C en - Lewis and Clark · of Montana artist Ralph Earll DeCamp By Jill Carlson Jackson Reviews 34...

1!August 2005 We Proceeded On

ContentsLetters: U.S.N.S. Lewis and Clark; Spirit Mound; Patrick Gass 2

President’s Message: Partnership and trail conservation 4

Bicentennial Council: Looking for “wildness” on the L&C Trail 6

Trail Notes: Opportunities for rediscovery and renewal 8

Charles Willson Peale 10The Philadelphia artist, naturalist, and impresariodid much to preserve the expedition’s legacyBy Marc Chalkley

“Specimine of the Stone” 17Contrary to the traditional historical view, Lewis and Clarkwere active and diligent geologists throughout the expeditionBy John W. Jengo

Landscapes Preserved for History 27The Lewis and Clark paintings and photographsof Montana artist Ralph Earll DeCampBy Jill Carlson Jackson

Reviews 34Two new collections of L&C essays; In Brief: One VastWinter Count; Venereal Disease and the Lewis and ClarkExpedition; The Lewis and Clark Trail: Yesterday and Today

Dispatches 38Comparing L&C’s speeches to the Otos and Yankton SiouxBy George Berndt

Chapter News 40Flathead Chapter organizes L&C “welcome”By Wendy Raney

Soundings 44Rethinking Toussaint CharbonneauBy H. Carl Camp

On the coverPainted a century ago, Ralph Earll DeCamp’s The Heart of the Gates of theRocky Mountains is one of two of his landscapes found in Olin D.Wheeler’s The Trail of Lewis and Clark (1904), the first travelogue of theexpedition’s journey across the West. DeCamp, a Montana artist bestknown for his landscapes of Big Sky country, also took many of thephotographs in Wheeler’s two-volume work, and he drew all of its maps.Jill Carlson Jackson profiles this underappreciated graphic chronicler ofLewis and Clark in a story beginning on page 27. Painting reproducedcourtesy of Thomas and Jane Petrie.

Peale, p. 10

Charbonneau, p. 44

DeCamp, p. 27

2 !We Proceeded On August 2005

August 2005 • Volume 31, Number 3

We Proceeded On is the official publication ofthe Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation,Inc. Its name derives from a phrase that appearsrepeatedly in the collective journals of theexpedition. 2005

E. G. Chuinard, M.D., FounderISSN 02275-6706

EditorJ. I. Merritt51 N. Main StreetPennington, NJ [email protected]

Volunteer ProofreadersH. Carl CampJerry Garrett

Printed by PRISM Color Corporation,Moorestown, New Jersey

EDITORIAL BOARD

James J. Holmberg, leaderLouisville, Kentucky

Robert C. CarrikerSpokane, Washington

Robert K. Doerk, Jr.Fort Benton, Montana

Glen LindemanPullman, Washington

Membership InformationMembership in the Lewis and Clark TrailHeritage Foundation, Inc. is open to the public.Information and applications are available bywriting Membership Coordinator, Lewis andClark Trail Heritage Foundation, P.O. Box3434, Great Falls, MT 59403.

We Proceeded On, the quarterly magazine ofthe Foundation, is mailed to current membersin February, May, August, and November.Articles appearing in this journal are abstractedand indexed in HISTORICAL ABSTRACTS andAMERICA: HISTORY AND LIFE.

Annual Membership Categories:

Student $30Individual/Library/Nonprofit $40Family/International/Business $55Heritage Club $75Explorer Club $150Jefferson Club $250Discovery Club $500Expedition Club $1,000Leadership Club $2,500

The Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, Inc.is a tax-exempt nonprofit corporation. Individualmembership dues are not tax deductible. The portionof premium dues over $40 is tax deductible.

Letters

I was privileged to attend the launching,on May 21 in San Diego, of the U.S.N.S.Lewis and Clark (T-AKE-1). Con-structed by the National Steel and Ship-building Company (NASSCO), it is the firstin a class of at least eight supply ships thatwill be crewed by the Merchant Marine.The Lewis and Clark and others in itsclass will carry food and ammunition tore-supply U.S. Navy combat ships. Thenext ship in the class will be named theU.S.N.S. Sacagawea. The other ships willalso be named for explorers.

Jane Lewis Sale Henley, a collateral de-scendant of Meriwether Lewis and aformer president of the LCTHF, and LisaClark, a great-great-great-great grand-daugher of William Clark, were the ship’ssponsors. They were two of many Lewisand Clark relatives in attendance.

The day before the launching, familymembers were invited on a tour of theship. As part of the occasion, Lisa’s dad,Peyton C. “Bud” Clark, and Jane Henleyread from the Lewis and Clark journalsfor May 20, 1805. After the tour, we en-joyed dinner, dancing, and a chance tomeet some of the NASSCO employees whoworked on the ship.

The Lewis and Clark is huge—689 feetlong, 105 feet wide, and displacing 41,000tons. The Corps of Discovery’s keelboatcould have fit in one storage compartment!

The launch took place at sundown totake advantage of the highest tide of theyear. Jane and Lisa did a wonderful jobchristening the ship—both broke theirbottles on the first swing, showering thehull with champagne. Bedecked with red,white, and blue bunting and trailingstreamers and balloons from its super-structure, the ship moved swiftly downthe incline into San Diego Bay. A displayof fireworks followed.

Nearly six thousand people werepresent at the festivities. Many V.I.P.swere on hand, including, appropriately,Congressman Jerry Lewis and AdmiralVern Clark. (Lewis is a Republican fromPennsylvania and chairman of the HouseAppropriations Committee, and Clark isChief of Naval Operations; neither is re-lated to the explorers.) Also in attendancewere Congressman Randy “Duke”Cunningham (R., Calif.), Vice AdmiralDavid L. Brewer III, Rear Admiral

Charles S. Hamilton II, Assistant Secre-tary of the Navy John J. Young, Jr.,NASSCO President Richard H. Vortmann,and the captain of the new ship, TerryRycenga.

At the post-launch reception Jane andLisa presented their gifts to the ship—prints of artist Gary Lucy’s painting ofthe expedition’s keelboat and Michael

The good ship Lewis and Clark takes to the water

From top: Twilight launch in San Diego; bowand stern views of the Navy’s newest ship.

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Haynes’s full-length portraits of Lewisand Clark. Jane and Lisa represented theirfamilies beautifully. It was wonderful torenew the 200-year-old friendship be-tween the Lewis and Clark clans.

JENNIFER R. CLARK

St. Louis, Mo.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The writer is married toCharles Clark, a great-great-great grand-son of William Clark.

Columbia River Gorge 1/3 sq.This ad is a PDF - it is includedin the “8/05 art & ads” folder.Make sure it prints out so thetext, display type, and illustra-tion are in focus (no “jaggies”).

WPO welcomes letters. We may edit themfor length, accuracy, clarity, and civility.Send them to us c/o Editor, WPO, 51 N. MainSt., Pennington, NJ 08534 (e-mail: [email protected]).

Last year I visited Wells-burg, West Virginia, andtook this photograph ofthe town’s bust of PatrickGass (inset), a member ofthe L&C Expedition. Itsits in a waterfront parkwith a commanding viewof the Ohio River. From this spot it iseasy to imagine Lewis’s anticipationbuilding as he floated down this majesticriver, knowing he was at last headed west.

MARK CHALKLEY

Baltimore, Md.

Thanks for the news item on the namingof Spirit Mound Creek (L&C Roundup,May 2005). When I recently took a visit-ing friend and fellow birder to see theSpirit Mound Historic Prairie, he was im-pressed by the magical nature of the placeand the sedge wrens we found there.

It is good that the creek now has aname, although it’s hard to see how ourcaptains missed it, even if it was dry whenthey stopped at Spirit Mound in August1804. The creek has cut a deep furrow thatsurely would have been recognizable asa stream bed.

A minor point: the nearby town ofVermillion, South Dakota, which the ar-ticle mentions, is spelled à la français,with two “l”s. But what’s a minor detailamong birders and L&C aficionados?

DOUGLAS CHAPMAN

Sioux Falls, S.D.

