2. Wilderness Aesthetics
Frank Bergon
The Lewis and Clark expedition, like the adventures in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey, was a trek into an unfamiliar and often frightening wilderness—the first, longest, and largest of nineteenth-century United States government expeditions into terra incognita. Launched from St. Louis in 1804 in a 55-foot masted keelboat and two pirogues carrying more than 8,000 pounds of food and equipment, the Voyage of Discovery, as it was called, lasted two years, four months, and ten days. Round-trip, it covered 7,689 miles between the mouth of the Missouri River and the Pacific outlet of the Columbia River. To a young nation—the United States was barely seventeen years old at the time—Lewis and Clark brought back maps of previously uncharted rivers and mountains, specimens of previously unknown plants and animals, amazing artifacts, and even representatives of previously unseen peoples of the West. But the explorers’ most valuable contribution came in an elkskin-bound field book and red morocco-bound journals, stored in tin boxes. Written in an odd, fragmented style that vacillated between the languages of art and science in accordance with the aesthetic expectations of the day, these remarkable journals offered a new natural history of the West. More significant—and surprising—is that the strange, vacillating style of the journals came to characterize the entire genre of American nature writing in the nineteenth century.
Beginning in 1983, The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition have been appearing piecemeal from the University of Nebraska Press in a standard edition of thirteen volumes, including an oversize atlas, a volume of natural history materials, the diaries of four enlisted men, and the complete journals of the expedition leaders, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, once dubbed “the writingest explorers of their time.”[1] More than a million words of journal entries in over five thousand pages of text and annotation
But what about students and teachers of American literature? Do these expeditionary materials stimulate their interest with the same intensity as that of historians, scientists, and geographers? If for an answer we turn to current canon-forming literary histories and college anthologies, the response would be no. The journals are absent from major commercial anthologies of American literature published by Norton (1994), Heath (1994), Harper Collins (1994), Macmillan (1993), and Prentice Hall (1991), while the recent Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988) advises readers to forego the complete journals and explore a modern abridgment because “[t]edious detail so clutters their narrative.”[2] Perhaps a change is imminent. The more recent Cambridge History of American Literature (1994) discusses the journals at length, and the new scholarly Nebraska edition now provides an opportunity to see that these writings—with their logs of temperature and weather, astronomical observations, tabulations of longitude and latitude, descriptions of flora and fauna, anthropological data, misspellings, and neologisms—do indeed constitute a classic “literary pursuit”—a natural history of the lands, animals, and native peoples of the West that rises to the level of an American epic.
“Epic” is a word frequently and loosely applied to the expedition itself—the historic act of exploration—with respect to its magnitude, but the term might also characterize the journals as literary texts.[3] In 1989, when asked to produce a popular abridgment of the journals not unlike those recommended by the Columbia Literary History of the United States, I found myself arguing in the introduction that “no abridgment can fully convey the dazzling epic quality of the complete journals or their splendid achievement in the literature of natural history, for their effect is monumental and cumulative.” I organized the abridgment into the paradigmatic twelve-book epic scheme, and with the freewheeling hyperbole welcome to such editions, I argued that from the hindsight of almost two centuries, these uneven, fragmented, and unpolished journals offer the equivalent of a national poem. In a multistyled language as distinctive as those that characteristically identify ancient epics, they tell a heroic story of a people's struggles through a wilderness and the return home. Better than more artful poems or novels or plays, they embody with the directness and plainness of an oral tale the
To Lewis and Clark themselves, however, and the expectant readers of their time, the account of this particular epic followed the format of a work in natural history that conformed to a well-established New World genre. In 1526, when the Spanish naturalist and friend of Columbus, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, published his Natural History of the West Indies, he initiated a freshet of works in this genre from New Spain, New France, New England, and other New Founde Lands that left Lewis and Clark the inheritors of an American literary tradition more than 250 years old. As with many of their predecessors, Lewis and Clark's conception of “natural history” was rooted in the double meaning of history as it had evolved from Aristotle and Pliny. History, or ‘istoria, to the Greeks meant “an inquiry” or “an account of one's inquires,” so that natural history came to mean an inquiry into the natural world and a systematic account (without relation to time) of its observable forms. But history in the Aristotelian sense also meant “a narrative or tale or story” in time. Since many naturalists combined their “inquiry into nature” with a narrative of their journeys and adventures, it came to be accepted that natural history was an eyewitness account of nature encountered on one's travels. For the natural historians of the Americas, observable phenomena included landforms, water bodies, minerals, plants, mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, amphibians, invertebrates—all the expected and unexpected flora and fauna—as well as the commodities and manners of the people in these areas, especially those native inhabitants of the Americas known as Indians.
Lewis and Clark were heirs to this genre that, in the eighteenth century, despite increasing specialization in the sciences, remained for the most part a branch of literature. When Benjamin Smith Barton, scientific adviser to Lewis and author of the first American textbook of botany—a book the explorers carried on their journey—wrote to the naturalist William Bartram in 1788 thanking him for botanical information, he said, “I know not how to repay your goodness, and attention to my literary pursuits.” He urged Bartram to publish his manuscript of natural history because it would be of
That type of comprehensive book, with its particular fusion of scientific and literary concerns, was what Jefferson had in mind for Lewis and Clark. A fine naturalist himself, with a particular interest in phenology (the study of relationships between climate and periodic biological phenomena), Jefferson gave the explorers careful written instructions for observing and recording in detail the natural world. As a result, Jefferson's influence informs the journals like that of a muse. The Voyage of Discovery was his dream, and the journals his inspiration. For twenty years he had sought to have someone do what Lewis and Clark were finally accomplishing. As a congressman in 1783, Jefferson had unsuccessfully tried to enlist General George Rogers Clark, the Revolutionary War hero and William's older brother, to explore the lands west of the Mississippi. As minister to France in 1786, Jefferson supported the Connecticut adventurer John Ledyard in his daring but frustrated attempt to cross the continent by traveling eastward over Siberia and the Bering Sea and then walking from the Pacific Coast, over the Rockies, to the Missouri River. In 1793, as secretary of state and vice president of the American Philosophical Society, Jefferson backed another aborted exploration when he instructed André Michaux, France's most accomplished botanist, to “find the shortest & most convenient route of communication between the U.S. & the Pacific ocean.”[7] A current mis-conception found in several recent books is that when Jefferson, as president in 1803, finally received congressional approval and funds to launch his expedition across the continent, he invited Bartram to serve as the expedition's naturalist.[8] An admirer of Bartram's work and one of the first public officials, along with President George Washington and Vice President John Adams, to order Bartram's Travels, Jefferson did later try to enlist Bartram on an expedition up the Red River, which the sixty-five-year-old naturalist politely declined.
