Maps and Myths: Consuming Lewis and Clark in the Early Republic

In preparation for the bicentennial commemoration of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition, the Lewis and Clark Federal Interagency Partnership published a pamphlet entitled Discovering the Legacy of Lewis and Clark. Intended to educate the American public about the expedition and to aid travelers and enthusiasts in their reenactments of the journey, the pamphlet features an alphabetized state-by-state catalog of national historic sites and landmarks, scenic overlooks, state parks, and interpretive centers along the expedition route. The reverse features a map of the journey by Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery across the continent from St. Louis to Fort Clatsop on the shores of the Pacific (fig. 1). The Interagency Partnership made every effort to depict the expedition in national terms, stretching the journey’s geographic coverage beyond the limits of what has become the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail to include phases of its eastern “prehistory”—its inception in the capacious mind of Thomas Jefferson and its periods of preparation and recruitment—and placing it all within the familiar framework of current national geopolitical boundaries, complete with modern place names, interstates, and Indian reservations.

The modern trail map is one of the most prevalent and problematical features of Lewis and Clark scholarship. Since the publication of the first route map of its kind in Reuben Gold Thwaites’s Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, published in 1904, such maps have become a familiar and concentrated symbol for the expedition—a distilled representation of experience, adventure, and discovery that is both easily consumable and reproducible. Modern mapmaking technologies, which function to “conceal the complex operations that preside over [graphic] construction”

Figure 1.

Discovering the Legacy of Lewis and Clark. Washington, DC: Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, 2003. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, DC. Reproduced in consultation with the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation at www.lewisandclark.org.

(Jacob 273), make these maps seem transparent, nothing more than reference material to situate readers geographically and to guide them in their understanding and appreciation of the expedition. They have been deployed to tell the story in a condensed, graphic version to give readers, within the constraints of the printed page, the broadest view of the geography covered by the expedition.

The power of these maps, derived in part by their sheer proliferation, is that we do not typically ask ourselves what an interstate highway in Arizona, for instance, has to do with the Lewis and Clark expedition; we have become too accustomed to their temporal compressions and spatial dissociations. These maps take for granted the space and shape of the nation in ways early nineteenth-century Americans could not. It is important to remember that modern trail maps, like the Interagency map, do not reflect what Lewis and Clark saw, they do not represent what readers of early published accounts of the expedition read, nor do they depict how nineteenth-century Americans (even the most imperially inclined) perceived North American space. Yet the Interagency Partnership’s idea of Lewis and Clark’s “legacy” is clear: the map draws straight lines from the expedition to the realization of modern US geography, reproduced here in gross simplicity.

Arguments about the impact of the expedition and its findings on nineteenth-century Americans tend to rely exclusively on versions of Lewis and Clark’s journals that were not published until the early twentieth century (or much later) and that come from a perspective at least a century removed from the expedition itself and contemporaneous publications and contexts of reading and reception.¹ In the introduction to their collection of essays commemorating the bicentennial, Peter Onuf and Jeffery Hantman argue, that in the case of Lewis and Clark, “good history—the assemblage of a vast and reliable historical record—serves mythological purposes,” and that “the authenticity of the record is important, for it licenses us to project ourselves into the past and to identify more fully with our heroes” (Seefeldt, Hantman, and Onuf 3–4). The attempt to...