Story by Bruce Nixon
LEO
November 27, 2002
On Aug. 31, 1803, Meriwether Lewis left Pittsburgh in a 55-foot keelboat whose construction he had supervised during the previous six weeks. He was charged by President Thomas Jefferson to lead an expedition across the continent, for the purpose of finding a passage that would extend trade routes across the rapidly expanding republic, and he would do so with this vessel. But the building of the boat had posed problems, and now, so late in the season, as he and a small crew headed down the Ohio River to Louisville, low water slowed their passage to a tedious pace.
Finally, on Oct. 14, Lewis reached his destination, where — contrary to some contemporary versions of the story — he almost certainly met William Clark on the Louisville docks. Clark had been in the area for seven years, after leaving the military to tend to the family plantation at Mulberry Hill and look after his older brother, George, a hero of the Revolutionary War debilitated by drink and debt. Undoubtedly he was delighted by the prospect of a lengthy journey.
The next day, Oct. 15, they took the keelboat across the Ohio to what is now Clarksville, where the boat remained for well over a week. No one knows exactly why they were there for so many days; perhaps the boat had been damaged in its passage over the falls. In any case, Lewis, 29, and Clark, 33, left on Oct. 26, a rainy day, bound for St. Louis, the edge of white civilization. They arrived in late November. After wintering alongside the Missouri River at Camp Dubois, this band, known as the Corps of Discovery, departed in May 1804, heading northwest on the Missouri, with two additional small boats now and a crew of 43, which included a slave of Clark’s named York.
They would not see the Falls of the Ohio again until November 1806. During the intervening years, the Corps traveled 8,000 miles, across an area that today encompasses 11 states. Their route took them over the Rockies to what is now the Oregon coast. Along the way, they encountered 58 native tribes and kept a daily journal that grew to nearly a million words, the scrupulous account of a world that within just 50 years would already be severely degraded by human habitation and development. They weren’t the first white men to cross the continent — a Scot named Alexander Mackenzie, who trekked across Canada in the 1790s, may have that distinction — but Lewis and Clark were the first to traverse what is now the United States. Back East once again, they were welcomed as heroes.
These are the bare bones of a remarkable and remarkably complex tale, one that is as important to the story of the young American republic as the Revolution, westward expansion, slavery or the Civil War. But what are we to make of it now? Now that we stand on the cusp of the bicentennial of the expedition, a carefully crafted, nationwide commemoration that promises to be a major event as it makes its way across the country during the next three years, following the route taken by Lewis and Clark themselves — how will we finally come to regard their achievement?
“It is complex,” said James Holmberg, an adviser to the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial Commission and the curator of special collections at the Filson Historical Society, one of the nation’s richest repositories of Lewis and Clark material.
“Their legacy has both pro and con aspects to it. It was truly the great exploring adventure of the United States at its time, much like going to the moon is today, and even more so because they were cut off. There was no Houston for them to call. They were out there on their own, and so there’s something about the Lewis and Clark expedition that appeals to the explorer in all of us, and to the human spirit.
“But,” he added, “it will be interesting to see how the bicentennial develops. One of the things we can say, as far as the Indians are concerned, is that this was the beginning of the end for them in the West. The full effect on native culture was still years down the road, but it started with Lewis and Clark. The National Council of the Bicentennial has included Native Americans from day one, and the Lewis and Clark Historic Trail Foundation is committed to including the Indians and their point of view. Each event throughout the bicentennial has a Native component. Their story will be told. But there is not only the Indian issue. There’s also the slave issue. Some of the men on the expedition were slaveholders or came from a slaveholding society.”
History records the high moments of human endeavor, those events in the vast narrative of human culture that forward our sense of our own accomplishment. But history belongs to the winners, does it not? Those people, or peoples, who take what they want, and then compose the stories that celebrate their deeds, thus inscribing them upon the future. So it is that the Lewis and Clark story has traditionally been regarded as the first true American epic, a mighty nation-building tale to match the great cultural narratives that come down to us from the distant past. It is a defining event, and its significance has never been challenged, but as it turns out, there is no absolute Lewis and Clark.
