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Introduction

Kris Fresonke

And Joshua … sent out of Shittim two men to spy secretly, saying, Go view the land, even Jericho. And they went, and came into an harlot's house, named Rahab, and lodged there.

… And [Rahab] said unto the men, I know that the Lord hath given you the land, and that your terror is fallen upon us, and that all the inhabitants of the land faint because of you.

Joshua 2:1, 2:9

Despite the drab Sacagawea dollar, despite commemorative tourism, despite sentimental histories, despite Lewis and Clark souvenirs made from authentic Dakota prairie grasses, despite the enforced invisibility of Native Americans, despite national park gift shops, despite half-baked bicentennial hagiography, despite product placement, and despite the national mood of hero worship, Lewis and Clark's achievement in the early nineteenth century is still absorbing, momentous, and of seemingly inexhaustible interest. The purpose of this collection is to offer a selection of the latest scholarship on the expedition, and to assess, on the occasion of the bicentennial, its importance in American history and literature.

That importance is a given, but the exact line to take, or bead to draw, has always been a source of debate. In literary studies, Lewis and Clark's redoubtable Journals have shown up only recently in the nineteenth-century canon, signaled by the publication of Nebraska's scholarly edition; for many years, exploration writing was simply a subliterary “artifact.” In history, scholars are still contending with the view that must be called Ambrosian, after its only true begetter Stephen Ambrose: “Lewis and Clark are the real thing. They're authentic heroes. They bind the continent together, they bind together the American people in a way that nobody else can, or ever will.”^[1] The New Western History has had its say, too: to the sentimental concept of Lewis and Clark's troupe as a “family,” the dry-eyed Patricia Nelson Limerick replied simply: dysfunctional. In the other social sciences, claims of Lewis and Clark's sympathetic anthropology versus their aggressive manipulation of tribes are hotly exchanged. Feminist scholarship has seen to it

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that the woman whose name we misspell as Sacagawea, a Rahab to King Joshua's pair of spies, has finally been promoted from noble savage. The meanings of Lewis and Clark are more disputed, some would say, than the tribal lands they assessed for later seizure by the United States. All of these disputes and more are part of a story that scholarship at the bicentennial must acknowledge and try to retell.

The Journals and the ways they have been published and read seem a good place to start. We can see in their changing material fortunes, and the different meanings they've held for different readers, a glimpse of the reflected standing of Lewis and Clark. Every age has had its own edition of the Journals, and in something as minor as our changing editorial tastes we declare our intentions toward the historical meaning of the expedition.

Every Lewis and Clark fan has probably seen a page or two of Meriwether Lewis's elegant handwriting and perhaps a few of Clark's sketches of animals and plants. (See Figure 3, for an example.) For field records, subject to accident and abuse, the journals are extremely handsome: Lewis and Clark used brown ink that has aged beautifully and wrote in two kinds of book—one elkskinbound, and the other red morocco with marbled endpapers. When you are permitted to examine these notebooks at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the sponsor of the expedition and its archive, you must put on a pair of white gloves.

Thomas Jefferson declared before anyone else that the Journals were “literary,” a term that in 1803 conveyed the several fields of inquiry that would benefit from Lewis and Clark's findings. Jefferson meant, in his fine Augustan word choice, something we would clumsily have to call “interdisciplinary writerliness.” The different genres that share a single text of exploration, such as journal, travelogue, scientific observation, military record, political theory, and so on, are all unified by their single goal of describing the new land, their use of written language to capture and commemorate those descriptions, and thus their single “literary” bearing.

It is odd, then, that this literary document passed quickly into subliterary status. Part of the problem was, of course, that the Journals didn't exist in print at all until 1814. The nineteenth century, in general, handled the editorial problems of the Journals, not to mention the elegance of the note-books, inside and out, with less than the white glove treatment. Meriwether Lewis's last years were not happy ones; a variety of distracting miseries left him unwilling to satisfy Thomas Jefferson's requests to publish. Accounts written by the expedition members John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and others were published over Lewis's protests. Clark, dispirited by Lewis's death in 1808 but still eager to go to print, hired Nicholas Biddle to make over their laconic field notes into readable, narrative prose. Biddle was not a great writer, but he caught the purple spirit of his age and solved the problem of the dual authorship of the Journals by erasing it: he merged the two distinctive

