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Giants in the EarthBy ALVIN M. JOSEPHY Jr.
UNDAUNTED COURAGE
Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West.
By Stephen E. Ambrose.
or almost 200 years, the explorers Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838) have stood among the first ranks in the pantheon of American heroes. Noble young partners, courageous and self-reliant, they were role models for generations of American youths. Even in this high-tech age of space exploration, their bold, 28-month, 8,000-mile expedition across largely unknown Western lands from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back in 1804-06 remains one of the most enthralling adventure stories in American history.
Not so well known to the general reader is the context that surrounded the expedition. Among its many elements were the dedicated role of President Thomas Jefferson as the driving force behind the enterprise; Jefferson's visionary guidance of Lewis during the preparations for the trip; the impact of the ''Corps of Discovery'' on Western Indian nations, the fur trade and the future of the American West; and the frustrations after the explorers came home, climaxed by the shocking tragedy of Lewis's death in a lonely and remote inn on Tennessee's Natchez Trace three years after his triumphant return.
All these aspects of the story are dealt with admirably in Stephen E. Ambrose's ''Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West,'' a swiftly moving, full-dress treatment of the expedition by the well-known biographer of Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. The new work is essentially a biography of Lewis, although the bulk of it is a lively retelling of the journey of the two captains -- together with their party of soldiers and frontiersmen, Clark's black slave, York, and the legendary Shoshone Indian woman, Sacagawea, and her infant son -- conveyed with passionate enthusiasm by Mr. Ambrose and sprinkled liberally with some of the most famous and vivid passages from the travelers' journals.
Much new research and writing have been done on the expedition during the last 30 years by Lewis and Clark scholars, particularly the late Donald Jackson, who published an amazingly rich trove of documents (''Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, With Related Documents: 1783-1854''), and Gary Moulton, the editor of the most recent and best edition of Lewis and Clark's journals. Mr. Ambrose has gathered up all this new material and synthesized it skillfully to enrich our understanding and appreciation of this grand epic of the youthful days of the Republic.
One of the results is a complex, three-dimensional portrait of Meriwether Lewis, who is still seen here as an outstanding explorer and hero, fair, energetic, beloved by his men and usually greatly self-disciplined, but also occasionally impetuous and arrogant, and possessed of a flaring temper that could get him into trouble. In his early Army days, he was court-martialed after picking a drunken quarrel with fellow officers and angrily challenging one of them to a duel (which was against Army regulations). He was acquitted, but was transferred to another company, captained by his future partner, William Clark, with whom he would form a lasting friendship.
Several times during this account, Mr. Ambrose portrays a suddenly angered Lewis using poor judgment in hot-headed confrontations with Indians who had offended him. Threatening recklessly to fight them (and in one case slaying two members of a Blackfoot party that outnumbered him and from which he had to flee), Lewis came close to violating Jefferson's instructions to try to avoid violent engagements with Indians that could endanger the expedition and its goals. In a similar vein, Mr. Ambrose calls our attention to how Lewis's impatience could cloud his judgment and tempt him to make wrong, and sometimes dangerous, decisions, as when he attempted to cross Idaho's Bitterroot Mountains before the snow had melted, despite the warnings of Nez Perc Indians.
Finally, Lewis apparently suffered from grim periods of melancholy -- which Jefferson remarked upon and which may have been a sign of manic-depression -- as well as from bouts of alcoholism, which seem to have been prevalent in his early Army days and re-emerged even more seriously after his return from the West. His drinking was not a problem on the trip itself; what alcohol was taken along ran out early, making Lewis an enforced teetotaler for most of the journey. Afterward, however, there were many banquets and rounds of toasting.
Despite Lewis's occasional melancholy, Jefferson, a Virginia neighbor and friend of the family, found much to admire about him. Lewis had acquired many of the skills of frontiersmen and Western river boatmen as a teen-age resident for several years on the Georgia frontier, as a master of his mother's Virginia plantation, as a militia officer helping to quell the Whisky Rebellion in Pennsylvania and as a paymaster in the regular Army, traveling among scattered posts in the Old Northwest. He was well educated and, being a man of the Age of Enlightenment like Jefferson, he was inquisitive and curious to know more.
