1. Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents, 1783–1854 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), v. [BACK]

2. William L. Hedges, “Toward a National Literature.” Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 202. [BACK]

3. In 1893 Elliott Coues comments on his edition of the journals, “This is our national epic of exploration” (introduction to History of the Expedition Under the Command of Lewis and Clark, ed. Elliott Coues [1893; reprint, New York: Dover, 1965], 1:v). In 1988 the editor Gary Moulton agrees, “It is our national epic of exploration” (“Lewis and Clark: Our ‘National Epic of Exploration’ Worthy of Monumental Editing,” Nebraska Alumnus, 1 March–1 April 1988, 8). John L. Allen notes that the expedition “has long been recognized as the American exploratory epic” (review of The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, vols. 2–4, ed. Gary E. Moulton, William and Mary Quarterly 46 [1989]: 630). Marius Bewley observes that the “community that existed between Lewis and Clark” and the members of the expedition “was very much of that character we find described in heroic poetry” (“The Heroic and the Romantic West,” New York Review of Books, 8 April 1965; reprinted in Masks and Mirrors: Essays in Criticism [New York: Atheneum, 1970], 214). [BACK]

4. Frank Bergon, introduction to The Journals of Lewis and Clark, ed. Frank Bergon (New York: Viking, 1989), xvii; William Gilpin, Mission of the North American People, Geographical, Social, and Political, rev. 2d ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874), 130. [BACK]

5. Benjamin Smith Barton, letters to William Bartram, 19 February and 13 December 1788, in Bartram Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 5, 4. [BACK]

6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, quoted in Francis Harper, introduction to The Travels of William Bartram: Naturalist's Edition, ed. Francis Harper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), xxvii; Thomas Carlyle, letter to Emerson, 8 July 1851, in The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 468. [BACK]

7. Jackson, Letters, 669. [BACK]

8. The erroneous claim seems to have originated with N. Bryllion Fagin's William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933), but it reappears in Josephine Herbst's New Green World (1954); Joseph Ewan's introduction to William Bartram, Botanical and Zoological Drawings, 1756–1788 (1968); and Joseph Kastner, A Species of Eternity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), among others. [BACK]

9. Jackson, Letters, 17. [BACK]

10. John Burroughs, A Sharp Lookout: Selected Nature Essays of John Burroughs, ed. Frank Bergon (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 333. [BACK]

11. Jefferson is quoted in Dayton Duncan, Out West: A Journey Through Lewis & Clark's America (New York: Viking, 1987), 10; Fisher Ames, Works of Fisher Ames, ed. Seth Ames (Boston, 1854), 1:324. [BACK]

12. Jackson, Letters, 350, 591, 394–396. [BACK]

13. Thomas Jefferson, Writings: Autobiography, Notes on the State of Virginia, Public and Private Papers, Addresses, Letters, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1313. [BACK]

14. Howard Goodman, “Lewis and Clark Redux,” We Proceeded On 19, no. 4 (1993): 25–26. [BACK]

15. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1904–05), 1:284–285. [BACK]

16. Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition, 13 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983–99). Any parenthetical page citations in chapter 2 text and notes are to this edition. The phrases in angle brackets are partly illegible words that Moulton has had to decipher. [BACK]

17. Paul Russell Cutright, A History of the Lewis and Clark Journals (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), 258. [BACK]

18. Gary E. Moulton, “The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: Beginning Again,” We Proceeded On 6, no. 4 (1980): 15. [BACK]

19. John L. Allen, Passage through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 79. [BACK]

21. Kastner, Species of Eternity, 123; Jefferson, Writings, 177, 176. [BACK]

22. Jefferson, Writings, 183, 184. [BACK]

23. Thwaites, Original Journals, 7:150–151. [BACK]

24. Jefferson, Writings, 227. [BACK]

25. Ibid., 142. [BACK]

26. Ibid. [BACK]

27. Jackson, Letters, 206. [BACK]

28. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), 329; Jefferson, Writings, 148. [BACK]

29. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton, 1911), 129; Burroughs, A Sharp Lookout, 36. It is interesting to note that Stephen Fender discerns in the journals, letters, and diaries of 1849 transcontinental travelers a similar “double style,” varying between formal and factual description, picturesque and scientific rhetoric, or literal and figurative language. Fender extends his examination of the “fortyniners’ ‘double style’” to include “their better known contemporaries, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville, whose prose also exhibits (though more designedly and much more famously) the strategic fracture between fantasy and documentary fact” (Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 14). Although Fender has been criticized for a vague shifting of dualistic categories, his stylistic observations about

30. Henry David Thoreau, The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. Torrey Bradford and Francis H. Allen (Boston: Houghton, 1908), 7:108. [BACK]

31. Cutright, History, 8. [BACK]

32. Paul Russell Cutright, Lewis and Clark, Pioneering Naturalists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 8. Field collectors like Lewis and Clark would normally not presume to name new species but would turn over their descriptions and samples to taxonomic specialists (usually noncollectors), like the German botanist Frederick Pursh, who received Lewis's herbarium and credited the explorers with providing 122 specimens of the new plants scientifically named and classified in his twovolume Flora Americae Septentrionalis (1814), including ones tagged with newly coined genera and species honoring their discoverers as Lewisia and Clarkia. Field collectors, however, would commonly use Latinate binomials for the identification of known species and Linnaean terms for the classification of new species, as Lewis does when comparing the eulachon or candle fish to “the herring, shad anchovy &c of the Malacopterygious Order & Class Cupea” (6:344) or when describing the magpie as a “bird of the Corvus genus” and “order of the pica” (3:83). [BACK]

33. Jefferson, Writings, 1127; Jefferson, quoted in Charles A. Miller, Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 44; Jefferson, Writings, 1261, 1330. [BACK]

34. Jefferson, quoted in John C. Greene, American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1984), 33; Jefferson, Writings, 1086. Resistance to the Linnaean system coincided with widespread American suspicion of specialized terminology. The earlier objection of some poets like Joel Barlow to foreign terms in the American language, especially a Latinity equated with monarchy, also shaped the views of those in the sciences, like Charles Willson Peale. Although Peale's museum in Philadelphia provided an orderly exposition of natural history according to Linnaean principles, Peale himself rejected Linnaean terminology and complained to Jefferson that “men pretending to a knowledge must be humored with the high sounding names made from the dead Languages” (Jackson, Letters, 308–309). [BACK]

35. Elijah Harry Criswell, Lewis and Clark: Linguistic Pioneers, University of Missouri Studies, no. 15 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1940), 45. [BACK]

36. Robert B. Betts, “‘we commenced wrighting &c.’ A Salute to the Ingenious Spelling and Grammar of William Clark,” We Proceeded On 6, no. 4 (1980): 11. [BACK]