Lewis and Clark set off

Mr. Thomas Jefferson, like other Virginia gentlemen before him, having made a purchase of western lands, sent some agents to look over the property. Since his was the largest such purchase ever made, the work of his agents attained corresponding fame, and is known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition. -- George R. Stewart, Names on the Land

Two hundred years ago today, Captain William Clark and his men struck their winter camp at Wood River, Illinois, and set out up the Missouri River towards St. Charles, where a week later they met Captain Meriwether Lewis, who’d been making preparations in St. Louis. They were on their way to the Pacific, equipped with only their own gumption, a boatload full of supplies, some generalized information from Indians about the lands ahead, and their own surmises about what they might see. After they left their next winter camp in North Dakota, they’d be going entirely through lands no white person had ever seen. For anyone who’s enjoyed SF novels about brave explorers across the galaxy, here’s some brave explorers for you.

I’ve been interested in Lewis and Clark since childhood, and wrote an oversized term paper on them for my AP History class in high school. In the same way the popular booms in SF and in Tolkien have amused and sometimes distressed me, the recent fashionable interest in Lewis and Clark has amused and sometimes distressed me. Stephen Ambrose, its main purveyor, like David McCullough is a master of the school that popularizes history by oversimplifying it and making it all about character instead of events. For some reason I can’t figure out, he exalts Lewis’s role while demeaning Clark’s, and yet simultaneously paints Lewis as a psychological basket case so severe that you can’t believe Jefferson would entrust him with an expedition across the street, let alone a continent.

This isn’t the Lewis and Clark I know from the books of Bernard DeVoto, John Bakeless, and Richard Dillon -- all classics, all still quite readable. Ambrose isn’t inventing Lewis’s moodiness, but he won’t emphasize that first of all, Lewis was a superb woodsman and an entirely competent leader. The older writers also emphasize the point that makes the expedition appeal to me: that in the field the two captains were equals, who split duties as interests and opportunity occasioned, and shared command easily without rancor. They also learned to trust their men: at one point on the return journey the expedition was split into five parties scattered across what would later be Montana, and they all came together again as planned. A less well-run group could easily all have died, several times; Lewis and Clark lost only one man in three years, apparently to appendicitis. I don’t believe in Heinlein’s mythical Competent Man: I prefer competent men I can believe in.

Many people are most interested in Lewis and Clark’s natural history discoveries, or in their relations with the Indians (far from perfect, but much more respectful of the Indians than most whites of their time were). I’m most interested in their geographical discoveries. Lewis did most of the scouting; Clark was the cartographer. I’ve been to many of their sites, including the rebuilt winter camps, Fort Mandan and Fort Clatsop, and starting today I’ll be following the expedition mentally at 200 years’ distance by re-reading DeVoto’s abridgment of their journals, day by day. I suppose I could get the nine volumes of the new complete edition edited by Gary Moulton, but that’d be costly, and more than I need: DeVoto will be enough to remind me where they were and what they did. I’ll be making occasional posts from the field.