For the more demanding trek across the continent, Jefferson had had his eye on young Meriwether Lewis ever since the nineteen-year-old boy requested Jefferson's permission to accompany Michaux to the Pacific. For two years before the expedition, Lewis had virtually lived with Jefferson, serving ostensibly as the president's private secretary while training to lead the Corps of Discovery. In 1803, when Jefferson sent Lewis to scientists and physicians in Philadelphia for brief but intensive instruction in botany, zoology, celestial navigation, and medicine, he confided to Barton that he needed not just a trained specialist but someone with “firmness of constitution & character, prudence, habits adapted to the woods, & a familiarity with the Indian manners & character, requisite for the undertaking. All the latter qualifications Capt. Lewis has.”[9] As an ensign in the army, Lewis had earlier served briefly in a rifle company under the command of Captain William Clark, who became his immediate choice as a cocommander of the expedition. In both Lewis and Clark, Jefferson found men capable of “a remarkable mass of accurate observation.” In their ability to keep “a sharp lookout”—as the naturalist John Burroughs describes it[10]—Lewis and Clark shared with other naturalists, like John James Audubon, Thoreau, John Muir, and Burroughs, a trait that surpassed their formal scientific training. They were not scientific specialists; the word scientist in its modern sense had not yet been invented. They were natural historians whose range encompassed all of nature. The strange landforms and new watercourses the explorers encountered were the primary concerns of Clark, who served as the main cartographer and geographer, while Lewis was the botanist and zoologist. Both compiled a valuable ethnographic record of Indian people, especially of the Lemhi Shoshone, whose meeting with Lewis and Clark marked their first encounter with whites.
In 1803 the writing of this natural history faced political obstacles. The vast stretch of lands that Jefferson wanted documented was still a foreign territory subject to murky claims by Great Britain, Spain, France, and Russia. Jefferson tried to assure these nations that his encroachment into their possessions was a “literary” endeavor, undertaken in the disinterested spirit of expanding scientific and geographic knowledge. He also couched his secret congressional request for exploratory funds in careful terms. In addition to increasing the literary store of natural history, he was interested in looking for possible trade routes, he told Congress, for external commerce. Everyone knew otherwise, especially the European powers who were anxious to keep the original colonies of the United States tidily contained along the continental eastern seaboard. Jefferson's grand design, they knew, was imperial, to make way for American expansion from sea to shining sea.
As with earlier accounts of American explorers, the enterprises of natural history writing and colonization became intertwined. “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” was the eighteenth-century sentiment that seemed
Although the political and commercial ramifications of Lewis and Clark's trek are well known, they should not overshadow what Jefferson told Congress were the “literary purposes” of the venture. In fact, it might be argued that the expedition succeeded more spectacularly as Jefferson's “literary pursuit” than in some of its other aims. Lewis and Clark failed in their primary commercial purpose of finding a practical water route across the continent to link the United States in trade with China. There was no Northwest Passage. They also failed to establish workable routes up the northern tributaries of the Missouri to capture the Canadian fur trade for the United States. And they failed to establish a lasting peace with the native peoples, especially those who controlled passage on the Missouri, and the killing of two Blackfeet warriors actually aggravated relations with tribes of the Northern Plains. It is also questionable how firmly the expedition reinforced the nation's claim to the Oregon territory. But as a “literary pursuit”—a report on the lands, animals, and native peoples of the American West—the expedition succeeded in ways that only now, after nearly two hundred years, are fully appreciable.
In 1806 Jefferson greeted the return of Lewis and Clark to the United States with “unspeakable joy,” noting that even the “humblest of it's citizens” looked forward with impatience to publication of the explorers’ journals. The president envisioned a revised, polished version of the raw journals, similar to the literate accounts of Bartram's travels and Captain Cook's voyages. Within weeks Lewis released a prospectus announcing the 1807 publication of a three-volume history of the expedition, including all the “scientific results … which may properly be distributed under the heads of Botany, Mineralogy, and Zoology,” “a view of the Indian nations,” and “Lewis & Clark's Map of North America.”[12] This project was delayed and then ended with Lewis's death, an apparent suicide, in 1809. Responsibility for the edition shifted to Clark, then serving as Indian agent for the Louisiana Territory, who engaged the Philadelphia lawyer and self-styled litterateur Nicholas Biddle to deal with the journals. Meanwhile, a number of
I have hovered over this history of the manuscripts because the new Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, edited by Moulton, expands and updates the 1904–05 Thwaites edition. Moulton adapts Thwaites's format of printing Lewis's and Clark's entries in tandem with appropriate sections
Moulton's stated purpose is to gather these scattered materials into the first comprehensive, collated edition with a reliable, definitive text and a thorough, uniform annotation. No newly discovered, previously unpublished materials appear in this edition. Accurate transcription is the primary task. “I’m very concerned,” Moulton has written, “to get every jot and tittle correct. … We're supposed to do the final edition that will stand for all time.”[14]
A comparison of sample passages from the Thwaites and Moulton editions exhibits the measure of care taken in rendering an accurate text. Here is Thwaites's 1904 transcription of Lewis's well-known departure from the Mandan villages for the great unknown after sending the keelboat with 18 men and important expeditionary materials back to St. Louis on 7 April 1805:
Our vessels consisted of six small canoes, and two large perogues. This little fleet altho’ not quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook, were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs; and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for their safety and preservation. we were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had
And here is Moulton's corrected version:
Our vessels consisted of six small canoes, and two large perogues. This little fleet altho’ not quite so rispectable as those of Columbus or Capt. Cook were still viewed by us with as much pleasure as those deservedly famed adventurers ever beheld theirs; and I dare say with quite as much anxiety for their safety and preservation. we were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civillized man had never trodden; the good or evil it had in store for us was for experiment yet to determine, and these little vessells contained every article by which we were to expect to subsist or defend ourselves. however as this the state of mind in which we are, generally gives the colouring to events, when the immagination is suffered to wander into futurity, the picture which now presented itself to me was a most pleasing one. entertaing <now> as I do, the most confident hope of succeading in a voyage which had formed a da[r]ling project of mine for the last ten years <of my life>, I could but esteem this moment of my <our> departure as among the most happy of my life. (4:9–10)[16]
Moulton has made nine alterations in vocabulary, spelling, and punctuation. The slight difference between the two renditions, hardly noticeable to the normal reader, demonstrates that Thwaites did a good job in his original transcriptions, but Moulton's are even better. No one can anticipate when a minuscule alteration might significantly affect interpretation, and care in transcription now gives scholars a text to rely on. The same care is extended to the correction of Thwaites's notations. For example, Thwaites's binomial identification of a Lewis zoological discovery misnames the bushy-tailed woodrat as Neotama cinera (2:205), which Moulton silently corrects to Neotoma cinerea (4:354). The few typographic errors that appear in the new edition pop out of the editorial scaffolding rather than the texts themselves, where, I assume, editors properly applied more scrupulous proofreading. For example, Prickly Pear Creek is misspelled as “Prickley” in footnotes (4:406n. 5, 406n. 9, 410n. 2) though correctly spelled in the index, and Lewis's entry for 29 May 1805, is mislabeled without notation “1905” (4:215). The typographic slip of spelling “allitudes” for “altitudes” in the editorial front matter of volume 3 was apparently caught and corrected in subsequent volumes. After such evidence of careful editing, it may seem
