“No General Use Can Ever Be Made of the Wrecks of My Loss”: A Reconsidered History of the Indian Vocabularies Collected on the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Hoping that comparative linguistics would show that Native languages descended from European or Asian roots, Thomas Jefferson collected dozens of standardized Native language word lists, or Indian vocabularies. He asked Lewis and Clark to expand his database during their 1804 to 1806 journey, and they did so, collecting 280-word keys to at least twenty-three Indian languages, many from tribes west of the Mississippi whose words had never before been written down. None of these vocabularies were ever published. In 1809, three years after the Lewis and Clark expedition, a thief threw Indian vocabularies belonging to Jefferson overboard into the James River. American history scholars have consistently, and mistakenly, claimed that the Indian vocabularies collected by Lewis and Clark were among the Indian vocabularies destroyed during this theft.

New findings reopen what has previously been described as a simple story of unfortunate loss. From previously unpublished handwritten court records, I have identified the man convicted of stealing Jefferson’s Indian vocabularies and the details of his arrest, conviction, and sentencing. From Jefferson’s late correspondence and from the inventory taken at the site of Lewis’s death three months after the trial, I offer clear evidence that Lewis and Clark’s Indian vocabularies were not among those stolen. These new findings both alter the historical narrative and also offer a narrowed field to any Native scholars interested in pursuing and reclaiming these “lost” vocabularies.

Hoping to prove that Native languages descended from European or Asian roots, Thomas Jefferson began collecting Indian vocabularies in 1791, and over the next thirty years he amassed about sixty Indian vocabularies. Jefferson created his own 280-word printed card-stock template of common English words. It is an oversize sheet that folds into quadrants for travel, with constellations of related words beginning with fire and ending with no. There is room next to each English word for its Native equivalent, but no room on the page for any context: no space for observations of the people or the community, though at times a field collector might scrawl a few notes in the margin. No room for grammar, either.

When Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on their 1804 to 1806 journey across the United States, one of the tasks the explorers were assigned was to collect Indian vocabularies— written lists of Native equivalents to common English words— during interactions with as many of the Indian communities they met along their route as possible.¹ Jefferson lamented that so many Native tribes had disappeared “without our having previously collected and deposited in the records of literature the general rudiments at least of the languages they spoke.”²

When Jefferson began to compare Indian vocabularies, it was quickly obvious that not only was his tongue not the father of these languages, but that Native languages showed a diversity and complexity that indicated Native cultures had existed here for a very long time, diverging and merging by turn as cultures do over tens of thousands of years.³ The extended history indicated by this diversity was particularly observable in the grammars of the languages, which built their sentences so very differently than European and Asian models, and showed several distinct Native language families as well. Grammar is thought, is logic, is worldview. Each language builds a particular city map in the brains of those who speak it. Jefferson, and most other early American amateur linguists during the early years of interaction, quickly found themselves in cities they could not navigate. Cities that were not laid out by European or Asian planners, but were older and more complex.

During the early years of European contact, Native languages showed what the land did not. The long history indicated by the complex city maps of these languages stood in contrast to the ravaged appearance of Native cities and towns themselves, which had been under attack for the preceding three decades as successive epidemics of influenza and smallpox swept back and forth across the land.^4...