Corps of Discovery failed in primary mission

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress Published in 1814 with the first edition of the Lewis and Clark journals, this map — copied by Samuel Lewis from William Clark's original drawing — was the most accurate depiction of Western geography the world had yet seen.

Meriwether Lewis' unhappy and solitary end on the Natchez Trace was but one of several unsatisfying codas to the Corps of Discovery's journey.

The expedition failed in its primary aim: locating a convenient shipping route across North America. Lewis and his co-commander, William Clark, had received explicit direction in that regard from Thomas Jefferson, who wrote in his letter of instructions, "The object of your mission is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it's course & communication with the water of the Pacific ocean may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce."

Upon his return, Lewis sent Jefferson a letter responding directly to that presidential mandate: "In obedience to your orders we have penitrated the Continent of North America to the Pacific Ocean and sufficiently explored the interior of the country to affirm with confidence that we have discovered the most practical rout which dose exist across the continent by means of the navigable branches of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers."

The devil, as always, was in the details. That route included an arduous slog of more than 300 miles across the northern Rockies, a series of rugged mountain ranges whose towering peaks are mantled with snow even in summer. It may have been "the most practical" water route across the continent, but it was profoundly impractical for the purposes of commercial trade — in fact, it had nearly killed Lewis and his party with cold, hunger and exhaustion during their transit of the most difficult stretch of mountains, the 140-mile trail through the Bitterroot Range on the border of Montana and Idaho.

Nevertheless, Lewis tried to put the best face on things, concluding somewhat lamely that "Many articles not bulky brittle nor of a very perishable nature may be conveyed to the United States by this rout with more facility and at less expense" than by ship around the tip of South America or Africa. But the truth was apparent despite his tepid optimism: There was no all-water transportation route across North America, and even the land crossing would be unsuitable for anything large or fragile. The Northwest Passage sought by explorers almost since the time of Columbus — a maritime shortcut from Europe to Asia Ñ simply did not exist.

Photo by John Krist For many years, specimens collected by the Corps of Discovery — including bird and animals skins, rocks and Indian artifacts — were displayed in a museum operated by Charles Wilson Peale in Philadelphia's Independence Hall.

Besides failing to locate proof of this old geographic fantasy, the explorers also failed to provide for the general public a coherent account of what they had done. They learned much that was important and remarkable enough to outweigh even the bad news about the illusory Northwest Passage, but in the first few years after the Corps of Discovery returned from its pioneering exploration of the West its members dispersed, the artifacts and specimens of native culture, wildlife, geology and botany they brought home were scattered, and the scientific information they so painstakingly amassed remained unpublished. (Full story)

And then there was Lewis' failure to live — and to die — in the manner befitting a national hero. When he killed himself in a lonely corner of the Tennessee mountains three years after the expedition concluded, he was despondent, drinking heavily, embroiled in political controversy, nearly bankrupt. Although his accomplishments during the journey across the West were noteworthy, the messiness of his post-expedition life and death made him a problematic public figure.

For those seeking to wrest wealth from the land, the expedition produced an immediate and tangible boon: Clark's detailed map of the West, the most accurate in existence, a precise blueprint of financial opportunity for trappers and traders. But the expedition's failures made the story of its journey poor material from which to fashion legends and myths. Time would have to pass, and the unsatisfying ambiguities would have to be forgotten, before that could happen. Lewis and Clark faded rather quickly from the nation's consciousness and were all but ignored by popular historians for nearly a century.

It would fall to subsequent generations to decide just what the Corps of Discovery had accomplished, to confer a broader meaning upon what was regarded by those who heard it in the early 19th century as merely a rollicking good adventure tale about ferocious bears, thundering rapids, snowy mountains and exotic natives.

Lewis and Clark rediscovered

Photo courtesy of the American Philosophical Society A drawing of a candlefish accompanying a meticulous description of the species on a page from Lewis and Clark's notebooks typifies the kind of scientific information the explorers collected. Delays in publication of the expedition journals meant the public saw little of that information for nearly a century.

The first widely distributed version of the Lewis and Clark expedition journals — containing much of their scientific and ethnographic data — finally appeared in print in 1893. That same year, historian Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a famous address at the Chicago World's Fair titled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Turner's thesis was that the settlement of the untamed West had been the country's defining experience, the constant push toward a receding frontier determining the American character and the development of the nation's institutions.

