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1. Contexts

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Though largely neglected by scholars and the general public for most of the nineteenth century, the Lewis and Clark expedition has attracted a great deal of attention since the centennial celebrations of 1904 and 1905. It would seem that the past one hundred years might be enough to exhaust the subject. After all, the expedition has a clear beginning and end, the route across the continent is well known and documented, various issues of the journals are widely available, and hundreds of authors have already written about the subject. Yet the increasing flood of books, articles, and films on the expedition suggests there may be no end to the appeal of Lewis and Clark and the ways it can be described or interpreted.

The most remarkable feature of writings on Lewis and Clark is not the sheer volume of material, but its narrow scope. Indeed, the Lewis and Clark expedition might be likened to a favorite national children's bedtime story—which like young children, Americans insist on hearing over and over. The physicality of the expedition generally receives the most attention, with Lewis and Clark and wild nature set up as antagonists in a classic tale of adversity and triumph. There is more to the appeal of the expedition than this, and it is unfair to suggest that recent scholarship on Lewis and Clark fits into this narrow story line. Nevertheless, there remains a great deal of work to be done on the broader contexts and meaning of the expedition. This section presents new views on the expedition, with particular emphasis on the conditions and concerns that shaped its purposes and ensured its lasting significance. The first three essays assess the support of organizations like the American Philosophical Society, the manner in which the journals fulfilled Jefferson's description of the expedition as a “literary pursuit,” and the social aspects of disease and injury and their medical treatments.

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1. Living with Lewis & Clark

The American Philosophical Society's Continuing
Relationship with the Corps of Discovery from the
Michaux Expedition to the Present

Edward C. Carter II

Both Benjamin Franklin's 1743 proposal for the creation of the American Philosophical Society and its 1780 charter charged the organization with fostering discovery and exploration through surveys, charting, and mapping of the unknown expanses of North America and its “Sea-coasts, or Inland Countries; Course and Junctions of Rivers and Great Roads, Situations of Lakes and Mountains,” and describing “the variety of its climate, the fertility of its soil,” all of which offered to “these United States … the richest subjects of cultivation, ever presented to any people upon the earth.” Over the years, the society has taken its responsibility seriously, occasionally mounting its own expeditions, subsidizing others, actively promoting exploration of the American West and the polar regions with federal agencies and the general public, regularly publishing the reports of expeditions and individual explorers, and amassing a vast array of rare manuscripts, printed works, and graphic collections of North American and oceanic exploration in its library. Admirable and valuable as these activities may be, in the eyes of the general public and the scholarly community, they are no match for the American Philosophical Society's role in helping plan and execute the Lewis and Clark expedition, preserving its records and fostering publication of those accounts for more than 185 years.

Thomas Jefferson was president of the American Philosophical Society from 1797 to 1814. During the first four years of his presidency, he was a “hands-on” leader and attended and chaired many meetings of the society, setting policy and initiating programs. After his removal from Philadelphia to Washington upon becoming the third president of the United States, he carried out his leadership through correspondence and surrogates. For the next decade Jefferson (APS 1780) was mostly concerned with the organization, training, and execution of the Lewis and Clark expedition between

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1803 and 1806, the allocation of the Corps of Discovery's booty, the flawed effort at publication of the journals, and the final donation of those invaluable documents to the society. Until his death on 4 July 1826, Jefferson gave books and manuscripts to the American Philosophical Society and successfully urged others to do likewise. Thomas Jefferson's principles, interests, generosity, and example have helped shape the American Philosophical Society's history and mission right up to the present time.^[1]

Knowing that the American Philosophical Society constituted the single greatest concentration of scientific talent and resources in the United States, he promoted its cause not only at home but also during his residence in Europe. Thus while the American Philosophical Society and its Philadelphia members provided Jefferson with intellectual stimulation and all-important friendship, it primarily served him as a source of inspiration by defining the level of scientific and technological competence Americans might achieve. The society also served as an instrument for advancing and diffusing American science and technology and, when constitutionally appropriate, assisting in or even executing federal projects. For his part, Jefferson not only materially enriched the society through donations of books, manuscripts, apparatus, and natural history items; provided active, interested leadership; but also added his great prestige to the society's name for nearly half a century.

Specifically, Jefferson's agenda for the society can be discovered in his great Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), probably the most important scientific book written by an American before 1790. First, Jefferson was eager to push western exploration and American claims beyond the Mississippi to the southwest and seek a water passage to the northwestern coast at the mouth of the Columbia. Second, he wanted to learn as much as possible about the Native inhabitants of all of North America—their languages, social and political organization, their means of livelihood, and ultimately their actual origins. Third, in response to the comte de Buffon's negative judgments on the degeneracy of American species, Jefferson was determined to identify American animal and plant species, measure them accurately, and compare them to supposedly superior European ones. He was also confident that the American environment that fostered such superior examples as larger and more numerous quadrupeds would extend its beneficent influence to his countrymen's physical, intellectual, and social wellbeing, as well as their political character and behavior.^[2]

The American Philosophical Society proved to be a valuable asset in Jefferson's “Westerning” efforts. In 1792–93, he drafted instructions on behalf of the society for a fact-finding mission up the Missouri River, and thence to the Pacific to be led by the French botanist André Michaux. The instructions from Jefferson to Michaux were a précis of those he drafted for Meriwether Lewis (APS 1803) a decade later. Interestingly, the eighteen-year-old

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Lewis, farming near Charlottesville, evidently volunteered to accompany the Frenchman, but Jefferson refused his request.^[3] In any case, the expedition was diplomatically and politically aborted. The Michaux expedition, however, was not a total loss for either Jefferson or the American Philosophical Society. The process of reviewing “instructions” by qualified members of the society was begun and an intellectual and organizational framework was created for future exploration. André Michaux bore no ill will toward the society, which today holds the nine-volume manuscript of his North American botanical journal, 1787–96. His famous son and assistant, François-André Michaux (APS 1809), had close contacts with the society and bequeathed it 92,000 francs at his death in 1855 to contribute to the progress of agriculture and silviculture in the United States. Today the Michaux Fund's value is approximately $850,000.^[4]

Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society did not allow the failure of the Michaux expedition to deter them from pressing forward with what would become a major component of the Lewis and Clark expedition—an investigation of trans-Mississippi Native American social and political organization, trade patterns, and demographic distribution. In 1797 Jefferson joined the recently created History Committee charged with gathering a wide range of documents relating to the creation of the United States and also with searching for general information about and artifactual examples of Indian cultures, the meaning of the trans-Appalachian mounds, and evidence of the American mastodon. Many valuable manuscripts and printed documents were gathered in, but as time went by the committee's focus intensified on “the Customs, Manners, Languages and Character of the Indian nations, ancient and modern, and their migrations.”^[5] By this time, Jefferson had become president of the United States and the American Philosophical Society was the nation's first and most prominent center of Indian linguistics and ethnohistory. Its members proved to be important resources for Lewis and Clark in how best to deal with and study the Indians of the Missouri. The History Committee then became dormant but began to revive in 1811 and was formally reestablished in 1815 as the Historical and Literary Committee devoted to the study of general (European and Asian) linguistics and Native American languages and linguistics.

The driving forces on the committee were the society's librarian, John Vaughan (APS 1784) and the famed international lawyer and the committee's corresponding secretary, Peter S. Du Ponceau (APS 1791). Together these two men built up a world-famous printed and manuscript collection of linguistics and anthropology. Jefferson himself was involved and most helpful in scouting out key documents of early American history like the 1728 survey between Virginia and North Carolina. The committee held regular meetings and published its own Transactions. By 1817, it was an

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ongoing, vigorous quasi-independent body within the American Philosophical Society devoted to linguistics, anthropology, and history—the latter topic pleasing Jefferson who always thought “we were too much confined in the practice to the Natural and Mathematical Departments.”^[6] The significance of this somewhat lengthy discussion is to demonstrate that when the time came for Thomas Jefferson to decide where the Lewis and Clark expedition journals and associated documents should be finally deposited after Nicholas Biddle (APS 1813) and William Clark had concluded their editorial and publication work, the Historical and Literary Committee was a ready and appropriate home for these great documents.^[7]

The record of the transfer negotiations of the Lewis and Clark journals and other materials can be found in Donald Jackson's second volume of the Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Related Documents 1783–1854.^[8] Vaughan responded to Jefferson's initial letter of 28 June 1817, offering to gather the Lewis and Clark materials together for deposit with the committee, and informed Jefferson “that the Society had [already] received the manuscript journals of Zebulon Pike's expedition up the Mississippi and of William Dunbar's travels on the Ouichita, these having been presented to the Society by Daniel Parker, adjutant and inspector of the army.”^[9] If Jefferson needed any further precedent for making his deposit of the Lewis and Clark journals, this probably sealed the deal. And so they came to the American Philosophical Society in 1817–18, where they have resided and been cared for with great affection and professional proficiency ever since.

