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Lewis and Clark - Stop celebrating. They don't matter.
Slate, via MSN ^ | August 16, 2002 | David Plotz

Posted on 08/18/2002 9:13:59 AM PDT by Larry Lucido

Lewis and Clark

Stop celebrating. They don't matter.

By David Plotz

Posted Friday, August 16, 2002, at 7:40 AM PT

The American infatuation with Lewis and Clark grows more fervent with every passing year. The adventurers have become our Extreme Founding Fathers, as essential to American history as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson but a lot more fun. Last month, President Bush announced the Lewis and Clark bicentennial celebration, a three-year, 15-state pageant that begins Jan. 18 in Virginia and could draw as many as 25 million tourists to the Lewis and Clark trail by the time it wraps up in 2006. The same week as Bush's speech, Time devoted a special issue to the expedition, 42 salivary pages of Lewis and Clark.

Bookstores have been stuffed with Lewis and Clark volumes since the publication of Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage in 1996. There are scores of trail guides, multivolume editions of the explorers' journals, a dozen books about Sacagawea, three histories of Fort Clatsop, a Lewis and Clark cookbook, and at least three books about Meriwether Lewis' dog, Seaman.

Our Lewis and Clark have something for everyone—a catalog of 21st-century virtues. They're multicultural: an Indian woman, French-Indians, French-Canadians, and a black slave all contributed to the expedition's success. They're environmental: Lewis and Clark kept prodigious records of plants and animals and were enthralled by the vast, mysterious landscape they traveled through. They're tolerant: They didn't kill Indians (much) but did negotiate with them. They're patriotic: They discovered new land so the United States could grow into a great nation. Lewis and Clark, it's claimed, opened the West and launched the American empire.

Except they didn't. "If Lewis and Clark had died on the trail, it wouldn't have mattered a bit," says Notre Dame University historian Thomas Slaughter, author of the forthcoming Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness.

Like the moon landing, the Lewis and Clark expedition was inspiring, poetic, metaphorical, and ultimately insignificant. First of all, Lewis and Clark were not first of all. The members of the Corps of Discovery were not the first people to see the land they traveled. Indians had been everywhere, of course, but the corps members were not even the first whites. Trappers and traders had covered the land before them, and though Lewis and Clark may have been the first whites to cross the Rockies in the United States, explorer Alexander MacKenzie had traversed the Canadian Rockies a decade before them.

After the celebration of their safe return, Lewis and Clark quickly sank into obscurity, and for good reason. They failed at their primary mission. Jefferson had dispatched them to find a water route across the continent—the fabled Northwest Passage—but they discovered that water transport from coast to coast was impossible. Jefferson, chagrined, never bragged much about the expedition he had fathered.

Not discovering something that didn't exist was hardly Lewis and Clark's fault, but the expedition also failed in a much more important way. It produced nothing useful. Meriwether Lewis was supposed to distill his notes into a gripping narrative, but he had writer's block and killed himself in 1809 without ever writing a word. The captains' journals weren't published until almost 10 years after the duo's return; only 1,400 copies were printed, they appeared when the country was distracted by the War of 1812, and they had no impact. The narrative was well-told, but it ignored the most valuable information collected by Lewis and Clark, their mountains of scientific and anthropological data about the plants, animals, and Indians of the West. That material wasn't published for a century, long after it could have helped pioneers.

Lewis and Clark didn't matter for other reasons. At the time of the journey, the Corps of Discovery "leapfrogged Americans' concerns," says American University historian Andrew Lewis (no relation to Meriwether). "They were exploring the far Missouri at a time when the frontier was the Ohio River. They were irrelevant."

When the country did start catching up, decades later, the Lewis and Clark route didn't help. William Clark told President Jefferson that they had discovered the best route across the continent, but he could hardly have been more wrong. Lewis and Clark took the Missouri through Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Montana before crossing the Rockies in Northern Idaho. Their route was way too far north to be practical. No one could follow it. Other explorers located better, southerly shortcuts across the Continental Divide, and that's where Western settlers went. Lewis and Clark aficionados delight today in the unspoiled scenery along the trail. The reason the trail remains scenic and unspoiled is that it was so useless.

In a few years, Lewis and Clark disappeared from the American imagination and the American project. Lewis was dead, and Clark spent the rest of his life on the frontier, supervising relations with Indians—an important job, but not one that gave him any say over government policy. Meanwhile, other daredevils captured the popular fancy, especially during the great wave of exploration in the mid-19th century. John C. Frémont enthralled the country with his bold Western trips. John Wesley Powell—the one-armed Civil War veteran—made his name by rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The midcentury explorers provided information that was vastly more productive than anything Lewis and Clark offered.

