Reading about Lewis and Clark

August 2, 2022

 

I spent a couple of weeks reading The Journals of Lewis and Clark during my lunch hour. It was just something I grabbed on my way out the door one morning. I wasn’t expecting to get caught up in it. But it was fascinating. They were both practical men, good in a crisis, and observed nature and their fellow men like naturalists; but Lewis, in particular, was very poetic. I kept wishing I had tabs to mark various passages with. *

 

Like where Clark is contemplating the hardships they will likely encounter, but then adds, “But, as I have always held it little short of criminality to anticipate evils, I will allow it to be a good, comfortable road until I am compelled to believe otherwise.” I loved that outlook.

 

And when Lewis got so frustrated because he couldn’t draw some particularly beautiful scenery. And Lewis’s reflections on his 31^st birthday about how in future he would live for mankind instead of himself. (He evidently had no idea of the great contribution he was making. He just saw it as the fulfillment of a long-dreamed-of adventure.)

 

There’s also the story of the Indian woman, part of a group they met, who stopped along the way and sent another woman in her party ahead with some horses she’d been guiding; when they inquired why she’d stopped, they were informed that she’d stopped to have a baby, but that she’d be along shortly; and within the hour, she and the baby caught up.

 

Also, I marked three different passages where Lewis almost fell over a cliff. It seemed odd that he was so accident-prone. He also was very funny about his run-ins with different types of animals within a short span of time. “It now seemed to me that all the beasts of the neighborhood had made a league to destroy me, or that some fortune was disposed to amuse herself at my expense…”

 

Charbonneau (Sacagawea’s husband) was almost a complete waste of space, and they would happily have done without him, if they could have kept her with them.

 

They wrote like Georgette Heyer characters talked. It was funny reading it, even though they weren’t doing it for humorous effect, like she was. At one point, Charbonneau did yet another stupid thing, and Lewis writes, “I could not forbear speaking to him with some degree of asperity on this occasion.”

 

Anyway, good stuff.

 

 

*Providentially, my sister sent me a present that included such tabs right before I went out and bought some. Excellent timing, sis.