In 1903, the centennial of the expedition, Lewis and Clark stood tall among the architects of Manifest Destiny, that dazzling, self-aggrandizing spirit of national entitlement that we have not lost even now; they represented an imperialistic impulse that required neither explanation nor justification in the early years of the 20th century. In 1953, the sesquicentennial year, amidst the bleak, forbidding atmosphere of the Cold War, Lewis and Clark were seen as an embodiment of the will and undaunted courage of a nation that felt itself to be leading — or in charge of — the free world.
We do not appear to have lost this impulse, either, but today we may be forgiven if we feel less certain of what, exactly, Lewis and Clark should be. Or, perhaps, we are simply more aware of the complexity of their legacy, its resistance to simple, emblematic meaning, the fact that other stories lie beneath the surface of the “official” narrative.
We can no longer ignore these things: That following the expedition, Clark, as governor of the Missouri Territory and superintendent of Indian affairs, assisted in engineering and administering Jefferson’s land-grab policy, which would lead in turn to the genocide of the remaining native population. Or that a startling number of the species documented in the expedition journals are either marginally extant or extinct, lost to unchecked development in a region that we once believed to be boundless — though scientists now use the journals as a source of information regarding local ecological histories.
In this tale of winners and losers, we may wonder, too, how the native population can be represented in a way that gives full value to its place in the story. For the winners, victory is complete. They can afford to be magnanimous. We cannot turn back the years. Will gestures of inclusion be only symbolic in the end?
For many generations, schoolbook accounts of the Lewis and Clark expedition began in St. Louis, and St. Louis has been the epicenter for previous expedition anniversaries. As a matter of narrative, this had a certain logic: The history of the continent after European conquest has been dominated by the ongoing story of the landscape itself, that is, the shift between the amount of inhabited or usable land, and the amount of wilderness. It is a dynamic that continues to the present day, though the amount of surviving wilderness is quite small, the struggle fierce, and the clear advantage lies on the side of official power.
At the dawn of the 19th century, however, St. Louis, a bustling, brawny American settlement along the Mississippi River, was the gateway to a domain that already had come to represent the future of the republic, an immense, tantalizing resource that would shape the national economy and national identity alike. Traditionally, space has been the defining medium of the American character, and in 1803, St. Louis was the portal between the domesticated space of the Eastern states and the uncharted spaces that lie to the West — between the past and a still-unwritten future. Where else would a grand epic begin but in a place such as this? Myth-making excludes extraneous detail, taking only what it requires to build its own edifice, a condition that has influenced our sense of the Lewis and Clark story for a long time.
So it is that the official Bicentennial, by its very nature, represents the spirit of the present — a reconstruction of the myth, expanded to include both the prelude and aftermath to the journey, acknowledging the reality of history, or of life itself, as continuous and interconnected. The National Council of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial has developed a program of 15 “significant” events, the first of which takes place in January at Monticello, Jefferson’s Virginia estate. The second, three days in mid-October 2003, will be at the Falls of the Ohio, and will include, among other things, a reenactment of the meeting and departure — some 40 local groups and organizations will be involved in one way or another. Then it goes to St. Louis. These alterations to the received version of the story would have been inconceivable even a half-century ago, when all the attention was focused on the journey itself.
Matt Pierce, the Indiana adviser to the bicentennial committee, recently left his position as chief-of-staff and community projects director for Rep. Baron Hill, D-Ind., to run for a seat in the Indiana state legislature. But Pierce dismisses out of hand any inference that the bicentennial has a political component.
Yet, we might wonder, how could it not? The event marks a crucial action from a period of voracious colonization, at a time when the United States is expanding its influence in the international community in a dramatic, imperious way. Can’t we find some parallel here? Just follow the money, then and now. Or the trade routes, and what the governing parties expect of them.