Spirit Mound Creek

Gass statue in Wellsburg

We Proceeded On(Back issues, 1974 - current)

All back issues of our quarterlyhistorical journal are available.Some of the older issues are copierreproductions. Orders for acollection of all back issues receivea 30 percent discount. Order yourmissing issues to complete yourset. Call 1-888-701-3434 or orderonline at www.lewisandclark.org.

$5 copier reproductions$10 originals

$2 shipping & handling

AD RATESInside front or back cover:Black & white, $650; color, $750Outside back cover:Black & white, $800; color, $900

Inside pages (black & white):Full page: 71/4 X 91/2 $6002/3rd vertical: 43/4 X 91/2 $4001/2 horizontal: 45/8 X 71/4 $3001/3rd square: 43/4 X 45/8 $2001/3rd vertical: 21/4 X 91/2 $2001/6th vertical: 21/4 X 45/8 $1001/12th: 21/4 X 23/16 $50

Address inquiries to Karen Rickert,P.O. Box 3434, Great Falls, MT59403. 406-454-1234/fax: 406-771-9237. [email protected].

Advertise yourL&C productsand services

in WPO!


President’s Message

The importance of partnership in trail conservationThe Lewis and Clark TrailHeritage Foundation, Inc.

P.O.B. 3434, Great Falls, MT 59403406-454-1234 / 1-888-701-3434

Fax: 406-771-9237www.lewisandclark.org

The mission of the LCTHF is tostimulate public appreciation of the

Lewis and Clark Expedition’scontributions to America’s heritage and

to support education, research,development, and preservation of the

Lewis and Clark experience.

OfficersPresident

Gordon Julich Blue Springs, Mo.

President-ElectPatti Thomsen

Oconomowoc, Wis.

Vice-President Jim Gramentine Mequon, Wis.

SecretaryPhyllis Yeager

Floyd Knobs, Ind.

TreasurerCharles H. “Chuck” Holland, Jr.

Meza, Ariz.

Immediate Past PresidentRon Laycock

Benson, Minn.

Executive DirectorCarol A. Bronson

Directors at largeJane Angelis, Carbondale, Ill. • Tom Davis,

Ft. Washington, Penn. • Jim Mallory,Lexington, Ky. • David Peck, San Diego,

Calif. • Jon Stealey, Findlay, Ohio •Hal Stearns, Wayne, Neb. • Stephenie

Ambrose Tubbs, Helena, Mont. • HarryWindland, Glen Carbon, Ill.

Active Past PresidentsDavid Borlaug, Washburn, N.D. • Robert K.

Doerk, Jr., Fort Benton, Mont. • LarryEpstein, Cut Bank, Mont.• James R. Fazio,

Moscow, Id. • Robert E. Gatten, Jr.,Greensboro, N.C. • Jane Henley,

Charlottesville, Va. • Stuart E. Knapp,Bozeman, Mont. • Barbara J. Kubik,

Vancouver, Wash. • H. John Montague,Portland, Ore. • Cynthia Orlando,

Washington, D.C. • James M. Peterson,Vermillion, S.D. • L. Edwin Wang,

Minneapolis, Minn. • Wilbur P. Werner,Mesa, Ariz.

Incorporated in 1969 under Missouri General Not-For-Profit Corporation Act. IRS Exemption

Certificate No. 501(c)3, ldentification No. 510187715.

housands of eager visitorsconverged during June and early

July in Great Falls, Montana, toparticipate in the National SignatureEvent “Explore Big Sky.” The eventplanners excelled in pre-senting a program bal-anced with scholarship,diversity, education, andentertainment.

In the vast openness ofthe Montana landscapeone can still glimpse, hereand there, portions of theL&C Trail that appearlittle altered by human activity. Yetmost of the route followed by the ex-plorers would be scarcely recognizableto them today. To ensure the legacy ofthe expedition, all who are passionateabout Lewis and Clark must adopt themantra of responsible stewardship.Thanks to the extensive work of con-temporary historians, we can at least beconfident that the basic history of theexpedition is accurately told and easilyavailable to all. It is important that weaccord equal attention to the trail—theexpedition’s physical legacy. If we failin its stewardship, any account of theLewis and Clark tricentennial mightbegin with the statement, “Once upona time there was a landscape we can nolonger even imagine.”

LCTHF’s critical roleThe Lewis and Clark Trail HeritageFoundation needs to renew and expandits commitment to trail stewardshipand work aggressively to ensure re-sponsible preservation, restoration, and(where necessary) development.

One of the bicentennial’s most sig-nificant contributions has been the cre-ation of important partnerships amongfederal, state, and local governmentalagencies. In the past year, the founda-tion and these agencies have engagedin numerous conversations. In all ourdiscussions a major fact has emerged:The LCTHF is widely regarded as thesole national organization with the

ability, know-how, and desire to pro-vide leadership in the critical area oftrail stewardship.

In coming months the foundationwill be working with the National Park

Service, Bureau of LandManagement, Forest Ser-vice, Army Corps of En-gineers, U.S. GeologicSurvey, and Council ofState Advisors to betterdelineate areas of possiblecooperation. We expect toidentify many opportuni-ties for foundation chap-

ters and members who want to partici-pate in “on-site” trail projects. By em-bracing this trail initiative, we can trulyfulfill our mission as “Keepers of theStory, Stewards of the Trail.”

—Gordon JulichPresident, LCTHF

T

“Destination: Pacific,” the next in a se-ries of 15 Signature Events marking thethree-year-long Lewis and Clark Bi-centennial, will be held November 11-15 at venues at the mouth of the Co-lumbia River, including Astoria andSunset Beach, Oregon, and Long Beachand Chinook County Park, Washing-ton. The five-day program will featurethe presentation of scholarly papers, theperformance of period music, the dedi-cation of the new Fort to Sea Trail link-ing L&C-related sites on both sides ofthe Columbia, and a commemorationof the “vote” cast by members of theCorps of Discovery at Chinook Pointon November 14, 1805, about where tomake winter camp.

The four remaining Signature Eventswill be held in 2006 in Idaho, Montana,North Dakota, and Missouri. Addi-tional information on all of them canbe found on the LCTHF Web sitehttp://www.lewisandclark.org/?p=sigevents&n=bicentennial. ■

Columbia Signature Event


Gib Floyd(Idaho Woodcraft)

pickup 5.05,inside back cover

South Dakota Tourism


wo hundred years ago Lewisand Clark moved through a

country unknown to them and tomost Euro-Americans. Of their manyexperiences and “discoveries” along thetrail, we are well informed. But perhapswe are not so well informed about aconcept they were discovering forthemselves, a notion of wildness thatwe these centuries later are beginningto envision for ourselves.

Not wilderness. Wilderness is aplace. In many areas of the planet wil-derness places are protected, and shouldbe, from disastrous human encroach-ment— but that very protection repre-sents an intrusion of human activity.Thus wilderness is an artifact, a museumfor recalling how things used to be.

I have seen the Missouri River fromnearly one end to the other. In so manyspots it is beautiful, powerful, full of sto-ries distant from our time and experi-ence; but the Missouri too is an artifact,damned and channeled and protectedbeyond its original nature. Humans havedeclared its value and either changed itor by their own choice left it alone. It isnot the wild and free river that Lewisand Clark followed and from it learnedthe meaning of wildness.

Wilderness as artifactI know what an artifact is; I’ve workedin museums my whole life. Theexpedition’s elk-skin journal, Clark’swatch-fob compass, Lewis’s telescope:these are more obvious artifacts. But theplaces we have claimed as Wilderness—Old Faithful in Yellowstone, Alaska’sDenali National Park, the Mark TwainNational Forest—these too manifestthe agency of human work, which is thedictionary definition of artifact.

About one hundred years afterLewis and Clark trekked across Mon-tana, Charles M. Russell was there, con-juring up images of the mythical OldWest. He painted a gorgeous picture hetitled When the Land Belonged to God.In the early morning, or perhaps it wasat sunset, a herd of buffalo, wild and

Bicentennial Council

Looking for “wildness” in the wake of Lewis & Clarkfree, emerged over asteep hill from theriver below. Thepristine landscapeshows no sign ofhumans, Indian orcowboy or rancher.It is a landscapeRussell never saw,nor will we.