Although Turner's address described an idea he had long been exploring, the timing of its delivery was largely due to a remarkable statement by the U.S. Census Bureau accompanying results of the 1890 census: "Up until and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement," the bureau reported, "but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line."

By the Census Bureau definition at the time, "unsettled" land had a population density of less than two citizens per square mile. It took Americans less than a century to occupy the vastness that had appeared as little more than a blank space on the map when Lewis and Clark set out. In only three generations, the frontier had moved from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Coast.

Fifteen years after the Census Bureau officially declared the frontier closed, Lewis and Clark were rediscovered by the American public, thanks in part to publication of a third edition of their journals — the first complete, verbatim version, copiously annotated. That year, the explorers also were pressed into service as symbols of America's manifest destiny to conquer the continent — indeed, to spread American influence across the Pacific.

The theme of the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Ore., was "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way," and it presented the explorers' journey as the first step in the inevitable spread of American dominance from the Atlantic coast to the shores of the Pacific. In choosing that slogan, exposition planners had appropriated verbatim a line from a verse written in the 1720s by George Berkeley, an English bishop and philosopher, who described America as the next focal point of world civilization, following the successive rise and fall of empires ruled from Greece, Rome, Spain, France and then England.

The tone of the centennial celebration was characteristic of that period in American history, when the notion of "progress" — the inexorable march from a primitive, backward past toward an ideal future — was applied not only to technological innovation but to changes in social and cultural institutions, and was assumed to be unequivocally good. In this context, Lewis and Clark were hailed for having opened the wilderness to the civilizing hand of American settlement and to the full exploitation (a word that had not yet acquired negative connotations) of its bountiful natural resources.

As the bicentennial of the expedition approaches, the language of 1905 and the attitudes it reflects are no longer in vogue. The cultural upheavals that bloomed in the 1960s produced a belated recognition of the price often paid for the "progress" celebrated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: degradation of air and water, dispossession and death for the aboriginal tribes of North America, loss of biodiversity and the consequent diminishment of the landscape's wildness and beauty. As next month's kickoff of the three-year bicentennial observance approaches, the Lewis and Clark expedition is being used to draw attention to the political goals of American Indian tribes and environmental activists — voices absent from previous commemorations of Lewis and Clark's journey.

The past four decades also have seen a burst of scholarship that contrasts markedly with the disregard for Lewis and Clark exhibited by historians of previous generations. Writers have examined the journey of the Corps of Discovery from nearly every conceivable angle, providing a richer and more detailed appreciation of the expedition and its role in Western history than was available even half a century ago. (Click here for a bibliography of such materials used as background for this series.) Which returns the discussion to the central question, one that could not be answered in the early 19th century. What did the Lewis and Clark expedition really accomplish? What did it all mean?

The story of the Lewis and Clark expedition is history, in the sense that the expedition's journals, maps and collections of plants, animal specimens and cultural artifacts constitute concrete data that may be used to fix the undertaking squarely into a broader geographical, cultural and chronological context. But the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition is more than history — it is nearly, though not quite, myth. The events are real, the documentation of them as true and reliable as historical documentation ever gets. But there is symbolic meaning as well in the account of the Corps of Discovery's epic journey — in the episodes we choose to recount most often, the passages we leave out, the events we distort, gloss over or misrepresent.

The meaning of the Corps of Discovery's story, in other words, depends on who is telling it. Many of those story tellers have been quoted over the past year in previous installments of this series. Some of their comments bear repeating here, at the project's conclusion.

Discovering the future

To environmental activists, the story of the expedition is a story of paradise lost, a benchmark by which to gauge what two centuries of settlement and exploitation have done to the Western landscape, as well as a call to arms for those who would protect what remains.

The Sierra Club, one of the nation's oldest and largest conservation groups, launched its Wild America campaign in 1999, calling it a five-year effort to save the "wild and untamed lands that represent the legacy of Lewis and Clark." American Rivers, focusing its efforts on the great waterway that served as the highway of exploration for the Corps of Discovery, has similarly initiated a five-year campaign called "Voyage of Recovery" to seek public support for efforts "to restore portions of the Missouri River to their natural condition — a condition that Lewis and Clark would recognize."

