Lewis and Clark - Stop celebrating. They don't matter.

Slate, via MSN ^ | August 16, 2002 | David Plotz

[SpringheelJack]

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

Actually, the evidence that Lewis committed suicide is pretty overwhelming. In the month before his death he had made two unsuccessful suicide attempts, and he was behaving very erratically in the hours before his death. Lewis, who survived his wounds for several hours, never once mentioned an attacker. Everybody at the time, including Lewis's own mother and his friend William Clark, concluded that his death was a suicide.

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks!

This is just another whacked out leftist revisionist attempt to minimize what European/Americans did in this country.

I put this in the same category as their aborted PC statue that would have shown a Rainbow of Diversity Firemen raising the Flag at the WTC instead of the reality that all were evil white male NYFD guys.

Fortunately, our own Jeff Head beat that leftist revisionist's BS down with his petition to preserve the truth not history revised by the lefties who hate America and anything good that descendents of Euros did in America.

[gcruse]

The Lewis and Clark phenom today is part
of the Great Myth of Diversity's Benefits.  As
public education consigns Columbus, Washington,
and even Ronald Reagan to it-would-have-been-
better-not-to-have-them-in-our-history-at-all,
we instead celebrate the marginal for what they
thought, not what they accomplished.

What did Martin Luther King really do, after all?
That stuff Maya Angelou writes -- would anyone
read it if they didn't have to?  Does anyone
believe Cornel West is of value to education?

[avg_freeper]

I loved climbing Elbert. It was a blast and a pretty easy climb too. The view from the top is great.

I was a lot younger guy then and met a whole lot of women that summer on the way up. I think that somewhere between 12 & 14k, the part of a woman’s brain that controls all of her modesty and the tendency to wear clothing stops getting supplied with oxygen.

A very interesting hike.

[pepsionice]

sank into obscurity?

The reason is simple. Neither man published. Yep, neither one of them published. The president told them that they could have made a good sum on a book of the expedition. The public wanted to hear the personal story. They had enough info to publish the quick 200 page story, and later a 7-volume series on everything they found out west. They could have made at least $30k each from such a effort. And they did absolutey nothing. Lewis had major mental problems, from anxity and stress...and ended committing suicide within four years. Clark, thinking that congress owed him more money, just took a position as governor of a Indian territory. Neither told their story...and thats the real reason of lack of knowledge of either man for 40 years after their episode.

[PLK]

What did Martin Luther King really do, after all?

One of his greatest accomplishments was keeping his doctorate degree & courtesy "Dr." title even after it was proven he plagiarized, wholesale and in LARGE amounts, his PhD dissertation. Any other idiot (namely white male) who was caught doing this would have the degree withdrawn and their name and reputation forever ruined. In this, Dr. King accomplished something no one else has probably ever done.

[VOA]

"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.

Remember that name, Thomas Slaughter.
Odds are you'll never hear this name again in this life because he's just the
average (and thereby un-notable) academic trying to gain a bit of attention by
trashing Lewis And Clark.

And a hundred years from now, there will still be "Lewis and Clark" markers from St. Louis, MO
to the Pacific Coast.

And not one that mentions this academic whose current reputation will go with him
to his grave.
That is, if it doesn't proceed him.

(To any worthy academicians who stumble across my rant, I apologize.
But having been around some of the warped ego nut-jobs of academia, I just couldn't help myself.)

[VOA]

...Notre Dame University historian Thomas Slaughter, author of the forthcoming
Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness.

Oh, and while I'm on a roll, I should mention one other fellow whose name will
be recognized LONG after this Slaghter guy is gone...
Stephen Ambrose.

There was an article in (believe it or not) The Los Angeles Times a few months ago
about Ambrose, his success, problems with plagiarism flaps, and his struggle
to beat cancer.

Ambrose said that of all the challenges he's had to writing about/popularizing
stories about American soldiers and exploreres, the worst was from his "fellow" academician.

IIRC, Ambrose said that in today's academic world of history research, a historian had
better be writing about the role of gays and lesbians in the Revolutionary War if
s/he wanted to get any academic respect.

Call me reactionary-conservative, but my money is on Lewis and Clark...and of the
bigger-than-life heroes that Ambrose has memorialized...not of some whiner
named Slaughter.

[Nonstatist]

Lewis and Clark may have been the first whites to cross the Rockies in the United States

You can always pick out a New Republic contrarian deconstructionist handjob; they concede the main point and then drag in a crate of irrelovent revisionist nitpicking. The fact that this was done in 1802, and not 1842 is kind of lost on the nitwit.

Thankfully, I quit reading that rag; I can often predict what theyre going to say before they say it.

[Teacher317]

Lewis and Clark - Stop celebrating. They don't matter

Gee, I didn't realize we had a "Lewis and Clark" national holiday, "Lewis and Clark History month", Lewis and Clark on our currency and stamps, along with several radically popular Lewis & Clark movies, video games, TV talk shows, etc. Our celebrating them is just totally out of control, isn't it?!!?

Why do white male leftists hate every accomplishment ever performed by white males, yet celebrate every silly "first by minorities" (first polynesian woman in space, first hispanic gay male at the North Pole, etc)?

[Cacique]

More of the before Karl Marx there was darkness and then there was light crap from the left.

Whatever culture and civilisation was created and put forth by caucasian dead Europeans doesn't matter because Orangutans would have eventually evolved to make a better world than us humans could.

[CholeraJoe]

don't you live down the stream from one of their outhouses or some such thing....?

I actually live six miles UPstream from where they spent the night of July 20, 1805.

[InvisibleChurch]

lewis and clark surveyed the entire trip to the pacific, much of it 'eyeballed'...turns out that they were off by an entire four (4) miles

[Freedom4US]

I would strongly urge anyone and everyone who hasn't read the Journal's to do so. Ambrose's book is very good, but I first cut my teeth on the story with Bernard DeVoto's 1954 edition "Lewis and Clark"; there are many others with varying degrees of readability.

Essential book to have at any campground, taking turns reading the days journal entries. Spelling is left intact (standardized spelling being a relatively recent phenom.) so we get such gems as "Muskeetors Vurry Trublesum."

One of the truly great exploration and adventure accounts ever penned. I'm not sure how Hollywood will mangle the story if they decide to make a movie. I suggest they use me as Director but I doubt that will happen.

[Freedom4US]

Oh -- another thing, a careful study of the expedition and one quickly comes to the conclusion that had they been led by anyone other than Lewis and Clark, they most assuredly wouldn't have made it to the coast, much less back. They had some great people with them -- Kentucky hunters, and good rifles -- guys like John Colter, the Fields brothers, etc etc

[MeekOneGOP]

There are three types of people in the world:
those who can count and those who can't.

- - - - - - - - - -

LOL!

[SunkenCiv]

Note: this topic is from 08/18/2002. Thanks Larry Lucido.

[21twelve]

That is pretty amazing only being off by 4 miles while estimating much of it!

Back in college we got to look through the old survey books in the museum of surveyors for the railroads. St. Louis to Denver, and they were off by a foot or something.

Amazing reading. Stuff like “Indians about, stayed in camp today.”

[mrsmith]

Idiots.
“Nothing useful” Ha! The difference betweeb the Gtizzly and Bruwn bear is enough by itself.

But sisssies want what they can understand...

[mrsmith]

Idiots.
“Nothing useful” Ha! The difference betweeb the Gtizzly and Bruwn bear is enough by itself.

But sisssies want what they can understand...