We now return to 1801 and the immediate years thereafter that witnessed the dramatic voyage of the Corps of Discovery. In March 1801 Thomas Jefferson assumed the presidency of the United States and Meriwether Lewis, an Albemarle County neighbor, became his private secretary, residing either in the White House or at Monticello. Most likely Lewis was selected not with an eye to his leading an expedition, but for his knowledge of the political opinions and convictions of the U.S. Army Officer Corps. But once Jefferson decided to go forward with a federal transcontinental exploratory enterprise, Lewis was ready, as was the American Philosophical Society. The Lewis and Clark expedition, a joint effort of President Jefferson, the U.S. Army, and the society, was the first major exploratory mission sponsored by the federal government. Clearly it was the greatest use of the society made by Jefferson, who submitted his draft instructions to the society for review and then enlisted society members to tutor Captain Meriwether Lewis in surveying, astronomy, medicine, natural history, and Indian ethnology. Members of the society were also assigned roles in the unsuccessful attempts at publishing the scientific findings recorded in the journals. Today the society is fulfilling its obligation by cosponsoring, with the University of Nebraska, Gary Moulton's definitive, award-winning, modern edition of The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition.

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A list of the society members who instructed and advised Meriwether Lewis in 1803 constitutes a contemporary pantheon of American science and medicine: in Philadelphia, Benjamin Smith Barton (APS 1789), natural history and the preservation of specimens; Caspar Wistar (APS 1787), anatomy and paleontology; Benjamin Rush (APS 1769), medicine and medical supplies; Robert Patterson (APS 1783), mathematics to support Lewis's astronomical skills; in Lancaster, Andrew Ellicott (APS 1785), astronomy and training in use of its instruments; and in Washington, D.C., Albert Gallatin (APS 1791), secretary of the treasury, Missouri River geography and cartography.^[10] Jefferson wrote letters of introduction to his society colleagues asking their assistance in training Lewis in the purchase of the correct supplies and instruments required, and in helping to assemble a working reference library for the expedition. The president swore his correspondents to secrecy because the Louisiana Purchase was not yet a reality and the expedition's Corps of Discovery's proposed path lay through foreign territory, and no one, as yet, envisioned the sudden purchase of Louisiana from Napoleon.

At the same time, April 1803, Jefferson wrote Lewis to inform him that “your destination is known to Mr. Patterson, Doctrs. Wistar, Rush & Barton” and instructed Lewis to submit the enclosed “copy of the rough draufht of the instructions I have prepared for you … for their perusal so that they may suggest any additions that they think useful. … A considerable portion of [the instructions] being within the field of the Philosophical society, which once undertook the same mission, I think it my duty to consult some of its members, limiting the communication by the necessity of secrecy in a good degree.”^[11] Jefferson's friends took their duties seriously and probably reviewed and amended the draft “Instructions” for the expedition several times. Patterson and Ellicott rejected a number of the astronomical and surveying instruments proposed by Jefferson as not practical for such a rough voyage and, by implication, because they were too sophisticated for a novice like Lewis. All (especially Benjamin Rush) were helpful in outfitting of the expedition in Philadelphia and the safe packaging of Lewis's fragile and perishable purchase of medical instruments and drugs.

This collaboration between members of the society continued during and after the voyage of discovery but with diminishing success. As Lewis and Clark pushed off upriver from the Mandan villages in April 1805, a major shipment of natural history specimens and Indian artifacts were sent back east to Jefferson. Many of these were then sent to the American Philosophical Society for study, classification, and, in the case of seeds, planting in the city's botanical gardens. The same process continued when Lewis and Clark returned in 1806, but with uneven results. Naturalists failed to prepare the materials for publication; much of the Lewis and Clark booty was dispersed and some eventually lost; and the publication plan announced to

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the public by Meriwether Lewis in 1807 floundered after his death two years later.^[12] However, as we have seen, the partnership took on new life with the 1814 publication of Biddle's two-volume narrative history of the expedition and William Clark's great printed map of its routes, and with the journals’ final deposit at the society several years later.

While the Lewis and Clark expedition was itself a triumph, the publication of its vital geographic, ethnographic, and other scientific findings was less satisfactory. Lewis, who was charged with arranging for the publication of the expedition's various reports, did little after selecting a Philadelphia publisher and apparently consulting with naturalists to work up those materials. Then Lewis died tragically in 1809, probably by his own hand, leaving the unfinished business for Jefferson and Clark to salvage as best they could with the planned publication. In fact, although the historical literature on Lewis and Clark is immense, it was not until the late twentieth century that the Corps of Discovery's definitive record would be made available in the multivolume modern edition.

Meriwether Lewis had announced in 1807 publication plans for a three-volume expedition report together with a separately issued large map documenting the Corps of Discovery's outbound and inbound routes and its principal geographic and ethnographic findings. The first volume was to be a chronological narrative of the expedition; the second was to deal with the geographic and other physical aspects of the territory traversed; and the third and final volume would be confined “exclusively to scientific research”—natural history and physical science. In the end, the first publication of the Lewis and Clark journals would be limited to Biddle's two-volume chronological narrative containing the engraved map. By the time of Lewis's death, Jefferson had retired to Monticello and Clark was deeply involved in his official duties in St. Louis, where he served as the Louisiana Territory's superintendent of Indian affairs. With his friend and comrade's death, William Clark took possession of all the records of the expedition. He traveled east in 1809–10 determined to discover a way to publish at least the narratives of the expedition—a task Clark felt was far beyond his own capabilities.

The ultimate solution lay in the recruitment of young Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia to undertake the work. Biddle was a lawyer, man of culture, and an important literary figure and editor. After the war of 1812, he would become the president of the Second Bank of the United States and in the 1830s President Andrew Jackson's archenemy in the realm of national fiscal policy. Biddle at first refused Clark's invitation but eventually spent about three weeks in the spring of 1810 with Clark at the family home of the captain's wife in Fincastle, Virginia. Together they studied the journals and discussed the expedition in great detail. It was agreed that Biddle would write a narrative account of the great enterprise, leaving scientific matters

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to experts. Clark turned over to Biddle the journals and other papers related to further publication. Upon Clark's return to St. Louis the two men corresponded about unanswered questions and publication problems. Biddle's synthesis was brilliant but unfortunately excluded the greater portion of Lewis's insightful natural history observations and descriptions.^[13]

When William Clark returned to his duties in St. Louis, he threw himself into the task of pulling all the cartographic records of the Corps of Discovery together, analyzing them, and producing the great “large Connected [manuscript] Map” of the Northwest based upon earlier composite maps, the expedition's highly accurate route maps, and Native American maps. Clark's masterpiece of American cartography also attempted to show some of the results of the exploratory efforts into the upper Arkansas and Rio Grande river basins by Captain Zebulon M. Pike (1805–7) and the individual travels of two former members of the corps: John Colter (1807–8), through the northeastern quarter of present-day Wyoming; and George Drouillard (1808), through some of the territory covered by Colter and through the Bighorn River's drainage area. Clark's manuscript map, now in the collections of Yale University, was sent in December 1810 to Biddle, who had it copied by the Philadelphia cartographer Samuel Lewis. This version was then engraved for inclusion in the 1814 publication (the engraved copper plate today resides in the society's collections).

William Clark's final cartographic achievement stands as one of the great maps of all times and perhaps the single most influential one of the American West, for it was upon this visual essay that our modern understanding of the topography of that vast area would evolve.

By this point, readers have noticed that the date of APS election follows the names of all the major figures in this essay—all, that is, but one—that of William Clark. It seems both incredible and immensely unjust that Clark, who shared the leadership of the expedition so brilliantly and tried to tidy up its loose ends after Lewis's death, was never elected to the American Philosophical Society. How might this have happened? The society retained records of the elections’ results, never of the preceding deliberations. Occasionally, members kept brief personal notes (against the laws of the society) and these have been found in personal papers. Nothing in Jefferson's correspondence or any known clandestine notes refer to Clark on such a matter.

Lewis himself was elected at the meeting of 21 October 1803 when he was in Clarksville, Indiana Territory, across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky, recruiting the Corps of Discovery's first enlisted men with Clark.^[14] Up to this point, Meriwether Lewis had really not accomplished anything of major consequence. Why was he elected at this time? The easy answer might be that he was the protégé, confidant, and friend of the society's president, who had urged his election. Perhaps a more likely reason is Lewis's

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“tutorial” visit to Philadelphia, during which he worked closely with the leading lights of the society. A number of them commented very favorably on Lewis, his character, and qualifications when responding to Jefferson's letters of introduction. I suspect that the Philadelphians thought Lewis a likely candidate for fame and put his name forward at the onset of his voyage of discovery.

But what about William Clark? Lewis himself had an opportunity to push for his best friend's election in the spring of 1807, a year after the Corps of Discovery's return from the West. By that time, William Clark was one of the most famous “scientists” in the United States and was well known to the society's Philadelphia members. Lewis attended three meetings of the society (17 April, 17 June, and 17 July 1807),^[15] which gave him an opportunity to propose and engineer Clark's election under the society's rules of the time. (Ironically, at the 17 April meeting, the society elected Ferdinand R. Hassler, professor of mathematics at West Point, who later attempted unsuccessfully to make sense out of Lewis's and Clark's astronomical computations and readings aimed at establishing the expeditions longitude and latitude at key locations.) We probably never will know if Lewis ever attempted to have his friend elected.