In his arrangement of texts, however, Moulton has done a significant service by moving materials that were chronologically out of place in the Thwaites edition. For example, the extensive summations about rivers, Indian tribes, and botanical and mineralogical collections prepared during the winter at Fort Mandan, which Thwaites tucked into an appendix in volume 6 of his edition, now properly appear with the other writings of that winter to give a better sense of the captains’ enterprise among the Mandan. In other instances, however, interspersion of new materials, particularly from Clark's field notes, is not clearly noted. In the Moulton edition a passage about the Mandan by William Clark for 30 March 1805, in part, reads: “All the party in high Spirits, but fiew nights pass without a Dance they are helth. except the—vn. [venereal]—which is common with the Indians and have been communicated to many of our party at this place—those favores bieng easy acquired. all Tranquille” (3:322). This passage is absent from Thwaites, but whether the earlier editor neglected to transcribe it or whether the passage has been inserted into the journal from Clark's rediscovered field notes is not made clear. In other instances, one wishes controversial interpretations of transcriptions were noted. For instance, a longstanding problem in geographic nomenclature has concerned the captains’ naming of the Milk River (in present-day Montana). Lewis refers to the Milk River as the “scolding river” (3:367), the one called by Hidatsa “the river that scolds at all others” (4:248). The scholars Donald Jackson and Paul Russell Cutright both claim that “scolding river” makes no sense; they assume that Thwaites, in transcribing Lewis, mistook “scalds” for “scolds.” They argue that “scalds” or “scalding” could be a reference to the color and temperature of scalded milk, an interpretation supported by an entry in a para-phrased version of Private Joseph Whitehouse's journal, discovered in 1966: “Our officers gave this River the name, Scalding Milk River.”[17] To my surprise, the Moulton edition shows that Jackson and Cutright are wrong. Thwaites did indeed correctly decipher Lewis's handwriting and properly transcribed “scolds” and “scolding.” The Indian terms do make sense when
In 1980, at the start of the project, Moulton wrote, “The most difficult and time-consuming work on the journals will be in the area of annotation. In hundreds of footnotes, the staff will clarify and expand upon the manuscript diaries. If we were to edit the journals only in terms of placing the original material into print we could complete the project in short order, even considering the extreme care we will give to this dimension. But a great deal of effort will be required to search out the writers’ numerous obscure references to people, places, and events.”[18]
The editorial staff relied not only upon published scholarship for its annotations but also upon direct consultation with experts in various fields around the country. The result is a fund of information gleaned from anthropologists, archaeologists, astronomers, botanists, geologists, geographers, ornithologists, cartographers, historians, linguists, and zoologists. Identifications of plants, animals, people, places, and events along the route are excellent, but notes occasionally reflect incomplete assimilation of such varied sources. For example, in the sections on the Lemhi Shoshone the staff relied on the noted linguist and anthropologist Sven Liljeblad for clarification of Shoshone words and phrases. Information about the Lemhi Shoshone as a group, however, is spotty despite the extensive account Lewis and Clark provided. In volume 4, when Lewis's first use of the word Shoshone (“Sosonees or snake Indians” [4:398]) appears, a note tells us that “[i]t was not the Shoshone name for themselves” (4:401n. 3) but does not say what that name was or what “snake” signified. Later, in volume 5, we learn that the Shoshone “call themselves n i m i (singular), ‘person’ or n i m i n ii (plural), ‘the people,’” and the Lemhi Shoshone were a “division of the Northern Shoshones of the Rocky Mountains, known to the Great Plains tribes as ‘Snakes’” (5:85n. 7), but the staff offers no cultural or linguistic identification of the various Northern Shoshone “divisions” (some of whom, including Bannocks, were also called “Snakes”) or the related “divisions” of Eastern Shoshone or Western Shoshone, information that Sven Liljeblad or recent studies by Brigham Madsen, Wick Miller, Robert Murphy, and Yolanda Murphy could easily have provided. In a subsequent footnote, the “Tukudikas” [sic] are described as a “Shoshonean group … later referred to by whites as ‘Sheepeaters’ because they ate the bighorn sheep” (5:94n. 8), but it would be helpful to know that they are also called Agaideka (eaters of salmon) and they are a group of Northern Shoshone with an important relationship to the Lemhi Shoshone. Both the Tukudeka and Lemhi Shoshone had a common cultural origin and were virtually
Although the Moulton edition includes no previously unpublished writings or stylistic changes to transform or subvert our general impression of the explorers’ journals, it does radically improve the Thwaites edition in its weakest dimension—maps. As one wrestled with the boxed set of maps in the Thwaites edition, it was difficult to make heads or tails out of the sometimes mislabeled, accordion-pleated reproductions of poor quality. In contrast, the first volume of the Moulton edition is a foliosize Atlas of the Lewis and Clark Expedition reproducing in facsimile on thick, creamy pages the maps Clark sketched on the expedition, those the captains consulted beforehand, and those executed after the trip, all clearly organized, labeled, and described. It is a beautiful set. Many were unavailable or unknown to Thwaites. Of the 129 maps in the atlas, 118 are at original size, and 42 have never been previously published. Many of Clark's lost maps have been reproduced from accurate copies of his originals prepared for the 1833 expedition of the naturalist Prince Maximilian of Wied Neuwied and the great Swiss artist Karl Bodmer. The only disappointment is the omission of the 1802 Aaron Arrowsmith Map of North America. Moulton explains in a note that it is not printed because the Nicholas King 1803 map, which is printed, largely duplicates it. The reason doesn't hold up when one considers the overlap of other maps as well as Moulton's admission that King made significant modifications from Arrowsmith's map. As James Logan Allen notes, the Arrowsmith map was “the single most important item of cartographic data” available to the explorers; more detailed than the King map in representing the upper Missouri basin, it served as a template for the explorers’ cartographic corrections of the area.[19] Jefferson had ordered a copy in the summer of 1803, and it is virtually certain that Lewis and Clark carried the map with them on the transcontinental trek. When gathering
Nevertheless, thirty-four of the maps in the atlas show about 900 previously undetailed miles of the trip, and all reinforce the achievement of Clark as a geographer who sketched the course of the journey with impressive care. He records the longitude and latitude, though not always accurately, of all important geographic features as well as compass readings of each twist and turn in the streams and rivers he explored (Figure 2). As he sailed up the Missouri, Clark estimated distances by eyesight, recording, for instance, that the expedition had traveled between the mouth of the Missouri and the Platte River a distance of 600 miles. A surveying team several years later concluded from their instruments that the distance was actually 611 miles.
What does all of this material add up to in relation to those teachers and students of literature I referred to at the beginning of this survey? The maps suggest an answer. They are not just illustrative enhancements of the Moulton edition; they heighten our understanding of the explorers’ writings, for they offer a detailed portfolio of the exploratory process itself, which is dramatized to a greater extent than in most expedition accounts in the journals’ day-by-day record of route finding and decision making in the field. The 129 maps of the atlas also reflect a concern for measurement and demarcation informing much of the language of the journals. Almost any page offers the explorers’ counts and measurements or estimates of size, weight, and time. On 21 July 1804 Clark observes the Platte River with typical detail:
the Rapidity of the Current of this river which is greater than that of the Missourie, its width at the Mouth across the bars is about ¾ of a mile, higher up I am told by one of the bowmen that he was 2 winters on this river above and that it does not rise <four> 7 feet, but Spreds over 3 miles at Some places, Capt Lewis & my Self went up Some Distance & Crossed found it Shallow. This river does not rise over 6 or 7 feet.