To American Indian tribes seeking federal recognition, legal validation of long-ignored treaty obligations, recompense for old injustices or just an equal voice in the chorus of American history, Lewis and Clark's journey marks the point in time when the world changed forever. Within two generations after the explorers' passage, a way of life that had been evolving on the Western landscape for 10,000 years was all but obliterated.

"To many Indian people, the story of Lewis and Clark is not separate from the story that followed, which includes decimation of whole animal populations, taking of Indian lands and suppression of tribal cultures," according to Julie Cajune, an Indian education coordinator and enrolled member of the Salish and Kootenai tribes in Montana.

To historians and many other writers, the significance of the Lewis and Clark expedition lies in what it revealed about the nation.

"It was the first report on the West, on the United States over the hill and beyond the sunset, on the province of the American future," historian Bernard DeVoto wrote in the introduction to the version of the expedition's journals he edited. "There has never been another so excellent or so influential. ... It satisfied desire and it created desire: the desire of the westering nation."

"They were the ones that really stitched the coasts together," said historian David Lavender of Ojai, author of one of the first book-length examinations of the expedition. (More excerpts from an interview with Lavender.)

"The importance of the Lewis and Clark expedition lay on the level of imagination: it was drama, it was the enactment of a myth that embodied the future," historian Henry Nash Smith wrote in 1950, long before most historians had devoted serious thought to the explorers. "It gave tangible substance to what had merely been an idea, and established the idea of a highway across the continent so firmly in the minds of Americans that repeated failures could not shake it."

"This was the greatest camping trip of all time. And the greatest hunting trip. And one of the greatest scientific expeditions ever," Stephen Ambrose wrote in his preface to a recent coffee table book on the expedition published by the National Geographic Society. Ambrose, who died Oct. 13, did as much as anyone to focus attention on the Corps of Discovery, his best-selling "Undaunted Courage" capturing the public's imagination and inspiring other authors to mine the rich lode of expedition lore.

"Lewis and Clark are the armature about which the history of the United States from St. Louis to the Pacific coast is hung," said Edward Carter, director of the American Philosophical Society's Philadelphia library (custodian of the original Lewis and Clark notebooks) and a member of the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial.

"They discovered the American future," Dayton Duncan says in Ken Burns' popular 1997 public television documentary on the expedition, for which he served as primary writer.

A timeless legacy

And perhaps it is with Duncan's simple yet provocative idea that this yearlong series of stories ought to end. With the benefit of 200 years of hindsight, Americans today can see in Lewis and Clark's epic journey from east to west a template for the pattern of national settlement that followed. The parallels are accurate to a surprising degree of detail: inexorable movement across the plains and mountains despite tremendous difficulties, a relationship with the land and its creatures that ranged from curiosity to awe to casual destruction, a gradual shift in the relationship with native tribes from diplomatic paternalism to deceit and violence, a relentlessly utilitarian evaluation of the region in terms of its suitability for farming, trapping, mining and commerce.

At the same time, however, Lewis and Clark showed themselves capable of leaping beyond the conventions of their time. The Corps of Discovery subordinated the demands of its ruggedly independent individual members to the greater needs of the group (a theme that also would come to define the process of Western settlement even though it is often absent today from the region's mythic image of itself). Lewis found himself enraptured by the tremendous beauty of the Western landscape, and took pains to write about it — those "seens of visionary inchantment" he described on the Upper Missouri River — even as he was evaluating the region's agricultural and mineral prospects. And the commanders of the expedition brought to the wilderness a more inclusive brand of democracy than was practiced in the United States at the time, enfranchising a black slave and an Indian woman when it came time to vote on the location of their winter camp on the Oregon coast.

The journey of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and the Corps of Discovery may be, as Edward Carter suggested, the armature about which the history of the West over the past 200 years is hung. But perhaps in its best moments, that journey also may have provided a blueprint for the region's future — a future characterized by cooperation in pursuit of common goals, appreciation for the aesthetic and spiritual qualities of the landscape, and a political culture that grants an equal voice to everyone with a stake in the West's destiny.