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Reviews
Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide
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By Carolyn Gilman, introduction by James P. Ronda
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Smithsonian Books, Washington, D.C., and Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, 2003. Photographs, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. 421 pages. $60.00 cloth.
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Reviewed by William L. Lang
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
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| The bicentennial commemoration of the Lewis and Clark Expedition on the Missouri and Columbia rivers has generated considerable new publications on the great exploration, but none are as beautiful as this book. Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide is the companion volume for the Missouri Historical Society's Lewis and Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition, but it is also an important contribution to literature on the expedition. The book's major strength is its magnificent color reproductions of maps, photographs of the original journals, collected material culture and natural history specimens, drawings, and equipment that were part of the preparations, experience, and aftermath of the expedition. By collecting so many illustrations of expedition-related materials, Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide immediately becomes the best single visual source on the epic exploration in print. |
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The challenge for any Lewis and Clark exhibition or book is to find a new way to tell the familiar story of the explorers' trek to the Pacific Ocean and their return to St. Louis. Exhibition curator Carolyn Gilman approached the expedition in a topical manner, beginning with a section on Thomas Jefferson's imaginative planning for the exploration. Successive chapters cover diplomacy, women, cartography, animal life, trade, science, and the fate of specimen collections after the expedition concluded. The book works wonderfully as an introduction to the myriad subjects that make up the exhibition, but its topical organization disassembles the expedition experience, tearing the story apart and often presenting specific incidents out of context. Readers may want to read this book with a traditional rendering of the story at hand. |
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Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide begins with James P. Ronda's graceful and insightful thirty-page essay that eases readers into the subject by focusing attention on material culture, especially objects the explorers and Native people exchanged, but also the expeditionary gear, from rifles to Pierre Cruzatte's violin. The book's contents confirm Ronda's main contention that the expedition "is no ordinary story" and that it continues to attracts us because we can "journey with a distinctively American community" that travels "through the lands and lives of other communities in a West already called home by thousands of Native people" (pp. 47, 48). Gilman relies on decades of Lewis and Clark scholarship, appropriating freely the insights she gleans from Ronda on Indian diplomacy, from geographer John L. Allen on cartography, from Paul Cutright on natural science, from William Goetzmann on exploration, and from a dozen other specialists who have investigated the Corps of Discovery. |
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2005 Joel Palmer AwardEstablished in 1997, the annual Joel Palmer Award for the best article published in the Oregon Historical Quarterly honors the memory and contributions of an early leader in the settlement of Oregon. Joel Palmer led two wagon trains — one in 1845 and another in 1847 — and wrote an important guide for Oregon Trail emigrants. He also negotiated treaties with Indian nations as superintendent of Indian affairs in Oregon Territory and served as speaker of the House in the Oregon legislature. The award promotes new scholarship in Oregon history tht advances our understanding of all important events and personalities in our past and remembers Palmer's often contrarian role in Oregon politics.
The Oregon Historical Quarterly is pleased to announce the 2005 Joel Palmer Award winners
10000#
First Place
Ives Goddard & Thomas Love
"Oregon, the Beautiful"
OHQ 5:2, Summer 4
Honorable Mention
Andrew H. Fisher
"Tangled Nets: Treaty Rights and Tribal Identities at Celilo Falls"
OHQ 105:2, Summer 2004
Jim E. O'Connor
"The Evolving Landscape of the Columbia River Gorge: Lewis and Clark and Cataclysms on the Columbia"
OHQ 5:3, Fall 2004
10000#
The Palmer Award is supported by a donation from Omar C. "Slug" Palmer and William Joel Lang
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Some readers may quarrel with Gilman's characterizations of more famous events in the expedition story or be unsatisfied with many of her conclusions and quick analyses. The noteworthy incident in the Nez Perce camp in May 1806, for example, when Lewis angrily reacted to a criticism of his choice of cooked dog for food, Gilman interprets as an ungracious reaction to the explorers' "demands for food," while other interpreters have stressed Lewis's arrogance (p. 261). Gilman seems to accept recent interpretations of the more famous incident on Two Medicine River in northern Montana in 1806, where Lewis's party killed two Blackfeet, by assigning blame to Lewis for his unwillingness to let the Indians escape with his horse. "Had he just let his horses go," Gilman writes, "he might have walked back to the Missouri and two lives might have been spared" (p. 287). Most historians consider Lewis and his fellows to have been in a vulnerable position, and walking to the Missouri — a hard two-day ride — was not a reasonable option. The famous rant against Indian character that Lewis recorded in his journal at Fort Clatsop in February 1806 Gilman assigns to his "physical revulsion to the coastal Indians," an unlikely source for his strong condemnation of all Native peoples in North America (p. 252). |
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This is a handsome book, with superb maps and a design that invites reading. It could stand a better index, and there are a few odd mistakes, such as using out-of-date references to the Yakama Nation of Washington State, but there is a lot about the expedition here that will surprise readers. Gilman concludes the book with an important essay on what happened to the journals and collections Lewis and Clark brought back to St. Louis in September 1806. The provenance of Lewis and Clark Expedition material is fascinating, and it underscores the importance of research on collections in creating an exhibition of this size and scope. Readers who want the basic story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition should stick with the standard works, but for experienced students of the expedition, Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide is a must addition to their libraries. |
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