Jefferson always seemed to favor Lewis over Clark, primarily because of his close association with, and high regard for, his young Virginia neighbor. Their relationship cooled in the years before Lewis's death mainly because of the younger man's failure to push forward with the expedition's publications or to inform Jefferson about his personal or professional life. After 1806, Lewis did make clear to Jefferson the immense role Clark played in the expedition's achievements. Later, Jefferson worked closely with Clark and Biddle to publish the history and major findings of the expedition. Biddle was elected in 1813 to the society presumably because of this work, but Clark (a non-Philadelphian) was not.

In 1815, Jefferson gave up the society's presidency without seeing that William Clark received his proper reward from an organization that had benefited and would continue to benefit from the captain's coleadership of the greatest act of exploration in the history of the United States.

When Thomas Jefferson died on 4 July 1826, the Lewis and Clark expedition was fading from the collective American memory—diminished by the stories of others who followed the Corps of Discovery's track and the ensuing national tensions like the 1820 Missouri Compromise that, in part, were engendered by western migration and settlement. But at the American Philosophical Society, their great president's western dreams and accomplishments were remembered and celebrated (if only momentarily) on 11 April 1827 when the Eulogium on Thomas Jefferson was delivered by Nicholas Biddle.^[16] In a fair, balanced manner, he described Jefferson's long-term interest in western exploration, highlighting the achievements of the

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Corps of Discovery while placing them in context with other federal expeditions instituted by Jefferson like those of Pike, Freeman, and Hunter Dunbar. Biddle, the author of the 1814 History, made no mention of his own work. Perhaps he passed over the subject out of respect for Jefferson's thwarted hopes for full-scale, European-standard exploratory reports, including transcriptions of the journals themselves, the full cartographic record, and scientific assessments of the natural history and ethnographic discoveries.

There was little Lewis and Clark interest or activity at the American Philosophical Society until the end of the nineteenth century. The journals were not lost or buried at the society, as Elliott Coues (APS 1878) later claimed. They were listed in the society's two printed catalogs of the library's collections and occasionally the historically curious asked to see and even study them.^[17] In 1896, a monumental discovery was made when Thomas Meehan, a botanist at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, acting on a tip from a colleague, searched the society and located 179 of Lewis's plants “stored away, probably untouched for three-quarters of a century and somewhat decimated by beetles.”^[18] These were placed on permanent loan at the academy, where today they constitute the majority of the 227 specimens of the Lewis and Clark Herbarium (eleven other items are at Kew Gardens and one is at the Charleston Museum). The society's botanical holdings proved to be an important element in the renewed scholarly and public interest in Lewis and Clark that developed at the opening of the twentieth century.

The subject of the Lewis and Clark expedition also benefited from two contemporary developments of the late nineteenth century: the propensity to mark important national anniversaries and the professionalism of social science. The celebration of the centennial of American independence in Philadelphia during the summer of 1876 set off an anniversary frenzy that stimulated the nation's patriotic, historical, and promotional appetites. There were famous extravaganzas like the Columbian World Exposition held at Chicago in 1893 and lesser known ones like that of August 1887 when “the Village of Lititz, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania celebrated its one-hundredth birthday.”^[19] At the same time, the founding of the American Historical Association in 1884 marked the rise of professionalism in the field of history—a development that also took hold at the American Philosophical Society, which began electing leading university trained historians. When the American Historical Association appointed its Historical Manuscript Commission to promote the collection, editing, and publication of American historical documents in 1895, the society responded two years later by creating its own Committee on Historical Manuscripts to examine the library's historical documents and its early American imprints and consider ways to make them more available for study. These two movements—

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popular celebrations and historical professionalism—coalesced at the American Philosophical Society when under the auspices of its committee, the publishers Dodd, Mead issued Reuben Gold Thwaites's eight-volume edition (1904–05) of the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, consisting mainly of materials Jefferson had sent to Philadelphia. The committee's sponsorship of the edition was strongly motivated by two forthcoming centennials: the 1904 Louisiana Purchase celebration in St. Louis and the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial and American Exposition and Oriental Fair held in Portland, Oregon.^[20]

Elliott Coues had already published in 1893 his enlarged three-volume edition of Biddle's History, but Coues's work was not an edition of the journals!^[21] After their 1817–18 deposit, the journals and associated materials were only occasionally consulted throughout the balance of the century until Coues, a former army surgeon, a leading American ornithologist, and an APS member, “rediscovered” the journals in the society's collections. Coues proposed to undertake a new edition of Biddle's History, consulting all the previously excluded natural history commentary and data. With the society's permission, he removed the journals to his home in Washington, D.C. in 1892, and set to work on the project. While his 1893 edition of Biddle's History would prove to be “in many ways a masterly work,” his treatment of the journals by current standards—and even those of the times—was scandalous.^[22]

To make the journals easier to work with, Coues defaced them in a shameless manner. He organized the materials chronologically, placed labels on each notebook, providing each with an alphabetic codex (an identification system that continues today), and paginated the lot. He removed brass holding clasps and presented them to friends, added interlinear notes in the manuscript text, and trimmed ragged pages. Nevertheless the doctor-scientist-editor wrote excellent natural history annotations and brought a degree of order to Biddle's 1814 effort.

Coues's publication, for all its virtues, was not an exact transcription of the captains’ words but an expansion of Biddle's paraphrased narrative of 1814. The first true edition of the materials would be Thwaites's Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Thwaites, the director of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin and an experienced editor of western historical materials, discovered new Lewis and Clark “documents that greatly enhanced his edition.”^[23]

Following the publication of Thwaites's edition there was an upsurge of Lewis and Clark interest, discovery of more critical documentation, and an expansion of the literature by scholars like Milo M. Quaife, Bernard DeVoto, Donald Jackson, and Paul Russell Cutright. A number of abridged editions of the journals were produced as well, but no one undertook a complete, modern, definitive edition until the 1970s. Gary E. Moulton, with the

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cosponsorship of the University of Nebraska Press and the American Philosophical Society, undertook that task. Opening with a brilliant atlas volume containing the entire cartographic work, the distinguished edition advanced with remarkable speed through ten volumes of journals (including those of Sergeants Charles Floyd, Patrick Gass, and John Ordway, and Private Joseph Whitehouse), concluding in 1999 with a natural history volume on the expedition's herbarium. One hundred and ninety-three years after the Corps of Discovery's return to St. Louis, Moulton's Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition not only fulfilled but also far exceeded the dreams of Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark for the publication of the records and achievements of the great enterprise.

The American Philosophical Society took its sponsorship of the project seriously and over the years provided valuable technical and financial support for Moulton's work. The society not only allowed him free and unlimited access to the journals but also provided microcopies of all the journals, photographs of individual pages when necessary, photographed all the Lewis botanical specimens from the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences for the final volume, and made significant annual grants to the project (matched by the National Endowment for the Humanities). For more than a decade the editor spent several two-week visits in the library reading all the project's transcriptions against the original text. Our staff came to regard Moulton as not only a friend but also an honorary member of the library. Professor Moulton generously claims that the sponsorship and financial support of the American Philosophical Society opened doors at foundations and the pocketbooks of private donors.

Of course, the Lewis and Clark journals represent only a very small part of the society's large and distinguished research collections on western, polar, and oceanic scientific research and their accompanying holdings in anthropology and Native American linguistics and ethnohistory. Over the years thousands of researchers have visited the society to use these resources—visits that have resulted in hundreds of notable scholarly articles and books.

The early 1990s seemed an appropriate time to think of undertaking a conference on the progress and current state of North American exploration studies. A resurgence of western history was under way, heightening scholarly and popular interest in scientific expeditions and surveys. Readership in the society's manuscript and printed exploration and anthropological collections, always vigorous, was on the rise, perhaps helped along by the library's 1991 publication of William Stanton's American Scientific Exploration 1803–1865: Manuscripts in Four Philadelphia Libraries, which highlighted our extensive and varied holdings. On 14–16 March 1997, the Library of the American Philosophical Society held a three-day conference on North American scientific exploration attended by some one hundred and

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fifty scholars and interested members of the general public, who heard twenty-seven presentations organized into nine plenary sessions.

The meeting was intended to examine and, we hoped, illuminate new historical approaches to scientific expeditions and surveys, and to stimulate discussion and intellectual interchange between the new generation of scholars and their more established colleagues. To accomplish these goals the Program Advisory Committee invited participation of historians, art historians, historical geographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, historical botanists, and others. We proposed to investigate broad topics that represented both new directions of inquiry and those more traditional ones that should be revisited. By employing “Surveying the Record” as the conference title, we hoped that participants would look at the actual history of specific expeditions through a variety of disciplinary lenses and also reevaluate earlier scholars’ accounts of the explorative enterprise.

The conference was a resounding success and certainly demonstrated that exploration studies were alive and well, imaginative and diverse. Two years later the society published Surveying the Record: North American Scientific Exploration to 1930 containing sixteen of the conference papers (including two on Lewis and Clark topics).^[24]

In 1979 the society had taken a modest step in making original Lewis and Clark documents available to the public. It reused the engraved plate of the 1814 map to print 10 extremely clear and sharp unnumbered copies and 150 numbered ones, selling the latter for the benefit of the Friends of the Library before retiring the plate from service because of its fragile state. Then in 1998 the librarian called upon one of the nation's most distinguished fine printing and facsimile presses, the Stinehour Press of Lunenburg, Vermont, using offset lithography, to produce another “run” of 2,500 copies of the unnumbered map, together with an explanatory booklet. In essence, the 1814 printed map is a précis of the Lewis and Clark expedition itself—a concluding page of the great enterprise's tale. It can be “read” with pleasure and enlightenment in tandem with either a modern historical account or an edition of the journals.

