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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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—
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
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
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
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,
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
1. Not much has been written on Jefferson's leadership of the APS other than Gilbert Chuinard, “Thomas Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 87 (September 1943): 163–276. A portion of the following text is taken from Edward C. Carter II, “Jefferson's American Philosophical Society Leadership and Heritage,” in “The Most Flattering Incident of My Life”: Essays Celebrating th e Bicentennial of Thomas Jefferson's American Philosophical Society Presidency, 1797–1814 (Philadelphia: Published for the Friends of the APS Library, 1997), 9–15. [BACK]
2. For Jefferson's thoughts on these specific topics see William Peden, ed., Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 7–10, 15–16, 92–107, 43–63. [BACK]
3. The possible early involvement of Lewis in the Michaux expedition is based on a statement in Jefferson's “Life of Captain Lewis,” which served as an introduction to Nicholas Biddle's 1814 two-volume History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clarke to the Sources of the Missouri, Thence Across The Rocky Mountains And Down The River Columbia To The Pacific Ocean. Performed during the Years 1804–5–6. By Order of the Government of The United States (1814; reprint, New York: Allerton Book, 1922), wherein Jefferson states that when Lewis was on recruiting duty in Charlottesville in 1792 he applied for the job but was turned down. Most historians have merely repeated Jefferson's statement although Lewis did not volunteer for the militia until 1794 when he was twenty. Anthony F. C. Wallace recently pointed these facts out and sets the date of Lewis's raising the issue as 1799, when he was in Charlottesville on recruiting duty (Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1999], 342). Lewis himself seems to place the date earlier; upon departing from Fort Mandan on 7 April 1805, he joyfully wrote in his journal about his “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]” (Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983–99], 4:10). [BACK]
4. For excellent biographical sketches of the dramatic, productive lives of the two Michaux see their entries in John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American
5. Quoted in Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians, 158. [BACK]
6. Quoted in ibid., 320. [BACK]
7. For a more detailed discussion of the committee see ibid., 139, 156–157, 319–321. [BACK]
8. Jefferson to Vaughan, Monticello, 28 June 1817; Jefferson to Peter S. Du Ponceau, Monticello, 7 November 1817; Du Ponceau to Jefferson, Philadelphia, 5 December 1817; Clark to Biddle, Washington, D.C., 27 January 1818; Biddle to William Tilghman (APS 1805), chairman of committee, Philadelphia, 6 April 1818, Vaughan to Biddle, 8 April 1818; all in Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents 1783–1854, 2d ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 2:630–637. For a summary of the negotiations through which the journals were acquired see also the minutes of the APS Historical and Literary Committee, especially entries of 19 November 1817 and 8 April 1818. [BACK]
9. Jackson, Letters, 2:74. [BACK]
10. The Philadelphians were also distinguished faculty members of the University of Pennsylvania. [BACK]
11. These quotations are from Jefferson to Lewis, Washington, D.C., 27 April 1803 in Jackson, Letters, 1:44. [BACK]
12. For an excellent review of postexpedition history of the numerous plant and animal specimens, Indian artifacts, and other objects collected see Paul Russell Cutright, Lewis and Clark, Pioneering Naturalists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 349–402. Moulton ably brought the botanical aspect of this story up to date in his edition's twelfth volume, Herbarium of the Lewis & Clark Expedition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 1–10. [BACK]
13. Biddle, History. [BACK]
14. Entry for 21 October 1803, in Early Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society … Compiled … from the Manuscript Minutes of Its Meetings from 1744 to 1838 (Philadelphia: McCalla and Stovely, 1884), 343. [BACK]
15. Entries for those dates in ibid., 396–398. [BACK]
16. Biddle, Eulogium on Thomas Jefferson Delivered before the American Philosophical Society on the Eleventh Day of April 1827 (Philadelphia: Robert H. Small, 1827), 33–35. [BACK]
17. Catalogue of the Library of the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: Joseph R. A. Skernett, 1824) [the society's first printed catalog]; and Catalogue of the American Philosophical Society Library, 4 parts (Philadelphia: C. Sherman, Son., 1863–84). [BACK]
18. Moulton, Herbarium, 6. [BACK]
19. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 141. [BACK]
20. Edward C. Carter II, “One Grand Pursuit”: A Brief History of the American Philosophical Society's First 250 Years, 1743–1993 (Philadelphia: APS, 1993), 44–45, 49, and 54. [BACK]
21. The following discussion of Coues's publication and three modern editions is taken from Edward C. Carter II, ed., introductory booklet to Three Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition 1804–1806, from the Collections of the American Philosophical Society: a facsimile edition (Philadelphia: APS, 2000), 17–21. [BACK]
22. Moulton, Journals, 2:39. [BACK]
23. Ibid., 40. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806, 8 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1904–05). [BACK]
24. See Gunther Barth, “Strategies for Finding the Northwest Passage: The Roles of Alexander Mackenzie and Meriwether Lewis,” and Albert Furtwangler, “Do or Die, But Then Report and Ponder: Palpable and Mental Adventures in the Lewis and Clark Journals,” both in Surveying the Record: North American Scientific Exploration to 1930, ed. Edward C. Carter II (Philadelphia: APS, 1999), 253–266, 267–278. As the APS librarian, Carter also organized and directed the conference. [BACK]
25. The final selections were William Clark Codex A journal 13 May–14 August 1804 (getting the expedition under way up the Missouri); Meriwether Lewis Codex E journal 24 May–16 July 1805 (going westward from the Mandan villages up the Missouri to the Great Falls and around them); and Meriwether Lewis Codex J journal 1 January–20 March 1806 (damp and rainywinter at Fort Clatsop with splendid summary of flora and fauna, descriptions of northwestern coastal tribes, and preparations for the homeward journey). See Carter, introductory booklet, Three Journals, 19–21. [BACK]