|
|
|
Review Essays
"A River of Promise"
Historians Reconsider the Missouri River and Its Explorers
Joseph C. Porter
| Among "the central themes in the history of the American West," according to historian James P. Ronda, is "the story of western rivers." During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the river most crucial to that story was the Missouri—"a highway into the West," in Ronda's words, but also "a river of promise, of dreams, and of dreams denied."1 |
1
|
|
In marking the two-hundredth anniversary of the most famous expedition up the length of the Missouri, several historians have reconsidered the expedition of Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery. Some authors have looked for those who went before, in the earliest explorations of the river; some have focused on the lesser-known characters of the well-known story; and some have found new ways to look at the narratives set forth in the diaries and journals. This essay examines five of these works. |
2
|
| |
|
THE MISSISSIPPI, THE MISSOURI, AND THE WEST BEFORE 1800 | |
|
The Mississippi River and its valleys were some of the earliest-explored regions of North America. In 1673 Louis Joliet and Jesuit Jacques Marquette reached the river and established a French presence in the interior of the continent. In 1682 Rene Robert Cavalier de La Salle claimed the Mississippi and its drainage for his king, Louis XIV of France, and named the territory "Louisiana." From that time until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, France, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States all made claims to the area, and explorers moved west beyond the Mississippi valley, attempting to follow the Missouri River to its conclusion. In 1763, the French, via the Treaty of Paris, transferred Louisiana to Spain to foil British designs on the region. The Spanish made several attempts to explore and strengthen their claim to the territory, sending expeditions to find sites for trading posts and forts. The strategy of officials in St. Louis was for the Spanish flag to follow the Indian trade. "Theoretically, the trade was open to all Spanish subjects," writes W. Raymond Wood, but officials limited the actual licenses "to a favored few whom the Spaniards used as quasi-governmental agents." Wood's Prologue to Lewis and Clark: The Mackay and Evans Expedition examines Spain's most ambitious endeavor to explore and control its acquired lands.2 |
3
|
|
After two failed attempts by teams of explorers in 1794 and the spring of 1795, Spanish officials launched a third expedition to "discover a route west of the headwaters of the Missouri River across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast. They planned to reinforce and defend this route with a series of trading forts."3 They chose Scottish-born, veteran frontier trader James Mackay (1759–1822) as commander. A Spanish citizen living in the St. Louis region, Mackay spoke and wrote French fluently and had worked for British trading companies in Canada, eventually becoming a trader in the Mandan villages of present-day North Dakota. "A man with his experience would have been priceless to the St. Louis Spanish," writes Wood, "for no one in that city could match his knowledge of the northern limits of Spanish territory."4 Welsh-born John Thomas Evans (1770–1799) was second-in-command. Evans was eager to journey up the Missouri because he believed that the Mandans were "Welsh Indians," descendants of Welsh prince Madoc who, according to legend, discovered North America in 1170. The instructions given to Mackay and Evans were "astonishingly similar" to those that Thomas Jefferson later issued to Lewis and Clark. Indeed, the Mackay and Evans expedition, with its "exploratory and scientific" goals, could be compared to the mission of the Corps of Discovery "in almost every respect save one: the Americans were to open the area for trade, but unlike Mackay and Evans they did not engage in trade themselves nor were they told to build trading forts anywhere along their route."5 |
. . . |
There are about 4352 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
