National Graffiti: The Textual Lives of Lewis and Clark

Thomas Jefferson’s directions to Meriwether Lewis for the Lewis and Clark expedition commanded that the expedition members produce and preserve thorough written accounts. A wide array of texts resulted from a fervid embrace of Jefferson’s instructions. Focusing on textual forms that have been maligned, sidelined, and ignored – the expedition’s graffiti and the so-called “spurious” editions about the expedition – this essay analyzes the selective authorization of the earliest nineteenth-century Lewis and Clark materials. I argue that the expanded archive shows that the literary production Jefferson imagined would write the Louisiana Territory into the United States introduced a range of textual forms, authorial bodies, and territorial visions that challenges rather than consolidates the nation-building project.