Clay S. Jenkinson

Thomas Slaughter's Expedition

Exploring (and Deploring) Lewis and Clark

Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness, by Thomas P. Slaughter. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003. Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes, index. 253 pages. $24.00 cloth, $14.00 paper.

Thomas slaughter's exploring lewis and clark invites us all to reconsider the Lewis and Clark story and to challenge what we think we know about the most famous exploration party in American history. It is an unapologetically revisionist (not to mention postmodern) book, designed to upset, irritate, and disturb the accumulated mythology of Lewis and Clark and to force the received master narrative off the table. Slaughter's book has annoyed almost everyone and is literally riddled with errors, but for all of its faults Exploring Lewis and Clark is very important as the first book in what we can only hope will be the new synthesis on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Exploring Lewis and Clark, coupled with Gary Moulton's thirteen magisterial volumes of The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, James Ronda's pivotal Lewis and Clark among the Indians, and Carolyn Gillman's recent and masterful synthesis, Lewis and Clark across the Divide, should be regarded as prolegomena to any future study of Lewis and Clark.

Still, it is hard to know quite what to make of Exploring Lewis and Clark. Slaughter is certainly right to demand that we look at the journals with fresh eyes. "What we have not gotten," he writes, "are many deep readings of the texts ... or expansion of the relevant universe of historical records" (p. xiv). This is now possible thanks to Moulton's publication of the journals. Nobody is now forced to take their Lewis and Clark from a severely truncated one-volume edition of the captains' journals or from such standard linear narratives as Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage or David Lavender's The Way to the Western Sea. Nobody can quarrel with Slaughter's insistence that we clear out the mythological rubbish that has accumulated around Lewis and Clark and begin again to make sense of the expedition with a nuanced, multi-layered reading of the original documents. What is less certain is the claim he makes for his own study: "Exploring Lewis and Clark," he writes, "seizes this hugely fascinating story, this mountain of contemporary records and scholarship, to widen our vision and to look beneath the explorer's narratives for different meanings than those they intended us to find" (p. xiv). The impression that even sympathetic readers of Exploring Lewis and Clark get is that Slaughter has done rather too much seizing and that many of the meanings he has found in the journals are different "than those they intended us to find" merely because they are demonstrably in error.

A central thesis of Exploring Lewis and Clark is that any narrative history of the expedition imposes order on a set of documents that is inherently disorderly and problematic. Slaughter rightly points out that all editions of the journals divide the original field scribblings into neat chapters, forcing the illusion of linearity and narrative comprehensiveness on a collection of field notes written as the experience actually unfolded by men who could not be sure how the story was going to come out.

Slaughter's distaste for the triumphalist mythology of the Lewis and Clark story is shared (more moderately) by virtually every serious scholar of the expedition. Go to any Lewis and Clark conference and you will hear the same tired litany of suspect notions:

Each man was eating up to nine pounds of animal flesh per day. Source? Lore about Canadian voyageurs blithely transferred to the Lewis and Clark story; no textual foundation.
The expedition would not have survived without the help of American Indians. Possible, but exceedingly hard to establish. The assertion, rarely backed up with evidence, is a kind of blanket declaration of solidarity with the Indian communities through which Lewis and Clark passed. It belongs more to cultural politics than historical analysis.
The two captains never disagreed, except about the desirability of eating dog flesh. Truth? There is no significant textual evidence of serious disagreement, but that is hardly proof of profound harmony. The more one studies the individual characters and leadership styles of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the less harmony one discerns.
Sacagawea rescued journals when the white pirogue nearly sank on May 14, 1805. Evidence? None. She rescued what Lewis considered important cargo, the exact nature of which he never describes.
Sacagawea was critical to the expedition's success. Truth? She performed admirably on the occasions when her interpretative talents were called upon; she supplemented the diet of at least some members of the expedition; she seems to have played a hard-to-measure role in signifying (by her very presence, with child) that the expedition was not a war party — and perhaps something more, though it is exceedingly hard to pin that down.
And more recently,
Meriwether Lewis was a manic depressive, suffering from bipolar disorder, who was at times barely functional on the expedition. This is little more than ex post facto pop psychology employed to explain Lewis's apparent silences during the course of the journey and to set up his 1809 suicide.