A more recent dramatic example of the society's Lewis and Clark public outreach was made possible by a generous 1998 grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia supporting the production and complimentary distribution of a facsimile edition: Three Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition in 2000. A total of 1,200 complimentary sets was presented to federal repositories, state libraries and historical societies, major independent research libraries and historical societies, state and federal historical interpretive sites along the Lewis and Clark trail, some two hundred tribal centers, high schools, colleges and universities in the Delaware Valley, and selected colleges and research universities throughout the United States.

With the assistance of Professor Moulton, we selected three journals to

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comprise the facsimile publication. As all thirty codices are filled with interesting and exciting descriptions and events, the selection was a difficult one. We picked journals from different stages of the expedition reflecting a variety of geographic landscapes, climates, seasons, and activities. We felt it was important for the reader to have the benefit of both Meriwether Lewis's and William Clark's reporting, insights, and literary styles.^[25]

From a viewpoint of enlightened self-interest, the response to these facsimile editions was highly favorable. Tens of thousands of individuals who had never heard of the American Philosophical Society will now learn something about the society and its mission. The greater significance of these facsimile publications is that numerous students, scholars, and members of the general public can study at firsthand these key documents of America's creation.

What of the present and future relations of the American Philosophical Society with Lewis and Clark? The tidal wave of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial is already upon us, pulled along by the amazing national response to Stephen Ambrose's record-breaking best-seller of 1996, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, and the widely viewed PBS documentary by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery. The society's librarian has served as a director of the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council since its founding in 1994. This national body is officially charged with the tasks of raising public awareness of the celebration; working with federal, state, tribal, and local organizations to produce meaningful events and lasting results; and offering its good offices as a general coordinating body. The American Philosophical Society already is feeling the increased pressure of coping with numerous Lewis and Clark queries and requests for TV and newspaper interviews about the Corps of Discovery, the society's role, and related library holdings. There is also a rising tide of e-mail questions from members of the general public (of all ages), scholars, and publishers; and numerous requests for permission to film Lewis and Clark materials for documentaries. The society is working closely with the Missouri Historical Society on planning and mounting the major national traveling exhibit that will include items from our collections. In 2003 we will welcome the annual convention of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation to Philadelphia, and the society is planning to hold a symposium with Monticello on “Thomas Jefferson, the American Philosophical Society, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition.”

Although at present we are handling all these requests efficiently and generally with good spirits, it is clear we must become more selective in carrying out our Lewis and Clark mission over the next few years. Even the best public projects have a way of getting out of hand. A good example is our Three Journals, a facsimile edition that will reach thousands of students,

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scholars, and members of the general public throughout the United States. What seemed like a fairly straightforward project required the full-time attention of a senior staff member and his assistant for half a year after the design and photography were completed.

Regardless of such diversions, the American Philosophical Society is ready to meet the new, and perhaps most challenging, Lewis and Clark adventure of modern times under way since January 2003. To echo the sentiments of Meriwether Lewis on his departure from the Mandan villages en route to the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean beyond—the society will succeed in a voyage which has formed a darling project of ours for more than two hundred years.

NOTES

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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

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this twenty-year project. Edited by Gary E. Moulton, professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, this joint venture of several institutions and numerous scholars, the product of both private and government funding, came to completion just shy of the bicentennial of the 1804–06 expedition. According to a reviewer's puff quoted on a publisher's brochure, “These journals of exploits and courage in a pristine West have a simplicity and timelessness about them—never failing to capture the imagination of the ordinary reader or to interest the historian, scientist, or geographer.”

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

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mythic history of a nation. They tell the story of the tribe, moving west. Not the conventional mythic story of the lone frontiersman facing the wilderness, this tale depicts a cooperative enterprise: a fluctuating community of some thirty-five to forty-five people, including soldiers, woodsmen, blacksmiths, carpenters, cooks, French engagés, a black slave, a Lemhi Shoshone woman, and a newborn baby of mixed race, all heading west. In retrospect, the journals also dramatize the disturbing design of a nation committed to the arrogant belief that—as William Gilpin expressed it seventy years after the expedition ended—the “untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent.”^[4] In portending the destruction of one civilization and the rise of another, the journals reveal the dark imperialistic underside of the epical adventure.

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

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“essential benefit to the cause of Science [and] would be considered a very valuable presente to the literary world.”^[5] He was right. William Bartram's Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, published in 1791, quickly passed into no fewer than nine European editions. It seems only appropriate that this remarkable work, given the importance of its genre to the New World, was arguably the first book published in the United States to become internationally recognized as a literary classic. Coleridge copied passage after passage into his own notebooks and acclaimed it “a work of high merit [in] every way.” Images from Bartram's Travels made their way into Goldsmith's “Deserted Village,” Coleridge's “Kubla Khan,” Wordsworth's “Ruth,” and Chateaubriand's “Atala.” Carlyle asked Emerson, “Do you know Bartram's Travels? … treats of Florida chiefly, has a wonderful kind of floundering eloquence in it. … All American libraries ought to provide themselves with that kind of book; and keep them as a kind of future biblical article.”^[6]

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.

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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

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to become reality when Napoleon, short of cash after failing to overcome the slave revolt in Haiti, abandoned his own imperial ambitions in North America and tried to frustrate Britain's by selling the vast Louisiana Territory to the United States for three cents an acre. The United States suddenly doubled its holdings, and expansion to the Pacific became a virtual certainty. “The consequences of the cession of Louisiana,” President Jefferson predicted, “will extend to the most distant posterity.” Scarcely six months after congressional ratification of the sale in October 1803, Lewis and Clark were on their way across the continent, writing their journals, and the United States was on its way to becoming a world power. After hearing of the Louisiana Purchase, the Federalist Fisher Ames fearfully warned, “We rush like a comet into infinite space!”^[11]

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

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apocryphal patchwork accounts, composed of older explorers’ journals and Jefferson's message to Congress, had appeared in popular editions, as did the bowdlerized diary of the expedition sergeant and carpenter, Patrick Gass, whose Journal of the Voyages and Travels of a Corps of Discovery, published in 1807, quickly went through seven editions. Finally in 1814, Biddle's authorized History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clarke appeared, much to Jefferson's disappointment, because all the scientific material given to Barton for preparation had not been completed and was therefore excluded from what Jefferson called the “mere journal.”^[13] Biddle's version was a paraphrase of the original journals written in the first person plural that compressed the two captains into a composite “we,” with accounts of Indian sexual activity translated into Latin. This edition stood as the only representation of the explorers’ writings for nearly a century. In 1893 the redoubtable ornithologist and military surgeon Elliott Coues edited Biddle's history with massive annotations that brought attention to the previously neglected scientific material. In the process, however, Coues took liberty in emending the original journals, and his numerous interlineations on the manuscript earned him the derision of later scholars despite his valuable editorial achievement. Coues, however, wasn't the only person who had left his smudges on the pages. At the turn of the century, on the eve of the Lewis and Clark centennial, when the American Philosophical Society authorized a verbatim edition of the original journals, the manuscripts were a palimpsest of interlineations and emendations in different shades of ink by Coues, Biddle, Clark, and at least one other unknown person. Biddle's notes in red reflected his own words as well as those of George Shannon, a member of the expedition who, along with Captain Clark, had helped Biddle in his interpretation of the journals. The American Philosophical Society considered asking the Western writer Owen Wister to edit the manuscripts, but it finally selected the historian Reuben Gold Thwaites, who had just edited the 73 volumes of the Jesuit Relations (1896–1901). Thwaites chose to reproduce the journals in their current markedup state, using a variety of typographic pyrotechnics to indicate authorship of most emendations and interlineations except extensive ones by Coues. With a surprising paucity of annotation about the scientific and geographic achievement, Thwaites's edition focused on transcription and compilation of extant materials, so that in 1904–05, one hundred years after the expedition, there at last appeared a verbatim et literatim et punctuatim edition of the Original Journals of Lewis and Clark, and the captains’ actual words were published for the first time.

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

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introduced by the writer's bracketed name. As in Thwaites's edition, chapter divisions follow the chronological and geographic demarcations inherited from Biddle's edition, and the journals of enlisted men are consigned to separate volumes. Like Thwaites, Moulton has identified emendations and interlineations in the text; only he adds the emender's italicized initials. Moulton relies on reproductions of the Thwaites text as scanned by the optical character recognition (OCR) process but checked, for the first time in a century, against the original journals to ensure accurate transcription. In the last ninety years, misplaced or lost expeditionary documents, unavailable to Thwaites, have been found and published, most notably Lewis and Clark's 1803 eastern journal and Sergeant Ordway's three-volume journal, edited by Milo Milton Quaife. Quaife's 1916 publication of the eastern journal, which recounts the preliminary trip from Pittsburgh on 30 August 1803 to the Mississippi River, presented the captains’ earliest writings and extended the documented length of the expedition to three years and one month. Clark's field notes, discovered in 1953 and dubbed the “Dubois Journal” and the “River Journal,” were edited by Ernest Staples Osgood and published in 1964. Other valuable materials became available in 1962 with the publication of Donald Jackson's Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783–1854. These and other important books in the last fifty years have rendered Thwaites's scanty notations antiquated, and previously neglected achievements of the expedition in the realms of botany, zoology, medicine, ethnography, linguistics, and geography/cartography have become documented.

