Books: Manifest Destiny

THE JOURNALS OF LEWIS AND CLARK (504 pp.)—Edited by Bernard DeVoto —Houghton Mifflin ($6.50).

This was mighty strange stuff to be going to the President of the U.S. In one of the four boxes there was “a red fox Skin Containing a Magpie.” In another “the bones & Skeleton of a Small burrowing wolf.” A third contained a tin box of “insects mice &c.”

These relics were not meant as a vulgar insult to President Jefferson. They were zoological samplings from Meriwether Lewis and William Clark,* of the U.S. Army, out to explore Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase. Every U.S. schoolboy has heard of them, but the seven volumes of their journals have long been the private browsing grounds of historical grubbers. Now Pulitzer Prize winner Bernard (Across the Wide Missouri) DeVoto has cut them down to everyman’s size, restored the great adventure to the common reader.

Common Dangers. Lewis and Clark left St. Louis in May 1804. Long before their return in September 1806, they were presumed to be dead, and it was a fair presumption. Many of the Indians were friendly, but there were plenty who were not. The travelers were repeatedly attacked by grizzlies. Another common complaint was “Louis Veneri,” which could be “contracted from an amorous contact with a Chinnook damsel.” Clark dutifully reported that “the Chin-nook womin are lude and carry on sport publickly.”

Mostly they lived by their rifles, and in buffalo country the living was easy. But there were times when roots, dried berries and their horses and dogs stood between them and starvation. Wrote Lewis on Jan. 5, 1806: “I have learned to think that if the chord be sufficiently strong, which binds the soul and boddy together, it dose not so much matter about the materials which compose it.”

Wild Melody. Lewis was a captain in the Regular Army, Clark a second lieutenant, but both were called “Captain” and shared the leadership. Their men, except for guides, were Army enlisted men, and never did men endure so much for so little: $8 a month for sergeants, $5 for privates. Yet only one man deserted.

The authors make little fuss about difficulties. And only occasionally does the beauty of the wilderness tempt them into the kind of lyricism that surged up in Meriwether Lewis on June 8, 1805: “[The Marias River] passes through a rich fertile and one of the most beautifully picturesque countries that I ever beheld, through the wide expanse of which, innumerable herds of living anamals are seen, it’s borders garnished with one continued garden of roses, while it’s lofty and open forrests are the habitation of miriads of the feathered tribes who salute the ear of the passing traveler with their wild and simple, yet sweet and cheerful melody.”

* Not to be confused with Explorer George Rogers Clark, his older brother.