Lewis and Clarkwalked into wild-ness, and throughtheir eyes I havewalked through it too. I have learnedthat wildness is a quality we have lostand that our common future dependson our ability to reclaim it. We cannotreturn to the world Lewis and Clarkexperienced, nor should we. We can-not undo what has been done even ifwe wanted. However, we need to learnthat wildness is essential, that placematters, that we have the obligation torecognize that we are part of this earth.We must redefine our relationship withour planet, with other life on it, andwith each other. Nature is not some-where else. It is not on the HeritageTrail or even the Yellowstone River,which is the longest free-flowing,undammed river in the country as itmakes its way east through Montanato the North Dakota border. The qual-ity of wildness is in each of us, asWallace Stegner described in his “Wil-derness Letter”:

We are a wild species, as Darwinpointed out. Nobody ever tamed ordomesticated or scientifically bredus. But for at least three millenniawe have been engaged in a cumula-tive and ambitious race to modifyand gain control of our environ-ment, and in the process we havecome close to domesticating our-selves. Not many people are likely,any more, to look upon what we call“progress” as an unmixed blessing.Just as surely as it has brought usincreased comfort and more mate-

rial goods, it has brought us spiri-tual losses ... . One means of sanityis to retain a hold on the naturalworld, to remain, insofar as we can,good animals. Americans still havethat chance, more than manypeoples; for while we were demon-strating ourselves the most efficientand ruthless environment-busters inhistory, and slashing and burningand cutting our way through a wil-derness continent, the wildernesswas working on us. It remains in usas surely as Indian names remain onthe land. If the abstract dream ofhuman liberty and human dignitybecame, in America, somethingmore than an abstract dream, markit down at least partially to the factthat we were in subdued ways sub-dued by what we conquered.

Lewis and Clark moved into a land-scape they did not control or dominate.They met people who held the landscapesacred and accepted their place in it. Themen of the expedition learned to live inthis world, a world we cannot fathom,for our world is manmade and we con-trol or hope to control it. But then thetsunami comes. The volcano erupts.Tornadoes and hurricanes swirl upon us.The thunder rolls, wild flowers growwithout our assistance, and babies areborn in nature’s time, not ours. Then weknow we live on a wild planet.

—Robert R. ArchibaldPresident, Bicentennial Council

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Russell’s vision of wildness: When the Land Belonged to God.


St. Josephpickup 5.05,

page 9


Trail Notes

L&C Trail offers a continuing opportunity for rediscovery and renewalach of us has a unique opportu-nity to discover the Lewis andClark National Historic Trail. Its

land and water are constantly chang-ing and its history is continuously be-ing written and revised.

Members of the Corps of Discov-ery were not the first to learn of the ex-istence of the plants, animals, people,water routes, or walking paths encoun-tered on their journey to the Pacific.Lewis and Clark did not “discover” therivers, the birds, or the mountainsnamed for them and members of theirparty. What they saw was new to them,but it was not unknown.

American Indians already knew theplants. They knew their uses as food,medicine, tools, and construction mate-rials. They had a spiritual connection withthe animals. They ate many species andused them for clothing, shelter, and tools.The Indians possessed a profoundknowledge of the life around them.

Indians understood the waters andpathways that led them to huntinggrounds and neighboring villages andprovided safety and sustenance. Lewisand Clark did not discover their routeto the Pacific Ocean. Every part of ithad been traveled for generations.

Indians were familiar with the

plants, animals, water, and land in waysLewis and Clark could not imagine.These things were, however, unknownto members of the expedition and sobecame their own personal discover-ies. They shared these discoveries withothers in new and exciting ways.

They sketched de-tailed, accurate im-ages of animals andplants. They re-corded animalmovements andbehavior, com-pared and con-trasted Indiantribes, measured distance and calcu-lated time, drew thorough maps, col-lected samples, and composed com-prehensive reports of their findings intheir journals.

Their journals present a picture ofwhat the landscape looked like 200years ago and describe the people andanimals that inhabited the land. Theyallow us the opportunity to reflect ontwo centuries of change and rediscoverfor ourselves what Lewis and Clarkpreserved so meticulously in writing.

If you have never seen the headwa-ters of the Missouri River or itsconfluence with the Platte River, you

can explore them for yourself. You canphotograph Lewis’s woodpecker orClark’s nutcracker, sketch a cotton-wood, or taste a chokecherry. You canlearn the history and culture of an In-dian tribe along the trail or visit a smallcommunity to learn of the trail’s rolein its history.

A 12-year-old in Montana recentlydiscovered a new species of moss whileon a school field trip, demonstratingthat significant discoveries are yet to bemade.

Last summer, author and botanistWayne Phillips found five plants thatLewis and Clark identified in their jour-nals in a single tipi ring on the Black-feet Indian Reservation, in northwest-ern Montana. For him, this was an ex-citing discovery.

Volunteers on the Lolo Motorwaylast summer found a wolf’s largepawprint and were awestruck by theimpressive size of an animal they neveractually saw.

The trail may not look the same as itdid 200 years ago, but most of whatLewis and Clark described can still befound. Prickly pear is prevalent, blueflax is visible on hillsides and in gardens,and grizzly bears are regularly spottedby hunters and hikers. Quiet places re-main along the Missouri and Colum-bia rivers, and hiking trails in the RockyMountains hint at the difficulty the ex-plorers had crossing those mountainsin 1805 and 1806.

The best way to understand the jour-nals of expedition members is to placeyourself in their footsteps. There areopportunities to explore and make dis-coveries all along the trail. You can doyour own part to preserve history bysharing stories of your exploration,keeping a journal, taking photos, ordrawing pictures of what you find.

The trail belongs to us all. Becomea part of its history by embarking onyour own journeys of exploration andsharing your discoveries.

—Wendy RaneyDirector, Field Operations

E

A biographical sketch by Matt Bless-ing of Reuben Gold Thwaites, the edi-tor of the first definitive version of theLewis and Clark journals, appears inthe Winter 2004-2005 Wisconsin Maga-zine of History (www.wisconsinhistory.org/wmh).

David J. Nicandri’s “Lewis andClark: Exploring under the Influenceof Alexander Mackenzie,” in the Fall2004 Pacific Northwest Quarterly, ex-amines the literary influence of theCanadian explorer’s book Voyagesfrom Montreal on the captains’ jour-nals. (Among the author’s findings:Lewis’s reference to the expedition ashis “dar[l]ing project” was almost cer-

tainly borrowed from Mackenzie.)Seonaid Campbell writes about the

expedition’s anglers in “Fishing theJournals of Lewis and Clark,” appear-ing in the Winter 2005 Flyfisher, themagazine of the Livingston, Montana–based Federation of Fly Fishers(fedflyfishers.org). “A Different Angleon the Expedition,” an article by NickGevock in the May-June 2005 MontanaOutdoors, also looks at L&C fishing.Gevock notes that the expedition re-corded 11 new species of fish and thatfish supplemented the expedition’s dietwhen game was scarce. (http://fwp.state.mt.us/mtoutdoors/HTML/Ar-ticles/2005/LCFishing.htm.) ■

L&C in other journals: Thwaites, Mackenzie, angling


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PRINTSUniforms anddress of theCorps ofDiscovery,by artistMICHAELHAYNES

10!We Proceeded On August 2005

In Philadelphia in the spring of 1807, MeriwetherLewis sat for a portrait and posed for a wax figure,both created by Charles Willson Peale. Lewis, a na-

tional hero who the previous fall had returned from hisepic journey to the Pacific, was just 32 years old and inthe prime of life. Peale—a celebrated portraitist, natural-ist, inventor, and founder of the nation’s most popularmuseum—was 66 years old, a Methuselah by the day’sstandards. Neither could possibly have imagined that theaging artist would long outlive his vigorous young sub-ject, whose life would soon spiral out of control, leadingto a mysterious death (almost certainly a suicide) a meretwo and a half years later.

This image of the two men in the artist’s studio offers aglimpse of the complex connections between the Voyageof Discovery and Peale, a restless genius whose contribu-tions to art and science both fostered and drew inspira-tion from the achievements of Lewis and Clark.