By the late 19th century, Lewis and Clark were negligible figures. They weren't found in textbooks, according to the University of Tulsa's James Ronda, a leading scholar of the expedition. Americans didn't hearken back to the adventure. It was so unimportant that Henry Adams could dismiss it in no time flat in his history of the Jefferson administration as having "added little to the stock of science and wealth."

The first Lewis and Clark revival occurred at the turn of the 20th century, when the journals were published again after an 80-year hiatus. Americans were remembering the trip only after the West had been settled, the Indians had been wiped out, and the frontier closed. During the years that the empire was actually being built, at the time of settlement and conquest, Americans hadn't cared at all about Lewis and Clark.

After World War I, says Ronda, the expedition was ignored again. University of Texas historian William Goetzmann says that when he was writing his Pulitzer-Prize-winning Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West in the mid-'60s, he wasn't even going to include Lewis and Clark, but "my publisher talked me into it."

But by the late '60s, Americans had rediscovered Lewis and Clark, and their fervor has not flagged since. The creation of the 3,700-mile Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail in 1978 made the story accessible in a way that history rarely is. Millions of people have followed Lewis and Clark's footsteps and oar-swings since the trail opened. Ambrose's book attracted tens of thousands of new fans to the tale. The expedition's various appeal—ecological, patriotic, diverse, literary, thrill-seeking—gives it traction. More and more Americans read directly from the captains' journals, whose blunt, direct, and oddly beautiful language makes the story live. And the United States, as Ronda notes, is a country that loves road stories, and there is none more vivid or exciting than Lewis and Clark's.

But our fascination with Lewis and Clark is much more about us than about them. The expedition is a useful American mythology: How a pair of hardy souls and their happy-go-lucky multiculti flotilla discovered Eden, befriended the Indian, and invented the American West. The myth of Lewis and Clark papers over the grittier story of how the United States conquered the land, tribe by slaughtered, betrayed tribe.

Lewis and Clark didn't give Americans any of the tools they required to settle the continent—not new technology, not a popular narrative, not a good route, not arable land. It didn't matter. Nineteenth-century pioneers were bound to take the great West, with or without Lewis and Clark. Their own greed, ambition, bravery, and desperation guaranteed it. They did not need Lewis and Clark to conquer and build the West. But we do need Lewis and Clark to justify having done it.


TOPICS: News/Current Events; US: Virginia
KEYWORDS: 2020election; americanhistory; andrewlewis; antipope; antiwhiteexplorers; clark; davidplotz; dnctalkingpoint; dnctalkingpoints; election2020; france; godsgravesglyphs; history; homosexualagenda; leftistrevision; lewis; lewisandclark; liberalfascism; louisianapurchase; mediawingofthednc; meriwetherlewis; nonplayercharacter; nonplayercharacters; northwestpassage; notredame; npc; npcs; partisanmediashills; popefrancis; presstitutes; romancatholicism; sacagawea; slate; smearmachine; stephenambrose; texas; thomasjefferso; thomasslaughter; undauntedcourage; virginia; williamclark; williamgoetzmann
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Just finished reading "Undaunted Courage," then found this article yesterday. I throws a wet blanket on my reading, but I'll take the author's comments with a grain of salt.
1 posted on 08/18/2002 9:13:59 AM PDT by Larry Lucido
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To: Admin Moderator
Guess this should be General Interest rather than News.
2 posted on 08/18/2002 9:15:36 AM PDT by Larry Lucido
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To: Larry Lucido
Publicity is everything.

There are fourteen (14) (xvi) mountains in Colorado higher that 14,000 feet. Most people only know about Pike's Peak.
3 posted on 08/18/2002 9:19:20 AM PDT by Doctor Stochastic
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To: Doctor Stochastic
(xvi)

Did you mean xiv?

4 posted on 08/18/2002 9:22:24 AM PDT by Larry Lucido
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To: Larry Lucido
There are three types of people in the world: those who can count and those who can't.
5 posted on 08/18/2002 9:27:32 AM PDT by Doctor Stochastic
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To: Larry Lucido
HOly Moly! What a sour sob. It WAS courageous to try to find the water route. This falls into the same sorry butted bunch who want to discredit Columbus! As if either of these expeditions were just a walk in the park.
6 posted on 08/18/2002 9:34:46 AM PDT by Dudoight
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To: Larry Lucido
The notion that pioneers don't matter if what they do Would Have Been Done Anyway strikes me as flawed and more than a little sad, and does a great disservice to what those pioneers actually went through.

By the same reasoning as in this article, almost no one has ever "mattered". Einstein? Come on, you think no one else could have thought of General relativity? How about Washington. Strike two - someone would have founded some kind of nation on this continent. Christ? Give me a break. A synthesis of Son-of-God worship and monotheism was just waiting to happen... if not him it certainly would have been some other Jesus (or Joseph or Judas or Thomas..) so-and-so!