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voices of Lewis and Clark into a third voice, unrecognizable as anyone's except, indelibly, Nicholas Biddle's. Here is a well-known passage from the Journals written by Clark on 7 November 1805:

Great joy in camp we are in View of the Ocian, this great Pacific Octean which we been So long anxious to See. and the roreing or noise made by the waves brakeing on the rockey Shores (as I Suppose) may be heard distictly.^[2]

Here is that passage made over by Biddle:

We had not gone far from this village when the fog cleared off, and we enjoyed the delightful prospect of the ocean; that ocean, the object of all our labours, the reward of all our anxieties. This cheering view exhilarated the spirits of all the party, who were still more delighted on hearing the distant roar of the breakers.^[3]

Here is another example, this time Lewis describing the Great Falls of the Missouri River on 13 June 1805:

I hurryed down the hill which was about 200 feet high and difficult of access, to gaze on this sublimely grand specticle.^[4]

And Biddle writes it this way:

the hills as he approached were difficult of access and seating himself on some rocks under the center of the falls, enjoyed the sublime spectacle of this stupendous object which since creation had been lavishing its magnificence upon the desert unknown to civilization.^[5]

Finding flaws in Biddle's prose is a turkey shoot; but even so, his rewrite does strike modern ears as a bit perverse. Lewis's sentence did not need revision. Biddle's version loses entirely the directness of Lewis's “hurryed down the hill” in order to ballast it with unwriterly, latinate excess about “stupendous magnificence.” He also leaves out Lewis's endearing specificity, despite his joy and haste, of “200 feet high.” Biddle, who sounds a bit like Charles Lamb on a bad day, seems altogether to have found the existing text insufficiently “literary.” He brings to his project a windblown, or perhaps overblown, Romantic prerogative for passionate intensity. The Biddle edition was of no help to tastes like Jefferson's, nor probably to ours either. It was the only version of the expedition available throughout the nineteenth century, with one exception, and relegated the adventure undeservedly to the status of a sentimental journey.

Meanwhile, that one exception—the bestselling, unofficial account of Sergeant Patrick Gass—found its place among more complicated questions of literary sensibility. Gass's account irritated Lewis, who complained of “unauthorized and spurious publications”; the expedition merited the words of the commanders, he insisted, not of the supporting actors.^[6] And

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the Gass edition contained delightful woodcuts that do not so much illustrate events as concoct and color them.

The first plate in Gass, entitled “A Canoe striking on a Tree,” was selected as the frontispiece to his journal, although it represents a pair of explorers at, perhaps, a fairly low moment: their canoe sinking, and their hands raised in alarm (Figure 1). Kenneth Haltman, an art historian who has written the only study of these illustrations to date, points out that the woodcut borrows its iconography from a popular eighteenth-century print of Pilgrim's Progress, namely Christian and Pliable in the Slough of Despond (1781).^[7] Christian and Pliable, like Lewis and Clark, sink into a pond with raised hands, because, as John Bunyan tells it, “they, being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog.” The caption of Christian and Pliable is a short colloquy from Bunyan on moral disorientation: “Then said Pliable ah! neighbour Christian, where are you now? Truly said Christian I do not know.” Gass's pictures and diary found a simple but lasting moral in westering, in which the national quest narrative automatically served the righteous aims of moral geography.

Gass's publisher, David McKeehan, publicly answered Lewis's complaints about the infringement on his original Journals. First, Lewis, he argues, will bore his readers with “too long and learned dissertations,” while Gass, “who does not speak scientifically,” is at least “homespun.” McKeehan unwittingly presents Lewis as a philosophe, or perhaps simply a quantitative drudge; in any case it is hard to miss the encyclopedic bent of Lewis's mind, even

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glimpsed through McKeehan's hostile account. Lewis, McKeehan hints and the Journals confirm, has a mind that finds truth in the sheer accumulation of knowledge, and that cannot take seriously any lesser effort to describe the natural world. The authoritative account of the expedition published in his own way provides for Lewis a certainty of knowledge with an audience who consent to that certainty. It is hard to imagine the Enlightenment mind more vividly.