Although a member of Philadelphia’s intellectual eliteand one of Thomas Jefferson’s regular correspondents,

Peale was not among those who directly planned the trans-continental exploration with the nation’s third president.He was neither a frontier-oriented Virginian like Lewisor his cocaptain, William Clark, nor a politician ambitiousto enlarge U.S. sovereignty, like James Madison and AlbertGallatin, both members of Jefferson’s cabinet. But Peale,whose interests were varied and voracious, was a vital par-ticipant in the social, political, and scientific evolution ofthe post-revolutionary United States. As such, he exer-cised a major influence on the Enlightenment atmospherethat engendered the western expedition.

PEALE’S EARLY YEARS AND THE BIRTH OF HIS MUSEUM

Like Benjamin Franklin and many others in his circle,Peale came from humble roots. He was born in Chester-town, Maryland, in 1741, the son of an English émigréand convicted forger given the choice of hanging or mov-ing to the Colonies. Peale apprenticed at age 13 to a sad-dler in Annapolis, a trade he abandoned by his early twen-ties for portrait painting.

ARTIST, NATURALIST, IMPRESARIO:

His Philadelphia museum became the repository forLewis and Clark’s specimens, and his brush rendered

the truest portraits of the captains in their prime

BY MARK CHALKLEY

CHARLES WILLSON

PEALE


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Charles Willson Peale was 81 years old when he painted his famous self-portrait, The Artist in His Museum. The view is of the Long Room.


The fledgling artist was an engaging young man with aknack for making friends with influential people. Whileliving in Boston for a time, he honed his skills at the el-bow of the distinguished portraitist John Singleton Copley.Friends thought enough of his talents to raise money tosend him to England for further study. In London he metFranklin, whose connections as a colonial agent helpedland Peale a job as an assistant to the court portraitist Ben-jamin West.

Peale returned to Maryland in 1769. In the words ofJoseph Kastner, a chronicler of the nation’s early natural-ists, he was now “a sure-handed professional: a gooddraftsman, a fine colorist, a sharp reader of personalityand a persuasive salesman.”1 He soon established himselfas a successful portraitistwhose list of clients in-cluded George and MarthaWashington and othermembers of America’s elite.

In 1776 Peale moved toPhiladelphia. The Conti-nental Congress was in ses-sion there, drafting theDeclaration of Indepen-dence. Caught up in therevolutionary spirit, Pealejoined the militia and wenton to distinguish himself asan officer at the battles ofTrenton, Princeton, andGermantown. While en-during the hard winter atValley Forge he painted the 19-year-old Marquis deLafayette, one of many portraits he would execute ofthe Revolution’s leaders.2

After the war, copies of many of these paintings hungin Peale’s home and studio at Third and Lombard streets,in Philadelphia. This gallery of national heroes was opento an admiring public and became the genesis of Peale’sMuseum. But what really attracted people’s attention weresome bones of a mastodon acquired by the artist in 1783.

The bones had come from Big Bone Lick, a swamp inKentucky rich in mammalian fossils. A German natural-ist named Christian Friedrich Michaelis had unearthed theremains of the extinct elephant and had commissionedPeale to draw them.

The nascent showman knew a good thing when he sawit. Within two years, Peale had turned part of his houseinto “a repository for natural curiosities, the wonderful

works of nature.”3 Visitors paid an admission fee of 25cents. On display were minerals, soils, seashells, and anastonishing variety of stuffed animals, birds, and fish re-alistically posed in natural settings; such “habitat arrange-ment”—the placing, according to historian Paul RussellCutright, of “mounted specimens in front of backgroundspainted to create the illusion of an actual, natural envi-ronment,” predated by a century the dioramic displayscommon to museums today.4 “Mr. Peale’s animals re-minded me of Noah’s Ark,” one visitor noted, “but I canhardly conceive that even Noah could have boasted a bet-ter collection.”5 In an adjacent menagerie the museum alsodisplayed live animals, including a bear, a rattlesnake, anda five-legged cow with six feet and two tails.6

Peale had taught himselftaxidermy and did most ofthe mountings himself. Hecontinued to gather speci-mens while touring thecountry painting portraitsand solicited them from awide circle of Americanand European correspon-dents. Among the donorswere Robert Patterson,Meriwether Lewis’s tutorin celestial navigation, whogave him a paddlefish, andGeorge Washington, whoforwarded a pair of goldenpheasants.7

The museum eventuallyoutgrew Peale’s house. In 1794 it moved to the AmericanPhilosophical Society (A.P.S.) and in 1802 to the Pennsyl-vania State House, known today as Independence Hall,where the crowning exhibit was a fully articulated skel-eton of what was thought at the time to be a mammoth—it was actually a mastodon—discovered the year beforeon a farm in Newburgh, New York. Peale’s excavation ofthe remains was underwritten by the A.P.S. and partlyoutfitted by the War Department, which on orders fromPresident Jefferson supplied it with pumps and tents.8

Peale’s devotion to the twin pillars of art and science isreflected in some of the names he gave his children. Foursons and three daughters by his first wife were all namedfor artists (two, Raphaelle and Rembrandt, became dis-tinguished painters in their own right).9 He named ason by his second wife Charles Linnaeus Peale, in honorof the Swedish naturalist who gave us our system for

Excavated in 1802, Peale’s “mammoth” (actually a mastodon), was ondisplay at his museum during Lewis’s pre-expedition visit to Philadel-phia. The drawing is by his son Titian Peale.


classifying species.10 (The thrice-widowed Peale mar-ried three times and fathered 17 children, of whom 10lived to adulthood.)

PEALE’S RELATIONS WITH LEWIS AND JEFFERSON

Meriwether Lewis arrived in Philadelphia in May of 1803to outfit his expedition. One of its primary goals was theadvancement of science, so he was also there to learn asmuch as he could about natural history from the city’ssavants. Although there is no record of his doing so, Lewismust have met with Peale and visited his museum to seeits famous mammoth.

Writers have laughed up theirscholarly sleeves at Jefferson’surging Lewis to look for mam-moths in the West. But the no-tion of evolution and the extinc-tion of species wouldn’t gaincurrency until later in the cen-tury, and it was assumed mam-moths and other large mammalsknown from the fossil recordmust still exist somewhere—per-haps in the farther reaches of thecountry that Lewis would soonexplore. Lewis took off precioustime later that fall, while de-scending the Ohio River, to in-vestigate reports of a mammothskeleton found at Big Bone Lickand report to Jefferson about it.11

Both he and Clark paid particu-lar attention to any fossil remainsfound on the expedition. Argu-ably, none of this would havecome about without Peale’s mammoth, which fired the sci-entific curiosity of Jefferson and his protégé.

Peale and Jefferson were intellectual allies in the effortto refute arguments of the Comte de Buffon, a famousFrench naturalist, that North America’s climate tended toproduce degenerate and reduced forms of wildlife andhumans; the Newburgh mammoth became an importantpiece of evidence in their rebuttal.

The artist and the sage of Monticello corresponded av-idly about natural history and other topics. Both had apenchant for mechanics. Peale was an early user of thepolygraph and promoted it to Jefferson. This wasn’t theunreliable “lie detector” beloved of Texas employers andF.B.I. interrogators, but an ingenious device for copying

handwritten letters. It worked by means of a slender arm,attached to the writer’s pen, which guided a second penthat traced an identical text. Invented by Peale’s friendJohn Hawkins, it was quickly embraced by the artist, whorefined and improved it. Jefferson, who came to rely on itas a way of keeping track of his prolific correspondence,later said he “could not . . . live” without his polygraph.12

The polygraph was just one of many side interests forthe artist, whose “world in miniature”—Peale’s Museum—remained his consuming passion. Jefferson, who had beenan early supporter of the museum and had lobbied un-

successfully for the governmentto adopt it as a national institu-tion, fully shared his friend’s en-thusiasm and made the museumthe official repository of theexpedition’s scientific trea-sures.13 In the spring of 1805,Lewis shipped Jefferson a har-vest of biological specimens andIndian artifacts from FortMandan, on the upper Missouri.The trove included skins andskeletons of the pronghorn an-telope as well as a live prairiedog and American magpie, allanimals new to science.14 In thepresident’s mind, observesKastner, “there was never anyquestion” about where thespecimens would go: “toJefferson’s good friend, the art-ist-patriot-naturalist-impresa-rio Charles Willson Peale, fordisplay at Peale’s Museum of

Philadelphia, the country’s only working natural historymuseum where tens of thousands of Americans were givena serious introduction to natural science.”15

Many more treasures followed upon the expedition’sreturn. The museum housing Lewis and Clark’s specimensgrouped exhibits according to Linnaean principles andidentified the plants and animals displayed by their corre-sponding Latin binomial names. It comprised four rooms,or halls, devoted respectively to mammals (“quadrupeds”),birds, reptiles and fishes, and Indian artifacts. The twohundred species on view in the Quadruped Room includedthe pronghorn antelope sent from Fort Mandan and a big-horn sheep collected later on the expedition. The LongRoom housed more than a thousand bird specimens as

Peale executed this radiant portrait of his friend ThomasJefferson in 1791-92, when he was secretary of state.