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

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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 or subsist or defend themselves. however, as 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. enterta[in]ing as I do, the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which had formed a da[r]ling project of mine for the last ten years, I could but esteem this moment of my departure as among the most happy of my life.^[15]

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

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unfair to suggest that the reading of a passage in Moulton is affected less by transcriptive changes than by the awkward three-to-four pound volumes in which they appear. Better suited to the scholar's desk than the reader's lap, these boxy books are less friendly to the general reader than is the Thwaites's edition with its compressed, old-fashioned print. Thwaites's notes, skimpy as they may be, do appear conveniently at the bottom of the page, a good place for many brief items that simply identify geographic location or the scientific denominations of plants and animals. Moulton's blocks of notes at the conclusion of daily entries, rather than in footnotes or chapter endnotes, are not always easy to locate, and their varied appearance within the text at the top, middle, or bottom of a page creates much shuffling back and forth between text and annotation.

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

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referring to the only stream of any magnitude above the mouth of the Yellowstone to discharge with enough force into the Missouri to churn, or “scold,” it. But Moulton offers no commentary on nomenclature that has puzzled historians since the appearance of the Original Journals of Lewis and Clark ninety years ago.

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

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indistinguishable until they diverged after the arrival of the horse. Today, however, both groups are still compositely referred to in the Shoshone language as Agaideka. In the annotations the generic term “Shoshone” causes confusion because it is repeatedly applied to the Lemhi Shoshone, despite the term's correct reference to a large language group of culturally distinct peoples ranging from northern Idaho to southeastern California. The staff's use of the term “Shoshonean” obscures matters even more because this linguistic category properly includes peoples as different as the Paiute, Ute, Comanche, and Hopi. Tossing around terms like “Shoshonean” and “Tukudikas” might produce the illusion of precision, but the uninformed reader remains so. In contrast, the staff provides full, clear annotations about other Native American peoples like the Mandan and the seven divisions of Teton, “those Sioux who spoke the western or Lak’ota dialect” (3:109n. 4). The excellent note about the Hidatsa amounts to a concise interpretive essay (3:206–207n. 8).

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

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information about the upper Missouri from the Mandan during the winter of 1803–04, Lewis refers to the errors “I see that Arrasmith in his late map of N. America has laid down” (4:266). Its absence from the atlas is unfortunate.

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

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body above the Ground” (2:430). On 5 May 1805, Lewis similarly considers the corpse of a terrifying grizzly:

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

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the eighteenth-century naturalist Thomas Jefferson concurs in Notes on the State of Virginia, “Such is the oeconomy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.” The stable relationships and processes of nature's economy, the concept that the great naturalist Baron Karl von Linné (or Carolus Linnaeus, as the master Latinist dubbed himself) coined in Oeconomia naturae (1749), were apparent to both eighteenth-century naturalists and poets. Everything is in balance in the vast chain of being, according to general laws, to produce “the amazing whole,” as Alexander Pope writes, “Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed.” The key to such beliefs comes with Popian succinctness: “order is Heaven's first law,” and “The general order, since the whole began, / Is kept in nature, and is kept in Man.”^[20]

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

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other “parts” of both men and women “usually covered from formiliar view.” When a Chinookan woman wearing a short cedar-bark skirt “stoops or places herself in many other attitudes, this battery of Venus is not altogether impervious to the inquisitive and penetrating eye of the amorite” (6:435). Many tall, well-proportioned Indians, like the Flatheads, who “are a very light coloured people of large stature and comely form” (5:197) and the Nez Perces—“Stout likely men, handsom women, and verry dressey in their way” (5:258)—counter French claims of physical degeneracy. As evidence against moral degeneracy, numerous accounts of kindness and honor include the story of a man who walked all day to catch up with the expedition to return a hatchet left behind in camp.

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

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the Throught” (5:188). Reluctant to harden their data into a premature theory, the captains do not write down what Joseph Whitehouse reports in his journal: “we take these Savages to be the Welch Indians if their be any Such from the Language. So Capt. Lewis took down the names of everry thing in their Language, in order that it may be found out whether they are or whether they Sprang or origenated first from the welch or not.”^[23] The legend that certain lightskinned Indians were offshoots of a Welsh prince named Madoc and his companions who had traveled to America in the remote past was a popular theory of origin based on speculation that Native Americans were descendants of Old World peoples like the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, or even one of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Jefferson had lamented the destruction of so many tribes before their languages had been recorded, for he firmly believed that comparative linguistics would eventually “construct the best evidence of the derivation of this part of the human race.”^[24]

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

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and substantiated by the illusory documentation of maps, including those Lewis and Clark consulted in preparation for their journey. A single “pyramidal height of land” (5:1), as the Arrowsmith map showed, would offer an easy portage between the eastward-flowing Missouri River and the westward-flowing Columbia River.

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

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visionary inchantment” (4:226) and “curious adventures” that “might be a dream” (4:294). In the woods we return to reason and faith, Emerson was to say, but not in the West of Lewis and Clark where “evil gennii” (4:225) lurk. The journals often become an epic story of confrontations with dark monsters and inexplicable powers. But the real snake in the garden hideously follows the explorers themselves. In the wanton smashing of a wolf'sskull with as pontoon, the slaugh tering of animals, and the proprietary attitudes toward the land, the explorers reveal sad glimpses of the dark side of American imperialism. Their first council with Native American likewise becomes both a threat and an omen. Characterized as the president's “red children,” the Otos and Miss our isare warned nottodis please “your great father, the great chief of the Seventeen great nations of America, who could consume you as the fire consumes the grass of the plains.”^[27] As a military expedition, the Corps of Discovery made way for others, seemingly bent on transforming what Clark calls “a land of Plenty” (3:66) into a land of waste.

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

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the palm, on this or that which I had discovered yesterday; at length I determined between these two great rivals for glory that this was pleasingly beautifull, while the other was sublimely grand” (4:290).

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

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companionship of friends and civil society. “O! how horriable is the day,” Clark writes in November 1805, during winter encampment on the Pacific Coast (6:79). “!O how Tremedious is the day. This dredfull wind and rain. … O! how disagreeable is our Situation dureing this dreadfull weather” (6:92); “Small bugs, worms, Spiders, flyes & insects of different kinds are to be … Seen in abundance” (6:94); “Since we arrived in Sight of the Great Western; (for I cannot Say Pacific) Ocian as I have not Seen one pacific day Since my arrival in its vicinity … tempestous and horiable” (6:104); “The winds violent Trees falling in every direction, whorl winds, with gusts of rain Hail & Thunder, this kind of weather lasted all day, Certainly one of the worst days that ever was!” (6:126); “The fleas are So troublesom that I have Slept but little for 2 nights past and we have regularly to kill them out of our blankets every day for Several past” (6:138). On Christmas Day 1805 Clark complains, “we would have Spent this day the nativity of Christ in feasting, had we any thing either to raise our Sperits or even gratify our appetites, our Diner concisted of pore Elk, So much Spoiled that we eate it thro’ mear necessity, Some Spoiled pounded fish and a fiew roots” (6:138). On New Year's Day 1806, as the weather improves, Clark flatly notes, “This morning proved cloudy with moderate rain, after a pleasent worm night during which there fell but little rain” (6:153). In contrast, Lewis is able to keep his spirits elevated as he faces the new year: “our repast of this day tho’ better than that of Christmass, consisted principally in the anticipation of the 1st day of January 1807, when in the bosom of our friends we hope to participate in the mirth and hilarity of the day, and when with the zest given by the recollection of the present, we shall completely, both mentally and corporally, enjoy the repast which the hand of civilization has prepared for us” (6:151–152).

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.

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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

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Muir's prose undergoes extravagant stylistic shifts not seen since Bartram's Travels 120 years earlier. Technical descriptions of lateral moraines, Quercus Douglasii, residual glaciers, albicaulus pines, and bituminous beds erupt into ecstatic renderings of the “spiritual affinities” binding the personalities of trees, ants, people, and “noble rock … full of thought, clothed with living light.” The birds of John Burroughs, reduced at one moment to conventional poetic epithets of “widowed mothers” or “happy bridegrooms,” are rendered vivid in subsequent sentences of astonishing transparency yet scientific accuracy.^[30]

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

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once. As a result, their prose does not reach the extreme vacillations of diction marking other works of natural history such as Bartram's.^[32]

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

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Barton Smith provided a running criticism of Linnaeus's ideas. Newly proposed systems had begun to dominate the sciences. Antoine Laurent de Jussieu's new botanical system was superseding that of Linnaeus. In zoology, Baron Georges Cuvier completely revised Linnaeus's classifications of animals, and Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck subverted the economy of nature with a theory of organic evolution. In the age of Romanticism, old metaphoric notions of teleology and animism that Linnaeus had tried so hard to kick out the door of science would reenter through the window newly guised in the acceptable concept of “life.” But to Jefferson, such scientific revolutions merely added more arbitrary systems to the old. He criticized Lavoisier's standardized nomenclature in chemistry for prematurely closing the door to discovery and retarding the “progress of science by a jargon.” One new discovery, he said, could send the whole system crumbling. “We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun,” Jefferson wrote. “The great extent of our republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new.”^[34]

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

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frontier French, others jammed into new linguistic hybrids. Instead of being honored for using scientific terms like Odocoileus hemionus, Lewis and Clark are remembered for adding the names “mule deer,” “prairie dog,” and “whistling swan” to the American language.