On the other hand, flailing at Lewis for calling only his own account authoritative—the pirate pointing out piracy—McKeehan also illuminates a different side of Lewis's mind, one that may strike us now as Romantic. McKeehan contends that no one has the right to claim unique interest in the recent expedition, because the facts about Louisiana were probably plagiarized from Alexander Mackenzie.^[8] Mackenzie had trekked across the Canadian Rockies to the Pacific for Great Britain in 1793. It is true that Lewis and Clark carried Mackenzie's account with them during the expedition; indeed, many explorers after Lewis and Clark carried the Biddle edition of Lewis and Clark with them. Lewis's obstinacy about “his” journal displays not only the Enlightenment impulse toward encyclopedic, “literary” presentations of knowledge, but also a Romantic's attachment to authentic, individual experience, rendered not as a corporate mission statement but as a direct chronicle of experience from the subject himself.

McKeehan's objections about Mackenzie, though—presented crossly, amid charges that Lewis walked to the Pacific and back only for the money—seem to me to get to the heart of the matter. Of course the Lewis and Clark journey was plagiarized; of course the route had essentially been traveled before; of course there was little novelty left in the Far West in 1806. Everyone knows the plot, McKeehan seems to be saying: you have no monopoly on it. What matters, McKeehan claims, is “spin,” or what we would probably also call genre. Lewis, preoccupied in St. Louis with the governorship of Missouri, did not comment on McKeehan's accusation, nor did he return to work on his own manuscript. The Gass edition, in its confusing mix of moral signals and literary genres, and its unmixed emotions of nationalism, had won.

The sensibility of the Gass journal, which attacks both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideas of the “literary,” and that of the Biddle journal, which pursues belles lettres like a bear treeing an explorer, were effectively the same thing in different wrappings, like the elkskin and the red morocco books kept by Lewis and Clark. Biddle created a single voice for the corporate Lewis-and-Clark, unrecognizable as either man's. Gass offered another. It is the privilege and inevitability of each age to ventriloquize Lewis and Clark, and the nineteenth century had two versions: Gass, the field soldier writing with the homespun morals of didactic Protestant literature, Pilgrim's Progress; and Biddle, with a rose-colored gaze and the prose to match.

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In 1893 Elliott Coues prepared a version of Lewis and Clark that took even greater liberties and cannot rightly be designated an edition of the Journals.^[9] Coues published chiefly for scientists, perhaps correcting the aestheticism of Biddle. The patchiness and randomness of the composition had only increased. It took the historian Reuben Gold Thwaites, under the aegis of the American Philosophical Society, to prepare a word-for-word, eight-volume edition in 1904–05, just in time for the centennial. (This history is reviewed in this collection's essay by Edward C. Carter II.) If the nineteenth century fumed over which voice the Journals should use, the twentieth century determined that all of them must be heard. Thwaites's verbatim approach is entirely to modern scholarly tastes, with its partiality to artifacts, its antisentimentality, its multiculturalism, and its skepticism about the limited notions of genre. As the literary critic Annette Kolodny cautions, in measured Jeffersonian terms, “the challenge is not to decide beforehand what constitutes literariness.”^[10]

It is the Thwaites edition that inspired both Bernard DeVoto, in his one-volume Journals digest from 1953, and Gary Moulton, in a multivolume work cosponsored by the University of Nebraska Press and the American Philosophical Society, who corrected Thwaites even further for his definitive, scholarly, bicentennial edition.^[11]

The scholars whose work is assembled here share the assumption that Lewis and Clark offer a classic case of Jeffersonian “literariness,” or of interdisciplinary intrigue. The bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition is thus a fitting occasion to see what mood we are in toward this pair of explorers, and why.

Literary criticism of the Journals has appeared in greater measure in the last few years, and its growing proportions surely prompted the Cambridge History of American Literature to include Myra Jehlen's long essay on Lewis and Clark.^[12] (Frank Bergon's essay, in this collection, reviews this literature-anthology question in detail.) In general, the fortunes of exploration writings have risen among literary critics: the mood appears sympathetic. The field has acknowledged that writings declared “nonliterary” had been unjustly banished, and the canon has enlarged to take them in. Also, methodologies have changed: reverence for the well-wrought urn gave way, thankfully, to new-historicist approaches that could value the portmanteau, pastiche quality of the Lewis and Clark Journals.