At any given Lewis and Clark presentation, there are more questions about the caliber of the weaponry the expedition carried or the fate of Lewis's dog Seaman than about the geopolitical implications of Thomas Jefferson's pet exploration project. It is this self-enclosed micro-universe of LEWIS & CLARK that seems to have precipitated Slaughter's book. Who can quarrel with, "There is recoverable history buried under our national origin myths which can teach us relationships between the present and the past" (p. xviii)?

There are a number of factual mistakes, clear mistakes of interpretation, and dozens of unsubstantiatable claims in Exploring Lewis and Clark. Slaughter writes that Nicholas Biddle's paraphrase of the expedition's journals did not appear for five years after the expedition's return. Actually, it was eight years. On one occasion he misnames the man of letters as Francis Biddle rather than Nicholas. Slaughter has the expedition leave Fort Mandan "on the morning of April 7, 1805," when Lewis specifically informs his reader that the departure occurred at four in the afternoon. The list of such (admittedly harmless) errors is quite long.

More importantly, Slaughter's urge to deconstruct carries him into many absurdities. He argues, for example, that Lewis and Clark were so eager to impose order on their travels that they imposed what we have stupidly taken for precise dating procedures on what was actually a very murky timescale, without really being able to ascertain just when things occurred. This is just plain wrong. Lewis and Clark were traveling with lunar almanacs that included genuine calendars that enabled them to determine just what day it was and, if they wished, the precise hour according to Greenwich time. As any study of the journals indicates, they lost track of the exact date once in a while (who does not?), but they self-corrected at times of apparent leisure. For a mission that had been instructed by the president of the United States to ascertain longitude and latitude, time mattered a great deal, and they took pains to stay on calendar.

There are other impressions that jar. In the journals, Clark writes: "I shall in justice to Capt. Lewis who was the first white man ever on this fork of the Columbia call this [the Snake] Louis's River." Slaughter wonders if this misspelling of a name that "he knew perfectly well how to spell the first time" suggests that Clark realized Lewis was not in fact the first white man to see the Snake River and, therefore, misspelled his name as an anxiety-driven acknowledgment that "this claim is disputable." This is nonsense. Clark was a lousy speller in an era when the language had not yet gelled into a standard orthography. At one time or another, he misspells nearly everything. Would Slaughter have us believe that Clark's notation of "Cheif" of the Arikara nation is a subtle acknowledgment that the tribe's leadership system is much more complicated than white people preferred to believe? Or that when he calls Sheheke-shote the "Chef of the Lower Mandan Village" he is subtly comparing him to Toussaint Charbonneau, whose one virtue was that he cooked buffalo sausage for the Corps of Discovery?

Slaughter spends pages suggesting that Lewis and Clark went to great pains to cover up evidence that there had been previous white visitors to the lower Columbia. Finding a "red-headed Indian, another with an English name tattooed on her arm, and more Indians outfitted with European clothing and weaponry," Slaughters argues, amounted to "a succession of blows to their ambitions" (p. 43). Not so. On a number of occasions, Lewis and Clark matter-of-factly describe evidence of previous white visitation to the lower Columbia and imply that such contact had a debasing influence on Indian character. They were well aware that Robert Gray had "discovered" the Columbia in 1792 and that Vancouver and Broughton had explored the lower reaches of the Columbia at about the same time. On January 1, 1806, they made "A List of the Names as given by the Indias [sic] of the Traders Names and the quality of their Vessels which they Say visit the mouth of the Columbia 2 a year for the purpose of Tradeing with the nativs." Clark lists thirteen European traders, without providing a single expression of melancholy, thwarted ambition, or discoverer's despair.

