"Not a Self-Contained Episode": William Clark and the Legacies of the Corps of Discovery

Landon Y. Jones. William Clark and the Shaping of the West. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. xiii + 394 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $25.00.

They had been paddling upriver for six months before the weather caused the Corps of Discovery to halt their westward movement in November 1804. Frozen rain and intermittent snow had been plaguing them since the middle of October, and now the riverbanks were starting to freeze over. After several days of scouting around, William Clark finally discovered a suitable location to built Fort Mandan, named, as Meriwether Lewis would record, "in honor of our Neighbours." The hastily constructed stockade would house the Corps for the next five months, as they waited for the opportunity to proceed.

During the long winter encampment, the Corps occupied themselves by hunting for provisions, manufacturing axes to trade for dried corn, fabricating rope, and mending clothes. At Fort Mandan, they made arrangements to have the translator Charbonneau and his wife Sacagawea accompany them west. During their layover, they queried the Mandans and the Euro-American traders they encountered about the "undiscovered" territory that lay ahead. But mostly they tried to stay healthy. Many of the men suffered because of the inhospitable climate, with temperatures plummeting so low that herds of buffalo could cross the Missouri River without breaking the ice. Others contracted debilitating venereal diseases. In the close confines of Fort Mandan, the shivering Corps took Rush's pills and doses of mercury to treat their ailments while impatiently waiting for spring.

When the thaw finally arrived in April 1805, the expedition was self-consciously at a crossroads. In the first six months of their voyage they had traveled, by their own estimation, roughly sixteen hundred miles. While they had traversed a "wilderness," they maintained no illusions about having been in unexplored territory. They knew they were not the first Euro-Americans to penetrate this portion of the Louisiana Territory, but that was—at least in Lewis's mind—all about to change. The Corps had little solid information about the terrain they were about to cross, and their party would soon diminish in size. When the Corps headed west, the engaged men who had initially accompanied them were to be discharged back to St. Louis bearing specimens and reports. As the river slowly broke free from its winter slumber, Clark and the Corps busily prepared the cargo bound east.

When he was not leading hunting parties or overseeing the construction of boats, Clark spent considerable time assembling these reports. In both his ethnographic record, an "Estimate of the Eastern Indians," and his geographical catalog, a "Summary Statement of the Rivers, Creeks, and most remarkable places," Clark outlined and annotated the early observations of the Corps. Clark firmly supported the movement of the nation into "unclaimed" spaces, and he envisioned these reports as informing that ensuing expansion. He took this work quite seriously for Clark understood the scope of the two reports to encompass the principal aims of the expedition. It was also the kind of work Clark had been doing all his adult life. Having grown up on the frontiers of the United States, Clark understood what information would prove useful to whoever might follow in their footsteps.

Historians have typically focused on themes of mobility and discovery when examining the import of the Corps of Discovery. Stephen Ambrose's popular Undaunted Courage (1996) exemplifies this type of reading. Ambrose focuses on the heroism of the Corps in "discovering" and "exploring," and, like many other recountings of the Corps, examines it in semi-isolation from the larger history of the American West. Handpicked by Jefferson and trained by members of the American Philosophical Society, Lewis's pedigree has often served as a launching point for critical investigations of the Corps of Discovery. Since Lewis committed suicide in 1809, historians who establish...