[Larry Lucido]

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.

[Larry Lucido]

Guess this should be General Interest rather than News.

[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.

[Dr. Frank fan]

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.

[Old Professer]

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.

[Bernard Marx]

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.

[arthurus]

This fellow doesn't like Americans much, does he?

[FairWitness]

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.

[pabianice]

Slate: stop reading it: it doesn't matter.

[xsmommy]

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[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...

[Larry Lucido]

Well, there apparently was no Seinfeld ping list in 2002. Not that it mattered. But Lewis and Clark mattered, finding the Pacific and all. Just like Desoto before them, discovering the Mississippi. Sure, they would have found it anyway, but still. Lewis and Clark matter!

[SauronOfMordor]

If Lewis and Clark were irrelevant, then that means that Sacagawea was TOTALLY irrelevant.