Lewis & Clark: Secrets Revealed!

I was going to write this blog entry when I was done reading “Undaunted Courage” by Stephen Ambrose, but it’s taking me too long to read, so I thought I would go ahead it anyway. The book is quite good, just kind of long winded. It’s about 500 pages long, but these are big pages with tiny print, not your standard paperback size. I loved the story of Lewis and Clark when I learned about them in grade school. I wanted to go off with them on one of their adventures. However, now that I have almost finished the book (About 70 pages left) I realized that I had hardly learned anything about in school. Plus, my teacher left out all the really interesting stuff!

The Lewis and Clark expedition was a venture in insanity. I saw many parallels between their trip across the mostly unexplored USA, and the more recent Apollo moon missions. There were two presidents, Jefferson and Kennedy, who wanted to go where “no one had gone before” (or in the case of the L&C trip, where no WHITE man had gone before). There was also a race to complete this journey before some foreign enemy did. With Apollo, it was Russia. With Lewis & Clark, it was England, along with a little bit of France, Spain, and some rugged mountain men who left on a similar journey just a few months after Lewis and Clark did. Lewis & Clark and Armstrong and Aldrin were both extraordinarily brave. You might think Armstrong and Aldrin were more brave than Lewis and Clark. I’m not sure, honestly. Both were headed into unexplored territory. Both were risking their lives for the sake of exploration, both trips were fraught with danger around every corner. Now granted, the Apollo 11 mission was done in a lot harsher climate than the L&C Expedition. Although Lewis and Clark did decided to winter in North Dakota. 2 weeks before winter actually began the air temperature was -45 degrees. Apparently they were the first Americans to realize a new definition for the word “cold”. They spent most of the winter inside their makeshift huts. The Indians they were staying near spent most of that winter frolicking in the snow or hunting Buffalo. Apparently they knew the secret of surviving in such conditions. Lewis and Clark also faced danger and death from starvation, hostile Indians, and disease.

I found their medical treatments to be quite alarming. I didn’t know this, but Lewis was accidentally shot in the bum-bum by one of his own men. They had been out hunting, and the guy (who was near sighted) thought Lewis was a deer, so he shot him. Lewis started hollering at him, and he wisely hid for awhile and then later said an Indian did it. The evidence disagrees, but no one can say for sure. Anyway, so Lewis spent a couple weeks on the return trip home laying on his stomach in the canoe, fighting fever and infection from a couple of bullet wholes in his bum. The medical treatment of choice? Washing it off with water straight from the Muddy Missouri river, along with some other weird things applied to the area. The worse diseases they fought were such lovely things like syphilis and other venereal diseases. For those of you who are as innocent as my sister is, that’s an STD. If you don’t know what that is, ask your mother. Funny my teacher never mentioned all the fornication going on between the lonely male companions of Lewis and Clark and the beautiful Indian maidens they met along the way. There was all kinds of debauchery going on, but I will spare the details. If you want to know, read their journals. Quite informative.

Another thing I didn’t realize was that as Lewis and Clark approached the Pacific Northwest, they would often hear loud booming noises that they thought were guns or cannons, but it was quite obviously not. The only other humans that might have even been in the area were the Indians, and they didn’t have such technology for the most part. So, the conspiracy theorist in me perks up at this! I think maybe it was aliens or time-travellers breaking the sound-barrier as the zoomed away, back to the future. There are some who would even try to say it was some kind of ghostly phenomenon. Whatever it was, about a hundred years ago an adventurer was following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, and he heard the very same noises! (cue the eerie Twilight Zone music now….)

I loved reading about the early 19th century America’s view of themselves. They bought this huge section of the continent, and so now everyone living it is under their rule, including the natives, who were probably hear first. Now, I’m not going to try and figure out whether or not this point of view was justified. I just found it amazing to actually read things that today would brand you as a bigot. Overall, I think we as a nation have come along way with our racial biases. But I’m not sure it was quite as bed (yet) as some woudl try to say. Lewis and Clark did have some high praise for several of the groups they met. They did run into a few tribes that met them with violence, such as the Sioux and especially the Blackfeet tribes. I’m told that I have some Blackfoot Indian heritage in me somewhere, so that was kind of neat. Who knows, in a different world this continent could be entirely populated with Native Americans. How would that drastically effect the dynamics of the world system right now? At the very least I would want to have a cool Indian name like Running Nose, or Breaks the Wind or something like that.

In some ways, reading books like this depress me. Lewis was just a couple years older than I am now when he went on this adventure. He led what become one of the most important historical moments in our American History at the age of 30-32! What have I done with myself? Well, I got a really high score on Text Twister the other day. Then I decided that I was like the Lewis and Clark of Apathy. I am exploring apathy to new limits. I am boldly watching others go where no one has gone before. And while they’re gone, I’ll raid their refrigerator and then flop on their couch watching TV late into the night. Assuming I can even summon the energy to get out of the house.