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Reviews
The Literature of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: A Bibliography and Essays
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Essays by Stephen Dow Beckham, bibliography by Doug Erickson, Jeremy Skinner, and Paul Merchant
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Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Ore., 2003. Illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 315 pages. $75.00 cloth.
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Reviewed by David L. Nicandri
Washington State Historical Society, Tacoma
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This is the type of book one imagines Thomas Jefferson would have
found appealing: a Linnean-like catalogue of specimens, in this
case the published literature of the Corps of Discovery. This term,
we learn here, though the ubiquitous moniker for the enterprise,
never actually appeared in the original documentary record but rather
was coined and first appeared as the subtitle to Sergeant Patrick
Gass's unauthorized but first-out-of-the-gate account, published
in 1807.
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1
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The heft and production values of this volume are a marvel, approximated in my own experience only by the recent Atlas of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, edited by Gary Moulton, or Karl Bodmer's America. The book is organized into a series of essays and attendant bibliographies. The latter are expanded so as to identify those items to be found specifically in the holdings of the Lewis and Clark College library. Many of these came to the institution through the prodigious efforts of several regional bookmen, most notably Roger Wendlick. |
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Students of the expedition will find the first two chapters — analyses of the expedition's traveling library and of the earliest expedition-related accounts — to be the most valuable in terms of interpretive content. Stephen Dow Beckham, the essayist for the publication team, provides a fascinating reconciliation of journal entries with passages from those books in the library Lewis put together that likely inspired particular observations made in the field. In so doing, Beckham seems, oddly, to have overlooked the most obvious instance of the traveling library's ability to inform the narrative content of Lewis and Clark's journals: the Corps of Discovery's multiple adaptations of Alexander Mackenzie's triumphal scrawl of exploratory accomplishment at Bella Coola in 1793. |
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The remaining five chapters explicate
the fascinating tussle between Lewis and the publisher of Gass's
account (a chapter unto itself), apocryphal narratives, the several
editions of the journals, and two chapters on general histories
of the expedition. The first of these chapters on general histories
takes the reader through the centennial era, or 1905, while the
concluding chapter is a twentieth-century checklist. The latter
is the only one without the benefit of an accompanying essay by
Beckham, which would have been welcome. An interpretive synthesis
of Lewis and Clark literature during what can now be termed the
"Moulton era" (1981–present) could have been the narrative
capstone of an otherwise exhaustingly complete tome.
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4
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Bibliophiles will pour over the pages of this book for generations, and, accordingly, any serious institutional library needs a copy. The work that went into the collation, description, and cross-referencing of the published literature by the bibliographers is most impressive. I could find only one error, the suggestion (p. 59) that Lt. William Broughton of George Vancouver's expedition sailed up the Columbia River in the Chatham to Point Vancouver in present-day Clark County, Washington. In fact, Broughton and some of his crew rowed up the river from the estuary in a launch and cutter. This single misstep aside, The Literature of the Lewis and Clark Expedition is sure to go into history as one of the landmark publications of the expedition's bicentennial. |
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In this respect, the epigraph for this book might have been Jefferson's famous quip to John Adams: "I cannot live without books." On page 22, Beckham provides his own wise corollary to Jefferson by universalizing the proposition: "Books are part of the glue that helps hold together civilization." The burgeoning literature and wide appeal of the Lewis and Clark story, a veritable phenomenon unto itself (much to the dismay of some in the academic community), binds millions of Americans together in a community of common historical interest. This book is their card catalog on a shelf. |
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