The Stamp of Our Wild West

It was almost exactly 200 years ago: Three dozen men, tough as mule meat, departed the last outpost of civilization on an American odyssey that would take them more than 8,000 miles by foot, canoe paddle, and hoof. Before they finally returned to St. Charles, Missouri an amazing 864 days later, nearly everyone except the man who sent them assumed they had long since perished on their journey.

The man who never lost hope was Thomas Jefferson--the Commander in Chief who more than doubled the size of the United States by purchasing "Upper Louisiana" from France in 1803, then dispatched an American military party (under the command of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark) to learn what the nation had bought. The vast tract stretching from New Orleans to the Montana-Canada border was an uncharted wilderness, full of threats and opportunities. Crossing it for the first time was equivalent to sending men to the moon; the expedition cost $40,000--which as a proportion of federal spending would be more than $11 billion now--and it lasted four times longer than Columbus's voyage to the New World. These surveyors of the Louisiana Purchase were quite conscious of the Columbian scope of their enterprise; one of the first toasts upon their return was to the memory of the Italian mariner.

When their work was complete, the glimmering outlines of a great new nation could be seen. What Captains Lewis and Clark and their soldiers traversed--what we now call the Middle West--was the far, far west in the minds of Americans of that day. And the sojourners didn't turn back until they had camped on the Pacific Ocean, the final, natural limit on their countrymen's continental aspirations.

These trekkers probed a land of vast scope and harsh dangers. They encountered predators of unspeakable ferocity, Indians both hostile and friendly, and wrenching sicknesses that literally knocked them off their feet. During their first winter the adventurers bore temperatures of 45 degrees below zero. The mighty Missouri River actually froze solid. Many times these men staggered weak-kneed with hunger, their ribs protruding as they barely survived on roots, wolf meat, berries, and the flesh of their own horses.

While (amazingly) only one explorer died during their three years of wandering, in subsequent adventures seven members of the party were killed by Indians, and numerous others succumbed to additional hazards of the territory. (A new book called The Fate of the Corps: What Became of the Lewis and Clark Explorers After the Expedition provides some fascinating details.) John Ordway, Lewis and Clark's invaluable sergeant, saw all the land he received as bounty for his service destroyed in unimaginable ways by the ferocious earthquake that tore the Midwest in 1811. The year 1816 became known in the Louisiana Purchase as "the year without a summer," as snow and frost descended repeatedly during June, July, and August.

But none of this discouraged American settlers from pouring into the new region. For Lewis and Clark had uncovered a land of mythic proportions that immediately took on a giant significance in the national mind. The "West" they opened up became a blank slate on which generations of striving Americans sought to write their name. In the process, this land shaped our national character in ways that still continue to be important.

Today, 200 years after Lewis and Clark entered it as a wild fringe, the Middle West is more like America's moral center. It is a land of intact families, strong faith, and close-knit communities (as several articles in this issue document). Americans are moving there to establish homes and businesses. Thanks largely to healthy childrearing the U.S. heartland is also (according to standardized tests) our brain belt. In these ways, the Midwest acts as a kind of safety harness, securing our nation from the center against the worst modern social traumas.

The Lewis and Clark expedition was very much a military mission. The company was made up of two officers, three sergeants, and 23 privates between the ages of 18 and 34. Nearly all were unmarried. These men were hand picked for their skill as soldiers, boatmen, marksmen, hunters, gunsmiths, and scouts. Most were originally from rural Virginia, Pennsylvania, or New England, and many had migrated to Kentucky when that was our nation's far western frontier. All were hardened outdoorsmen.

In recent months I've described to many audiences the reconstructive, political, and economic work I have observed present-day U.S. soldiers carrying out in Iraq. Several people have told me that those seem inappropriate tasks for soldiers. One TAE subscriber wrote to insist that the only legitimate assignment for a military unit was to "rain down fire upon our enemies."

The soldiers under Lewis and Clark, however, were charged with much more than just military duties. They did indeed plant the flag, announce American suzerainty, and rain down fire on a few occasions, and they operated under full military discipline throughout, including courts martial, honors for the dead, and so forth. But the U.S. soldiers deployed in Louisiana from 1804 to 1806 also did many other things.

Jefferson, in his initial description of the type of officer he was seeking to lead the expedition, said he wanted a man with "the necessary firmness of body and mind, habits of living in the woods, and familiarity with the Indian character," but also one "perfectly skilled in botany, natural history, mineralogy, astronomy." When he settled on Captain Lewis, the first thing he did was send him to Philadelphia to study with some of the leading scientists in our young nation.

In equipping the corps, the first priority of the co-commanders was their guns--a variety of arms, ammunition, flints, ramrods, and powder canisters were purchased, packed, and carefully maintained and stewarded over three years of use. But their very next priority was scientific equipment--sextants, weather instruments, compasses, chronometers--used to make observations, create maps, and collect information and specimens from nature. When canoes overturned or goods had to be abandoned, saving and protecting the scientific gear was always a matter of frantic importance to the men.