Slaughter goes on to declare that the expedition's meeting with the first of the white men who would follow in their wake, Forest Hancock and Joseph Dickson, on August 12, 1806, in what is now North Dakota amounted to "the final, crushing blow to Lewis's and Clark's ambitions." How? Slaughter's explanation is that if Hancock and Dickson could ascend the Missouri River without the expedition's maps and journals, then they rendered Lewis and Clark pointless. This is as absurd as it is counterfactual. Lewis and Clark were well aware that white men had been to the upper Missouri, at least as far up as their meeting with Hancock and Dickson near today's New Town, North Dakota (see April 14, 1805), and they made no attempt to suggest that future ventures up the Missouri could not occur unless they returned safely to St. Louis. A few pages later, Slaughter acknowledges that Lewis and Clark met "over 150 white men on the Missouri," but he does not suggest that each of these meetings sent shivers of failure through the expedition's leadership.

One could quibble with Slaughter on nearly every page of the book. It is hard not to conclude either that he wrote it very quickly without any significant examination of the immense secondary literature on the subject (perhaps to ensure that he was making a fresh read of the journals) or that he was so bent on teasing out new and disturbing readings of the texts that he abandoned good sense. Still, it would be a terrible mistake to dismiss this book merely because there is a certain spirit of perversity in it.

Slaughter is excellent on the dynamics of the journals, the ways in which silences are as important as statements and the manner in which the journal-keepers shaped their experiences into the conventional prose of exploration. He is surely right when he concludes that "we have hugely complicated texts to work with, ones that in published and manuscript form are often quite distant from any literal 'truth' and are often deceptively remote from even the authors' first impressions of the experiences that they recount." His postmodern approach bears most fruit when he writes such sentences as these: "The journals are fascinating sources — beguiling, perplexing, complex, and far richer than historians have generally appreciated. They are foggy windows which admit and distort light on the men who wrote them" (p. xvii). All future readers of Lewis and Clark should post this sentence above their desks.

Slaughter's most important insights are about the very nature of exploration and discovery and the particular character of Meriwether Lewis. When he meditates on the nature of exploration — indeed, the paradox of exploration — he deepens the discourse on the expedition. Four of the eight chapters — "Dreams," "Being First," "Writing First," and "Possessions" — are truly outstanding (with the usual caveats about absurdities, special pleadings, misreadings, and unverifiable provocations). A short list of marvelous sentences may serve as a menu for Slaughter's insights:

"For all their culture's celebration of hunting, and for all the explorers' documentation of their hunting skills, they never experienced killing as a spiritual act" (p. 10).
"Clark was more open to his doubts, though, more accepting of the unreliability of his senses, and experienced greater spiritual growth" (p. 18).
An explorer "carries the great explorers from the past with him too. They are his guides, models, and competitors. These are the men he measures himself against" (p. 27).
Of Sacagawea: "In the absence of information beyond the journals, she is a creation of the explorers. They give her life. They name her. They define her. They tell her story. They leave her underdescribed and thus a nearly empty vessel into which the makers of our national myths can pour what we need to cast the Lewis and Clark Expedition as a multicultural, multiracial, gender-integrated success" (p. 101). "Her lack of emotional display could reflect any number of things, including her emotional inaccessibility to Lewis" (p. 105). Sacagawea is "our national Indian, our founding princess, and a symbol of what our interracial history might have been. By turning her from a slave into a leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, we have fabricated heroic qualities that our culture needs" (p. 112).
The expedition's leaders "saw their possessions as personal but viewed Indian ownership as collective" (p. 162).
"None of the expedition members would ever be an explorer again, although John Colter continued to explore the region as a fur trapper. 'Explorer' was the principal identity only for Lewis and Clark" (p. 204).
And, finally, we must not exaggerate the historical importance of Lewis and Clark. "As individuals, they were insignificant, except to the extent that they reveal the mind-set of others who followed them" (p. 206).

