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Letters
To the Editor:
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As a scholar who has spent the last eleven years collecting new data and critically analyzing published documentary evidence on the public life of Meriwether Lewis, I read with particular interest, David Nicandri's article, "The Columbia Country and the Dissolution of Meriwether Lewis" (OHQ 106:1, Spring 2005). I agree with Nicandri's declaration that the article was "shaped by speculation and informed interpretation." So why write it at all? The ongoing bicentennial celebration is already saturated with speculative articles which are the result of limited research and a dependence upon untrustworthy secondary opinion. |
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Nicandri rips apart the journals and reconstructs them to support his reasoning that "the first cracks in Lewis's psyche occurred in the Pacific Northwest." While the expedition was arduous and undoubtedly stressful for the two men who shared the responsibility, it was not unique in the history of the expanding frontier. Nicandri says that Lewis behaved irrationally toward the Indians but for more than one hundred years fur traders were taught, like Lewis, to handle them with authority or suffer the consequences. It seems preposterous that "only one man" cracked during a depressing winter in the rain forests of the Pacific coast. By July 11, 1806, Nicandri speculates that Lewis is happier, not because he's on his way home but because he has been overtaken by "visionary inchantment." |
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Nicandri has reordered events into a procession of shocks to Lewis that began in late 1805 with the difficulties experienced in the Bitterroot Mountains and were magnified by a rain drenched winter of confinement and introspection. Dealing firmly with the opportunistic tribes of the Columbia River was a leader's responsibility and does not prove a deteriorating personality. Lewis was obliged by the orders of the expedition to observe and record tribal culture. |
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But casting a stranger's ignorance of ceremonies into imaginary mysticism and psychological decline is not supported by selective proofs taken out of context. Amplifying the poor medical understanding of that time into a diagnosis of bipolar or unipolar disorder (conditions still not fully understood) is akin to presentism and giving credence to a wild imagination that ignores what really ailed and eroded Meriwether Lewis. |
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Having completed a book length manuscript on the character and public life of Meriwether Lewis, I find that the Nicandri thesis is based upon very old and limited information. He falls far short of proving that Lewis's dissolution began on the expedition. For the next three years Lewis conducted the business of a newly-organized territory and was not once betrayed by those supposed weaknesses. Deeper research refutes that Lewis was cracked, unlucky in love, a poor journal writer, disorganized, bankrupt or that he suffered from some nebulous psychological disorder. That he was the victim of a misunderstood calamity and hit like a deer on the highway should not be allowed to continue to dishonor the memory of a national hero. |
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| Thomas C. Danisi
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| St. Louis, Missouri |
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David Nicandri replies:
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In response to Mr. Danisi, let me state at the outset that rare are the episodes or questions posed by history wherein every conceivable piece of evidence or perspective is retrieved or reconstructed thus allowing the full story to be "self evident." Even so, how many times do we see that the critical issue in historical discourse is not the evidentiary path, but perspective? Thus, in even hazier circumstances, such as Lewis's death, we are either left with informed interpretation, or speculation, or we ignore the story. |
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Of course, in the case of Lewis, the denouement is impossible to ignore and begs for explanations. I offered a theory, which I submitted in the original article, and invited each reader to dismiss what they did not find persuasive. Mr. Danisi is among that number, intimating that he has his own view of "what really ailed and eroded Meriwether Lewis." I look forward to reading that exposition. |
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If indeed, Lewis was attempting to engage the Indians of the Columbia River "with authority," he surely did a much poorer job of it than actual fur traders like Alexander Mackenzie or David Thompson, his contemporaries, to say nothing of William Clark, his counterpart. Unless it is being suggested, somehow, that Clark was the "good cop" and Lewis the "bad cop." |
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As for the supposed reordering of events and selective proofs, actually, it is Lewis (especially) and Clark to a lesser extent, who were the real pros at this, which is amply clear upon a close reading of their journals. As Barbara Belyea, the editor of David Thompson's Columbia River journals, put it so succinctly: in exploratory accounts, "the reader responds not to the events recorded, but to the record of events." In other words, evidence, even supposedly empirical accounts, needs to be filtered by the historian, every bit as much as the original actor in history (in this case Lewis or Clark) was filtering what they chose to relate to posterity. |
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