The Lewis and Clark Trail: Retracing America’s Most Adventurous Journey by Archie Satterfield (review)

Reviews 179 Memorable, too, are such incidents as the passing of a huge herd of caribou, the rumbling roar of their hoofs from the distance sounding like a freight train. But the cast is a bit large in these chapters, the quotations from the diary frequent, with perhaps a few too many accounts of camp meals and of such difficulties as crossing the rough muskeg. At least I found the reading slower than in the original chapters. When I first read the book, soon after its publication in 1962, it held me enthralled. The re-reading was equally entrancing — with many of the images returning like old friends. To readers like me in the lower forty-eight, the material in the new edition may probably not seem as vital as it is to residents of Alaska. But the original three long chapters should involve readers fully. Beginning in 1911, when she was nine, Mardy recreates the excitement of the voyage by steamer from Seattle to Dawson and upriver to Fairbanks. The picture of that frontier town in the second decade of the century is unforgettable. Fairbanks, “cut off from the world, immersed in its own life,” had a live and let live attitude that allowed the “proper” and “improper” lives to intermingle. “We lived in an atmosphere of tolerance and love,” Mardy says. Even more, though, will the reader respond to the love story between the first woman graduate of the University of Alaska and the gentle but strong young biologist who was to become the foremost authority on the caribou and the elk, to their honeymoon by poling boat and dog team, and to their return to the wilderness with their infant son, Martin. Two In The Far North lets you, the reader, share in a unique frontier and wilderness experience. Above all, though, you will come to know a wonderful, warm, beautiful woman — Mardy Murie. BEATRICE K. MORTON Bowling Green State University The Lewis and Clark Trail: Retracing America’s Most Adventurous Journey. By Archie Satterfield. Illustrated by Marilyn Weber. (Harrisburg, Pennsyl­ vania: Stackpole Books, 1978. 224 pages, $8.95.) Confronted by the numerous and widely-divergent routes pursued by contingents of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06 through the Rocky Mountains in Montana, the author and his family reached an inevitable decision: “We did what we probably planned all along. We went where we wanted to go and if Lewis and Clark’s footsteps crossed the highway ahead of us, so much the better.” With only a month’s time available, and limited most of the way to surfaced highway by travel in a 180 Western American Literature twenty-seven foot motor home, they could not accurately be described as “Retracing America’s Most Adventurous Journey.” The publishers, in implications of the subtitle and elsewhere, claim too much. Satterfield himself, aware of limitations of time and mode of travel, acknowledges that many of the most beautiful and significant parts of the Trail were not “retraced.” To prepare the reader for what will follow, the author gives the largest single section of the book to a condensation of the story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, based upon the journals of its leaders, describing their routes and experiences from St. Louis, at the mouth of the Missouri River, to the mouth of the Columbia on the Pacific Coast, and back again. This abridgement, necessarily very restricted, is enlivened by judiciously chosen quotations, vivid and engagingly suggestive of the personalities which pro­ duced them. Lewis and Clark enthusiasts will be pleased with publication of any account of the story of the Captains they so much admire, but may be dismayed by some geographical inaccuracies. Examples are assignment of the Expedition’s first major parley with Indians to the area of present Council Bluffs, Iowa, instead of near to what is now Fort Calhoun, Nebraska; and the statement that Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who accompanied the explorers from present North Dakota to the Pacific, came from the Bitterroot Valley of Montana rather than the Lemhi Valley of Idaho. Starting from Seattle, where he is book editor of the Seattle PostIntelligencer , Satterfield, with his family, first encountered the Expedition...