He also knew the Army, and he was an ardent member of Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. Jefferson, who was anxious to reduce the standing army and reduce its overwhelming number of Federalist officers, felt that his friend could be valuable to him; in 180l he made Lewis his private secretary.
Living with Jefferson at the President's House in Washington, Lewis had many opportunities to expand his education. He met Jefferson's famous colleagues, used Jefferson's library and shared many of Jefferson's interests, including the American West. In 1802 the President received the published account of the first trip across the continent to the Pacific Ocean, undertaken in 1793 by Alexander Mackenzie, a British fur trader. It came like a cannon shot to both Jefferson and Lewis. Mackenzie had crossed in Canada on an impractical route far to the north, but his advice to Britain to open a road lined with fur trading posts across the West and seize control of trade between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans ''galvanized Jefferson into manic activity,'' according to Mr. Ambrose, ''and changed Meriwether Lewis's life overnight.''
Jefferson set out at once to beat the British by dispatching an American expedition ahead of them to find an all-water route to the Pacific with only (as he hoped) a brief and easy portage between the headwaters of the Missouri and Columbia rivers. He selected Lewis to lead the undertaking, describing him later as ''the fittest person in the world for such an expedition.'' Wanting to acquire all the information possible about the geography, topography, climate, Indian tribes, minerals and flora and fauna of the lands through which the expedition would travel, Jefferson sent Lewis to Philadelphia for cram courses from some of America's leading men of learning in subjects like cartography, botany, anatomy and astronomy. Among Lewis's tutors was Dr. Benjamin Rush, who equipped him with a pharmacy for the expedition that included an ample supply of his famous ''Thunderclapper'' explosive purging pills, which Rush believed ''were sovereign for nearly all mankind's ills.''
While Jefferson was winning Congressional approval and money, and compiling the long list of information that he wanted the expedition to bring back from the West (and also while he was making the purchase of Louisiana), Lewis was enlisting Clark as his co-commander, hiring men and making necessary purchases and preparations. In May 1804, he and Clark set off along the Missouri River from the vicinity of St. Louis.
The expedition failed to find Jefferson's hoped-for all-water route to the Pacific, but it fired interest in the West among fur traders and other Americans. In addition, the nation gained a huge store of information about that region, and a basis for its claim to the Oregon country. For the Indians, the expedition, as might be expected, heralded both the coming of more whites, with their desired trade goods, and the arrival of trouble. The two captains tried to treat the Indians fairly, got on well with most of them and observed them keenly, reporting to Jefferson what they saw and heard. But the interpreting was often unsatisfactory; the whites had little interest in the Indians' spiritual life and values; Lewis and Clark often did not understand what they were seeing, and reacted in ways that puzzled or angered the Indians. Mr. Ambrose, aware of present-day Native American perspectives, does better than most in conveying the problem, but the Indian role remains the one major gap in the Lewis and Clark story; it still awaits an understanding treatment (perhaps by an Indian historian), not simply of what the explorers reported but of what was happening on the Indians' side of the contacts.
After the return of the explorers, Jefferson appointed Lewis Governor of the Louisiana Territory and urged him to hurry his journals into print. For reasons that one can only speculate about, Lewis let Jefferson down on both counts, ignoring the duties of his new job and doing nothing to prepare the journals for publication. Meanwhile, he faced personal bankruptcy over bills that he had charged for the expedition without proper authorization and that the Madison Administration refused to honor.
In something of a panic, Lewis started from St. Louis to Washington to clear his name. But by that time he was on the verge of a mental collapse, caused, according to Mr. Ambrose, by any number of factors: his depressions; the threat of financial ruin and the besmirching of his name and honor; a series of frustrations and failures in his quest for a wife; alcoholism; drug addiction; and poisoning resulting from his heavy overuse of some of Dr. Rush's pills (which contained mercury). Whatever the cause, he became deranged and met a tragic death in that rustic inn on the Natchez Trace during his journey east. Through the years, many people have believed that he was murdered. Mr. Ambrose writes persuasively that he committed suicide.
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