“Actually,” Pierce said, “I feel that one of the most interesting aspects of the bicentennial is the existential question it raises about where the expedition began. It represents an effort to tell a bigger, wider story. So we don’t start in St. Louis. We include the Falls of the Ohio, where they got together and enlisted the Corps of Discovery. But even that doesn’t tell the full story. Did it begin at Monticello, in the mind of Jefferson, or in Washington, where the money for the expedition was put together? These are good questions, which may shed some light on how we think about our history.”
Indeed they may. And they may also shed some light on the mercurial, contingent elements that contribute to the making of history — that is, how events are recast from one generation to the next, according to the demands of the moment — “history” as a ceaseless, infinitely malleable process.
In this case, we might look to a rather complicated tale that begins in 1964, with the establishment of the Lewis & Clark Trail Commission, a nonprofit, quasi-federal body meant to stimulate federal, state and local interest in Lewis and Clark sites. On the commission’s recommendation, the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation was created in 1969 (the Lewis and Clark Trail was one of the 14 original sites in the National Trails System when it was formulated as a division of the National Park Service in 1968). The Foundation would in turn spawn the Bicentennial Committee in 1985, first as a division, and after 1993 as a separate nonprofit organization. In 1998, the Lewis and Clark Congressional Caucus was formed to coordinate congressional response to the bicentennial; it will remain in effect through 2006. Compli-cated? Certainly. And what does it all mean?
Recounted so simply, it is a textbook tale of bureaucratic self-perpetuation and self-interest, but it constitutes the foundation to the bicentennial itself. The Congressional Caucus, meanwhile, has generated a surprising amount of legislation, most of which drifts well below the public radar: the approval, for instance, of commemorative coins, or the posthumous promotion of William Clark to captain in the U.S. Army. (Clark was recommissioned as a lieutenant, which made him Meriwether’s subordinate, a fact kept from crew members, who called him “captain,” his rank in the Kentucky militia.) Other legislation has been more complex: the conveyance of federal land in Illinois to the state, say, for historic and interpretive sites, or acts related to land acquisition and maintenance along the Lewis & Clark Trail.
More intriguing, and probably more important, is the less concisely defined relationship between the caucus and the bicentennial commission, which has enabled members of Congress to lobby on behalf of their home states for historical revision. Thus, Rep. Hill, as well as Indiana’s U.S. senators, Richard Lugar and Evan Bayh, are often mentioned as forces behind the inclusion of the Falls of the Ohio as the site of a “significant” event in the official commemoration.
“A number of Congressman Hill’s constituents came to him and said that they felt the Lewis and Clark site at the Falls of the Ohio had been overlooked,” Pierce said, “that it has never been properly represented historically. So we worked to make sure that Indiana’s role in the expedition is not forgotten.
“As a member of the caucus, our office has been assisting the local community to ensure that it has a good event. We assist in any way we can. Our hope is that this will get the area on the map: First, so that there will be a strong turnout for the event itself, and then to create what we call a ‘lasting legacy.’ What this means is that anyone who studies Lewis and Clark, or retraces their steps, will have to come through Louisville and Southern Indiana. The area continues to benefit.”
In 1803, talk of a transcontinental exploration had already been in the air for a while. But it was the publication during the previous year of Alexander Mackenzie’s account of his journey from Montreal to the Arctic Ocean in the early 1790s that prompted Jefferson to action: Mackenzie advocated that the British advance into the Pacific Northwest from Canada. At a moment when the Spanish continued to exert a presence in the territories north of Mexico and along the Pacific coast, the thought of a republic hemmed in from all sides was repugnant to the president who still dreamed of establishing a peaceful agrarian empire from ocean to ocean. In July 1803, the administration completed the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from the French, which added a considerable amount of land to the national map, and the stage was set.
The purpose of the expedition, then, was not entirely benign. Commerce was the goal, and Lewis and Clark were charged with providing information about the passage and the landscape, the resources, the receptivity of the tribes they met along the way. Could the land be farmed? Was there game? Which native groups were cooperative and which were not? Were the Indians potential trading partners? As a man of the Enlightenment, Jefferson had a strong interest in the natural sciences, one reason for scrupulous documentation along the way, but it would be a mistake to frame Lewis and Clark — as some have — as proto-ecologists. This was a military operation. They were gathering intelligence.
