REFLECTIONS ON LEWIS AND CLARK

Six Metaphorsin Search of an Epic

by Clay Jenkinson

LEGACY IS A VERY SLIPPERY SORT OF TERM, and thinking about the legacy of the Lewis and Clark Expedition proves to be very difficult. What exactly is Lewis and Clark's legacy? What is the legacy of any historical event? How do you measure such a thing? It is easier to opinionate about legacy than to think about it, and the more you think about it the more difficult it becomes to pin down the legacy of a transient event like the twenty-eight-month Lewis and Clark Expedition.	1
There's a paradox in the way we think about Lewis and Clark. Two hundred years after the fact, the Expedition has taken on a monumental importance as an American saga, a national origin story, and a part of the American narrative. We know how the story comes out, we know what followed, and we know that we live on lands that Lewis and Clark in some sense helped open for Anglo-American settlement. That means that we detect a heavy burden of consequence that may not actually constitute historical legacy. Our awareness of consequence encourages us to overload Lewis and Clark with a moral burden that they may not deserve to bear. Let me give you one fascinating example. Lewis and Clark spent more time with the Mandan and the Hidatsa and had their most successful relations with them than with any other native peoples they met on their journey to the Pacific and back. There is a Mandan winter count on a buffalo skin, an ideogrammatic chronology of the Mandan year when the captains were in the Mandan villages. There are fifty or sixty icons on the robe — the grassfire, the big buffalo hunt, the skirmish with the Shoshone — and then there is a tiny icon of bearded white men. That is not how we see it. We want that robe to exhibit a few perimeter icons of traditional Mandan-Hidatsa activities and then a dramatic depiction of Lewis and Clark in the center, with the caption, "We're here! And everything is going to change forever now. History has arrived at the Mandan villages." From a native point of view, Lewis and Clark were travelers who came through, spoke somewhat aggressively and pompously in a language that probably did not get translated very well, and then moved on. But from a native point of view, Lewis and Clark were transitory figures.	2
Meriwether Lewis Woodcut by Jim Todd, Missoula, Montana. Used by permission of the artist
One of the "gifts" that Lewis and Clark presented to the Mandan and Hidatsa was a corn mill. There is some irony in this because the Mandan and Hidatsa were agriculturalists long before the United States was conceived. They were North Dakota's first farmers and had the region's first grain storage facilities underground. They were so rich that tribes from all over North America went there to trade. While Lewis and Clark were in North Dakota that year, Canadians from the North West Company and the Hudson's Bay Company were there as well, moving back and forth between the Canadian trade forts on the Assiniboine River and the Mandan and Hidatsa villages. Unlike Lewis and Clark, who built a fortified compound outside of the Mandan and Hidatsa world, the Canadians embedded themselves in the villages. On July 20, 1806, two years after the captains bestowed the corn mill on the Mandan people, Canadian Alexander Henry wrote: "I saw the remains of an excellent large corn mill, which the foolish fellows had demolished on purpose to barb their arrows; the largest piece of it, which they could not break nor work up into any weapon, was fixed to a wooden handle and used to pound marrow bones to make grease." This is a great legacy moment, because, of course, Lewis and Clark had handed over the corn mill with a Jeffersonian legacy in mind. Henry provided a thoroughly Eurocentric analysis, and he probably spoke for Lewis and Clark: These Mandans are fools. They've broken this wonderful device to make arrow points.	3
What if we reverse the lens on this story? The Mandan had been grinding corn on the Great Plains for a thousand years or more and had mortars and pestles that were perfectly crafted. At the same time, they were a people without metallurgy and craved any piece of metal they could get their hands on. They wanted axes and grinders with which to process buffalo robes, and they wanted knives and arrow points. They did not need another agricultural instrument. And so they quite intelligently broke the corn mill up. They found another use for the only piece they could not break up — to pound grease.	4
ANOTHER WAY TO LOOK AT the question of legacy is to ask what Lewis and Clark thought their legacy would be. We can find the answer in two letters, one that Lewis wrote to Thomas Jefferson and one that Clark wrote his brother Jonathan. Most of what the captains wrote focused on reporting that the Expedition members had done what Jefferson asked them to do — find the best water connection between St. Louis and the Pacific. They wrote about trail issues and the commercial possibilities of Upper Louisiana. At no point in those letters do they describe the complexity of Native American culture, the potential sovereignty questions that the nation might face, or the potential resistance that the United States was going to meet as it developed the frontier. Lewis and Clark believed that their legacy was that they had opened the road to the commercial extraction of the American Northwest and the American competitiveness against Great Britain. They had mapped the landscape, made significant scientific discoveries, and filled in the blank spaces on the map.	5
Another legacy document is in the so-called Mandan Miscellany. During the winter at Fort Mandan, Lewis and Clark wrote their only government report. It includes charts of rivers; an estimate of the number of "Eastern Indians"; the names of the tribes and the names by which other tribes knew them; what each tribe could produce in pelts or other commodities; and the exchange rates. The Mandan Miscellany also includes a small chart created by William Clark that lists the places where military fortifications would have to be built on the upper Missouri to fulfill America's geopolitical plans. Clark advised that if the United States wanted to compete successfully in the fur trade, it had to engage in an occupation of the Upper Missouri.	6