The Otteaus a Small nation reside on the South Side 10 Leagues up, the Panies on the Same Side 5 Leagues higher up—about 10 Leagus up this river on the S. Side a Small river Comes into the Platt Called Salt River. (2:401, 403)
After killing a rodent that the explorers eventually name the prairie dog, Clark notes: “The toe nails of his fore feet is one Inch & ¾ long, & feet large; the nails of his hind feet ¾ of an Inch long, the hind feet Small and toes Crooked, his legs are Short and when he Moves Just Suffcent to raise his
Figure 2. Great Rapids of the Columbia River, sketchmap by Clark. (American Philosophical Society)
it was a most tremendious looking anamal, and extreemly hard to kill notwithstanding he had five balls through his lungs and five others in various parts he swam more than half the distance across the river to a sandbar & it was at least twenty minutes before he died; he did not attempt to attact, but fled and made the most tremendous roaring from the moment he was shot. We had no means of weighing this monster; Capt Clark thought he would weigh 500 lbs. for my own part I think the estimate too small by 100 lbs. he measured 8 Feet 7½ Inches from the nose to the extremety of the hind feet, 5 F. 10 ½ Inch arround the breast, 1 F. 11 I. arround the middle of the arm, & 3 F. 11 I arround the neck; his tallons which were five in number on each foot were 4 ⅜ Inches in length. (4:113)
The explorers are here engaged in their work as scientific collectors of objective data about the natural world. These details, when added to astronomical symbols and tabulations of longitude and latitude, produce those texts that the Columbia Literary History of the United States finds so cluttered with tedious detail. But the cumulative effect of this detail is monumental. Clark's hunters shoot 1,0001 deer. In one day Lewis with ten men catch 800 fish. Gifts for Indians include 2,800 fishhooks, 4,600 assorted needles, and 130 twisted rolls of tobacco. Among medicines are 3,500 pills to counter sweats, 1,100 doses of emetics to induce vomiting, and over 600 pills, appropriately named “Rush's Thunderbolts” after their inventor, to counter-act constipation. On the Missouri a floating mass of white feathers 70 yards wide and 3 miles long lead to an island covered with thousands of pelicans. The petrified backbone of an ancient fish is 45 feet long. The carcass of a beached whale measures 110 feet. July hail 7 inches in circumference hits the ground and bounces 12 feet into the air. Under the unbearably difficult circumstances of their composition, the writing of such detailed accounts was the most heroic of acts. Bristling with factual matter characteristic of scientific enterprises in the New World, the texts also reflect early American literary fascination with registering the density of the physical world and ways of encountering it. The extensive language of measurement and demarcation elevates the journals into an epic of the quotidian.
In contrast to the language of contemporary science, the journals also offer the explorers’ subjective responses in language borrowed from the prevailing lexicon of art, including literature, painting, sculpture, music, and architecture, to produce a vacillating style. The language of eighteenth-century science with its penchant for objective observation and quantification vies with that of art in its figurative modes of classifying the natural world. Both forms of expression, however, are ordered by the prevailing aesthetic expectations of the day. “Nature does nothing in vain” was the scientific position of the seventeenth-century physician William Harvey, and
In the 1780s such aesthetic assumptions intertwined with political ideology to shape Jefferson's argument with the French naturalist, the comte Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, about the character of the natural world in the Americas. Jefferson offered measurements of everything, from the height of American mules to the size of strawberries from his own garden, to counter Buffon's theory that flora and fauna had degenerated in the inferior environment of the New World so that “animals of America are tractable and timid, very few ferocious and none formidable. … All animals are smaller in North America than Europe. Everything shrinks under a ‘niggardly sky and unprolific land.’” About America's wild animals, Jefferson exclaimed, “It does not appear that Messrs. de Buffon and D’Aubenton have measured, weighed, or seen those of America.” In the aftermath of this debate, Lewis and Clark's descriptions of large bison and fierce grizzlies became both scientific and patriotic weapons. Jefferson's view that the bones of what he called the Megalonyx in Virginia provided triumphant evidence against the purported degeneracy of American animals, along with his belief that the economy of nature disallows the annihilation of any species, led him to order Lewis and Clark to look out for signs of animals deemed rare or extinct, like the mammoth. According to the “traditionary testimony of the Indians,” as Jefferson reports in Notes on the State of Virginia, “this animal still exists in the northern and western parts of America.”[21]
As for the native peoples of the New World, Jefferson is happy “for the honor of human nature” to dismiss Buffon's claim that Indians are feeble, insensitive, timid, cowardly, and listless—lower than animals—lacking passion, intelligence, honor, body hair, and developed sexual organs. Lewis and Clark's detailed accounts of native habits and physical characteristics support Jefferson's defense, including his riposte that the “Indian is neither more defective in ardor nor more impotent with his female than the white man.”[22] The explorers even comment on the bare breasts of women and
No ideologues of Noble Savagery, Lewis and Clark also report what they perceive as brutality, thievery, and squalor. Their mixed accounts of unsavory and noble behavior create a complex ethnographic record of culturally diverse native peoples in their historical situation. “I think the most disgusting sight I have ever beheld,” Lewis notes about some northwestern coastal women, “is these dirty naked wenches” (6:436), and Clark finds a coastal Cathlamet village “the dirtiest and Stinkingest place I ever Saw” (7:10). The cultural biases of certain reports are clear, as when Lewis watches some starving Lemhi Shoshone eating raw venison innards—kidney, spleen, liver—“blood running from the corners of their mouths”; one man “with about nine feet of small guts one end of which he was chewing on while with his hands he was squezzing the contents out at the other. I really did not untill now think that human nature ever presented itself in a shape so nearly allyed to the brute creation. I viewed these poor starved divils with pity and compassion” (5:103). Just three months earlier Lewis had delightedly praised his own cook's preparation of boudin blanc—composed of buffalo innards, intestine, and a “moderate portion” of what normally “is not good to eat”—as “one of the greatest delacies of the forrest” (4:131). Those Indians the explorers find least aesthetically pleasing and most corrupt are tribes on the northwestern coast who have had extensive commerce with whites. Deteriorating and demoralizing conditions even extend to the speech of coastal Indians who “inform us that they speak the same language with ourselves, and gave us proofs of their veracity by repeating many words of English, as musquit, powder, shot, nife, damned rascal, sun of bitch &c.” (6:187).
In pursuing Jefferson's directions to gather linguistic information, Lewis and Clark engage in the search for the possible origin of Native Americans and their interconnections within the human family. The explorers collect extensive vocabulary lists, make comparative observations, and note inflectional distinctions in Indian speech. The Flatheads, they notice, appear to have a brogue as they speak a “gugling kind of languaje Spoken much thro
Apparent in Jefferson's views of native peoples and the natural world are the aesthetic underpinnings of value and meaning provided by the Linnaean concept of oeconomia naturae—the governing plan that sustains the processes of nature and the existence of individual species so that all natural things are interconnected, chained together, in a common, ordered function. The antecedents of such an aesthetic view extend at least as far back as Plato, but Linnaeus approached the question of nature's balance, or nature's economy, as a scientific problem, albeit one with a mythological basis as old as Plato's Protagoras and a theological basis in its manifestations of the creator's benevolent disposition. What Linnaeus found in nature was an economy that worked for the good of the whole and the preservation of individual species. What Lewis and Clark found in the wilderness did not consistently support such an amiable view. A shadow world of disorder, underlying every aesthetic scheme, thus provides dynamic tension to the language of the journals.
