Lewis And Clark Are Dead To Us Already Anyway, Slate
Seattlest took a course at our liberal arts college in Chicago that had as its text The Journals of Lewis and Clark. We can't remember the name of the course or the instructor's name, but, our school being what it was, the class was probably for math credit. We were young and our mind was still impressionable, so the instructor's passion for the material infected us and for a long time afterwards we reserved a place in our literary heart for the Journals. In fact, it still sits on Seattlest's bookshelf. It's one of the Bernard Devoto editions from the fifties and Roxanne Rutledge wrote her name inside the front cover sometime before we purchased it for $2.70. It shows how highly we regard it as a text when we say that we've actually reread the thing. Multiple times. The instructor steeped us in the romance of heading West with nothing but a boat full of shiny things and a brutish companion (Clark, we were always Lewis, her sensitive mastermind) and, well, here we are. We didn't find the waterway either. Still, it's the ultimate backpacking trip (not that anyone cares about backpacking anymore, according to this week's Seattle Weekly).
Slate's bashing of Lewis and Clark this week didn't really faze us, though. "Lewis and Clark: Stop Celebrating. They Don't Matter," doesn't really matter to us. It's a funny piece in that contrarian-for-contradiction's-sake type of way that Seattlest, we assure you, would never participate in.
But our fascination with Lewis and Clark is much more about us than about them. The expedition is a useful American mythology: How a pair of hardy souls and their happy-go-lucky multiculti flotilla discovered Eden, befriended the Indian, and invented the American West. The myth of Lewis and Clark papers over the grittier story of how the United States conquered the land, tribe by slaughtered, betrayed tribe.
Yeah, yeah, we are well aware of the slaughter, as well as the fact that Lewis and Clark are more projections of our modern mind than actual performers of exploratory feats. The truth is, Seattlest and Lewis and Clark have been drifting apart since we got out of school, and we'd be surprised if we could even come up with Lewis's email address right now. The problem is not the actual irrelevance of L&C in the course of history - That doesn't really take away from how cool the Journals are. And it's not how embarrassingly white bread Lewis and Clark are. The problem is all the bicentennials and honors bestowed by George W and, more than anything else, Barnes and Noble. Lewis and Clark just got used to sell too much crap for us to really care anymore. The Slate piece does mention this:
Bookstores have been stuffed with Lewis and Clark volumes since the publication of Stephen Ambrose's in 1996. There are scores of trail guides, multivolume editions of the explorers' journals, a dozen books about Sacagawea, three histories of Fort Clatsop, a Lewis and Clark cookbook, and at least three books about Meriwether Lewis' dog, Seaman.
Yeah, Slate, testify!
"If Lewis and Clark had died on the trail, it wouldn't have mattered a bit," says Notre Dame University historian Thomas Slaughter, author of the forthcoming Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness.
Oh. Well, whatever. Just like like every time the retailers steal something from us--even if that something turns out to be kinda nerdy and bourgeois and all-in-all just harmless crap--it doesn't hurt so much when it goes away. It just turns into an empty space and the book turns into just another used book from college on our bookshelf. And maybe someday we'll get to go all "Falling Down" on the world. Hopefully near a Lewis and Clark display in a Barnes and Noble.