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

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are tubular lips of conch shells, about the size of normal pipe stems, drilled through the center from end to end so that they can be strung in the hair. They were as popular among Plains Indians as the famous blue beads that the explorers also brought with them.

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

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regional pronunciation but also the survival of once acceptable forms, as in “catched” for caught. In fact, the word fitten, whose usage in England is last noted in the OED in a quotation for 1642, continued to survive in America to become a favorite colloquialism of Twain. To study the journals in this way, as reflecting speech in the time of Lewis and Clark, opens a resource for understanding the development of American English. Perhaps an analogy with the interpretation of Mayan transcriptions is not inappropriate. For years, Mayan glyphs had eluded decipherment until scholars overcame the mistake earlier decoders had made in thinking that glyphic writing did not reflect spoken language. Reading the journals as largely oral transcriptions reveals Lewis and Clark's mastery of the vernacular in their achievement as effective, vigorous writers.

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

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future moments in Thoreau's Maine Woods (1864), Burroughs's Signs and Seasons (1886), and Muir's Mountains of California (1894), where fusions of documentary and visionary expression through a vernacular style will continue to invigorate the genre of American nature writing at its best.

NOTES

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3. “Two dozes of barks and opium”

Lewis & Clark as Physicians

Ronald V. Loge, M.D.

After the purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson entrusted the fate of the expedition to explore the Missouri River headwaters to his capable friend and personal secretary, twenty-eight-year-old Meriwether Lewis. Having planned the expedition for ten years, Jefferson outlined detailed and precise goals. He was interested in opening up the west in order to establish trade routes, particularly for the fur trade, and he wanted to lay claim to the Pacific Northwest. In addition, Jefferson wished to learn more about the indigenous peoples, their cultures, and their health. He provided Meriwether Lewis with the necessary instruction to prepare for this journey. Lewis invited a former fellow army officer and experienced frontiersman, thirty-two-year-old William Clark, to serve as cocaptain of this expedition of discovery.^[1]

This remarkable journey of 8,000 miles up the Missouri River, over the Rocky Mountains, down the Columbia River, and back again was successfully completed because of rigorous preparation, frequent good luck, and exceptional tenacity. Although the voyagers on this journey faced extreme weather, many types of injury and disease, and encounters with hostile Indian tribes and grizzly bears, only one of the expedition members died. The skillful leadership and care provided by Lewis and Clark were central to this successful outcome.

Possessing a low opinion of most physicians and their treatments, Thomas Jefferson considered a physician to be an unnecessary encumbrance on the expedition and assumed that all illnesses and injuries would be handled effectively by Captains Lewis and Clark.^[2] Some background about the state of medicine of the early 1800s helps explain how the capable army captains were able to function as physicians.

Medicine in 1804 had evolved very little in the two thousand years from

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the time of Galen and Hippocrates. Thus, the theories and treatments used in medical practice persisted into the nineteenth century. Newer scientific discoveries, however, had changed the names of some of these descriptors from good and ill humors of the Greeks to inflammation, morbid conditions, and nervous irritability. Purging and bloodletting endured as the standards of therapy.^[3]

The first medical school in the colonies was founded in 1765, and by 1800 the five medical schools in the new republic had graduated a cumulative total of 250 physicians. Many practitioners had little or no training. One doctor in ten held a medical degree. Though many nondegree physicians had legitimate apprenticeship training, impostors were widespread. A New York City newspaper from the late 1700s described the city as having forty doctors, “the greatest part of whom were mere pretenders to a profession of which they were entirely ignorant.”^[4]

Frontier areas had few, if any, trained physicians, and most of medicine was practiced with only a basic understanding of first aid. Midwives and “yarb” (herb) doctors were common. One of the better known yarb doctors in Albemarle County, Virginia, was Lucy Marks, the mother of Meriwether Lewis. She was undoubtedly a source of his knowledge of herbal remedies.^[5]

With an abiding interest in medicine, Thomas Jefferson had an extensive medical library and corresponded with leading physicians of the day. Jefferson understood very well the limitations of both insight and abilities possessed by his contemporaries. Succinctly summarizing the state of early nineteenth-century medicine, he wrote: “Thus, fulness of the stomach we can relieve with emetics; disease of the bowels, by purgatives; inflammatory cases, by bleeding; intermittents, by the Peruvian bark; syphilis, by mercury; watchfulness, by opium; etc. So far I bow to the utility of medicine.”^[6] These principles of medical practice outlined by Jefferson were the basis of treatments used by Lewis and Clark.

Therapeutic bleeding goes back to the time of the Greeks and was probably practiced even before written history. In Jefferson's time few maladies escaped treatment with the phlebotomy lancet. “Intermittents” described intermittent fever, usually malaria, but the term was also applied to any sort of fever. Peruvian bark, or cinchona, contains quinine and other alkaloids that reduce fever. “Bark,” the aspirin of its day, was used frequently by Lewis and Clark.

Syphilis was treated with mercurial salts. Mercury had been used for nearly three centuries to treat syphilis, both the primary and secondary forms, and was standard therapy through the end of the nineteenth century.^[7] Watchfulness, a diagnosis that included insomnia, anxiety, and probably even depression, was treated with opium.

To prepare Meriwether Lewis better for his formidable journey, President Jefferson sent him to Philadelphia to receive scientific instruction

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from some of Jefferson's fellow members of the American Philosophical Society. He expected Lewis to enhance his skills in natural history, zoology, botany, and astronomical navigation, and also to become proficient in field medicine.^[8] The principal teacher in Lewis's brief medical study was Benjamin Rush, whom Jefferson knew from the days of the Declaration of Independence, which they both signed.^[9] Dr. Rush was considered to be the most influential physician of his time. A zealous advocate of bleeding and purging techniques, probably to the extreme, Rush was said to have shed more blood than any general in history.^[10]

Although there is no record of any detailed medical training that Dr. Rush provided Meriwether Lewis, he did give Lewis a list of instructions for the health and hygiene of the men under his command and probably helped Lewis assemble medical supplies. Assessing Lewis's abilities for the mission, Rush wrote to President Jefferson, “Mr. Lewis appears admirably qualified for it,” thereby confirming to Jefferson that Lewis could be captain, naturalist, and physician.^[11]

Congress initially allocated $2,500 for the entire expedition, expected to field only a dozen men and take up to two years. Meriwether Lewis budgeted $55.00 for medicine and $696.00 for Indian presents, a ratio that reflected the relative needs he anticipated.^[12] As the journey unfolded, however, medicine, rather than the presents, secured the beneficial relationships with the northwestern natives.

A list of the medical items originally packed for this journey reflects the medical treatments of that era (see Table 1). George Gillaspy and Joseph Strong were Philadelphia physicians who owned the apothecary that supplied the medications. The total cost was $90.69, appreciably over budget. One-third of the expenditures, $30.00, was for Peruvian bark.

Other items included several laxatives (rhubarb, magnesia, and jalap, a powerful laxative derived from the Mexican morning glory) and substances to induce vomiting (ipecac and cream of tartar). Most frequently employed of the medical supplies were the bilious pills (fifty dozen) of Benjamin Rush, a potent laxative combination of jalap and calomel. Although inexpensive, Rush's bilious pills produced powerful results. Approximately 1,300 doses of laxatives were prepared for this journey. A medicine that would prove of great worth was vitriol, a topical solution of zinc sulfate and lead acetate, used for eye diseases.

Lewis, aware of reports from the upper Missouri River that syphilis was endemic amongst the Mandan Indians, anticipated that the sexual behavior of his men would require a store of mercurials.^[13] Calomel (mercurous chloride) was given orally as a laxative and also to treat syphilis. Lewis bought clyster syringes (enema and penis syringes). Although the penis syringe was designed to treat gonorrhea by urethral irrigation, it may have

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TABLE 1. Medical Items Purchased for the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Bought of Gillaspy & Strong the following article for use of M. Lewis Esquire on his tour up the Mississipi [sic] River, & supplied by his Order (Phila., May 26, 1803).—Viz.
SOURCE: Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents, 1783–1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 1:80–87.
15 lb. Pulv. Cort. Peru	$30.00	4 oz. Laudanum	.50
½ lb. Jalap	.67	2 lb. Ung. Basilic Flav. 50	1.00
½ lb. Rhei [rhubarb]	1.00	1 lb. […] Calimin 50	.50
4 oz. lb. Ipecacuan.	1.25	1 lb. Epispastric.	1.00
2 lb. lb. Crem. Tart.	.67	1 lb. Mercuriale	1.25
2 oz. Gum Camphor	.40	1. Emplast. Diach. S.	.50
1 lb. lb. Assafoetid.	1.00	1. Set Pocket Insts. Small	9.50
½ lb. lb. Opii Turk. opt.	2.50	1 lb. Teeth	2.25
¼ lb. lb. Tragacanth	.37	1. Clyster Syringe	2.75
6 lb. Sal Glauber 10	.60	4. Penis do.	1.00
2 lb. Nitri 33½	.67	3. Best Lancets .80	2.40
2 lb. Copperas	.10	1. Tourniquet	3.50
6 oz. Sacchar. Saturn. opt.	.37	2 oz. Patient Lint	.25
4 lb. Calomel	.75	50. doz. Bilious Pills to Order of B. Rush .10	5.00
1 lb. Tartar Emetic	.10	6. Tin Canisters 25	1.50
4 lb. Vitriol Alb.	.12	3. 8 oz. Gd. Stopd. Bottles 40	1.20
½ lb. Rad. Columbo	1.00	5 4 lb. 0 Tintures do	1.85
¼ lb. Elix. Vitriol	.25	6 4 lb. Salt Mo.	2.22
¼ lb. Ess. Menth. Pip.	.50	1. Walnut Chest	4.50
¼ lb. Bals. Copaiboe	.37	1. Pine do. Porterage	1.20
¼ lb. Traumat.	.50		.30
2 oz. Magnesia	.20		—
¼ lb. Indian Ink	1.50		$90.69
2 oz. Gum Elastic	.37
2 lb. Nutmegs	.75
2 lb. Cloves	.31
2 lb. Cinnamon	20
	$46.52

been more effective as a deterrent. Three of the best lancets were included in the inventory.