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well as Peale’s portrait gallery of great Americans.Grouped with the Indian materials in the Back Room wasPeale’s wax figure of Lewis, grasping a calumet and dressedin a buffalo-skin hunting shirt, a gift from the Shoshonechief Cameahwait.16

When Lewis visited Philadelphia in 1807, Peale becamehis greatest champion. It was at this juncture that Pealepainted Lewis, whose portrait, he told Jefferson, was“richly entitled to a place” in the Long Room’s gallery ofnotables.17 Peale also welcomed the triumphant explorerat three meetings of the A.P.S., which had elected him tomembership in early 1804.18

As Peale’s admiration of Lewis makes clear, he did notforesee the dark turn the explorer’s life would take. Theartist himself had struggled at times with physical andmental illness (he had suffered a period of “lethargy” af-ter the Revolutionary War which seems to have been aform of post-traumatic depression), but his intense curi-osity and creative energy prevailed. Work was his anti-dote. Lewis, unfortunately, responded more typically tothe emotional let-down that so often follows a peak expe-rience: he began to drink heavily. Jefferson had chargedLewis with producing an account of the expedition basedon the journals, and no one anticipated its publicationmore keenly than Peale: “It is a work,” he wrote, “thatseems to excite much attention, & will I hope have a greatsale & give considerable profit to this bold adventurer.”19

Although Lewis managed to line up a prospective pub-

lisher, John Conrad, and float a prospectus, from mid-1807 until his death, in October of 1809, he appears tohave made no effort to begin writing. Jefferson wasshocked to learn from Conrad that “Govr. Lewis neverfurnished us with a line.”20

Peale’s connection to the expedition might have beencloser had Lewis lived and carried through on his publish-ing plans. Lewis had expected to produce a work in twovolumes, the first devoted to a narrative of the journey andthe second to natural history. For the latter he chose thePhiladelphia naturalist Benjamin Smith Barton to preparethe text and Peale to illustrate it. 21 Peale’s correspondenceshows he was eager for the assignment. Even with Lewis’sdeath, Barton might still have produced a text, perhaps withsome assistance from Clark. But the project languished, andPeale’s involvement came to naught.

THE ARTIST’S LATER YEARS

The aging but indefatigable Peale had other projects tooccupy his time. In 1810, the same year he painted a visit-ing William Clark, he handed the management of the mu-seum over to his son Rubens and went to live on a farm innearby Germantown, Pennsylvania. There he turned hisexperimental mind to gardening, windmill design, dairyproduction, cotton spinning, and other rural enterprises.He called his country retreat Farm Persevere. “Here,”writes Kastner, “he labored happily, contour-plowing theland by a method prescribed by Jefferson, mechanizinghis chores by use of his own millstream contraptions, ca-reening about the farm at twelve miles an hour on his ‘fastwalking machine,’ a primitive bicycle without pedals,throwing all his energies and enthusiasms into agricul-ture.”22 The summer after Peale turned 80, Jefferson—bynow four years into his own retirement, at Monticello—dropped him a letter whose gentle solicitation seems toimply a concern about his old friend’s physical exertionsas well as the state of the national institution dear toJefferson’s heart: “I shall be anxious to know that you arewell and happy. I have heard that you have retired fromthe city to a farm. Does not the museum suffer?”23

In 1815, Peale returned to the city and devoted his re-maining 12 years to maintaining the museum’s collections.

PEALE’S INFLUENCE ON OTHERS

In his long life—he died in February of 1827, a few monthsshy of his 86th birthday—Peale was a mentor to manyyounger men, among them Alexander Wilson, a lonelyScottish immigrant who figures in the Lewis and Clarkstory. Wilson wrote and illustrated American Ornithol-

Peale’s life and art inspired the artist George Catlin, shown in a self-portrait from the 1830s. He is painting the Mandan chief Four Bears.


ogy, a nine-volume work that was the first comprehensivetreatment of the nation’s birdlife. A former peddler andsometime poet, Wilson arrived penniless in Philadelphiain 1794. He found a job teaching school and was be-friended by a kindred spirit, the naturalist WilliamBartram, whose “garden” on the west bank of theSchuylkill was a nursery for native plants collected on hiswide-ranging botanical excursions. It was there, in 1802,that Wilson by chance met Peale and his son Rubens. Theywere collecting—that is, shooting—birds to display at themuseum, and Wilson protested their killing of a favoritecardinal. Despite this somewhat inauspicious beginning,Peale and Wilson struck up a lasting relationship. Wilsonhad only recently turned to the serious study of birds,and Peale encouraged his ornithological ambitions.24

Peale’s son Rembrandt painted the only known portraitof Wilson.

Although there is no record of it, Lewis probably metWilson a year later, during his first visit to Philadelphia.On his visit in 1807, Lewis entrusted him with drawingthose birds collected on the expedition that were new toscience. Two of these—Lewis’s woodpecker and Clark’snutcracker—Wilson named for the explorers; they werefeatured along with another news species, the westerntanager, in one of the color plates of the first volume ofAmerican Ornithology when it was published the follow-ing year. Lewis also provided Wilson with valuable in-sights about behavior and habitat that informed his text.25

In 1811, Wilson wrote an invaluable account of Lewis’sdeath based on his interview with the proprietor of theTennessee roadhouse where he had died of gunshotwounds.26

Another man drawn into Peale’s orbit was the artistGeorge Catlin. A native Pennsylvanian who in 1823 aban-doned a law career to study art in Philadelphia, Catlinwas a friend of Rembrandt Peale. His exposure both tothe western artifacts in Peale’s Museum and the artist’sportraits helped convince him of his own mission in life:to document in paint the native peoples of the West. Hejourneyed to St. Louis in 1830 and with the help of Will-iam Clark traveled up the Missouri. Catlin painted GreatPlains chiefs who had greeted Lewis and Clark a quarter-century before, and the images he has left us offer a rareglimpse into tribal cultures that would soon vanish. 27

“ICONIC” PORTRAITS

The most direct and lasting of Peale’s contributions to thelegacy of Lewis and Clark are his portraits (above) of theexplorers themselves. As the best portraits always do,while faithfully rendering their subject’s outward featuresthey also capture their personalities (even, perhaps, some-thing of their souls).

Studying Peale’s Lewis, we see a man who is confidentand intense but detached, his eyes focused on the far—oris it inward?—distance. Clark, by contrast, looks directlyat the artist; he seems as interested in the painter as the

Peale’s portraits of William Clark (1810) and Meriwether Lewis (1807) are the best renderings of the captains at the height of their fame.

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painter is in him. His grave lips appear on the verge of asmile.

Lewis and Clark have been called icons, a word thatin its primary sense refers to a painting or statue of aholy person, an object of otherworldly devotion. Peale’sportraits, which have probably been reproduced morethan any other likenesses of the explorers, are “iconic”only in the secondary sense of their representativeness.The men portrayed are knowable, real, and decidedlydown-to-earth.

Charles Willson Peale was neither a planner of nor par-ticipant in the Voyage of Discovery. Yet, inspired by thatepic journey, he stimulated others to carry forward itswork, and he played an important role in preserving itsachievements for future generations.