And finally, a subterranean shift in attitudes toward American nature writing has renewed critical interest in texts like Lewis and Clark's. D. H. Lawrence once sneered that “absolutely the safest thing to get your emotional reactions over is nature”;^[13] but after the American pastoral was reread by Leo Marx, Walden by Stanley Cavell, the virgin land by Henry Nash

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Smith, the nonvirgin land by Annette Kolodny, and the environmental imagination by Lawrence Buell, it was evident that sentimental naturalism had decamped for good, and we would have no more Biddling. Thus Smith's Virgin Land permitted scholars to examine the American West as a “drama … [and] the enactment of a myth.”^[14] Marx's Machine in the Garden elevated American arcadia to the most significant motif of New World discovery and conquest.^[15] (Marx himself set the endpoint of the pastoral in 1963, when Robert Frost died; a new edition of Machine might have to stretch at least to Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, or to Meriwether Lewis's restored descriptions of the Missouri River plains.) Cavell and Buell found in Henry David Thoreau's Walden the evidence of a mind for whom writing about nature was not what came naturally, but what you did only after acquiring a generous knowledge of classical and contemporary languages, natural history, moral philosophy, Eastern religion, and basic gardening. Nature was not inert, exterior, and value-free; it was one's intellectual gymnasium.

Even after these studies appeared, Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia attracted far more critical attention than the epic journals of his protégé, Lewis, especially for three important works on landscape and literature: Wayne Franklin's Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America, Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, and Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. And then, around 1992 (another significant anniversary of New World discovery), the literary draw was in the Southwest, among Spanish writers of conquest, coincident with Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America and Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Three works that finally addressed Lewis and Clark in aesthetic terms were Bruce Greenfield's Narrating Discovery: The Romantic Explorer and American Literature, 1790–1855, Robert Lawson-Peebles's Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America, and Albert Furtwangler's Acts of Discovery: Visions of America in the Lewis and Clark Journals.^[16]

Historians have also, in the twentieth century, offered a number of important studies of Lewis and Clark, and their mood has shifted over time. The centennial of the expedition that inspired Thwaites to bring forth a complete new edition of the Journals was also joined by Olin Wheeler's The Trail of Lewis and Clark, 1804–1904, which drew on the work of Thwaites and the author's own travels on the expedition route to present a century of historical change.^[17]

Thwaites, Wheeler, and others were motivated by a certain postfrontier anxiety, that America had moved beyond its wilderness origins and would now lose the exceptional qualities that shaped its rise to global eminence. Progressive-era historians thus sought to resurrect and preserve the American

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West and its imagined values, such as its heartiness and masculine vigor—all for the edification of effete, cosmopolitan, urban readers. Frederick Jackson Turner's closed-frontier thesis, in effect, had opened the gates to the mythic claims of a backward-looking, redemptive West. In this respect, Lewis and Clark provided the nostalgic evidence of American virtue, which was even more appreciable from the perspective of an arid, amoral modernity.

While this approach to the expedition shaped a number of popular and scholarly treatments of the expedition, the anxious fears of the early twentieth century were tempered by that era's abiding belief in the future. Lewis and Clark were most commonly portrayed optimistically, as prophets of a new faith in material progress and overseas empire. No study of Lewis and Clark in the first decades of the century failed to reflect on the abundance of the western landscape, for instance, from the forests of the Pacific North-west to the mines of the Rocky Mountains and new agricultural developments on the Northern Plains, and the comparable “abundance” promised in the enormous trade possibilities with East Asia. In this respect, Lewis and Clark not only connected the past with the present, and nature with nation, but merged all of these into a prophecy about the future.

