1780s by Spanish district commandant Louis Lorimier, who had traded with those tribes in Ohio, because Spain hoped the Absentee Shawnee would serve as a buffer against the Osage and against American expansion in the Louisiana Territory.