Remembering Lewis and Clark, 205 Years Later

Two hundred and five years ago, on the morning of August 30, 1803, a 29-year-old Virginian named Meriwether Lewis, lately private secretary to President Thomas Jefferson, left Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to journey down the Ohio River to its confluence with the Tennessee River and thence westward. Only three miles passed before a fellow traveler, eager to try Lewis’s newfangled hunting rifle, shot a bystander in the head (”she fell instantly and the blood gusing [sic] from her temple,” Lewis recorded in his notebook, adding, “we were all in the greatest consternation”). The victim revived, though, and Lewis and company went on their way, joining his friend William Clark and another party of soldiers and hunters 400 miles downstream.homeimage

Three years later, weather-beaten and weary, the grandly named “Corps of Discovery,” some 40 men strong, marched down the streets of St. Louis. There they were hailed as heroes, deservedly. Lewis, Clark, and their companions had, after all, traveled across 8,000 miles of largely uncharted territory. They had hauled two tons of equipment on their long journey from the Ohio to the Pacific Ocean: sextants and pistols, barometers and barrels, mirrors and knives to trade with the people they met along the way. They had described more than 300 plant and animal species new to science, among them the grizzly bear, which would ever after haunt Lewis’s dreams, and the prairie dog. And they had helped open the door to the American conquest of a vast interior recently sold to the United States by Napoleon Bonaparte, who had had no legal authority to do so.

Jefferson had instructed the Corps of Discovery to undertake several tasks. The first was to map the northern portion of those lands. The second was to determine whether the western rivers that drained into the Mississippi led to the Pacific Ocean; if they did, and if the fabled Northwest Passage really did exist, then American ships would be able to travel straight to China without having to skirt British-controlled shipping lanes in the Caribbean and South Atlantic. The third was to determine the location and strength of any Europeans the Corps might encounter along the way, and there were plenty afoot in the West, from French trappers to Russian whalers and Spanish missionaries—and, always, British agents.

Only farther down on Jefferson’s list of instructions to Lewis did American Indians figure. Were they friendly or hostile? What wealth did they possess? How were they organized politically? Could they be enlisted as allies?

Heroes they were, but not for long. Within a generation, the men of the Corps of Discovery were all but forgotten. The record had no need for them: the logic of Manifest Destiny had begun to unfold even before they returned to St. Louis. A century would pass, at the dawn of another American empire, before Lewis and Clark again took their place in the national pantheon. Through the efforts of historians and writers such as Elliot Coues and Reuben Gold Thwaites, archives were thrown open, dossiers dusted off, maps redrafted, and editions of the expedition’s mountainous journals prepared.

089-meriwether-lewis-memorial-1.jpgThose journals tell us much: they speak of hardship, of constant sickness, of danger, of bad weather and beasts, of Clark’s many preoccupations, of Lewis’s gnawing loneliness. But often we must often between the lines to get at what the circumspect authors truly had on their minds. Does Toussaint Charbonneau, the trapper and boatman who joined the expedition at Fort Mandan, North Dakota, deserve our remembrance as an intrepid guide and skin-saver, or should we see him as one of the most cowardly, feckless, and useless humans to have drawn breath? Was Sacagawea, the teenaged Shoshone girl who came along with Charbonneau as wife or as property, and whom the men called “Janey” as they would any camp follower, a help or a hindrance? Were the soldiers under Lewis and Clark’s command worthy comrades, or a constant reminder that the categories “civilized” and “savage” were both fluid and misapplied?

Depending on which page you turn to and which voice you heed, the answers will vary. That ever so deliberate ambivalence complicates the work of anyone who would regard the men (and women) of the Corps either as heroes unalloyed or as destroyers unleashed in an American Garden of Eden. Both threads are common in interpretations of American history, and neither is complete.

Other questions remain. What happened to York, Clark’s slave, whom the Indians they encountered found more mysterious, and more attractive, than the leaders of the expedition? Did York return to the Plains to become a Crow warrior and elder, as some believe, or did he fall to cholera in Tennessee? What of Sacagawea, or Janey, or Porivo, as some called her? Did she, too, die of illness in 1812, or did she run away from Charbonneau to find safe haven among the Comanches, then return to live among her own people until her death as an old woman in 1884? Did Meriwether Lewis commit suicide along the Natchez Trace in 1809, or was he murdered?

Three million words of firsthand history cannot tell us, but historians have made some reasonable and altogether fascinating guesses over the last 200-odd years—work of scholarly detection that will go on for years to come.