Traditionally, the native tribes have assumed a passive role in the story. There was little conflict with the white explorers, and so they — much like the Indians who came to the aid of the Pilgrims in the tale of the Plymouth colony — have largely remained faceless, compliant, a backdrop to national (white) destiny. The Mandan, for example, in the region at the headwaters of the Missouri, sheltered the expedition during the bitter winter of 1804-05; without their willing assistance, Lewis and Clark almost certainly would have perished.
“Historically,” Holmberg said, “it was a mutual-use relationship. Lewis and Clark provided trade goods, even weapons in some cases. So the Indians wanted something in return for their goodwill. If they had chosen to do so, they could have stopped the Corps long before they reached the Pacific. In fact, they only came to blows once, which was pretty amazing, considering the number of tribes they met.
“The Sioux were the first really tense encounter. If they could’ve looked down the road 70 years, even 50 years, they would have no doubt found a way to stop Lewis and Clark. But America was growing. If it hadn’t been Lewis and Clark, it would have been someone else, probably sooner rather than later.”
The Mandan, on the Fort Berthold Reservation in the northwest quadrant of North Dakota, are fully cognizant of their place in the Lewis and Clark story, and they have prepared for the bicentennial by developing a tourism office, building a small museum and adding rooms to their casino; they will take part in an official event in October 2004. But other tribes are simply too impoverished to do much. Visitors will find areas along the expedition route with scant lodging or restaurant facilities, and marginal medical facilities. Protests are planned for the Monticello event, and may also occur elsewhere along the Trail.
Of the 58 tribes that encountered the expedition, 30 have agreed to participate in an official capacity: “We tell them that we are not celebrating but commemorating,” said Dark Rain, a Shawnee of Ohio who is one of the founding members of the Circle of Tribal Advisors, which serves as an intermediary between the tribes and the National Council.
“In the past, we have had no choice about how we would be represented. This time, there is an official heads-up. The individual tribes can either tell their stories as they wish them to be told and take control of representation, or not participate at all, if they choose.
“This is the first time in 200 years that the government has asked tribal people to speak. I say, history is not all written. The account is not fixed, by any means. But how do you tell the same old story in a way that will grab the imaginations and hearts of American tourists, and the American people? Only a little bit of history has been told so far. We can make it a richer story, like adding color to a pencil sketch that has grown only too familiar over the years. But we insist that tribes tell the truth.”
In conversation about the tribal role in the bicentennial, Dark Rain is relentlessly optimistic. She hopes, for example, that there will be a tangible response to conditions on some of the reservations along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Obviously, the bicentennial offers the possibility of substantial symbolic, cultural and economic rewards, but they will not come without risk. As Dark Rain also notes, many tribes are anxious about the “literal footfall” of tourism.
“Before 9-11, we were projecting about 30 million tourists over the three-year period,” she said. “Say the figure is more like 10 million now. That’s still something like 275,000 people every month somewhere along the Lewis and Clark Trail. You could have 3,000 a month in your territory, and we’re talking about Indian communities of 400 to 1,000 people. Some of these are small Western tribes that still live largely off the land. It’s going to be an eye-opener for the people who come with their money and their attitudes, all the I-wants, and then they see how little there really is.
“We’re also telling the tribes to document their world as best they can, because after the onslaught of tourists, they will never be the same again. Everything will actually look different than it did before. This will change their circumstances, and so we want them to try to mitigate the damage that even kind-hearted tourists will do, literally, to the land itself.”
As Dark Rain explains it, tribes that agree to join the official bicentennial benefit from the accompanying publicity. In return, they are required primarily to be positive in their self-presentation. Few, it seems, wish to repeat the fiasco of 1992, the 500-year anniversary of the arrival of Columbus, when whole portions of Native America squared off against the official celebration.
“For us,” she said, “the legacy of Lewis and Clark is negative. But the artificial separation of the tribes from the bicentennial only ensures that that negativity will be continued.
