Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2001
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 3, Summer 2001, pp. 211-32.
Abstract
When Lewis and Clark awakened in St. Louis on 24 September 1806, one suspects that they felt quite well rested. They had just slept in regular beds for the first time in 864 days. As men who "had forgotten the use of chairs ... they must have had a way of standing and a look in their eyes," Bernard De Yoto imagines.1 Now was the time for reverie, and celebration, as the capital of the Northern Louisiana Territory welcomed back explorers who had been given up as lost.
Two days later, as the initial fanfare began to subside, Clark told us that they "commenced wrighting." The precise nature of this "wrighting" is unclear. It may have been letters or other routine matters and may even have involved some copying of journal entries.2 But what we do know is that a series of circumstances would delay for eight years the publication of an "official" paraphrase of the journals of Lewis and Clark, and a century would pass before they would be seen in relatively full form.3 But America quickly became aware of the great journey by other means, and this would prove to have a significant impact on the development of an American culture.
It is conventional to view Lewis and Clark's expedition as the essential first step in America's trans-Mississippi expansion. William Goetzmann sees the return of Lewis and Clark as not so much the end of a major period of exploration, closing the door on the quest for the Northwest Passage that had dominated since the time of Marquette, but the beginning of a new phase. In the imperial struggles of the times, Lewis and Clark mark for Goetzmann the first important step in a sequence that would result in the "winning" of the American West for the United States.4 I believe it is appropriate to view the expedition of Lewis and Clark as the initial phase of an emerging American imagination, the starting point for what has variously been described as "cultural nationalism" and "cultural patriotism."5 Their journey, and America's marveling over what they did, saw, and reported, is a pivotal point in a turning away from Europe by American writers, painters, and other intellectuals to their own land and culture, and to an emerging American imagination. The Voyage of Discovery, in short, engendered a new vision of America.
Lewis and Clark were not conquistadors, as their voyage did not seek gold and silver. Mountains of salt and lead, mastodons, Welsh Indians, and furs, yes, but the fortuitous last-minute acquisition of the Louisiana Territory had added a new thrust to their purpose, one that likely was of comparable importance to the original Enlightenment science and Northwest Passage themes. While it is not explicit in the formal instructions Jefferson had given to Lewis in June 1803, there is no question that the president looked to his explorers for confirmation that the newly acquired West constituted a Garden of the New World, space into which his agrarian "chosen people of God" could expand. Concerned about a burgeoning American population, and using a density alarm factor of ten people per square mile, Jefferson felt an American West suitable for agriculture and settlement would provide the ideal answer for potential overpopulation. The journals and other reports from the two sons of agrarian Virginia abound in commentary as to the perfect nature of the new lands for such purposes.6
Comments
Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln