Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Summer 1997

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3/4, Summer/Fall 1997, pp. 165-84.

Comments

Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

In early June 1805, as they traveled up the Missouri toward the continental divide, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark came to a fork where two rivers of apparently comparable width and force flowed together. The captains paused at this junction, unable to decide which river was the "main stream" of the Missouri and which was the tributary. They were determined to fulfill Thomas Jefferson's instructions as exactly as possible: "to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it's course and communication with the waters of the Pacific ocean ... may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across this continent."1 Punctilious to a fault, the captains interpreted this mandate narrowly: for them this order meant following the Missouri itself to its source, where a portage across the continental divide would lead to the Columbia watershed, a pattern that would mirror the upper Missouri and flow west to the sea. After nine days of reconnaissance, they decided that the river approaching them from the southwest should be declared the Missouri. Lewis named the other river Marias, and called it one of the Missouri's "most interesting branc[h]es."2

The days of observation and definition at the Missouri/Marias confluence exemplify the survey work to which Lewis, Clark, and contemporary European explorers were committed. All were field agents in a larger process of scientific classification by which "unknown" regions of the earth were mapped and described. But as Lewis and Clark moved west across the North American continent, their contact with Native informants revealed spatial and topographical concepts at variance with their own. Native geographical knowledge was not simply sketchy, provisional information that scientific survey could confirm, correct, or supersede.

HISTORIES OF THE LEWIS AND CLARK EXPEDITION

Historians of the Lewis and Clark expedition have been accepting and uncritical of the captains' mandate and what they achieved. In 1952 Bernard DeYoto praised expedition members as heroes because "they had filled out the map" and had pursued "scientific objectives" during two years of hardships, dangers, and adventures. Specifically, De Yo to called the Missouri/Marias decision "a remarkable act of the mind [that] must be conceded a distinguished place in the history of thought. It is the basic method of science."3 More than twenty years later, John Logan Allen contrasted Clark's field surveys with earlier geographical "lore" gleaned from speculative cartography and "sketchy native data." In Passage Through the Garden, published in 1975, Allen considers the expedition leaders to have been "a pair of trained and intelligent observers [who] gathered and analyzed geographical information in what can only be described as a scientific method." Allen echoes De Yo to in calling the decision at the Marias "a brilliant piece of deduction from a fuzzy set of facts [that] illustrates ... the competence and intelligence of its commanders."4 In a complementary work published within a few years of Passage Through the Garden, Paul Russell Cutright established Lewis and Clark as "pioneering naturalists" who charted flora and fauna according to Linnaean categories.5 Although James P. Ronda's studies of the expedition's contact with Native groups have tempered earlier interpretations of the captains' success, Ronda continues to see the expedition as a scientific breakthrough and Clark as mastering not only European cartographic skills but those of Native mapping.6 Gary E. Moulton's recent re-edition of the expedition's journals and maps praises the captains' science and specifically endorses Allen's account of the decision at the Marias.7 Without exception, the captains' reasoning at the Missouri/Marias junction has been admired as characteristic of the expedition's scientific achievement.

The expedition's mapping procedures are of particular interest in understanding the problem facing Lewis and Clark at the Missouri/ Marias junction. These procedures are described and judged within a geographical context clearly outlined in Passage Through the Garden. Allen suggests a progressive shift from the hearsay of Natives and traders, to speculative mapping, and finally to scientific geography:

There are really three ways of knowing about areas geographically: a system of coherent knowledge based on accurate data and long acquaintance, a system of more or less coherent knowledge based on simple logical and theoretical constructions, or a system which is largely incoherent and based on desires, ambitions, long-standing myths and traditions, or pure rumor and fantasy .... The captains [Lewis and Clark] would replace conjecture and speculation, wild reasonings of theoretical and logical frameworks, with scientific observation. They would fill in many blank spaces on the maps of the Northwest with facts recorded and verified rather than guessed at or hoped for.8

Allen's progression, rather confusingly presented in reverse order, is to be understood as three levels of geographical knowledge ranging from the least reliable ("desires, ambitions ... myths and traditions, ... rumor and fantasy") to logical deduction ("more or less coherent ... theoretical constructions") to field survey ("accurate data and long acquaintance ... scientific observation"). The captains' job was to replace the first two levels, inherited from Native "lore" and earlier maps, with the third. This process of discovery separated Lewis and Clark from "lesser men and less capable explorers." As the captains ventured beyond the lower Missouri, "from an area ... actually well known into one ... less known (in a real or empirical sense)," they found themselves in the frontier region of speculative cartography, faced with inadequate "data" and obliged to replace this reported knowledge with their own observations.9

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