Slaughter's greatest contribution to Lewis and Clark studies is his assessment of Meriwether Lewis. Of all his portraits of major players of the expedition — Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, York — he seems to have the surest intuition of Lewis's strange and compelling character. Slaughter is a close reader of texts, and he begins by listening to Lewis, who, alone among the journal-keepers, cannot help but open windows onto his soul when he puts pen to paper. Lewis alone compares himself to Columbus and Captain Cook and frets endlessly that the expedition is about to "collapse altogether." Lewis alone tells us that the journey has been a "darling project of mine for the past ten years" and that the bewildering occurrences at the Great Falls of the Missouri on June 14, 1805, make him wonder whether "all the beasts of the neighbourhood had made a league to distroy me, or that some fortune was disposed to amuse herself at my expense." Slaughter understands that there is something fractured in the very nature of calling oneself an explorer. He understands that Lewis's post-expedition spiral into depression and (almost certain) suicide cannot be seen as unrelated to the journey that took him from Jefferson's house to the source of the "mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri River" and back again. In a public lecture in 2003, the great prose poet Barry Lopez asked: "How far can you go out and still come back again?" Slaughter's answer for Meriwether Lewis is, not as far out as he ventured. Slaughter writes: "Neither [Lewis nor Clark] was the same man on the return trip that he had been on the way out. Lewis was spiritually drained, emotionally exhausted, a nervous wreck. Clark was calmer, more open, wiser, and more powerful by journey's end. Vision quests, the Plains Indians knew, do not work for everyone. Lewis was already dead; only his body was still alive" (pp. 19–20). There is overstatement here, but it only slightly weakens a great insight.

Of Lewis, Slaughter writes: "He fears losing his way, his civilization, and himself. Exploration challenges his identity. In ways that the explorer never fully comprehends, his greatest discovery may be of himself, and that can be the scariest prospect he will ever face on any continent, at any altitude, and in any weather. In the end, in this sense, the explorer is truly alone" (p. 29). This seems to capture Lewis's psychological journey precisely. Later in the same essay: "The longer he is away from home, the less sure he is about his self-worth, the more violent he becomes, and the more mistakes he makes" (p. 31). Nobody who has attempted to find out the heart of Lewis's mystery can fail to find these insights useful, however much one might quibble here and there or sense a certain presumptuousness in Slaughter's analysis. He concludes by calling Lewis "the most nervous, least patient, and most bellicose of the explorers" (p. 177).

Slaughter's chapters on York and Sacagawea are less successful. As far as I can tell, he argues that Sacagawea lived into ripe old age solely to upset historians who have, he believes, too hastily concluded that she died in 1812. Slaughter believes that historians preferred the 1812 death for political reasons, to preserve a narrative tidiness that her longer life would offend. But would it not be useful to examine the little evidence that we have, evaluate the lingering ambiguities of the historical record, raise questions about why historians have "privileged" certain documents over others, and draw whatever careful conclusion seems to emerge? In other words, Slaughter's cultural politics seem to make him want to argue for whatever position most de-centers the existing historical consensus. If this were done with full disclosure of the author's intentions and with disclaimers about the level of authoritativeness intended in what amounts to a kind of intellectual playfulness, then Slaughter's conclusions would be more palatable. As it stands, the argumentation of Exploring Lewis and Clark tends to go down as unhappily as Captain Lewis's 183 pounds of portable soup.

The importance of Exploring Lewis and Clark is large and twofold. First, in calling for everyone to undertake new close readings of the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and to attempt a liberation from the conventional (and largely mythic) national master narrative that has been permitted to pass for real history for so long, Slaughter has done Lewis and Clark studies an important service. His challenge will surely be taken up by a new generation of scholars and writers. Second, Slaughter has provided a highly creative rereading of the journals, one that is so full of provocation that no reader of Exploring Lewis and Clark can fail to return to the journals to see if the sometimes wild arguments can be supported by plausible readings of the original texts. He has produced what Montaigne and Bacon called an "essay" into the meaning of the Lewis and Clark Expedition; and if we find ourselves disagreeing with much of what he has written, then we have at least awakened to the possibility that bold new readings are possible.

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