Still, an aesthetics of order, moderation, regularity, and stability shaped Jefferson's and the explorers’ preconceptions of western rivers and mountains. Long navigable rivers flowing eastward suggested their counterparts in the West. One supposedly could anticipate the western course of the Missouri from the eastern course of the Ohio. The same apparent symmetry affected the order of mountains. “Our mountains,” Jefferson writes, “are not solitary and scattered confusedly over the face of the country; but that they commence at about 150 miles from the seacoast, are disposed in ridges one behind another, running nearly parallel with the seacoast.” Jefferson adds that “as the tract of country between the seacoast and the Mississippi becomes narrower, the mountains converge into a single ridge.”[25] A country seemingly ruled by such balance and economy had given rise to the myth of the Northwest Passage, a fantasy bolstered by the dreams of earlier explorers
Lewis and Clark's subjective responses to the western wilderness also drew from artistic tropes ruled by Enlightenment assumptions of harmony and order. Lewis finds a pleasing neoclassic balance between wildness and sweetness in the songs of birds, described as those “feathered tribes who salute the ear of the passing traveler with their wild and simple, yet s[w]eet and cheerfull melody” (4:266); and he likens a stretch of the Great Plains to a “beatifull bowlinggreen in fine order” (3:80). Expectations of encountering fertile, well-watered lands across the country trigger frequent, hopeful notations on areas suitable for agrarian settlement. Adjacent to “lofty and open forrests,” Lewis finds “one of the most beatifully picteresque countries that I ever beheld … it's borders garnished with one continued garden of roses” (4:266). Even late in the journey when the country does not quite measure up to its promise, Clark can speculate that it would be fine when cultivated. The explorers do seem at times like new men in a new Eden, walking peacefully among hundreds of animals that will not scare: “the whol face of the country was covered with herds of Buffaloe, Elk & Antelopes; deer are also abundant, but keep themselves more concealed in the woodland. the buffaloe Elk and Antelope are so gentle that we pass near them while feeding, without apearing to excite any alarm among them, and when we attract their attention, they frequently approach us more nearly to discover what we are” (4:67).
Horror shatters this Edenic world in the form of enraged grizzlies, rampaging buffalo, violent storms, flash floods, smashed boats, horses rolling down hillsides, feet torn and bleeding from cactus needles, incessant rain, fleas, and mosquitoes. The thick, multiridged labyrinth of lines “scattered confusedly”[26] on Lewis and Clark's Map of the West denotes the actual Rocky Mountains the explorers enter, where, as Lewis writes, “every object here wears a dark and gloomy aspect. the tow[er]ing and projecting rocks in many places seem ready to tumble on us” (4:402). Rather than the easy two-day portage the explorers anticipated, the trek spanned some 45 days of hardship from the headwaters of the Missouri to those of the Columbia. A reverential distance from wilderness might allow one to see reflected there a benevolent order and a peaceable millennium, but in the space of one day, Lewis is chased into a river by a bear, attacked by a “tyger cat,” and charged by three buffalo bulls. “It now seemed to me,” he writes, “that all the beasts of the neighbourhood had made a league to distroy me” (4:294). The wilderness becomes animate in a way that is as primal as it is gothic. Measurable topography and objective events melt into romantic “seens of
When the conventions of the age fail to encompass the western wilderness, Lewis opts for the conventional trope of noting such failures. While trying to describe the Great Falls of the Missouri, Lewis “truly regretted” that he had not brought along a camera obscura, sometimes called a Claude glass, the popular device carried by tourists that projected an image though a lens onto the back wall of the box. The reflected photographic image could then be traced onto a sheet of paper, rendering the scene into the ordered perspective of picturesque art. But as commentators like Robert Edson Lee and Robert Lawson-Peebles have noted, the Great Falls of the Missouri would only elude the tranquil principles of Claude Lorrain's aesthetics. To apprehend these extravagant waterfalls, Lewis also “wished for the pencil of Salvator Rosa … or the pen of Thompson,” but the aesthetic framework informing the wild, desolate scenes of the seventeenth-century Italian painter and the eighteenth-century Scottish poet would be “fruitless and vain” for Lewis to achieve (4:285). Only the concept of the Burkean sublime, which, as Ernst Cassirer notes, had shattered the “conceptual framework of previous aesthetic systems,” could suggest the grandeur that “fills [Lewis] with such pleasure and astonishment” (4:285).[28] Enlightenment order collapses into sublime asymmetry, and the aesthetic of measurement shifts to the aesthetic of the measureless to accommodate natural disorders like floods and earthquakes. Still, Lewis feels he can offer only an “imperfect description” of these “truly magnificent and sublimely grand” torrents of falling water (4:285). Unlike Jefferson, who confidently described the Natural Bridge on his own Virginia property as the “most sublime of Nature's works,”[29] Lewis wrestles for two days to covey a “faint idea” (4:285) of the beauty and sublimity that distinguish the twin falls, only to come up with his own uneasy, qualified categorization of them: “nor could I for some time determine on which of those two great cataracts to bestoe
It is now a commonplace of Lewis and Clark criticism to characterize the stylistic extremes of the two explorers as reflections of their sensibilities. Laconic, measured, and scientifically objective accounts of the environment are identified with Clark. Effusive, romantic, and subjective literary responses are identified with Lewis. The styles supposedly mirror the personalities of the two men as polar opposites: Lewis as a brooding introvert given to melancholy speculation, Clark an even-tempered, sociable extrovert inclined toward good-natured self-effacement. Charles Willson Peale's famous portraits, now hanging in the Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, seem to emphasize these contrasting images. Clark, a husky man with a high forehead and shock of red hair, looks boldly from the canvas directly at the viewer, while Meriwether Lewis, tall and slender with sensitive bow lips and an aquiline nose, gazes dreamily toward the side of the canvas. The contrasting careers of the two men after their renowned expedition have also reinforced the image of Clark as a gregarious public official and Lewis as a moody loner. Clark pursued a long and distinguished career as superintendent of Indian affairs at St. Louis, while Lewis experienced a brief and troubled governorship of the Louisiana Territory—ridden with alcoholism and abruptly terminated by a murky death.
The stylistic differences of the two men cannot be ignored, nor can their differences of temperament—Lewis is more subjective, circumlocutory, and polished, Clark more terse, objective, and direct—but the journals do not bear out the rigid categorizations of either style or personality imposed from the hindsight of their subsequent careers. Lewis employs the descriptive discourse of science as scrupulously as Clark, even more so in many cases, particularly in regard to flora and fauna, where his command of technical terminology is greater. Lewis's rhetorical nod to the “truly magnificent and sublimely grand” (4:285) Great Falls of the Missouri occupies only a brief moment in pages of careful observation and measurement. At times Clark's quantitative topographic recordings also might break into brief rhetorical flourishes about “butifull fertile picteresque Country” (7:223), or a place he called “bad humered Island as we were in a bad humer” (3:114). The distinction between verbose Lewis and laconic Clark also needs qualification, for Clark contributed to the journals many more of the 862,500 total words than did Lewis. Unless some journals were lost, Lewis made entries for only 441 of the 863 days, while Clark provided entries for all but 10 days, which he later summarized.