This way of looking at things is like something a naive 15-year-old boy with no appreciation for history would come up with, and then write a little punk rock song about.

7 posted on 08/18/2002 9:40:14 AM PDT by Dr. Frank fan
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To: Doctor Stochastic
---better count the "fourteeneers" again--
8 posted on 08/18/2002 9:43:07 AM PDT by rellimpank
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To: Dudoight
HOly Moly! What a sour sob. It WAS courageous to try to find the water route. This falls into the same sorry butted bunch who want to discredit Columbus! As if either of these expeditions were just a walk in the park.

Id like to see how todays adventurer would stand up to the perils and hardships of new discovery TODAY without the modern conveinences of today it would be interesting to see how many would go crazy without the tools of today to discover new and fabulous lands dont ya think?

9 posted on 08/18/2002 9:46:09 AM PDT by ATOMIC_PUNK
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To: Dr. Frank
Come on, you think no one else could have thought of General relativity?

Hell, Al Gore would have invented it!

And I'm sure Edmund Hilary's misspelled namesake would have discovered an actual water passage if she hadn't been busy solving health care.

10 posted on 08/18/2002 10:02:58 AM PDT by Larry Lucido
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To: Larry Lucido
There's a bit of the adventurer in each of us; I still feel good about finding the men's room in a Kroger without asking for help.
11 posted on 08/18/2002 10:08:59 AM PDT by Old Professer
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To: Larry Lucido
I think this author is full of it. At one point in my life I spent a lot of time studying Lewis & Clark, especially Bernard de Voto's scholarship on the expedition.

There is strong evidence indicating politics was Jefferson's overriding concern. He wanted to survey his new Louisiana Purchase, of course, but most particularly he wanted to find out what the main colonial powers were up to in it: how far Russia had encroached from its trapping bases in Alaska (to Ft. Ross in California, actually); the British, the French, Spanish and Mexicans, etc. The expedition provided extremely useful information on that subject.

This writer would do well to read the actual expedition journals. The explorers did plenty of damage to indigenous wildlife, especially grizzly bears, and were very realistic about potential hostile intentions of some of the Indians they met. On the Missouri River leg of the trip they had a handy little cannon on their boat for just such adventures.

Life on the American frontier was necessarily multicultural and it wasn't a bad thing. It arose naturally from the interplay of human contacts and wasn't imposed from above by a politically correct elite. I deplore the revisionist Western history that's now in vogue with PC types, and this article seems to be a part of it. It's another attempt to discredit a unifying American story, more of the icon-bashing that typifies Marxist political strategy.
12 posted on 08/18/2002 10:11:28 AM PDT by Bernard Marx
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To: Old Professer
Dig yields Lewis and Clark latrine!
13 posted on 08/18/2002 10:15:49 AM PDT by Larry Lucido
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To: Larry Lucido
This fellow doesn't like Americans much, does he?
14 posted on 08/18/2002 10:17:02 AM PDT by arthurus
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To: Larry Lucido
I've often wondered about the brief references in the Lewis and Clark tales about sending specimens and information back east. Since the "Corp of Discovery" members all made the complete journey (except for the one who died near Omaha) there must have been other folks (trappers and traders) on the trail besides them. It's still a great story, but I agree it propbably made little difference in the settlement of the west.
15 posted on 08/18/2002 10:22:44 AM PDT by FairWitness
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To: Bernard Marx
. I deplore the revisionist Western history that's now in vogue with PC types, and this article seems to be a part of it. It's another attempt to discredit a unifying American story, more of the icon-bashing that typifies Marxist political strategy.

I Concur

16 posted on 08/18/2002 10:23:37 AM PDT by TeleStraightShooter
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To: arthurus
Yep. Plotz is an idiot. His bilious review of the Corps of Discovery is just another deconstructionist diarhea-of-the-mouth, he obviously hates himself, his country, etc.

The expedition was extraordinarily well run. Only one soldier died throughout the entire trip - and most likely because of appendicitis, something that would have proved fatal in Philadelphia as well as Council Bluffs.

His snide remark about not "killing Indians (much)" shows he knows nothing about Indians nor the expedition. It's not entirely settled whether Meriwhether Lewis killed himself - while he was prone to bouts of depression and was in severe debt, there is some evidence he was murdered in Tennessee.

17 posted on 08/18/2002 10:39:29 AM PDT by Freedom4US
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To: Larry Lucido
Slate: stop reading it: it doesn't matter.
18 posted on 08/18/2002 10:53:15 AM PDT by pabianice
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To: rellimpank
54 as I recall.
19 posted on 08/18/2002 10:53:57 AM PDT by DUMBGRUNT
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To: CholeraJoe
don't you live down the stream from one of their outhouses or some such thing....?
20 posted on 08/18/2002 10:56:18 AM PDT by xsmommy
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