Following the Great Depression, Lewis and Clark acquired new temperaments. Western historians like Walter Prescott Webb and Herbert Bolton rejected the emphasis on the frontier as a significant aspect of American history. In its stead, they focused on the ecologies and cultures that Americans encountered as they pushed westward. Webb defined the West as a land of hardship and scarcity, one that contained little of the promise it had for the earlier generation of historians. His central idea was westerners overcoming adversity: only through such ordeals did Americans convert the region into the mightiest of the United States. In a direct parallel of Webb's arguments, scholarship on Lewis and Clark at this time largely took place in the context of New Deal efforts to develop a series of national monuments and memorials that would inspire Americans to triumph over contemporary adversity (the crash of 1929), just as their forebears had done. Centered on what would become the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, these studies did not so much connect Lewis and Clark with prophesies about the future as emphasize the American character, one with a special ability to overcome difficulties, whether they be mountains, waterfalls, Indians, or unemployment.^[18]

By the 1950s Lewis and Clark took on the qualities of Cold Warriors in a world of clashing global empires. In Bernard DeVoto's magisterial Course of Empire, Lewis and Clark were the agents of Thomas Jefferson's geopolitical visions. The major threats to the expedition did not come from Native peoples or grizzly bears so much as the imperial designs of France, Spain, and England. It would be too much to state that DeVoto simply placed Lewis and

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Clark in a Cold War context, but in Course of Empire and his single-volume edition of the journals, he did bring new emphasis to discipline and duty on the part of the captains. More significantly, DeVoto argued unequivocally that the expedition was one of the most pivotal episodes in all of American history.^[19]

Service to a greater cause remains a central component of most popular approaches to Lewis and Clark, but these have been tempered by newer concerns for environmental and cultural issues. Both are at the heart of outstanding scholarly works like Paul Russell Cutright's Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists and James Ronda's Lewis and Clark Among the Indians.^[20]

But the tendency to celebrate Lewis and Clark as triumphant nationalists has remained a constant aspect of most works on Lewis and Clark throughout the twentieth century. This celebration is clearly on display in the work of Stephen Ambrose, where his Lewis and Clark are a conglomeration of past descriptions: dutiful soldiers, virile frontiersmen, culturally sensitive diplomats, protoecologists, and visionaries of the future. Ambrose's work has not gone unchallenged by the so-called New Western History, though, which has sought to wean us from the guilty pleasures of nationalism. Patricia Nelson Limerick has made a point of critiquing the work of Ambrose with ready revisions of the more popular narratives of national glory. Led by Limerick's Legacy of Conquest and James Ronda's Lewis and Clark Among the Indians, the New Western History offered a skeptical corrective, only to have to confront its own analytical limits: as this collection, essay by essay, seeks to demonstrate, even revisionism is limited—by its devotion to a kind of unified Skeptical Field Theory.

The contributors to this volume variously tackle the expedition that opened the West for American expansion in the nineteenth century, and the ways it can be read, misread, and made over in tourist displays, paperback romances, natural history, suffrage propaganda, archives, legal codes, medical artifacts, and multivolume scholarly editions.

If major histories of the expedition have often operated in the field, doggedly retracing the expedition's steps, then it is fitting first to offer the judgment of Edward C. Carter II, who from 1980 until his death in 2002 was librarian of the American Philosophical Society (APS), where the expedition deposited its copious specimens and records, and where editors of the Journals have always worked. His essay narrates the crucial role of the APS in sponsoring the expedition, and the even more difficult task of organizing and publishing the troupe's geographic, ethnographic, and other scientific findings. Carter also details the trials of an institution that continues to serve as an intellectual headquarters for students and scholars of the expedition, especially during the busy bicentennial.

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Frank Bergon evaluates the Nebraska scholarly edition of the Journals. We gladly reprint it from American Literature because it is undoubtedly the most thorough and thoughtful assessment of Lewis and Clark as writers and the vexing status of the Journals as literature. Dubbed by Donald Jackson “the writingest explorers,” Lewis and Clark occupy a fascinating position in literary history and in the cross-currents of genres present in their epic text. Bergon describes the difficulties of publishing this text, as well as the rewards.

Charles Boewe reminds readers that among the less famous members of the expedition, George Shannon is worth our attention for his connections to the linguist and scientist C. S. Rafinesque. Rafinesque, who met Shannon and interviewed him about his experiences out west, was a keen reader of Biddle's edition of the Lewis and Clark journals and used it to assign scientific names to five animals that he had never seen. He also undertook significant linguistic researches among Native Americans and published widely on the topic. Thus the effects of the expedition were felt strongly among the scientists of the early nineteenth century.