Moments even occur where the two men seemingly reverse personalities, and Clark becomes the melancholy loner depressed by bad weather and bugs, while Lewis retains his joie de vivre amid misfortune and longs for the
The expeditionary record shows that Lewis and Clark form an alliance that transcends their differences of personality and style. They seem to command, effortlessly and without conflict, as one; over the course of the journey, both demonstrate cunning, intelligence, and dignity in their leadership of others. In chronicling their trials and achievements, the heroes of this epic adventure sing of themselves, becoming—in a modern literary twist—their own bards. Where modesty commends one to silence about his own achievement, history compels the other to document the worthiness of the event, producing an absence of boastfulness that Theodore Roosevelt found so impressive. The effectiveness of this strange alliance, a sharing of command that defies military hierarchy, is unique to military history. While Lewis enjoys eating dog meat and Clark hates it, Lewis craves salt and Clark dismisses it as a luxury, and Lewis likes eating black currants and Clark favors yellow ones, the two leaders otherwise form a perfectly harmonious relationship. A moving aspect of the journals is how much they care for each other. They remain friends to the end.
It is the composite character of these leaders—their pervasive outpouring of intellectual and moral energy—that sustains the expedition and guarantees its success. This composite character manifests itself in the thousands of right decisions the leaders jointly make to avert disaster. Only when Lewis and Clark are apart on the return journey does tragedy strike, when two Blackfeet Indians are killed. Clark's declamations against the harsh winter weather also peak when the men are separated. While they are still apart, Lewis is almost killed when accidentally shot by one of his own hunters. It is as if the division of the classical hero into two men allows Lewis and Clark to embody heroic impulses in believable ways. They become heroes cut down to credible size, eighteenth-century men who merge into a composite character acceptable to the skepticism of the modern age. Of all the heroic moments recorded in the journals, however, none surpasses the writing of the journals themselves. In a touching moment, Lewis notes “the ink feizes in my pen” (5:133), and yet he continues to write. When the explorers copy from each other's field notes or journals, original authorship sometimes becomes blurred or lost. The “I” of some entries becomes that composite hero and author whom Clark seemed to honor, after his cocaptain's death, when he named his son Meriwether Lewis Clark. The journals appropriately end with William Clark's last brief entry on 25 September 1806: “a fine morning we commenced wrighting &c” (8:372).
The vacillating style of this composite authorship is less the product of differing sensibilities than of the era's competing languages of art and science. That two men happened to write the journals conveniently symbolizes the split in discourse that had characterized American nature writing since the eighteenth century. In the 1787 edition of his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson typically jumps from the language of science to that of art when his quantitative description of Virginia's topographic features breaks into paeans to the sublimity of the Natural Bridge or the Potomac River. Even more extreme are the wild swings in style in William Bartram's 1791 Travels. Bartram's sudden flipflops between neoclassic poetic tropes and scientific Latinate descriptions now cause student wonderment that such a schizophrenic text was actually written by one person. A similar tension continued into the nineteenth century, evident in the split between Thoreau's transcendental flights and those journalistic observations once dismissed as dry, meaningless factual details about grasses, snowfalls, tree rings, lichens, and seeds. After the Civil War, the prose of trained geologists like John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, and Clarence Dutton vacillates between technical description and metaphors drawn from mythology and architecture to shape a visionary, aesthetic response to an apparently inanimate landscape. Static buttes, mesas, and canyon lands become animate dramas of shifting forms under the violently changing pressures of wind, water, fire, and light. In My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), John
Part of the reason for the vacillating style of American nature writing lies in the increasing professionalization of scientific pursuits and scientific language in the eighteenth century. Earlier writers of American natural history drew from a common language, free of specialized terminology, to record both natural phenomena and personal experience, so that Thoreau could refer to the “strong and hearty but reckless hit-or-miss style” in the early works of John Josselyn and William Wood, “as if they spoke with a relish, smacking their lips like a coachwhip, caring more to speak heartily than scientifically true.”[31] By William Bartram's time, “natural philosophy,” a term once loosely encompassing all scientific pursuits, had become sharply differentiated from “natural history,” which in turn was splintering into the specifically termed studies of botany, zoology, geology, and mineralogy. Specialization of scientific tasks was making way for the nineteenth-century invention of the word scientist, and the specialized language of naturalists like Bartram pointed toward James Fenimore Cooper's caricature of Dr. Battius in The Prairie (1827), floundering through the wilderness, a danger to himself and others, oblivious to everything except new species, while gibbering in the Latin derivatives of the Linnaean system.
Why Lewis and Clark avoided the Linnaean system of taxonomy and nomenclature has puzzled many commentators. Recent studies have shown Lewis to be better trained and more scientifically competent than is often assumed. His careful descriptions of plants include no fewer than two hundred technical botanical terms. He had studied Latin as a young man and had worked for two years with Jefferson who, as Cutright observes, “took to binomials like a poet to iambic pentameter.” At Fort Clatsop in 1806 Lewis exhibited familiarity with Linnaean principles in the organization of his ethnobotanical and ethnozoological data. Because they provided the first detailed, formal descriptions of new flora and fauna, the explorers are now credited with the discovery of 178 plants and 122 birds, animals, fish, and reptiles, including the cutthroat trout, mountain quail, pack rat, western hognose snake, western meadowlark, kit fox, Lewis's woodpecker, and Clark's nutcracker (see Figure 3). But in their journals Lewis and Clark employ Latinate classifications only three times and an actual binomial only
Figure 3. Manuscript page by Lewis, 24 February1806, with his sketch of a eulachon, or candle fish, Thaleicthys pacificus. (American Philosophical Society)
The explorers’ scrupulous adherence to Jefferson's instructions during the trip west suggests that their use of the vernacular met with the president's charge and approval. “Your observations are to be taken,” Jefferson wrote, “with great pains & accuracy, to be entered distinctly, & intelligibly for others as well as yourself.” Although Jefferson himself used scientific names as often as the vernacular in his own writings, and although he believed in the aesthetic and theoretical order of nature's economy, he maintained the first task of good science to be the accurate collection and precise description of data. “A patient pursuit of facts, and cautious combination and comparison of them is the drudgery to which man is subjected by his Maker, if he wishes to attain sure knowledge.” A faulty scientific investigator like Buffon too precipitously selects “facts, and adopts all the falsehoods which favor his theory, and very gravely retails such absurdities as zeal for a theory alone could swallow.” As a Lockean empiricist, Jefferson notes that “he who attempts to reduce [the natural world] into departments, is left to do it by the lines of his own fancy.”[33] Here, Jefferson joins hands with his old intellectual avatar, Buffon, who had attacked the Linnaean system from its inception, arguing that its categories of classes, orders, genera, and species imposed an enormous abstraction on the natural world.
Jefferson's views dramatize what Linnaeus himself had come to realize: the systema naturae is actually a systema Linnaei. The system is artificial, Linnaeus grudgingly acknowledged, although he maintained that it was a step toward the discovery of the natural system he felt sure existed. In searching for the structure of nature and—his favorite slogan—the “object itself,” he sought to rid science of figurative language and allusion. But while rejecting the falsity of rhetoric, in Hobbesian and Lockean terms, as powerful instruments of error and deceit, Linnaeus found himself replacing one rhetorical trope for another. His “kingdoms” of plants and animals in the “empire” of nature, composed of “phalanxes,” regiments,” and “recruits” underscore the imperialist thrust of his scientific enterprise to dominate both the study of nature and nature itself. In his last edition of Systema naturae, however, Linnaeus no longer insisted on the immutability of species, the concept that had sustained the aesthetic order and metaphor of nature's economy. The Linnaean system, prior to the moment of its widest acceptance, was already crumbling.