“A lot of Indians realized that they’d done the earlier one inappropriately, and it was a disaster. But don’t just throw Indians a bone. The Indians know bones. And eight years ago, when they began organizing the bicentennial, that’s what they were planning. We turned it around. It is not tokenism this time. It is not a ‘poor Indian’ story. We will tell what we want to tell, and not at our own expense.”
Then there is the matter of York. The often volatile reassessment that has occurred during the past several decades around the slaveholding legacy of Thomas Jefferson is just one obvious instance of a need that will also insist upon the recovery of York’s role in the Lewis and Clark story. It is something that can no longer be brushed aside, or buried in the shadows of a larger historic enterprise. York and William Clark grew up together, from childhood, and while Clark would free this man several years after the expedition, he does not seem to have done so without reluctance; Clark was a product of his time and culture, and his letters reveal his view of York as property.
This is ripe territory for Holmberg, who has written two books about the Lewis and Clark expedition, one of which is “In Search of York,” published by the University Press of Colorado in 2001. York accompanied Clark as a body servant, but he was an experienced hunter as well, and in many tribal encounters, the Indians regarded him as superior to the white members of the Corps — partly because they had never seen a black person, and partly because his skin color made him unique among the whites. The legends are true, apparently, that York was seen by some of the tribes as a magical being, and was kept busy by Indians who believed his power could transmitted sexually through the Indian women to Indian men.
“Lewis and Clark used this to their advantage,” Holmberg said, “and they learned to do so early on.”
York began agitating for his freedom in 1808, but he and Clark seem to have had a falling out, and when Clark went to St. Louis later that year, he took York with him, leaving York’s wife behind in Louisville. He was freed several years later, but little is known of his subsequent life. He can be placed in Louisville in 1816, Holmberg said, working as a wagon driver. According to one legend, he rejoined one of the tribes along the old expedition trail, but Holmberg is more inclined to believe Clark, who told Washington Irving in 1830 that York had died of cholera in Tennessee during the 1820s.
In their own time, their fame was terribly short-lived. In 1809, Meriwether Lewis was found dead, apparently by his own hand, in a roadside inn along the Natchez Trace outside Nashville. He was prone to depression and had been squabbling with bureaucrats in Washington over expedition expenses. He had failed, too, in his obligation to have the journals published. They might have established the significance of the expedition — rather like media coverage in our own time — but he continued to procrastinate, and so they would not appear in print until 1814, after Clark hired a writer named Nicholas Biddle to put them into manageable order. By that time, other accounts of the expedition had been published, and almost all of the Western flora that they had discovered and named had been rediscovered and renamed by others.
“This was not quite the ultimate insult, but it was a great shame,” Holmberg said. “An important part of their accomplishment was forgotten. Clark knew it and was disturbed, but there wasn’t much else he could do. Had they been published earlier, the journals would have had much, much greater impact.” (The complete journals are now published by the University of Nebraska in 13 volumes.)
Clark died in 1832 after a long, active public life. (Interestingly, his grandson, Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr., was a founder of Churchill Downs and was the architect of the Kentucky Derby.) The rest of the Corps dispersed, mostly around the Midwest, and there are small towns that still claim the affiliation of residence or gravesites. In any case, the expedition route did not avail itself to easy passage for trade, and in the popular mind, the achievement of Lewis and Clark was soon overshadowed by John Charles Fremont’s expedition across the Rockies to California and John Wesley Powell’s trek down the Colorado River. Ironically, Fremont and Powell are now overshadowed in turn.
“This is the story of a nation,” Holmberg said, “which begins in Plymouth, in Jamestown, and St. Augustine, and moves across the country. It was inevitable. You can see the same story on other continents, too — a movement of people — and somebody’s lost, and somebody else has won. It’s the story of human history. As long as we don’t shrink from that reality, and the potential to learn from it, the bicentennial will be a good event. The movement continues and there are new territories ahead, although the new territory might be the environment, which is in danger of being destroyed, or something of that nature. All of our deeds have consequences.”
Contact the writer at leo@leoweekly.com