I purchased this book while on our vacation, at the bookstore at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis (aka The Gateway Arch), but only started reading it along about November 12. It has been a very fun read, to see how Lewis & Clark got There and Back Again, and I am actually sorry that they have made it back safely to civilization, because I was enjoying reading the book so much.
As you learned way back in American History Class, in May of 1804 President Thomas Jefferson sent his secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to be a c0-captain of an expedition (in concert with Captain William Clark), to go up the Missouri River to its source and then over the mountains to the Columbia River, and thence to the Pacific Ocean. While the exploration was in large part scientific and geographical, Jefferson wanted to establish a land route across the newly purchased Louisiana Territory to the beachhead in Oregon. He also told his explorers to establish if there was any connection between the Missouri / Columbia and the Saskatchewan River (heart of the British fur trade), so as to be able to position the United States to hijack the fur trade route through American soil; and also to determine if one could get from the Missouri to the Columbia via a short portage route.
Therefore, in May 1804 Lewis & Clark headed northwest from St. Louis up the Missouri River with a group of soldiers and boatmen (the barge and the canoes had to be brought upstream against the current by rope, paddling, and poling). They arrived in the Mandan Country (one man of the party died, apparently of a burst appendix) and set up Fort Mandan (near present-day Washburn, North Dakota); after spending the winter there working on establishing good ties with the local Native Americans, they sent the large boat back down to St. Louis with the boatmen who had come up with them, a detachment of soldiers, and several bales and packages for President Jefferson (including a “liveing burrowing Squirel of the praries”, according to Clark’s journal). The expedition then forged westward as they beat on, boats against the current.
The permanent expedition (from Fort Mandan westward) consisted of Lewis and Clark, four Sergeants, twenty-two Privates (including John Colter, later famous as an explorer of the West in his own right), two Interpreters (one of whom was Touissant Charbonneau), one Indian woman (Charbonneau’s wife Sacajawea), one infant (born to Sacajawea at Fort Mandan), one black slave (belonging to Captain Clark), and one dog (belonging to Captain Lewis).
During the next eighteen months this group made their way up the Missouri, across the Rocky Mountains (in the process meeting up with a Shoshone chief who was the brother of Sacajawea, which greatly aided the expedition’s relations with the locals), and down the Columbia to the Pacific; they wintered near the Pacific between 1805 and 1806, hoping that an American ship would touch shore (one never did; it’s never been explained why Jefferson did not send a ship, knowing that the expedition would be on the shore during those months), then heading back (going upstream along the Columbia, back across the mountains the moment the snows allowed, then splitting up and heading downstream down the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers, meeting up again, and taking an easy downstream route to Fort Mandan, and from there (minus John Colter, Charbonneau, Sacajawea, and their son) back to St. Louis, where they were greeted rapturously, as everyone in St. Louis had long since given the party up for dead.
Along the way both Lewis and Clark kept journals, which run to several volumes in an unedited state; hence, the need for this amendment by Bernard DeVoto. Both men wrote of the travel, of the game encountered and killed (they mainly ate off of the land), the Native American tribes encountered, and the landscape they were traveling through. After a certain amount of reading, one can tell without being told when a journal entry is from Clark’s journal, and when an entry is from Lewis’s journal; Lewis tended to be more descriptive and introspective, and just a tad more regular in his spelling, while Clark is more detailed about the making of boats and saddles).
The Journals are, as I noted, a fun read; Captain Clark has some twenty-six ways to spell “Sioux” (none of them ‘Sioux’); we read over and over about how ‘Musquetors Troublesome”; upon shooting their first grizzly with little trouble, Lewis notes “the Indians may well fear this anamal equiped as they generally are with their bows and arrows or indifferent fuzees [inferior flintlock rifles], but in the hands of skillfull riflemen they are by no means as formidable or dangerous as they have been represented” (he learned better later on); we learn that Sacajawea is of much more use to the expedition than her husband Charbonneau (he is a good interpreter, but he can’t hunt, navigate a boat, or ride a horse well); and we learn that Captain Lewis nearly lost his dog when it was stolen by Indians (he got it back; a good thing, or else it would surely have gone into the Indian’s cooking pots).
The editor of the present volume notes, “This condensation of the Lewis and Clark journals cannot be used instead of the original edition for the purposes of scholarship. It has been edited for the general reader.” And a very good read it is; I only regret that the maps provided are not of stellar quality, looking very circa-mid-1950’s in their style. But that is my only quibble, and I am very glad that I picked up this book at the Arch.
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