These soldiers collected, catalogued, and painstakingly shipped back to Washington many hundreds of scientific artifacts--bighorn sheep skeletons, live prairie dogs, dried plants, Indian ritual items, rock samples. And the items corps members prized most of all were their expedition journals--nearly one million hand-lettered words describing events, weather, flora and fauna, and natural wonders, with nearly every man keeping his own account--along with the masterful maps created by William Clark. These hardy armed warriors took the time to discover and describe 178 plant species and 122 animals previously unknown to science, and compiled one of the most impressive records of natural history ever assembled.

They not only acted as scientific investigators, but also as diplomats and promoters of trade. They made direct contact with at least 15 different Indian tribes, introducing many of them to white men for the very first time. They assembled detailed records of Indian language and culture. The travelers explained why they had come, pleaded for peace, and promised mutually beneficial commerce. All Indians were treated with respect, and some chiefs were subsequently escorted as far as Washington, D.C. to meet with our country's elected representatives. William Clark spent the rest of his life serving as a friend and advocate for Native Americans.

This military company was driven not by ego, or a lust for riches, or demands for national glory, but mostly by a hunger for knowledge of new places and people and creations of nature. It was primarily an intellectual quest, carried out against supreme physical demands, a benign and public-spirited exploratory venture that benefited humanity as a whole. It succeeded only because the voyagers combined the high impulses of intellectual curiosity with the strength of bottomless courage. In this, the American soldiers who took part were early precursors for others who have been asked in many times and many places since to carry out vital work that extended far beyond their main expertise of warfighting.

The settling of the Louisiana Purchase cemented many deeply American qualities into our national character. One of these traits was the insistence that every man is as good as the next. In the American West, there were no masters and peons, partly because on our dangerous frontiers all residents had to be armed, and many people carried their weapon with them at all times. The rifle, and later revolver, were great equalizers of men, and potent encouragements to civility and egalitarianism in all public dealings.

Western life also encouraged the acceptance of individuals for cooperative reasons. On a sparsely populated frontier, one additional shooter, or nurse, or laborer could make the difference between success and failure, life and death. There were many niches where people could show their worth. When Lewis and Clark turned west, their party included a skilled hunter and interpreter who was half Shawnee. Two other men were half Omaha Indian. One black man made the journey. And a French-Canadian close to 40 years old was engaged as a translator, along with his teenage Shoshone wife and their two-month-old baby.

One of the expedition's historic moments came on November 24, 1805, when the corps voted on where to spend the winter before returning home. Both the teen Indian squaw

Sacagawea and York, William Clark's black slave, were allowed to vote. This vote was administered easily, without ostentation, generations before laws engineered back in Washington, D.C. would recognize blacks, women, or Indians as electors.

Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, the child of the French-Canadian mountain man and Indian mother, who passed his infancy and toddling years in the mountains and prairies with the corps, was eventually adopted by William Clark himself. "Pomp," as the boy was nicknamed by Captain Clark, became a perfect symbol of the new Western American. After his wild boyhood he was schooled, then traveled to Europe--where he mastered several languages and impressed people with his manners and reading. After a few years, though, he left the cities of Germany and returned to the American West, where he became a prominent wilderness guide, participated in the Mexican-American War, and ended life as a California pioneer. He was described in his obituary as "pleasant...intelligent, well read in the topics of the day, and generally esteemed in the community in which he lived...a good-meaning man."

When one of the Indian chiefs whom Lewis and Clark befriended was brought to Washington, D.C. to meet the President, he was toasted with these words: "To the Red People of America... gaining by steady steps the comforts of the civilized, without losing the virtues of the savage state." That formulation expresses in a nutshell what many Americans have aspired to across the history of our country: to grasp the benefits of modernity and civilization, but always "without losing the virtues of the savage state."

Americans prize breadth of mind, and seek a progressive refinement of life. Ralph Waldo Emerson noted how quickly pianos found their way into log cabins along our frontier. Our desire for self-improvement, material gain, and intellectual advance can also be seen in our powerful, longstanding enthusiasm for business expansion, scientific progress, and economic growth.

But we Americans emphatically do not want to be civilized to the point of becoming domesticated and sissified. That is an important theme visible in our literature and popular culture. From Melville, Twain, and Jack London to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, we have shown that we want our men and women to keep their raw authenticity and retain some of their sharp edges. A certain wild hardness of character, we believe, leaves us better prepared to battle life's hostile elements, win necessary competitions, and prevail against dangerous enemies--even vicious storm troopers or kamikazes or mujahideen who terrify less rugged people.

America's high mix of civilized wisdoms and wilderness virtues was well encapsulated in the event staged by the social elite of St. Louis on September 26, 1806 to celebrate the Corps of Discovery's historic return:

The men made their way through the muddy streets of St. Louis, that civilized, uncouth, eastern, western city, outpost of narrow, crowded streets overrun with merchants, miners, hunters, trappers, gamblers, army officers, priests, bonneted women, and painted French girls.

(Compare the above to the marvelous sketch of contemporary Hyder, Alaska that begins on page 22 of this issue and you will see that even in a time of paved roads and SUVs with heated seats, America's frontier energy still survives.)