Ronald Loge's medical expertise focuses our attention on the fascinating question of field medicine techniques during the Lewis and Clark expedition. Equipped with the most up-to-date medical information and, for all that, provided chiefly with laxatives, mercury, and opium, Lewis and Clark managed admirably during the various medical crises faced by the troupe.

Raymond Cross and Peter Appel approach the expedition from the perspective of legal history. Cross assesses Lewis and Clark from the perspective of the Native Americans (Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara) whom the expedition encountered and then infected with the twin plagues of disease and treaties. Not only does Cross decenter the “historic” significance of Lewis and Clark by viewing their efforts from a tribal perspective, he also offers this deflationary suggestion: that Lewis and Clark, far from being the heroes of their own expedition, more closely resemble Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, those minor flunkies of tragedy.

Appel queries the classic formulation by Alexis de Tocqueville, that political questions in America inevitably wind up in the courts. If that's the case, then where is the legal precedent set by Lewis and Clark? Appel answers: in the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson's assumption of broad powers to purchase this million-mile landmass was, even to Jefferson himself, a breach of explicit constitutional limits. But Jefferson went ahead with the purchase, despite his Republican views on strict constructionism. This decision changed American federalism entirely, from the bare minimum sanctioned by the Republican Party to an excess still evident in land-use policies and in policies regarding Native Americans.

John Spencer's essay takes on the Lewis and Clark centennial and shows that the anniversary hype of 1904 came from turn-of-the-century railroad

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pamphlets, boosterism, and Teddy Roosevelt's expansionist wars—just as later hype about the glories of the expedition also came from current events, such as ecological consciousness raising and the Vietnam War's lessons in racial conquest. Spencer interrogates the revisionism of our own age and candidly reviews the ongoing divide between the perspectives of buffs and scholars.

Joanna Brooks examines the enduring, exasperating romance of Sacajawea, thinly masked as the title character Cogewea in Mourning Dove's 1927 novel. We know relatively little about Sacagawea (historians don't even agree whether she died in 1814 or 1884) and yet her heroics have been taken over and retold by figures ranging from Susan B. Anthony to Charles Eastman to the Unites States Department of the Treasury, which recently put her image on the gold dollar. Lewis and Clark's famous appearance on the Pacific coast in Cogewea is not the tragic melodrama of Indian conquest, stirring the “patience” and “endurance” for which Sacagawea was canonized by the women's suffrage movement. Instead, Mourning Dove makes over Indian awe at the western heroes—into the bafflement of the nonplussed. Cogewea even quarrels with her white lover to defend her grandmother's eyewitness observation that Lewis and Clark simply were not the first white explorers in Oregon. As Brooks points out, Red Progressives at the turn of the century (Native political activists grappling with the question of assimilation) were similarly nonplussed by the tragic role that Indianness offered them.

Wallace Lewis's essay offers a review and a critique of the commemoration of Lewis and Clark, from roadside plaques and monuments to ersatz Fort Clatsops on display at the St. Louis World's Fair. The greatest commemoration, Lewis points out, has been the trail itself, a tourist destination 3,700 miles in length, and of mixed authenticity and purity—especially after the massive construction effort of hydraulic dams in the twentieth century, which obliterated many camp and fort sites.

Through a juxtaposition of the expedition's original purposes with present understandings of Lewis and Clark, Mark Spence demonstrates that the bicentennial is celebrated as an opportunity for national redemption. With millennial zeal, Lewis and Clark fans see the bicentennial as an opportunity to reenact the virtues of a mythic past, bury the mistakes of two centuries, and press ahead with a newly restored environmental and cultural sensitivity. Because the experiences and goals of the expedition do not support this interpretation, the bicentennial cannot address historical problems or start the process of actively addressing their difficult legacies. Indeed, Spence argues that these issues are actively avoided. Current plans for the bicentennial place great emphasis on outdoor recreation where individuals can “relive a spirit of adventure” and “discover the past.” This tendency to conflate the distant past with the tourist's immediate present

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makes the historical roots of ecological and social problems disappear—the very issues that shape current ideas of Lewis and Clark. As Spence concludes, therein lies the real appeal of these newly constituted heroes for the new millennium, and there also can be found reason for deep concern about the challenges of the next century.

