The Journey of the Corps of Discovery:
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Review by Harwell Wells
When the Lewis and Clark expedition left St. Louis and headed up the Missouri River in May 1804, its members were entering territory never systematically explored by white men.
In his excellent "Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery," a companion to Ken Burns' new documentary "Lewis and Clark," Dayton Duncan tells the extraordinary story of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and the 40-plus men (and one woman) who made up their "Corps of Discovery," and whose two-year trek across the Great Plains to the Pacific truly opened the American West.
Before their journey, the trans-Mississippi west was a blank spot on America's maps. Literally -- Lewis and Clark expected only a single mountain range to stand between them and the Pacific, one perhaps as high as the Blue Ridge. The Bitterroots and Rockies came as a surprise!
Nor did Americans know much about the Indian tribes living on the Plains and beyond; where facts were few, rumors flourished, and many back east believed some tribes were descendants of Welshmen who had crossed the Atlantic 600 years before. Even the animals that roamed the west would prove new to the explorers. Lewis, Clark and their men were the first to describe for science (among others) the grizzly bear, jackrabbit, prairie dog and coyote, though they never found the mammoths that President Thomas Jefferson hoped might live along the upper Missouri.
It was a difficult and often harrowing trip. No reader is soon likely to forget Duncan's account of the Corps' first winter on the northern Great Plains, or their 11-day climb over the Bitterroot mountains to reach the Columbia River that would carry them to their goal, the Pacific. It was 18 hard months between the day they left St. Louis and the moment Clark could at last write his famous journal entry "Ocian in View! O! the Joy!"
The book is enlivened with illustrations and extensive excerpts from the journals kept by several members of the expedition, who were indeed, as Duncan puts it, the "writingest explorers." Equally welcome is his skillful discussion of Lewis and Clark's encounters with many Indian tribes, some of whose extraordinary generosity likely saved the expedition.
Interspersed with the main text are shorter essays by the author William Least Heat-Moon, the poet Erica Funkhouser (writing a moving meditation on the expedition's interpreter and guide Sacagawea) and the historian Stephen Ambrose. Readers left wanting to know more about Lewis and Clark after this book and Burns' series should turn to Ambrose's own "Undaunted Courage," a longer history of the expedition, or best of all to Bernard DeVoto's edition of the "Journals of Lewis and Clark," recently re-released with a new introduction by Ambrose.
Harwell Wells is a writer in Nashville.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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