By the time Lewis and Clark trekked into the West, rejection of Linnaeus's system and method was widespread. The breakdown was anticipated in Bartram's Travels, where an Ovidian world of metamorphosis shattered the Linnaean economy of nature. Likewise, in Elements of Botany (1803), appropriately illustrated with Bartram's pre-Darwinian drawings, Benjamin
Lewis and Clark's disregard of Latinate terminology coincides with a need to forge language appropriately descriptive of a new country and its inhabitants. While the explorers never completely abandon the literary and scientific conventions of their age, a qualitative change does occur over the course of the journals as those conventions diminish. Most of Clark's topographic descriptions in quantitative scientific language appear early in the journals. Conventional rhetoric and cultural assumptions break down as the country, animals, and native peoples of the West effect new forms of perception. Less often as they move west do the explorers encounter landscapes that “exhibit a most romantic appearance” (4:225). On the return home, the Rocky Mountains become to Lewis “that icy barier which seperates me from my friends and Country, from all which makes life esteemable” (7:267). Conceptual frameworks and aesthetic orderings, like instruments of measurement hauled from the East, crack, as did the expedition's three thermometers. Two streams the explorers tried to name in honor of the Enlightenment virtues of Wisdom and Philanthropy are now called Big Hole and Stinking Water. At the Great Falls of the Missouri, where Lewis finds his aesthetic descriptions shaky, he watches helplessly as his collapsible iron boat, designed and built in the East, sinks into a western river. In the Rockies, the explorers abandon their canoes and depend on Indian horses to cross the Bitterroot Range to where they can chop and carve native cottonwoods into dugouts for the final run down the Snake and Columbia Rivers to the sea. Attempts to render their experience, the country, and its wildlife through conventional expression give way to new terms. Language itself has to be altered in the process; words coined and twisted to fit the occasion produce in the journals, according to the lexicon compiled by Elijah Criswell, the first usage of 1,004 new words or extended meanings in the American language, some adapted from Native American languages and
The best linguistic study of the journals, Elijah H. Criswell's Lewis and Clark: Linguistic Pioneers, appeared as a quarterly issue of University of Missouri Studies in 1940. Although photocopies are currently available from the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, this fine 313-page monograph has never been republished. This is a shame, for Criswell's investigations of Lewis and Clark's Americanisms—ripe for correction and expansion—offer fruitful entry into the explorers’ achievement as writers. The Nebraska edition, for example, might have noted how Lewis and Clark, as masters of the vernacular, use American words that in some cases had recently entered the language, like cutoff, tote, overalls, barefoot, cloud up, overnight, shut of, lick (as a verb), jerk (in reference to cured meat) and balance (in the sense of “remainder” or “leftover”). Criswell presents 301 examples of new words or new meanings of old words that antedate their earliest usage cited in the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED does note that some Americanisms like noon it (as in “we nooned it just above the entrance of a large river” [4:124]) mark their first recorded appearance in the journals, but it leaves out others like the specific definition of cheek, as Clark uses the word, when he observes after Lewis is shot that the bullet “cut the cheek of the right buttock for 3 inches in length” (8:290).
The new Nebraska edition of the journals does not gloss words or extended meanings that Lewis and Clark contributed to the language, nor does it note when they use recently coined Americanisms, but it does draw on Criswell's lexicon to define some nonce words, like happerst as “some form of knapsack, perhaps from ‘hoppas,’ an Indian knapsack” (4:253n. 10). Other apparent nonce words or individualisms like dismorallity remain unglossed. We learn from Criswell that dismorallity is Lewis's humorous combination of disease and morality to describe flatulence as “a dismorallity of order in the abdomen” from smoking intoxicating Indian tobacco (6:179). As these examples show, not all neologisms in the journals have entered the language. Neither did the maxim, “accidents will happen in the best families,” nor the adage, “to push a tolerable good pole” (4:423), but such coinages do invest the journals with lively, inventive prose responsive to fresh experience. Given the excellent annotations of the Moulton edition in other fields, one can only wish that it might have more fully built on these preliminary linguistic investigations and filled their gaps. For example, the term hair pipe baffled Criswell. “I do not know,” he writes, “the identity of this article apparently taken along for Indian trade.”[35] Moulton offers no help. The term hair pipe receives no gloss. But as one can readily see in Karl Bodmer's and George Catlin's paintings of Great Plains Indians, hair pipes
Besides freshly minted words that would eventually make their way into dictionaries, the explorers’ diction and syntax reveal the survival of obsolete words and the frequent use of archaisms in American speech. Many words, though departing from today's standard English, extend back to older forms, even to Middle English. When Lewis refers to a woman's breast as a “bubby,” his use of this obsolete word lacks the vulgar connotations of later slang and employs its former acceptable usage in prose and poetry by writers like John Dryden. When Clark writes “for to” (as in “I prepare Some presents for to give the Indians of the Mahars nation” [2:474]) and Lewis writes “same of” for “same as,” the result is not bad grammar but use of once standard forms that have survived in American dialect into the twentieth century.
Irregularities of grammar and spelling in the journals have given commentators much to chuckle over. A favorite observation is that the explorers spell the word Sioux at least twentyseven different ways. In an age when orthographic variants were common, even Jefferson consistently began sentences without capital letters and spelled words inconsistently. But the absence of standardized spelling before the publication of Noah Webster's dictionary in 1828 cannot account for the extremes of the journals. Who but Clark, one scholar asks, could create such a “classic howler” as “fee Mail” for female?[36] Yet in spelling accent “axcent” and sagacity “segassity,” the explorers are clearly striving to spell words phonetically. Rather than howlers and malapropisms the explorers often accurately present the vernacular as it was heard at the time in the speech of Virginia and Kentucky backwoodsmen. Sharp ears, rather than ignorance or subliteracy, account for much of the inventive orthography in the journals.
While Criswell's study is primarily one of vocabulary, not of grammar or orthography, his work offers a valuable starting point for investigation of the journals as a compendium of colloquial pronunciation. Some spellings produce dialect reminiscent of Mark Twain's best efforts to put colloquial speech on the page, as when we read “fur” for far, “git” for get, “jest” for just, “tegious” for tedious, “furin” for foreign, “pint” for point, and—sounding much like Natty Bumppo—“sarvisberry” for serviceberry. In certain words, consonants intrude or disappear, as can still be heard in some regional dialects today, as in “idear” for idea, “onced” for once, “musquetor” for mosquito. The same is true for the formation of doubly inflected participles like “drownded.”
Variations in spelling, along with departures from current standard usage in the forms of nouns and the tenses of verbs, sometimes reflect not only
We might argue that the vernacular adds a competing strain to the literary and scientific languages of the journals. In a way it does, producing a linguistically tense, multistyled text common to epics, like Dante's, that employ the vernacular. In such tensions, symbolically reinforced through dual authorship, the journals characterize the vacillation in much American nature writing between, on the one hand, scientific precision and poetic extravagance, or on the other, scientific reductiveness and poetic vision. The vernacular occasionally offers a way out of this split by fusing literary and scientific concerns in untechnical language. When Lewis describes how antelopes are like birds on the plains, figurative language anticipates the metamorphosis of post-Darwinian science. Anthropocentrism diminishes. One aspect of nature is defined in terms of another. When Clark documents the rise and fall of a river in the animistic speech of a backwoodsman, his writing fuses the relicts of an older language with that of future geologists like Powell or King whose visions of landscapes are more alive than conventional science would allow. The literary result of such composition, unlike a scientific experiment, is as unrepeatable as a Twain novel.