Foundation member Mark Chalkley lives in Baltimore. Hewrote about John Pernier in the November 2004 WPO.

NOTES1 Joseph Kastner, A Species of Eternity (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1977), p. 145; Paul Russell Cutright, Lewis and Clark:Pioneering Naturalists (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1969), p. 351. Peale was christened Charles Wilson Peale, withjust one “l” in his middle name. Later, for unknown reasons, headded the extra letter. (Kastner, p. 145)2 Kastner, pp. 146, 158.3 Ibid., p. 148.4 Cutright, p. 352.5 Kastner, p. 148. The person quoted is Manassah Cutler, a Mas-sachusetts naturalist.6 Kastner, p. 149.7 Cutright, p. 351.8 Kastner, pp. 150-154; Cutright, p. 351. The specimen wasthought at the time to be a mammoth. Mastodons were smallerthan mammoths.9 Kastner, p. 156.10 Ibid., p. 149.11 Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedi-tion with Related Documents, 1783-1854, 2 volumes (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 2nd edition, 1978), Vol. 1, pp. 126-130.12 Robert Plate, Charles Willson Peale: Son of Liberty, Father ofArt & Science (New York: David McKay, 1967), p. 118. Theauthor does not give the source of Jefferson’s letter. Jeffersonalso used the wet-copy process to duplicate his letters. This in-volved laying a damp sheet of paper on the original to absorb atracing of the ink, but the resulting copy was often smudgedand faint.13 Cutright, p. 392.14 Jackson, Vol. 1, pp. 260-261.15 Kastner, p. 143.

16 Jackson, Vol. 2, pp. 439-440.17 Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 364.18 Paul Russell Cutright, Contributions of Philadelphia to Lewisand Clark History (Philadelphia Chapter of the Lewis and ClarkTrail Heritage Foundation, 2001), p. 29; Jackson, Vol. 1, p. 166.Lewis received word about his election to the A.P.S. in a letterfrom Jefferson dated January 22, 1804, when the expedition wasat Camp River Dubois preparing to ascend the Missouri.19 Jackson, Vol. 2, p. 410. Peale to John Hawkins, May 5, 1807.20 Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 469.21 Cutright, Contributions, pp. 24, 26; Jackson, Vol. 2, p. 411.22 Kastner, p. 158.23 Ibid., p. 157.24 Ibid., p. 159; Robert Cantwell, Alexander Wilson: Naturalistand Pioneer (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1961), pp. 121, 167.25 Cutright, Pioneering Naturalists, p. 383; Cantwell, p. 141.According to Cantwell, Lewis also put Wilson in touch withJohn Ordway, one of the expedition’s sergeants, who providedadditional information about western birds. Many other expe-dition species found their way into American Ornithology, butthe captains did not necessarily receive credit for their discov-ery. Jackson attempts to sort all this out in a five-page footnotein Volume 2, pp. 292-298, but as he observes, “It is difficult toknow exactly what species of birds and animals Lewis and Clarkmay be credited with discovering.”26 For Wilson’s account, see WPO, February 2002, p. 24.27 www.ready-to-hang.com/LCP_ArtNotes/George_Catlin_Bio.htm, downloaded May 23, 2005. Catlin in 1832 alsopainted a full-length portrait of Clark as the prosperous firstcitizen of St. Louis. A black-and-white image of this portraitcan be seen on page 8 of the February 2001 WPO.

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Peale’s renderings of four specimens collected by Lewis and Clark anddisplayed at his Philadelphia Museum. Clockwise from top left: Clark’snutcracker, mountain quail, horned toad, Lewis’s woodpecker.


“SPECIMINE OF

THE STONE”:THE FATE OF

LEWIS AND CLARK’S

MINERALOGICAL SPECIMENS

Contrary to the conventional historical view, new evidencesuggests the captains were diligent collectors of rocks

and fossils throughout the expedition

In the late afternoon of May 31, 1805, after anotherlong and arduous day of struggling against the unrelenting current of the Missouri River, Meriwether

Lewis, William Clark, and the rest of the Corps of Dis-covery made camp at Stonewall (now Eagle) Creek inpresent-day Montana. The laborious work of hauling thecanoes and pirogues upstream may have been achinglymonotonous and familiar to the explorers, but the routethey traveled this day had been a singular revelation. Theywere passing through a series of remarkable free-standingstone walls and brilliantly white sandstone cliffs, the in-spiration for Lewis’s famed journal passage about “seensof visionary inchantment” and “most romantic appear-ance” describing the White Cliffs region of the Missouri.1

Yet the captains’ work on this memorable day was notover by any means. Intrigued by the extraordinary free-standing stone walls that rose on each side of the river,Lewis and Clark summoned the energy to have a closer

look at these unique geological features, and not just be-cause they desired to include more detail in their journals.Lewis and Clark were acutely aware that observations ofthe “mineral productions of every kind” were an essentialpart of the scientific mission that Thomas Jefferson hadoutlined for them two years before, but the captains hadanother objective in mind in the waning light of this lateafternoon. As Clark wrote, “both Capt Lewis and Myself walked on Shore this evening and examined those wallsminutely and preserved a Specimine of the Stone.”2

Although not nearly as celebrated as their botanical andzoological work, Lewis and Clark collected a multitude ofmineralogical specimens throughout the expedition. Thereare numerous places in the journals where it’s obvious thecaptains are collecting rock and mineral specimens. Thebest-known incident took place on August 22, 1804, whenLewis, attempting to assay a specimen, was overcome bywhat Clark assumed were fumes of arsenic or cobalt.3

BY JOHN W. JENGO


Lewis’s incapacitation may have dampened the cap-tains’ zeal for conducting such experiments, but it didnothing to deter them from continuing their collectingactivities. Perhaps realizing their own limitations in theproper identification of rocks and minerals—still a veryinexact science in the early 1800s—Lewis and Clark madethe wise choice of dealing with mineralogy in the sameway they did botany and zoology, by diligently collect-ing representative samples for shipment back East, whereexperts could make the proper descriptions and chemi-cal analyses.

Lewis and Clark appear to have assembled at least threeseparate collections of rock, mineral, and fossil specimensduring the expedition, not counting the special shipmentof mammoth bones and teeth recovered from Big BoneLick, Kentucky, that Lewis sent to Thomas Jefferson inthe fall of 1803. The following discussion seeks to unravelthe complicated collection history and ultimate fate of the

captains’ mineral specimens. It addresses when each ship-ment of specimens arrived in the East, determining whoreceived and described them, evaluating the accuracy ofthese descriptions, hypothesizing how the rocks and min-erals fell into the hands of a private collector before trans-fer to the Academy of Natural Sciences (A.N.S.) in Phila-delphia, reviewing which specimens survive to the presentday, and assessing whether the captains’ mineralogicalcollection played a role in influencing scientific thoughtand the advancement of geology and mineralogy in theearly nineteenth century.

DONATED LOUISIANA TERRITORY

SPECIMENS: FIRST SHIPMENT

In early January of 1804, when the expedition was at CampRiver Dubois, near St. Louis, Meriwether Lewis circu-lated a survey among the leading merchants and citizensof St. Louis inquiring about population, trade, agricul-

Long Room, Peale’s Museum

“The Long Room, Interior of Front Room in Peale’s Museum, 1822,” an ink-and-watercolor sketch by Titian Ramsay Peale, depictsthe 100-foot room that was the showpiece of the first modern, egalitarian museum of natural history in the United States. CharlesWillson Peale displayed minerals and fossils in glass cases between the windows of the Long Room (right), including some Lewisand Clark specimens prior to their ultimate acquisition by the Academy of Natural Sciences.

