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

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

[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.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Publicity is everything.

There are fourteen (14) (xvi) mountains in Colorado higher that 14,000 feet. Most people only know about Pike's Peak.

[Larry Lucido]

(xvi)

Did you mean xiv?

[Doctor Stochastic]

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

[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.

[rellimpank]

---better count the "fourteeneers" again--

[ATOMIC_PUNK]

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?

[Larry Lucido]

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.

[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.

[Larry Lucido]

Dig yields Lewis and Clark latrine!

[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.

[TeleStraightShooter]

. 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

[Freedom4US]

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.

[pabianice]

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

[DUMBGRUNT]

54 as I recall.

[xsmommy]

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