After securing the plans, training, and materials needed for the expedition, Captain Lewis traveled down the Ohio River and met his friend, William Clark, at Clarksville, Indiana Territory. They proceeded on to Camp DuBois, near St. Louis, where, during the winter of 1803–04, they assembled and prepared a crew of hearty woodsmen and army volunteers, now numbering fortyfive.

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In May 1804 the Corps of Discovery set off upriver on the mighty Missouri River at high water in a heavy iron keelboat and two smaller boats, called pirogues. The strenuous voyage had begun. These boats had to be rowed, sailed, poled, and pulled up the 2,300 miles of the Missouri River.

The voyagers had not traveled far before some men complained of sore eyes, probably from blowing sand and ultraviolet keratitis from the bright sun on the water. But the first real medical problem occurred on 4 July 1804, when one of the men suffered snakebite on his foot, which immediately began to swell. Captain Lewis applied a poultice of gunpowder and Peruvian bark to the wound.^[14] Lewis did not ignite the poultice, as was the practice in some quarters to treat snakebite.

No one was severely ill until mid-August when the group arrived at what is now the area of Sioux City, Iowa, where the only fatality on the entire journey occurred. Sergeant Charles Floyd died of an acute illness that was described as “bilious colic.” Floyd had complained of being ill for several days in late July but had soon improved. On 19 August, however, Floyd developed crampy abdominal pain, vomiting, and diarrhea and died the next day.^[15] Although no treatment is described in the journals, the customary use of purgatives and bleeding for such illnesses may have been employed, with catastrophic consequences. A ruptured appendix with peritonitis has been the traditional historical diagnosis used to explain Floyd's death. Floyd was about twenty years old, and certainly appendicitis is common in this age group. Arsenic poisoning and cholera-like illnesses have also been suggested as etiologies.^[16] Chronic peptic ulcer disease with perforation and peritonitis has not been previously considered and should be added to the list of possible causes of Floyd's illness and death. Undoubtedly, apprehension arose thereafter whenever anyone developed the frequently occurring symptoms of colic or abdominal pains.

Medical events were infrequent until the explorers reached Fort Mandan, where the corps spent its first winter on the banks of the Missouri River, adjacent to Mandan and Hidatsa Indian villages. These friendly Indians provided food for the visitors in exchange for trinkets and important blacksmith goods. But of greater significance, the captains acquired knowledge of the upper Missouri, the uncharted waters ahead of them.

Also traded were sexually transmitted diseases! Clark wrote: “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” (3:322). The natives believed that powers or “medicine” could be transferred through sexual relations. Thus, it was a common practice for esteemed visitors to have the honor of sexual intercourse with the Indian women.^[17] Since syphilis was endemic in the tribes, Lewis and Clark administered mercurials throughout that winter.

Clark learned that smallpox had previously decimated some of the Mandan

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villages. Although helpless against smallpox epidemics, the Indians might have been aided by Lewis and Clark if President Jefferson's plans could have reached fruition. Jefferson and Rush, both ardent advocates of Jenner's new cowpox (kine-pox) vaccination methods, believed that the scourge of smallpox could be prevented. In his final instructions to Meriwether Lewis in June 1803, Jefferson wrote, “Carry with you some matter of the kine-pox,” and he encouraged Lewis to teach its use to and vaccinate especially those with whom they would spend their winter encampment.^[18] The potentially historic opportunity to vaccinate the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes never came about because, as Lewis reported in a letter to Jefferson in October 1803, “the Vaxcine matter,” supplied by the president, “has lost it's virtue.”^[19]

During that cold Dakota winter when the group experienced forty days of temperatures below zero, frostbite was common. In January they found a young Indian boy who had spent a 40-degrees-below-zero night out on the prairie wrapped only in a buffalo robe. He had badly frostbitten toes, which turned gangrenous. Three weeks later, the captains sawed off the boy's affected toes (3:281). His recovery likely left a favorable impression on the Indians.

The most significant event of the winter at Fort Mandan was the captains’ introduction to Sacagawea, a Shoshone woman who had been captured by the Hidatsa Indians four or five years earlier. Lewis and Clark immediately perceived that she would be a key link to the western Indians. She was about sixteen years old, married to a French fur trapper named Charbonneau, and pregnant. In February 1805 Sacagawea began a long and difficult labor. Captain Lewis was approached by Ren Jessome, another French fur trapper, who said that in situations like this “he had frequently administered a small portion of the rattle of the rattle-snake” (5:291). Lewis had a rattle that Jessome broke into small pieces, mixed with water, and gave to Sacagawea. Lewis, in his only foray into obstetrics, observed that within ten minutes the patient delivered a healthy baby boy.

With the breakup of the Missouri River in the spring of 1805, the Corps of Discovery resumed its upstream travel. Lewis, a gifted naturalist and botanist, described plant and animal life extensively, including fruits and wild vegetables that grew along the way. Sacagawea—now part of the corps—would occasionally dig roots to supplement their meat diet (4:15). And with buffalo and elk abundant on the prairie, there was never a short-age of food.

When the group neared the Great Falls of the Missouri, Lewis became afflicted with abdominal pain and fever. Would he, while experiencing “violent pain in the intestens” (4:278), have remembered Sergeant Floyd's fatal illness and recognized the perilous balance that such new intervening diseases created? He did recall what was presumably one of his mother's

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herbal remedies made from chokecherry twigs boiled in water. After drinking this black decoction, Lewis described feeling remarkably better. By the next day he was able to march twenty-seven miles (7:279).

At about the same time Sacagawea became gravely ill, the infirmity lasting nine days. William Clark wrote in his journal on 10 June 1805: “Sah cah gah, we a, our Indian woman verry Sick I blead her” (7:277). Like a sagacious and attentive physician, Meriwether Lewis noted the following in his journal on 16 June 1805:

about 2 P.M. I reached the camp found the Indian woman extreemly ill and much reduced by her indisposition. this gave me some concern as well for the poor object herself, then with a young child in her arms, as from the consideration of her being our only dependence for a friendly negotiation with the Snake Indians on whom we depend for horses to assist us in our portage from the Missouri to the columbia River. … I found that two dozes of barks and opium which I had given her since my arrival had produced an alteration in her pulse for the better; they were now much fuller and more regular. I caused her to drink the mineral water altogether. When I first came down I found that her pulse were scarcely perceptiable, very quick frequently irregular and attended with strong nervous symptoms, that of the twitching of the fingers and leaders of the arm; now the pulse had become regular much fuller and a gentle perspiration had taken place; the nervous symptoms have also in a great measure abated, and she feels herself much freer from pain. she complains principally of the lower region of the abdomen, I therefore continued the cataplasms of barks and laudnuum which had been previously used by my friend Capt Clark. I beleive her disorder originated principally from an obstruction of the mensis in consequence of taking could. I determined to … restore the sick woman. (4:299–301)

Sacagawea did recover with, or in spite of, the treatment. Lewis's observations suggested a pelvic disorder. The syndrome of lower abdominal pain, fever, and occasional delirium may have been pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), a likely possibility considering the presence of gonorrhea among the Hidatsa Indians of that era. History suggests that she did have another child in about 1812.^[20] In that so many infertile years passed before this presumably sexually active young woman had a second child, PID may be a credible retrospective diagnosis.

The exhausting portage around the Great Falls of the Missouri was made worse by a trio of pests: mosquitoes, gnats, and prickly pears. All three made the next leg of the journey to the three forks of the Missouri River unpleasant. The hard, sharp thorns of prickly pears penetrated their moccasins, broke off in the flesh, and caused abscesses. The three forks of the Missouri, the convergence of the Gallatin River, the Madison River, and the Jefferson River, had been the site of Sacagawea's abduction by the Hidatsa tribe five years before. Near this key geographic point, Lewis and Clark anticipated

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finding the Shoshone Indians. The expedition, however, was unexpectedly forced to halt here. Captain Clark had become alarmingly ill. Several days earlier he had complained of blisters and prickly pear thorn wounds on his feet. On 26 July 1805 he felt “verry unwell & took up Camp” (4:432). On the 27th, as described by Lewis: “at 3 P.M. Capt Clark arrived very sick with a high fever on him and much fatiegued and exhausted. he informed me that he was very sick all last night had a high fever and frequent chills & constant aking pains in all his mustles.” Lewis noted that Clark was “somewhat bilious and had not had a passage for several days.” He persuaded Clark to take a dose of Rush's pills, which Lewis had “always found sovereign in such cases” (4:436).