Another legacy that Lewis and Clark expected to leave is evident on the return journey. On August 14, 1806, Clark wrote in his journal: "Set out at sunrise and proceeded on. When we were opposite the Minitaris" — the Hidatsa — "we saw a number of the natives viewing us. We directed the blunderbuss, fired several times. Soon after we came to at a crowd of the natives opposite the bank of the village on the Shoo Indians" — another of the Hidatsa group — "at which place I saw the principal chief of the little village of the Hidatsa, and the principal chief of the Maharas, those people were extremely pleased to see us. The chief of the little village of the Minitaris cried most immoderately. I inquired the cause and was informed it was for the loss of his son who had been killed laterally by the Blackfoot Indians. After a delay of a few minutes I proceeded on."	7
Clark perceived that the Hidatsa were delighted to see them — which may be true — but then he wrote that the chief cried because his son had been killed. The back story of this episode is that the Hidatsa leadership had come to Lewis and Clark at Fort Mandan in the spring of 1805 to ask them whether, according to their diplomatic instructions, they could conduct their yearly raid on the Blackfeet and the Shoshone. The captains reminded them that the United States insisted that there be no more raids, and they refused to give their permission. A young Hidatsa reportedly told Lewis and Clark that eliminating raids would jeopardize the status of the men in the tribe, that their standing among women would be diminished, and that eliminating raids would make it more difficult to chose chiefs, since performance in raids helped determine who belonged to the leadership class. The Hidatsa were not just talking about war but about deconstructing the very social dynamics of their culture.	8
Even before Lewis and Clark left the villages on April 7, 1805, the annual Hidatsa raiding party took off for western Montana. The captains liked to think they were powerful, paternalistic representatives of the Great Father, who would help guide Indians to a civilized, peaceful way of life. But what the native peoples tended to hear was a very localized prohibition. They may have canceled the next raid, but they saw no reason to cancel raids in perpetuity.	9
Lewis and Clark saw war as Napoleon did, and the native peoples they met tended to see war as a violent rugby match. For native peoples, war was not a fixed battle among thousands of troops but the skirmishing of small clusters of people. Lewis and Clark could not understand that and, in fact, made a famous mistake when there was a skirmish between the Sioux and the Mandan. There was a terrible snowstorm, and the Mandan shouted across the river to tell Lewis and Clark that the Sioux have attacked them. Clark immediately put together a large contingent of soldiers and crossed the frozen river to the Mandan village, ready to fight the Sioux. But the Mandan refuse their help. They essentially say: "Well, aren't you blowing this a little out of proportion? It's a snowstorm, and there's no bringing back the dead. We'll wait until spring, and we'll go down and kill a few of them in retaliation. If you want to come with us then, you can help, but we don't want to fight a war in a blizzard." Clark is upset and embarrassed. He has been bold and offered to fight on behalf of the Great Father, and the Mandan have rejected his help. To save face, he marches his men around for awhile. But the snow is deep and the wind is raw, and even Clark soon decides that retaliation can wait until there is better weather on the Northern Plains.	10
LEGACY AND METAPHOR. How can we come closer to an understanding of the legacies of the Lewis and Clark Expedition? Six metaphors are worth considering: a pebble falling into a pond, a capsule breaking open, a tsunami, a seed of change, a hand passing through a basin of water, and a bug coming to life in an old table.	11
A pebble falling into a pond. When a pebble falls into a calm pond, it creates dramatic concentric circles that begin to dissipate as they move farther and farther from the point of origin. If the water is unruffled, those concentric circles will travel miles to the end of the lake. According to this metaphor, Lewis and Clark arrive and then they depart as quickly as they came. The concentric circles of the Expedition's influence and legacy play themselves out for a period of time, more if a tribe's world is unruffled when the newcomers arrive and less so if it is ruffled by more pressing concerns. The influence does not continue forever. An event occurred in the center of a tribe's pond, as if dropped from the sky, and then the impact played itself out in an entirely natural way over a limited period of time.	12
A capsule breaking open. Alan Morehead, who has written extensively about "first encounters" between more industrialized and less industrialized peoples, describes "that fatal moment when a social capsule was broken open." He described the moment when representatives of an alien culture suddenly appear; their appearance cracks the indigenous culture, and that culture is cracked forever. Something innocent, or at least something intact, is lost forever. The indigenous culture is now "dis-covered," and the fissure has the same effect that a crack in an egg creates. The crack can be sealed, but the egg can never be quite the same.	13
