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

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

[Larry Lucido]

I was just going to put this book on my reading list.

Until I realized I read it 17 years ago and posted this thread.

Didn't Elizabeth Warren travel with Lewis and Clark?

By the way, I believe "Clark!" was the winning answer in the Pig in a Poke gameshow question on European Vacation, "Who was the Lieutenant in the Lewis and Clark Expedition?"

[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!

[SunkenCiv]

LOL

“Typical American *******s!” (in French)

[SauronOfMordor]

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

[PapaBear3625]

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 author assumes that, just because Lewis never published a book, that his information was never used. That he wasn't thoroughly debriefed by Jefferson and his staff upon his return, and his notes used in government planning.

[refreshed]

Don’t let this guy throw a wet blanket on your reading. We live in a day of revisionist history, and this is a good example. It is good to realize that Lewis and Clark were humans, but it is also good to recognize the amount of courage, tenacity and leadership they must have possessed to keep the expedition together. That is worthy of study.

[wildbill]

This is part of the “reconstruction” of the American mythology as an exceptional nation—or as I call it, the “destruction of the American ethose.”

Countries need their myths to teach their citizens that they are bound together by the deeds of past heroes. Where would Rome have been without the stories of their founding by Romulus and Remus and the mother wolf? Did Cincinatus really give up the reins of power when the crises was over? That legend certainly served Rome well in the time of the Consuls and in our own catalogue of civic virtues in America.