Andrew Gulliford offers an upbeat and thoughtful account of many aspects of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, assessing not only the actual physical problems associated with walking in the footsteps of the explorers (especially when the terrain is fragile and the archaeological record has vanished) but also the subtle, less tangible difficulties that come to every tourist who faces changes in stereotypes and conventional historical wisdom along the route of the trail.

Roberta Conner's chapter offers her call for meaningful attention to the Indian perspective on the bicentennial and also presents the views of Wish-low-too-latin, Raymond Burke, of the Umatilla nation. Both documents not only expand the Native American standpoints on the expedition collected in this volume but offer a sharp corrective to the univocal and patriotic commemorations originating in Washington, D.C. and in the federal agencies overseeing the festivities of 2003–06.

Finally, Dayton Duncan, in the epilogue to this volume, offers the perspective of a documentary filmmaker who has traveled the Lewis and Clark trail twice and has found particular inspiration in the unofficial motto of the expedition, “We proceeded on.” The phrase appears frequently in the Journals and tells us of the persistent values of the expedition—the perseverance of their scientific inquiry and their progress in covering huge distances, along with the beauty and wonder of western landscapes. Duncan takes Lewis and Clark on an imaginary tour of the trail and offers reflections on its contemporary state.

Why study Lewis and Clark? Because we have to. It is already studying us. Two important and related facts arise from it. The first is that Lewis and Clark, from the evidence of the last hundred years, are very much with us, from uncirculating golden dollars to the prospering enterprise of national myth. The material proof of their popularity should not necessarily cheer us up. Like all legacies, these bequests from the expedition—in the form of the Sacagawea coin or the Genuine Dakota Prairie Grass Tote Bag or the sorry state of Native American rights—are a burden. Efforts to ignore these burdens or consider them “in the past” are a basic misunderstanding of the laws of inheritance.

The corollary of this burden is the second fact: the West and its effect on national history. Of course, to call the importance of the West in American history an “effect” is to crop half of its glory and half of its doom, for the

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West is also a first cause, a prime mover. Recovering from the European delusion that we discovered the New World, we find that all along it discovered us: the West has, at least since 1803, set the agenda, wagged the dog, and written the plot. This collection acknowledges that we might better perceive Lewis and Clark themselves as the undiscovered country and instead now write the biography of the territory that apprehended them. And how it was willed to us.

A fistful of dollars—now there's a Western theme. The Sacagawea dollar will be spent in, approximately, fistfuls during the bicentennial by the many tourists who visit the Lewis and Clark trail. Having Sacagawea on that coin is good luck for the bicentennial, a series of events hungry for publicity and commemoration, not to mention product endorsements. And her image there is either a joke on white people, or it is not: so far no one is quite sure. Either the Native has had the last laugh, circulating cool and golden in white hands and offering herself as the medium of exchange for souvenirs and Diet Cokes and gasoline for the drive down the trail to the Pacific; or whites have won again, shriveling Indian brass into its most abject form: a dollar coin available only from Wal-Mart, just big enough to be rejected by parking meters and vending machines, and with a gold finish that bank tellers in my town lament “turns dirty after a few weeks.”

It is probably the latter. Commemoration always works this way: tackily, with tarnish, fitting ill. A friend who is a Cherokee recently wrote to me about the Sacagawea dollar with this hilarious story of memorial tarnish in her own family:

For years family mythology had it that Sacagawea was my great great great great great great grandmother. … In 1976 I was asked to represent her in a pageant so I began a lengthy research into Shoshone beadwork to be used to decorate a four-hundred-dollar buckskin dress I had made for the occasion. … To cut to the chase, my research revealed that we were not related to Sacagawea but to her no-account husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, and to him illegitimately. Now several relatives no longer speak to me, others flatly deny the validity of my work and go on with the myth, and I have a four-hundred-dollar dress minus beadwork that I never wore.^[21]

Four hundred Sacagawea dollars worth of buckskin later, this friend still harbors great admiration for her nonancestor. Many people share this view or offer its corollary, admitting that political correctness must have had a hand in the choice of Sacagawea but shrugging that, like a family myth, such a pleasant frailty can be indulged.

