Lost and Found

Thomas P. Slaughter. Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness. New York: Knopf, 2003. xviii + 231 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $24.00 (cloth).

In his story "Heart of Darkness," Joseph Conrad explored an explorer through his narrator's encounter with the dangerous, enigmatic Kurtz, a pillager of ivory and hollow at the core. A universe of lies binds the characters to each other and their venalities. Nothing is at it seems, and the river of the story is not the Congo, but a more uncanny geography. Documents are important; Kurtz lives in his words though he dies on the river. The encounter reveals as much about Marlow—who lies strategically, spectacularly—as it does about Kurtz.

Thomas Slaughter's Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness has some of this flavor. "Neither the journals nor the explorers are what they seem," he warns us. His goal is neither to "celebrate [n]or to vilify," but "to understand the Lewis and Clark expedition differently than we do now" (p. xviii). The Corps of Discovery was conscious of an audience they would never really have, giving the impression of continuous reporting, though this was difficult and not accurately accomplished. What we read as the journals of an expedition are neatened transcriptions at least one remove from the first record. No one appears bothered by the lack of originals or the fact that the entries were consciously composed, though this offers Slaughter a jumping-off point in stating the obvious: the journals are assumed to record events as they happened, but they do not. Though they were ambitious, Lewis and Clark were not first, their journey was irrelevant to American westward expansion, and their scientific "discoveries" were moot. According to Slaughter, they recorded meticulously when they were most disoriented or least occupied. One is reminded of rivets.

The expedition has been given to us through the journals as if through a window, but they have not themselves been a location of much interpretive interest. Slaughter writes, "What we have not gotten are many deep readings of the texts, though there are a few, or expansion of the relevant universe of historical records" (p. xiv). For Slaughter, the journals are a lively surface whose composition and effects are interesting, like a mirror. Mirrors are important in the book; Slaughter says that for Plains Indian cultures, mirrors may have had "spiritual significance," they may have "clarified the dreamers' image, thereby altering and possibly even enhancing the visionary's soulful gaze" (p. 15). Certainly they do for Slaughter. "Reflections" mark the title and name the last chapter of the book. It matters that Slaughter's hand holds the mirror.

Conrad achieved something of the depth of exploring the explorer that Slaughter attempts. This is probably more fair a comparison than measuring Slaughter's book against the hundreds for which the Lewis and Clark documents are simply true (if also fragmentary, difficult to read, sometimes biased, and not available in their original form—qualities many editors and authors have acknowledged). When Conrad published his brooding nightmare in 1902, Reuben Gold Thwaites was finishing his edition of the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which he dedicated to Theodore Roosevelt in honor of the centennial of the expedition's departure. This was a period of late imperial romance, to use John McLure's phrase. In the U.S. it included Frederick Jackson Turner's anxious frontier thesis, delivered in the same year that the red, Morocco-bound, gilt-edged manuscript notebooks recording the Lewis and Clark expedition were rediscovered in an archive, a banner year for historiographical explorers. There was, however, no American Conrad. Performers like Buffalo Bill Cody and writers like Owen Wister were more to the point, nostalgic as Conrad was for blank spaces on the map, but unmoved by national phantoms. Wallace Stegner and Cormac McCarthy, whom Slaughter admires, came much later. Perhaps the best moment for Slaughter's exploration is past. Perhaps a novelist would have...