The new Nebraska edition of The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition in its inclusiveness takes an important step in fostering appreciation of the journals as an important contribution to American literature. On display are those monumental accumulations of data and varied systems of notation—a massive achievement in the genre of natural history—that take on epic characteristics. Ragged and unpolished, the journals now bear comparison to oral tales that are often even more expansive, digressive, and tediously detailed, unlike the doctored versions that survive in popularly printed editions. The unpolished journals appropriately become an unfinished epic for a nation still discovering its ties to the natural world. Like other great nature writers, Lewis and Clark often move against contemporary conventions toward an apprehension of the unknown and the uncategorized in imaginative ways that abandon technical terms and stock conceits for fresh, flexible uses of the vernacular. Such writing anticipates
NOTES
1. Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783–1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), v.
2. William L. Hedges, “Toward a National Literature.” Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 202.
3. In 1893 Elliott Coues comments on his edition of the journals, “This is our national epic of exploration” (introduction to History of the Expedition Under the Command of Lewis and Clark, ed. Elliott Coues [1893; reprint, New York: Dover, 1965], 1:v). In 1988 the editor Gary Moulton agrees, “It is our national epic of exploration” (“Lewis and Clark: Our ‘National Epic of Exploration’ Worthy of Monumental Editing,” Nebraska Alumnus, 1 March–1 April 1988, 8). John L. Allen notes that the expedition “has long been recognized as the American exploratory epic” (review of The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, vols. 2–4, ed. Gary E. Moulton, William and Mary Quarterly 46 [1989]: 630). Marius Bewley observes that the “community that existed between Lewis and Clark” and the members of the expedition “was very much of that character we find described in heroic poetry” (“The Heroic and the Romantic West,” New York Review of Books, 8 April 1965; reprinted in Masks and Mirrors: Essays in Criticism [New York: Atheneum, 1970], 214).
4. Frank Bergon, introduction to The Journals of Lewis and Clark, ed. Frank Bergon (New York: Viking, 1989), xvii; William Gilpin, Mission of the North American People, Geographical, Social, and Political, rev. 2d ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874), 130.
5. Benjamin Smith Barton, letters to William Bartram, 19 February and 13 December 1788, in Bartram Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 5, 4.
6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, quoted in Francis Harper, introduction to The Travels of William Bartram: Naturalist's Edition, ed. Francis Harper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), xxvii; Thomas Carlyle, letter to Emerson, 8 July 1851, in The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 468.
7. Jackson, Letters, 669.
8. The erroneous claim seems to have originated with N. Bryllion Fagin's William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933), but it reappears in Josephine Herbst's New Green World (1954); Joseph Ewan's introduction to William Bartram, Botanical and Zoological Drawings, 1756–1788 (1968); and Joseph Kastner, A Species of Eternity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), among others.
9. Jackson, Letters, 17.
10. John Burroughs, A Sharp Lookout: Selected Nature Essays of John Burroughs, ed. Frank Bergon (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 333.
11. Jefferson is quoted in Dayton Duncan, Out West: A Journey Through Lewis & Clark's America (New York: Viking, 1987), 10; Fisher Ames, Works of Fisher Ames, ed. Seth Ames (Boston, 1854), 1:324.
12. Jackson, Letters, 350, 591, 394–396.
13. Thomas Jefferson, Writings: Autobiography, Notes on the State of Virginia, Public and Private Papers, Addresses, Letters, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1313.
14. Howard Goodman, “Lewis and Clark Redux,” We Proceeded On 19, no. 4 (1993): 25–26.
15. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1904–05), 1:284–285.
16. Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, 13 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983–99). Any parenthetical page citations in chapter 2 text and notes are to this edition. The phrases in angle brackets are partly illegible words that Moulton has had to decipher.
17. Paul Russell Cutright, A History of the Lewis and Clark Journals (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 258.
18. Gary E. Moulton, “The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: Beginning Again,” We Proceeded On 6, no. 4 (1980): 15.
19. John L. Allen, Passage through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 79.
20. Jefferson, Writings, 176; Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man,” in Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 279, 300, 276.
21. Kastner, Species of Eternity, 123; Jefferson, Writings, 177, 176.
22. Jefferson, Writings, 183, 184.
23. Thwaites, Original Journals, 7:150–151.
24. Jefferson, Writings, 227.
25. Ibid., 142.
26. Ibid.
27. Jackson, Letters, 206.
28. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 329; Jefferson, Writings, 148.
29. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton, 1911), 129; Burroughs, A Sharp Lookout, 36. It is interesting to note that Stephen Fender discerns in the journals, letters, and diaries of 1849 transcontinental travelers a similar “double style,” varying between formal and factual description, picturesque and scientific rhetoric, or literal and figurative language. Fender extends his examination of the “fortyniners’ ‘double style’” to include “their better known contemporaries, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville, whose prose also exhibits (though more designedly and much more famously) the strategic fracture between fantasy and documentary fact” (Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 14). Although Fender has been criticized for a vague shifting of dualistic categories, his stylistic observations about
30. Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Torrey Bradford and Francis H. Allen (Boston: Houghton, 1908), 7:108.
31. Cutright, History, 8.
32. Paul Russell Cutright, Lewis and Clark, Pioneering Naturalists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 8. Field collectors like Lewis and Clark would normally not presume to name new species but would turn over their descriptions and samples to taxonomic specialists (usually noncollectors), like the German botanist Frederick Pursh, who received Lewis's herbarium and credited the explorers with providing 122 specimens of the new plants scientifically named and classified in his twovolume Flora Americae Septentrionalis (1814), including ones tagged with newly coined genera and species honoring their discoverers as Lewisia and Clarkia. Field collectors, however, would commonly use Latinate binomials for the identification of known species and Linnaean terms for the classification of new species, as Lewis does when comparing the eulachon or candle fish to “the herring, shad anchovy &c of the Malacopterygious Order & Class Cupea” (6:344) or when describing the magpie as a “bird of the Corvus genus” and “order of the pica” (3:83).
33. Jefferson, Writings, 1127; Jefferson, quoted in Charles A. Miller, Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 44; Jefferson, Writings, 1261, 1330.
34. Jefferson, quoted in John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1984), 33; Jefferson, Writings, 1086. Resistance to the Linnaean system coincided with widespread American suspicion of specialized terminology. The earlier objection of some poets like Joel Barlow to foreign terms in the American language, especially a Latinity equated with monarchy, also shaped the views of those in the sciences, like Charles Willson Peale. Although Peale's museum in Philadelphia provided an orderly exposition of natural history according to Linnaean principles, Peale himself rejected Linnaean terminology and complained to Jefferson that “men pretending to a knowledge must be humored with the high sounding names made from the dead Languages” (Jackson, Letters, 308–309).
35. Elijah Harry Criswell, Lewis and Clark: Linguistic Pioneers, University of Missouri Studies, no. 15 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1940), 45.
36. Robert B. Betts, “‘we commenced wrighting &c.’ A Salute to the Ingenious Spelling and Grammar of William Clark,” We Proceeded On 6, no. 4 (1980): 11.