[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.

[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