I myself am less certain. I write about Lewis and Clark and the dynamo of manifest destiny in the nineteenth century. My sympathy is not with the empire. But rather than declare the dollar a good or bad thing by looking at it on its own, I follow it into circulation. What is it trying to buy?

If the Sacagawea dollar were a success, it would mean, for one thing, an

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uncontroversial entry into our wallets, when it has been anything but. We should be spending it; but at the moment no one is, preferring to collect it like the fifty-states quarters or the doomed old Susan B. Anthony dollar. In a survey of friends I have found their responses to the new dollar to range from glee (“all money is beautiful”) to resignation (“at least it is better looking than the nickel”) to isolationist hauteur (“I live in Paris”), to classic Manhattanite confusion: “Whassat? Like the Euro, but for the West Coast?” But nobody has yet exchanged it for food, drink, or half a gallon of gasoline. This unspent dollar is not so much a reminder of Sacagawea's heroism as an incoherent bit of national omertá, a bribe to ourselves, to doctor the slightest amount of historical inquiry into dusty monuments to heritage. Hoarding the dollar, we're keeping its meaning out of circulation.

I see this fact in the ancient prototype for the mythic Sacagawea who appears in the book of Joshua. The tale of Rahab gives me an inclination to dislike and distrust the Sacagawea dollar, and not merely for its effortless condescension to Native Americans. A pair of spies from Israel, so the story goes, traveled west into Canaan to reconnoiter for Joshua's invasion. A Canaanite woman named Rahab, grasping “that the Lord hath given [the spies] the land,” and that Zion was coming and hell followed with it, helps them; she has her life spared during the massacre that follows. The spies spilled neither ink nor blood to thank her or make her famous, and she's no Canaanite heroine today. Rahab, therefore, is a key player in Israel's exaltation, but she is so predefeated in the terms of the story that her survival is to Israel's credit, not her own. Like Sacagawea with Jefferson's pair of spies, the enterprise she might have once been leading changed directions, so that she had to follow.

The Navajo Mary Brown, who was the model for Sacagawea on the new coin, has been touring the country, signing autographs. The coeditor of this collection wants to know, quite sensibly: what name is she signing? Sakakawea? Sacajawea? Sacagawea? Mary Brown? or perhaps Rahab?

It's a cheap shot to say that any commemoration is unhistorical, that Jefferson wasn't as noble as he looks on Mount Rushmore (or in the book of Joshua), that Kennedy never had a day in his life when he looked as unraffish as he did on a previous dollar coin. Those would be boring little beefs to make. What matters is that American history is once again wriggling out of the grip of commemoration. It simply won't go into the neat coinshape of legend, with a happy ending, or at least an ending, and some sort of moral. Only stories do this. But history, in the hard-edged definition of Gibbon, thinking of antiquity and of the old Old World, is “little more than the story of the Crimes and Follies of Mankind.” We like to think the New World is Zion, that it reveals a plan or at least a plot, that it unrolls destinies that are manifest. But the theme of New World history is just conquest: the conquest by displaced Europeans over the huge land, its inhabitants, and

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finally over the world. Conquest is the dominant theme from the days of Columbus on Hispaniola to the days of globalization.

To be an adult means shouldering historical original sin and holding on, with dry eyes, to a counterfeit ornamented buckskin hanging in your closet. When it comes to buying peace of mind, I am against symbols of contrition and would rather traffic in contrition itself. We cannot, if we want to think clearly, entirely regret the triumphant American conquest, since it makes our world, and we are all to some degree beneficiaries of it. But nor can we, in good conscience, merely celebrate the pageant of the lush American centuries. We are all players, most with comfortable bit parts, in that tragic avalanche of human resettlement along the Lewis and Clark trail: Sacagawea the kind collaborator with the process of her nation's obliteration, Mary Brown the elegant poster girl, and I myself the coeditor of a book published amidst the commotion of the bicentennial.

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