A tsunami. Early during the Bicentennial, we heard that the West was the Garden of Eden, environmentally and culturally, before Lewis and Clark. The Indian cultures of the West were thriving, we learn, and they were perfectly adapted to their environment. They had their own science, advanced social structures, and technologies that not only resonated with their cultural norms but also embodied sustainability. The expedition represents a disastrous wave that shattered and engulfed the American West. At the first national signature event at Monticello, a number of speakers came back to this theme again and again. Everything was fine until Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark up the Missouri.	14
I do not think that can be true given native attitudes toward Lewis and Clark, native sophistication about trade and sovereignty issues, native capacities for cultural adaptation and the usual give-and-take of human nature, and native good sense about the transience of Lewis and Clark. It seems clear that the tsunami metaphor satisfies a national cultural need for both Indians and non-Indians. We all tend to aggrandize the pre-contact world, and we degrade the post-contact reality. The Eden myth — though it clearly has some basis in fact, at least in terms of relative impacts on the environment — serves in a double capacity for non-Indians. It allows us to process our imperial guilt for the forceful Europeanization of North America, but it also makes us feel good about the potency of the culture we choose to decry. And for Indians, the tsunami metaphor not only does the crucial work of envisioning a pre-lapsarian world of innocence, a Native American golden age, but it also provides a neat apologia for whatever is wrong in Indian Country today.	15
A seed of change. Using this metaphor, Lewis and Clark planted a few seeds — let us call them seeds of change — that sprouted over time. Some of the plants that came from those seeds flourished and changed the world that the Expedition traveled through, and some of the seeds did not sprout at all. Lewis and Clark as cultural sowers seems a more useful metaphor than a tsunami. If Lewis and Clark had never come West, would Portland, for example, be the same or different? Would Bismarck be the same or different? It is hard to think that there would be no Bismarck if there had been no Meriwether Lewis — or no strip mining or interstate highways or Burger King restaurants.	16
Among those who study Homer, there is an endless debate about whether Homer is actually the author of the Homeric poems. We know we have the Iliad and the Odyssey, and they are said to be by an epic poet named Homer, but increasingly it is pretty clear that the composition of the two great epics is more complicated. As one English classicist said: "The Iliad and the Odyssey were written by Homer or by another chap by the same name." We can say the same about Lewis and Clark. If Lewis and Clark had not come West, it would have been Peter and Charles, or Hancock and Dickson, or Evans and Novak. Whoever it was would have planted much the same seeds. To give Lewis and Clark — or the men they led or even the men they represented — so much agency of legacy is a form of historical fallacy.	17
Just how important are Lewis and Clark? It is possible that they are merely representative rather than determinative. North America was going to be Europeanized one way or another, and Lewis and Clark are not much more than early harbingers of that Europeanization. Absent Lewis and Clark, the process would have unfolded more or less as it did.	18
A hand passing through a basin of water. In a 1622 midsummer sermon at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, John Donne advised his congregation: ... thou passest through this world, like a flash, like a lightning, whose beginning or end no body knows, like an Ignis Fatuus in the aire, which does not onely not give light for any use, but not so much as portend or signifie any thing; and thou passest out of this world, as thy hand passes out of a basin of water, which may be somewhat the fouler for thy washing in it, but retaines no other impression of thy having been there. Donne's sermon may help illuminate the legacy of Lewis and Clark. Using the metaphor of the hand passing "out of a basin of water," Lewis and Clark essentially had no effect. They came, they went, and maybe they sullied things a little, but the West sealed up the minute they arrived back in St. Louis.	19
This is an intriguing idea, but I think Lewis and Clark's impact was greater than that. Certainly, if the Corps of Discovery had not been harbingers, if the members of the Expedition had visited Indian Country in the same sense that American astronauts have visited the Moon — a brief, proud presence and then a complete withdrawal without the mass of humanity following in their wake — then Donne's view might be correct.	20
A bug coming to life in an old table. In the conclusion to Walden, Henry David Thoreau tells us about how our lives bear fruits in ways we cannot anticipate and uses a metaphor to remind us that there may be long periods of dormancy before those fruits are borne. He wrote: "Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer's kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts — from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the albumin of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society's most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!"	21
Maybe there is a hidden bug at the center of the Lewis and Clark story. Wouldn't it be ironic if a bug metaphor governs this story, and all this time we have been talking about buffalo and grizzly bears, keelboats and bull boats, Dr. Rush's thunderclappers and guns, how many elk they killed and how many pounds of meat they ate per day, and where they camped on such and such a night, and whether the lead they used for bullets was from a mine in Missouri or Kentucky. All these are interesting questions, but they have tended to dominate the Bicentennial much more than is sensible. As the great Thoreau would say, maybe the bug, the true seed of this story, has yet to surface.	22

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