Eleven months of the year, hardly anything has a greater impact on our lives than politics (this being October, and World Series month, I get some arguments about this right now). Politics? More important than gas prices? ..than the stock market?
Indeed. Consider the recent Supreme Court decision that allows a businessman to take away your home if he can convince local authorities that he can generate more tax dollars with it than you can. Hmmm.
Yet few people are paying attention, and typically only 30% of those eligible even bother to vote. Why? very simple. In order to understand the political process, and our place in it, one has to have at least a passing familiarity with U.S. history, and Americans are arguably the most history-challenged people on earth.
I used to teach a college course which required, for proper contextual understanding, what I considered to be a 9th grade knowledge of history. In order to gauge the depth of that knowledge, I periodically gave a non-graded history pop-quiz on the first day of class. The results were fascinating, and depressing. 40% of college students could not name the century in which Columbus sailed to the New World. Most students could not choose a date within 50 years of the American Revolution or 100 years of the Civil War. Few knew the dates of WWII, or who was engaged with our “Greatest Generation”. No one could tell the date of the Battle of Hastings, an event the importance of which, with regard to the development of the English and American cultures, cannot be overstated.
Hence, it comes as no surprise that the greatest adventure in American history rated only a one-liner in my Junior High history book. The 200th anniversary of same passed recently with equally cursive, even dismissive one-liners from the press.
That event, of course, was the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson, acting against the wishes of his Congress, bought the Louisiana Territory from France, thereby doubling the size of the United States. Even before the document was signed, Jefferson had put in motion the plans for a military expedition through this area. To placate his Congress, the expedition was positioned as a scientific journey, although
the real reason was to determine how far North extended the tributaries of the Missouri River. You see, lacking any global positioning technology, the purchase agreement defined the area as “all the territory drained by the Missouri River.” Had any part of any tributary of the enormous Missouri and Mississippi River systems extended across the Canadian border, the U.S. would then have had a valid claim to parts of Canada. Woof!
Despite Jefferson’s ploy, there was a scientific component to the journey. Co-Captain Meriwether Lewis spent most of two years in training, studying botony, zoology, mineralogy, surveying, mapmaking, and medicine, from some of the greatest scientists of the day.
The expedition, known as the “Corps of Discovery”, left St. Louis (hence, “Gateway to the West”) in 1804, and consisted of Lewis, William Clark, Clark’s slave, York (the first black man ever seen by the Plains Indians), about 30 U.S. Army enlisted men, a barge, and several canoes. Along the way, they picked up two French interpreters, one with a wife and baby.
They were going to travel 8000 miles by river and foot, rowing and poling, pulling the boats upriver and over rapids, making portage, sleeping in the open each night, facing uncertain Indians and very certain bears, building permanent quarters each winter, and hunting for food when their provisions ran out. They would cross the Rocky Mountains by foot, twice. They would suffer bitter cold, impassable mountains, hunger, illness, accidents, getting lost, and depending several times on the largesse of Indians who chose to help them rather than slaughter them.
In what universe could this have a happy ending? The odds against this expedition suceeding were so long as to be laughable, and over the course of two years, with no contact, all hope was lost. Jefferson assumed they had died in the wilderness.
Yet, in the Fall of 1806, 2 1/2 years after they left, a group of canoes sailed into St. Louis, containing a band of bearded men wearing clothes made of elkskin, buffalo, and beaver. This was the Corps of Discovery, largely intact. The only man lost was a Sgt Floyd, who died of appendicitis shortly after they left (he has a marked grave today, overlooking the Mississippi River North of St. Louis). They brought back with them volumes of notebooks and diaries, botanical specimens, and hundreds of drawings and maps, including the most detailed knowledge of the Mississippi and Missouri River systems ever collected. Lewis personally discovered dozens of animals and hundreds of plants unknown to science. Lewis and Clark interfaced with many Indian tribes between Illinois and Oregon, making written vocabularies for several languages, learning the customs of the Plains Indians, and establishing trading alliances. One of the members of the expedition would later discover the geysers in what is now Yellowstone National Park.
This “great adventure” led directly to the opening of the West for settlement, the expulsion of British interests from the Northwest, the end of Spanish interests in California, and the uniting of a country that spanned the continent from Atlantic to Pacific.
Worth more than a one-liner, wouldn’t you say?
For the definitive book on this subject, buy Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose
