Robert Frazer (d. 1837) was a private who replaced Moses Reed after Reed’s desertion and discharge. Frazer kept his own journal during the expedition and, upon returning to St. Louis, announced plans to publish it — even issuing a prospectus before Lewis and Clark could publish theirs.
Lewis, concerned about being scooped, intervened to delay Frazer’s publication. The journal was never published during Frazer’s lifetime, and the original manuscript was eventually lost — one of the great literary losses of American exploration history. Only Frazer’s hand-drawn map, discovered in the Library of Congress in 1916, survives.
After the expedition, Frazer settled in the St. Louis area and lived until 1837. His lost journal remains one of the tantalizing what-ifs of Lewis and Clark scholarship.
