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Reviews
A Vast and Open Plain: The Writings of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in North Dakota, 1804–1806
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Edited by Clay S. Jenkinson
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State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck, 2003. Illustrations, photographs, maps, tables. 648 pages. $49.95 cloth, $34.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Keith Edgerton
Montana State University, Billings
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| Of the 864 days the Corps of Discovery journeyed from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back, 215 were spent in what would become North Dakota. Cumulatively, in parts of all three years directly comprising the odyssey, the Corps spent more time in North Dakota than it would in any other place. Without question, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark collected some of their most crucial information there, and events that would significantly weigh on the fate of the expedition occurred there, too: the encounters with the Mandan and Hidatsa peoples in their earth lodges along the upper Missouri above present-day Bismarck; the decision to build Fort Mandan as winter quarters in 1804–1805; the accumulation of vital information about the vast, uncharted reaches of the Missouri and the Rockies that lay ahead of them in the subsequent traveling season; the hiring of the interpreter Toussaint Charbonneau and the decision by the captains to allow his young Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, to accompany the party into the unknown recesses of the continent; the birth of the youngest member of the party, Sacagawea's and Charbonneau's child, Jean Baptiste; the determination of which members and what materials would be sent back with the keelboat to St. Louis in April 1805; the coming to terms with the unforgiving northern Plains winter and the daily wonderment at the vast and boundless northern prairie ecosystems; the hurried return journey in 1806 in which Pvt. Pierre Cruzatte, unfortunately and mistakenly, shot Captain Lewis in the posterior in western North Dakota; and, finally, the Corps's fateful and remarkable reunion in north-central North Dakota after it had split into a number of smaller units in western Montana to explore new country. |
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A Vast and Open Plain documents all of this and then some. It is primarily a compendium of information and almanac of each of those 215 days. Clay Jenkinson, one of the foremost Lewis and Clark scholars, has organized this volume by presenting readers a day-by-day account from October 13, 1804, to April 27, 1805, and then again from August 2 to 20, 1806, as seen directly through the eyes of the journal writers on the expedition — Lewis, Clark, Sgts. Patrick Gass and John Ordway, and Pvt. Joseph Whitehouse — utilizing the recently published Moulton edition of the journals. Jenkinson has also included miscellaneous material that previously was available only in Donald Jackson's Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Interspersed throughout are thorough and capacious editorial documentation, the daily meteorology as recorded by the Corps, dozens of color and black-and-white photographs, and numerous maps, both contemporary and historical. A graceful foreword by James Ronda and a lengthy summary introduction by Jenkinson contextualize the volume, as do the editor's concluding essays on the dynamics of journal writing and the "challenge of Sakakawea" and biographical sketches of the primary North Dakota participants: Lewis, Clark, Charbonneau, the free trader and Mandan diplomat Rene Jusseaume, and the principal Mandan leader Sheheke, who accompanied the Corps to St. Louis and eventually to Washington, D.C., on its return in 1806. |
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In sum, this is a remarkably useful volume containing a treasure trove of information about the Corps of Discovery during some of its most fruitful and fascinating periods. It would be a tribute to all of the states that were directly touched by the expedition and to the memory of the Corps itself if each state historical society took North Dakota's lead and published a Lewis and Clark compendium approaching this quality. |
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