In the midst of that bubbling, bustling, half-barbarian boomtown of St. Louis, a formal dinner and ball were thrown for Lewis and Clark and their men. The evening began with 17 toasts. "To the President of the United States." "To the federal Constitution." "To commerce." "To agriculture and industry," added someone. "To the fair daughters of Louisiana!" grinned one gentleman.

Then came the salutations of a somewhat wilder, and fiercer, tinge. "To the Missouri River." "To the Louisiana Territory." "To the memory of the illustrious Washington, Father of America. [He had died just seven years earlier.] May his guardian spirit still watch over us and prove a terror to the engines of tyranny." "To peace with all nations--without submission!" And "To our fathers who shed their blood and laid down their lives to purchase our independence."

For generations, it was the harsh demands of life on our Western fringe that prevented Americans from being seduced by comfort, that kept alive our respect for the savage virtues. It was experience in frontier communities--first rural towns across the Atlantic seaboard, then cabins strung along trails through the Appalachians, then farms carved into the emptiness of the Great Plains, and finally homesteads in and over the Rocky Mountains, that honed our appreciation for the untamed man.

But right from the beginning, the West was a state of mind for Americans as much as a physical place. The majority of our people never actually experienced Western life, but they lived it nonetheless--through books, paintings, journals, travelling shows, songs, photographs and movies. The Western identity became wholly intermixed with the American identity.

A taste for the wild seeped right into our bones. We must hope it will remain there, a permanent part of Americanism. If so, that will separate us eternally from our European cousins and the many kept and captive nations of history. And that will also forever link all American citizens to the Middle Westerners of Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Dakotas--people who stamped onto the minds of their fellow countrymen the indelible image of an unbroken plain of wild grass, stretching right to the horizon, and beyond.

2 posted on 06/15/2004 7:50:22 AM PDT by HiJinx (Go with courage, go with honor, go in God's good Grace. Come home when it's time. We'll be here.)

Interesting article. You may not be aware that Meriwether Louis committed suicide some years later at an inn on the Natchez Trace. I don't remember how far it is from Natchez, but there is a marker there and you can still see little hummocks where the foundation of the inn was.

Louis suffered from depression (probably what would be called bipolar disease today) but the depression apparently didn't evidence itself when he was on the trail and constantly being challenged.

He shot himself with two pistols (one in the abdomen and the other in the head) and died the next day.

The "Corps of Discovery" feat was very enlightning, but, in no way were they the first non-Indians there.

French cour de bois and the Metis had been in that part of the country for almost a hundred years prior to L&C showing up on the upper Missouri yellowstone rivers.

4 posted on 06/15/2004 8:07:34 AM PDT by Ursus arctos horribilis ("It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!" Emiliano Zapata 1879-1919)

If you go out and visit various sites along the route of the expedition, you get a very different perspective of it. The explorers were primarily military men because the expedition was primarily a military one. One of Jefferson's goals was to secure the allegiance of various native tribed in the Louisiana Purchase, with the intent of arming them to protect the territory from forays by the British (from what is now western Canada) and the Spanish (from what is now the southwestern U.S.).

Great column.

I especially liked the comment about us retaining our rugged individuality which allows, yes, even forces us to fight back and rain fire down upon those who would try to use terror to destroy us.

We are Americans in the mold of hard men like Lewis and Clark. We will not fail falter or fall down. We will not cower in sissified metrosexual fear and sensitivity.

This one's being sent home for hte kids to read.

I understand the Spanish were aware of the expedition and sent some troops to intercept them. Fortunately they missed them (I want to say by a couple of weeks, but don't quote me on that).

The one incident during the expedition in which they killed two natives (Blackfoot Indians, I believe) was an indication of what the expedition was all about. Members of the expedition had befriended the two, thinking they were Shoshone, and told them that in the future the Shoshones would be given arms to protect them from the Blackfoot tribe to the north.

The Blackfoot Indians realized exactly what was going to happen when the U.S. began securing alliances with different tribes in the West, so they tried to steal the horses one night and prevent the explorers from making their way back east.

Thanks for noticing.

That's the last time I call myself an idiot on FR. Too many of you fine individuals take the opportunity to agree with me.

Thanks for noticing.

That's the last time I call myself an idiot on FR. Too many of you fine individuals take the opportunity to agree with me.

(Figured I'd get the double post over with in one shot)

14 posted on 06/15/2004 8:51:00 AM PDT by cyclotic (Cub Scouts-Teach 'em young to be men, and politically incorrect in the process)

You are correct. The area was already fairly well traversed and understood but it was still open to conquest. San Francisco (nee San Carlos) was already 30 years old, well established and growing. The Brits also considered it their territory. It is somewhat surprising that they did not cross paths at some point. At one point L&C crossed within 100 miles of at least one well armed Spanish slaving expedition. But for the vagarities of fate they could have met and partied -- or fought. An intercepting party from Taos arrived too late and too weak to stop them.

Lewis and Clark are big time history in Oregon. You can't swing a cat and not hit some memorial, marker or reference to them.

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