Captain Clark did take five of Rush's pills, a very large dose, and though sick throughout the night, began to feel somewhat better, particularly after the medicine had “operated.” The following day Clark had improved, although he was still very languid and complained of a general soreness in all his limbs. He took Peruvian barks, which probably assuaged his symptoms. The following day, 30 July, he was well enough to travel (5:14).

What was the cause of Clark's febrile illness at Three Forks? Although this illness caused Captain Lewis to suspend their voyage at this critical juncture, scores of previous analyses have simply dismissed this infirmity as constipation, exhaustion, malaria, or infection from prickly pear punctures. Current knowledge of infectious diseases and epidemiology suggests that a person presenting now with these symptoms during the summer season in south-western Montana would usually be suffering from Colorado tick fever. This viral infection, transmitted by wood ticks, is endemic today in the Three Forks area. The 1805 journal account of Clark's illness may be the first clinical description of Colorado tick fever, written by two good clinical observers.

The captains must have been elated when, on 8 August, Sacagawea recognized the Beaverhead Rock and stated that beyond it they would find her people. Indeed, reunion with her Shoshone tribe took place a few days later just south of presentday Dillon, Montana. Cameahwait, a Shoshone chief and Sacagawea's brother, agreed to provide horses and a guide for the corps to make the overland journey.

A heavy September snowstorm made the seven-day crossing of the rugged Bitterroot Range a severe struggle. With no wild game, the captains staved off starvation with horse meat and “portable soup,” a canned soup concentrate purchased by Lewis in Philadelphia. Some scholars have suggested that, by this time, the party had developed scurvy, because Captain Clark made frequent mention of skin infections and boils.^[21] The journals, however, provide no clues to any illness with the clinical manifestations of scurvy in the men. Furthermore, they had adequate sources of vitamin C from rosehips, plums, chokecherries, serviceberries, and currants.

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Descending to the Clearwater River valley, in what is now Idaho, the group reached a Nez Perce Indian village. The Corps of Discovery troops were famished. The natives provided a feast of dried salmon, berries, and roots. Apparently because of the food, all of the men became extremely ill for several days with what may have been some type of bacterial enteritis to which the Indians were immune. Lewis was, in fact, so weakened by vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea that he could not ride his horse. And what treatment did Captain Clark administer to all of these men with dysentery? None other than the “sovereign” bilious pills of Dr. Rush!

After this two-week delay, the expedition proceeded down to the Columbia River in handhewn canoes, establishing contact with Indian tribes as they went. On this part of the journey Lewis and Clark began their medical practice with the Indians by treating their very common eye complaints with vitriol eye drops. The Indians suffered from sore eyes and blindness, perhaps caused by trachoma, still the leading cause of blindness in the world today.

On 7 November 1805 Clark wrote, “Great joy in camp we are in View of the Ocian” (6:33). The winter camp, Fort Clatsop, was fairly quiet, except for some interaction with the local Indian tribes. These natives had the same sexual mores as the Mandan Indians. In spite of admonitions of chastity, the captains had again to treat many of the men with mercurials for “the venerial” (6:416).

Three men were dispatched from Fort Clatsop to the ocean to make salt by boiling seawater. In February 1806 one of them, Bratton, became ill with a cough and low back pain. The back pain persisted for four months and caused him to be totally disabled. On the return journey, while camped along the Clearwater River in May, Bratton asked that he be sweated in an attempt to restore his health. After a set of vigorous sweats in a sweat hole, followed by immersion in cold water, his back finally began to improve, and he was soon able to resume his duties (7:283).

Captain Lewis had purchased nearly $700 worth of gifts and trinkets for the Indians to be used to barter for food, horses, canoes, and goodwill. Returning up the Columbia, they lacked resources to complete the return trip, and their supply of trade items was depleted. Although they resorted to cutting buttons off their clothes to trade for food and horses, it was the medical practice of Captain Clark that saved the day. Word of the redhaired doctor and his “Big Medicine” had gotten out to the Columbia River tribes, and on the return voyage, natives were waiting for him with their medical problems. And Captain Clark had many important successes.

Lewis wrote that Clark gave an Indian man some liniment to rub on his knee and “the fellow soon after recovered and has never ceased to extol the virtues of our medicines and the skill of my friend Capt. C. as a phisician” (7:209). Word of the medical skills of Lewis and Clark traveled fast and far.

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Indians came from as distant as two days’ ride on horseback just to seek medical attention. Captain Clark would see as many as fifty people a day at his clinics, while Captain Lewis carried on diplomatic negotiations with tribal leaders.

The expedition lacked sufficient numbers of horses to cross back over the mountains. Captain Clark's medical practice produced the needed horses. One of the many horses came from an Indian man whose wife had an abscess in the small of her back. He promised a horse for the treatment of the abscess. Captain Clark received a second horse in exchange for medicine for a little girl with rheumatism. Lewis noted, “[M]any of the natives apply to us for medical aid which we gave them cheerfully so far as our skill and store of medicine would enable us. schrofela, ulsers, rheumatism, soar eyes, and the loss of the uce of their limbs are the most common cases among them” (7:243).

One of the most interesting patients among the Nez Perce was a paralyzed chief. Lewis wrote,

a Cheif of considerable note at this place has been afflicted with it for three years, he is incapable of moving a single limb but lies like a corps in whatever position he is placed, yet he eats heartily, digests his food perfectly, injoys his understanding, his pulse are good, and has retained his flesh almost perfectly, in short were it not that he appears a little pale from having lain so long in the shade he might be taken for a man in good health. (7:243)

Lewis perceptively observed that the chief's muscles were not atrophied and he looked well. The usual remedies of sulfur, purgatives, and dietary changes did not help. Relatives of this chief had seen Bratton's sweat therapy and subsequent recovery. They persuaded Lewis and Clark to sweat the chief even though the Indians could have done this themselves. Before the first sweat, the captain-physicians sedated the chief with a dose of laudanum. After the sweat the chief began to use his arms, and after several more treatments, he regained the use of his limbs. After a month in the camp “hospital,” he had nearly recovered.

Like Clark's fever at Three Forks, this illness has undergone little analysis by medical historians. The chief was possibly disabled by a conversion reaction resulting from past psychological trauma that remained unresolved in the male Indian tradition and culture of the time.

Why were these Army captains effective healers among the Indians? Lewis noted that “everything which is incomprehensible to the Indians they call big medicine, and is the opperation of the presnts and power of the great sperit” (4:101). Since Lewis and Clark presented a novel appearance, spoke a strange language, dressed differently, had unusual-colored skin or hair (Clark had red hair and Clark's servant, York, was black), and employed unique remedies, they were perhaps considered to be

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personifications of the Great Spirit. Their treatments seemed to produce powerful results for the Indians.

Lewis gave credit to his partner, Captain Clark, as the Indians’ “favorite phisician.” Lewis and Clark acknowledged they were not actual physicians, but in their circumstance they felt that it was “pardonable to continue this deseption for they will not give us any provision without compensation in merchandize and our stock is now reduced to a mere handfull” (7:209, 210). This “pardonable deseption” enabled the Corps of Discovery to secure the critical provisions and packhorses needed to return over the mountains.

Similarly to Hippocrates, Lewis stated: “we take care to give them no article which can possibly injure them” (7:210). Their journals give evidence that as good physicians, the captains truly cared for these native people and desired as good an outcome as possible.

In June 1806 they retraversed the rugged Bitterroot Range and proceeded on their homeward voyage. In August of that year an accident of grave potential occurred at the junction of the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers, when Meriwether Lewis was accidentally shot in the leg by one of his own men. Fortunately, it was only a superficial wound. He recovered quickly, and shortly thereafter the Corps of Discovery “proceeded on.” Arriving in St. Louis on 23 September 1806, the troops “received a harty welcome.” Writing from St. Louis to President Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis summarized the importance of their health: “The whole of the party who accompanyed me from the Mandans have returned in good health, which is not, I assure you, to me one of the least pleasing considerations of the Voyage.”^[22]

The role of Captain Lewis and Captain Clark as expedition physicians was vital to the overall success of this mission. Included among the physician-captains’ patients were their troops, Sacagawea, her baby, the Native Americans, and each other. Their aid to the Indians assured the success of travel and prevented starvation. With the exception of one tragic encounter with a Blackfeet hunting party on Lewis's return, their interaction with the native people was friendly. By using diplomacy, honesty, and their medical skills, Lewis and Clark achieved more than any conquering army might have for their president and for their country.

NOTES

Acknowledgment: the author would like to thank Edward W. Hook, M.D., for his encouragement to publish this Medical Center Hour presentation and for his assistance with manuscript editing. Thanks are extended also to Joyce S. Garver for manuscript preparation, and especially to my wife, Charlene, for editing and encouraging me in this endeavor.

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