Exploring an expedition's intellectual life
Most of us think of the Lewis and Clark expedition as an adventure in the great outdoors, like the conquest of Mount Everest or the South Pole. But a small gem of an exhibition at the
"The Lewis and Clark expedition was an enterprise in America's commitment to the Enlightenment," says Stephen Dow Beckham, professor of history at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., and curator of the exhibit, who spoke by telephone from his home. "They carried the first library across America, with Barton's `Elements of Botany,' two volumes of Linnaeus, Patrick Kelly's `A Practical Introduction to Spherics and Nautical Astronomy.' They had an eight-volume encyclopedia. The expedition was conceived by a president who saw that the purposes of a nation-state were intellectual as well as economic and political."
"The Literature of the Lewis and Clark Expedition," in the Norma Jean Calderwood Gallery through April 24, is a rich sampling of the extensive collections held by Lewis & Clark College. It includes books, newspapers, maps, letters, field notes, artwork, and documents, some of which inspired the adventure, some that followed it, and some that went with it.
Led by captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the 40-man expedition left St. Louis in 1804, traveled up the Missouri River, crossed the Rocky Mountains, returned to water again on the Clearwater, Snake, and Columbia rivers, and reached the Pacific Ocean. It returned in 1806 to great acclaim, losing only one man to illness. President Thomas Jefferson, who had acquired the vast Louisiana territory from France in 1803, had assigned the expedition not only to explore the way west but to amass a treasure-trove of learning.
Beckham says, "Jefferson's letter of instructions to them was like a blueprint for a liberal arts college." The captains created, says Beckham, "a massive database of flora, fauna, weather, paleontology, linguistics, diplomatic relations with the tribes. Their entries were encyclopedic, in the spirit of what Diderot was doing in the 18th century in his `Encyclopedie': to collect all knowledge and make it useful." Altogether, the two captains and the men who accompanied them produced an estimated 2 million words in journals and notes.
The exhibit, in display cases modeled on those at Jefferson's Monticello, samples the books the explorers brought with them (contemporaneous copies -- not the actual ones they carried) and the literary explosion that followed the expedition. Due to one of history's great cases of writer's block, Lewis could not produce a promised book and died, perhaps by his own hand, in 1809. Clark was no writer, and not until 1814 did he team up with writer Paul Allen and lawyer Nicholas Biddle to produce a history of the expedition, a copy of which is on display. The actual edited journals were not published until 1892-93.
So great was the worldwide interest in the expedition that other books poured out, several of them sampled in the exhibition. Patrick Gass's 1807 "Journal of the Voyages and Travels of a Corps of Discovery" was the first by a member of the expedition. Numerous other accounts, mostly fanciful and full of fantastic illustrations, were published in America and Europe. A bogus 1822 account by Irish evangelical George Phillips, who pretended to have accompanied the adventure (he tells of its return in 1815, six years after Lewis's death), went through four printings in Dublin.
The maps remind us how recently the West was as opaque to Easterners as the
There's also a section on the 1905 centennial exposition in Portland, at the time of a great explosion of interest in the expedition, and another on books about the legendary Indian guide, called "Sacagawea: The Making of a Heroine." Beckham says Sacagawea, about 15 at the time, had actually not had a large role in the expedition and had not even been mentioned in Lewis's reports. In 1902, however, suffragist Eva Emery Dye vastly exaggerated her stature as the maiden who guided the expedition through the wilderness, in her book "The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark."
In this quiet and uncrowded gallery, gazing at these cases of books and papers accompanied by a few related objects (a compass, a Northwest Indian basket-hat, a leather-covered book box), one can't help but admire the romantic and enlightened spirit of the great adventure. Though it was not long before Lewis and Clark were followed by less enlightened hordes bent on wealth or dispossession of the native peoples, the two captains had no such objectives -- which Beckham says "must have been perplexing" to the tribes they encountered.
"Here came this group of men who were not interested in trade and had limited trade goods," Beckham said. "Instead, they were pressing plants and borrowing bows and arrows and baskets. They had these word lists and would ask: `What is your word for God, mother, father, finger?' They collected data, not furs. When they reached the Missouri River watershed, they named three rivers Philosophy, Philanthropy, and Wisdom. That choice of place names, which they put on their maps, sets this expedition apart from others in the 19th century -- a noble and sophisticated pursuit that is remarkable and engaging."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.