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ture, natural history, and othermatters relating to “UpperLouisiana,” the territory re-cently acquired from France bythe United States. A number ofquestions deal with mineralogy.They ask, “What are yourmines and minerals? Have youlead, iron, copper, pewter, gyp-sum, salts, salines, or othermineral waters, nitre, stone-coal, marble, lime-stone, or anyother mineral substance?Where are they situated, and inwhat quantities found? ...Which of those mines or saltsprings are worked? and whatquantity of metal or salt is an-nually produced?”4

These inquiries yielded atleast 15 mineral specimens,which Lewis forwarded toJefferson on May 18, 1804, twodays before leaving St. Louis tomeet Clark and the expeditionat St. Charles, Missouri. Thespecimens were donated by Jean Pierre Chouteau, his half-brother René Auguste Chouteau, and Nicholas Boilvin, aFrench-Canadian trader and Indian subagent. The collec-tion comprised a limited selection of minerals of concernto Jefferson; among these were nine samples of lead orefrom the “Mine of Berton” (Mine à Burton, located some60 miles southwest of St. Louis); lead ore from the bed ofthe Osage River; a salt concretion from a saline of theOsage Nation; and silver ore, lead ore, and a rock crystalfrom Mexico.5 Jefferson received these specimens in Wash-ington, D.C., and forwarded them to naturalist and mu-seum keeper Charles Willson Peale, in Philadelphia.6

Lewis’s efforts in procuring them confirms that document-ing and collecting examples of the “mineral productionsof every kind” from the Louisiana Territory was not sim-ply an afterthought in Jefferson’s Instructions.

FORT MANDAN SPECIMENS: SECOND SHIPMENT

It’s possible that Lewis began his collecting of mineralspecimens while still in the East, for at least one of thespecimens sent back from Fort Mandan appears to datefrom November 22, 1803.7 Lewis also did some sporadiccollecting in late May 1804, during the early phase of the

journey up the Missouri, in the vicinity of the FemmeOsage and Gasconade rivers, but it doesn’t appear he trulyengaged in serious mineral collecting until he received aspecimen of “granulated Spontaneous Salt”8 from theOtoes, perhaps during a council with the tribe held onAugust 3, 1804.

This gift from the Otoes may have reminded Lewis ofhis obligation to assemble a collection of representativemineral specimens. Whatever triggered the subsequentactivity, the next six weeks would be the most productivecollecting period for specimens he would later send backfrom Fort Mandan. On one day alone—August 22, 1804—he collected at least nine mineral specimens, followed thenext day by at least six more.9 There was another flurry ofactivity between August 28 and September 1, when sevenadditional specimens were collected. Lewis appears tohave skewed the collection to attractively interestingobjects; there may have been at least 12 different speci-mens of pyrite, a.k.a. “fool’s gold,” along with otherminerals such as salts, alum, and weathered limestonesediments whose chemical composition proved too dif-ficult to identify conclusively in the field. Overall, Lewisattempted to ensure that the collection was representa-

Glacial Drift at Little Sandy,on the Missouri River

To comply with Thomas Jefferson’sinstructions to observe the ‘mineralproductions of every kind’ as theyjourneyed across the continent,Lewis and Clark assembled rockand mineral collections on at leastthree different occasions forshipment back East. As the principalmineralogical collector, Lewisattempted to ensure that theselected specimens were represen-tative of the diverse geologyencountered along the expeditionroute, symbolized here by some ofthe assorted rocks that comprisethe glacial drift at the confluence ofLittle Sandy Creek and the MissouriRiver, in Montana.

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tive of the geology encountered along the lower Mis-souri valley by including samples of salt, “petrefactions,”“carbonated wood,” a fossil fish jaw and fossil shells,flint, sand, clay, “slate,” chalk, sandstone, pebbles,“pummice,” “lava,” and lead ore.

Lewis assembled a collection of at least 67 mineral speci-mens from late 1803 through early 1805 and sent themback downriver with Corporal Richard Warfington andthe expedition’s keelboat in April 1805.10 Included in theshipment were two of the Chouteau-donated specimens(Fort Mandan mineralogical specimen Nos. 27 and 29,from Mine à Burton), which Lewis had received prior todeparting Camp River Dubois nearly a year before. WhyLewis included them is uncertain, since he had alreadyprovided Jefferson with equivalent specimens in the May18, 1804, shipment of donated specimens.

A number of letters, particularly between Jefferson andPeale, document the Fort Mandan shipment’s progress andserve as evidence that the specimens reached Philadelphia.11

On November 15, 1805, the American Philosophical So-ciety (A.P.S.) received “A Box of plants, earths and min-erals, from Captain Meriwether Lewis, per Jefferson, whowishes . . . Vaughan and Seybert to examine the earths andminerals.” 12 This statement refers to John Vaughan, sec-retary and librarian of the A.P.S., and Adam Seybert, a

physician, gentleman-scientist, andPhiladelphia’s leading mineralogy expert,who subsequently played a major role inthe fate of the Lewis and Clark mineralspecimens.13 The following day, Vaughncopied specimen descriptive notes, eitherfrom an original list or from the specimentags themselves, into the donation book ofthe A.P.S. Seybert then added supplemen-tal mineralogical comments augmentingLewis’s original specimen descriptions.14

Lewis, during a visit to Philadelphia in thespring and summer of 1807, had access tothe donation book, so it may be assumedhe reviewed these transcriptions and wassatisfied as to their accuracy.

POST-APRIL 1805 SPECIMENS:THIRD SHIPMENT

It is clear from the journals that mineralspecimens were collected after the expedi-tion left Fort Mandan on April 7, 1805. Evi-dence for this can be found in the previ-

ously mentioned entry of May 31, 1805, about collectinga “Specimine of the Stone” in the White Cliffs area of theMissouri, as well as from Lewis’s entry for June 26, 1805,which mentions the explorers’ plan to cache minerals atthe Upper Portage Camp, above the Great Falls.15

Unfortunately, none of the mineral specimens collectedafter leaving Fort Mandan were accounted for by name inthe list of items sent to Washington by Lewis followingthe expedition’s return to St. Louis. The list, however,mentions two boxes and a tin case holding “Various ar-ticles,” which could have included minerals.16 It is alsopossible that Lewis delivered the mineral specimens toPhiladelphia in person in 1807.17 Or they could have beenpart of a shipment Lewis sent via New Orleans to CharlesWillson Peale about the time he left on the journey thatended with his death, in Tennessee, on October 11, 1809.In a letter to his son dated November 17, 1809, Peale saysthat he had received “a number of Articles” from Lewis,including “some minerals.”18 In December 1809 Peale re-corded in his museum accession book a long list of “Ar-ticles collected” by Lewis and Clark.19 Among the sundryitems mentioned are “A number of Minerals,” presum-ably the same ones referenced in his letter of November17.20 In January 1810, during a visit to Philadelphia, Clarkmentions finding “a fiew Minerals” while searching “forthe Materials left in this City by the late Govr. Lewis,

Lewis and Clark lava-pumice specimens

The two surviving rock specimens from the Lewis and Clark Expedition areSeybert Collection No. 534 (“pummice stone,” at right) and ANSP 3916/ex SeybertCollection No. 535 (left), which was described by Lewis as “lava” (a volcanicrock) based on its twisted, ropy appearance, but it’s actually a piece of metamor-phosed sedimentary rock. Although the captains consistently misidentified thesetypes of rocks throughout the expedition, Lewis and Clark should be credited withdisproving the belief that active volcanoes existed in the Louisiana Territorybecause they deduced the causal relationship between burnt coal beds andadjacent layers of baked and fused rock along the Missouri River.

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reletive to our discoveries on the Western Tour.”21 Nei-ther Peale nor Clark states when on the expedition theseminerals were collected, but as the following discussionattempts to show, some of them were almost certainly ac-quired after leaving Fort Mandan in April 1805.

THE FATE OF THE EXPEDITION’SMINERALOGICAL SPECIMENS

The expedition’s mineral specimens, which as notedreached Philadelphia in several shipments between 1805and 1809, were ultimately acquired by the Academy of

Natural Sciences and merged with its mineral collection.22

Somewhere along the way whatever identifying tags theymay have had were lost, along with knowledge of theirprovenance. Today, the one specimen in the A.N.S. col-lection we can definitively link to the expedition is thefossilized jaw of a fish, Saurocephalus lanciformis, whichretained its original expedition tag. (The jaw was foundby Sergeant Patrick Gass on August 6, 1804.)

The A.N.S. came to possess the expedition mineral col-lection because at least 34 Lewis and Clark mineral speci-mens were acquired initially by Adam Seybert, the same

[Lewis] paid little attention to potential mineral depos-its, especially after leaving the Mandans. … [W]hen heentered the Rockies he hardly ever commented on rocksor minerals.

—Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage:Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the

Opening of the American West (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 254.

There was no reason during those drab weeks [descend-ing the Columbia River] to ponder geology, aboutwhich they knew little.

—Donald Jackson, Among the Sleeping Giants(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), p. 25.

The forbidding mountains, what forces made them, howthe great canyons were cut, what ingredients were fusedto make the craggy skyline—of these things Lewis andClark had little to say. At the beginning of the expedi-tion their journals had contained random observationson potentially useful mineral deposits, and a collectionof rocks and minerals had been sent back with thekeelboat. . . . But even here in the Rockies, whereobservations about the earth might have crowded thepages of the journals, they concentrated on plants andanimals. It was a blank spot in Lewis’s thinking that healmost surely acquired from Jefferson.

—Donald Jackson, Thomas Jefferson and theStony Mountains (Urbana.: University

of Illinois Press, 1981), p. 197.

As Lewis and Clark moved on up the Missouri they hadless and less to say about minerals. The discovery of anincreasing number of new and extraordinary plants and

A “blank spot” in their thinking: conventional views of L&C as field geologistsanimals and stirring experiences with Indians divertedtheir attention from such lackluster objects as coal,limestone, and lead ore.

—Paul Russell Cutright, Lewis and Clark: PioneeringNaturalists (Urbana: University of

Illinois Press, 1969), p. 57.

[B]eing vitally interested in ethnology, they [Lewis andClark] forget geology altogether. From the Great Divideto the Pacific their journal entries contain virtually nogeological descriptions. Those that do appear areworthless.

—Donald Jackson, “Some Books Carried by Lewisand Clark,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin,

Vol. 16, No. 1 (October 1959), p. 8.

***Historical commentary like the examples here fail totake into account the state of geological science in 1803.Geology as we know it was just emerging as a separatephysical science, and it was decades away from the firstdiscoveries of the astonishing processes behind theformation of a vast array of geological phenomena, fromangular unconformities (unimaginably long gaps in therock record) to volcanoes to the uplift of mountainchains whose summits are imbedded with marine fossils.Lewis could write at great length about the taxonomy ofplants and animals because the relatively advanced stateof botany and zoology gave him the intellectual frame-work and vocabulary to do so. It was the nascent stateof geology, not deficiencies in the captains’ dedicationor attention, that precluded similar efforts in the scienceof rocks and minerals.

—John W. Jengo


man tasked by Jefferson in November 1805 with examin-ing the expedition specimens sent back from Fort Mandan.We know this because Seybert produced a hand-writtencatalogue, circa 1812, to accompany his large mineral col-lection; scattered throughout the list of nearly two thou-sand specimen notations are unmistakable references to theexpedition, and the collector is listed as “Captn. Lewis.”23

We don’t know how or exactly when Seybert came topossess the Lewis and Clark specimens, but one possibil-ity should be considered. Clark’s visit to Philadelphia inJanuary 1810 came only two months after Peale receivedthe shipment Lewis sent via New Orleans, but the min-eral specimens were apparently unlabeled—Peale statesthat he “expected that he [Lewis] intended to have de-scribed them on his arrival here as I did not receive anyletter with them.”24 Thus, it’s possible that Clark turnedthe collection over to Seybert in exchange for his exper-tise in identifying the specimens, with the hope that theresults would be included in the proposed (but ultimatelynever published) scientific volume of the journals.25

Seybert was a particularly good choice because he wasactively collecting minerals and was still reaping the ben-efits of nearly four years of study in Edinburgh, London,Paris, and Göttingen.26 Two years later, in 1812, whenSeybert set aside the study of mineralogy to pursue busi-ness interests and also to serve in Congress, he sold hismineral collection to the newly established Academy ofNatural Sciences.27

A review of Seybert’s circa-1812 list of expedition speci-mens confirms that at least some specimens collected af-ter April 1805 did make it back to Philadelphia. Scatteredamong the minerals associated with the well-documented

Fort Mandan shipment, Seybert listed specimens such as“Pumice. Pacific ocean. Captn. Lewis”; “Green Clay. fromthe Kooskoosche River, west of the Rocky mountains.Captn. Lewis”; “Keffekill [impure clay]. found at theWallenwaller [Walla Walla] nation on Columbia River.Captn. Lewis”; and “Magnetic Iron sand, borders of thePacific ocean near the mouth of Columbia river. Captn.Lewis.”28 The existence of these specimens proves that thecaptains continued their mineral collecting west of the Con-tinental Divide and all the way to the Pacific Ocean, refut-ing the disparaging opinion of some historians that Lewisand Clark neglected this essential duty.29 [See sidebar, page21.] Noticeably absent from this list, however, is any speci-men collected between Fort Mandan and the Great Falls.All the botanical specimens from this phase of the journeywere cached at the Upper Portage Camp on June 26, 1805,and were subsequently ruined in a flood; the mineral speci-mens presumably succumbed to a similar fate.30

Assessing how many of the captains’ rock and mineralspecimens have survived to the present day must beginwith the collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences.According to the A.N.S., only “five specimens can nowbe ascribed certainly to this expedition, two rocks and threeminerals.”31 The two rocks—Seybert Collection No. 534(“pummice stone”) and ANSP 3916/ex Seybert Collec-tion No. 535 (“lava”)—appear to correspond to FortMandan mineral specimen Nos. 62 and 67, respectively.In the journals, the captains’ identification of lava was nevercorrect, nor were their nearly 20 “pumice” or“pumicestone” observations actually related to active vol-canism. Unlike today’s restricted definition, which classi-fies pumice as a volcanically derived vesicular glassy rock,

Lewis and Clark selenite specimens

Lewis and Clark collected several specimensof selenite, a clear, colorless variety ofgypsum that occurs in clays. Three of thesespecimens were definitively collected on theexpedition: the specimen second from theright in the top row (Seybert Collection No.799), the specimen second from the left inthe top row (Seybert Collection No. 804) andthe specimen to the extreme left in thebottom row (Seybert Collection No. 803). Theother specimens seen here are presumed tohave been collected by Lewis and Clarkbecause they are found in association withthe known expedition specimens in theAcademy of Natural Sciences collections.JO

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the captains’ characterization of pumice apparently in-cluded any fused or baked rock (termed “clinker”), whichexplains why they most consistently noted its occurrencein regions where coal beds had burned and slightly meta-morphosed the adjacent rock strata. Lewis deftly recog-nized this causal relationship when he composed a clev-erly concise comment to accompany the “Lava & pummiceStone” specimen (Fort Mandan mineral specimen No. 67)sent back from Fort Mandan: “The tract of Country whichfurnishes the Pummice Stone seen floating down theMisouri, is rather burning or burnt plains than burningmountains.”32 (Air pockets in pumice stones and similarrocks can make them light enough to float.)

Of the three documented mineral specimens identifiedas selenite (a clear, colorless variety of gypsum), it appearsthat the specimen labeled Seybert Collection No. 799 cor-responds to Fort Mandan mineralogical specimen No. 6because of its unique cross-like shape (technically termed“twinning”) and its documented date of collection of Au-gust 23, 1804. Seybert’s appended description of two otherselenite specimens (Seybert Collection Nos. 803 and 804)may be in error because they were described in his circa-1812 catalogue as “Crystallized sulphat of Lime. CalumetBluff. Missouri. Captn. Lewis,” which would place theirdate of collection between August 28 and September 1,1804; according to the Fort Mandan mineralogical speci-men list in the A.P.S. donation book, there were no min-erals collected in that time frame matching Seybert’s“sulphat of lime” description. This includes those speci-mens that mention Calumet Bluff in their listed descrip-tion (Fort Mandan mineralogical specimen Nos. 22 and34) or that were identified as collected on September 1,1804 (Fort Mandan mineralogical specimen No. 15) orfrom adjacent areas of “white Chalk Bluffs” or “white<Chalk> Clay Bluffs” (Fort Mandan mineralogical speci-men Nos. 3, 43, 52, and 53).

Additionally, each of the expedition minerals identi-fied by Seybert, in whole or in part, as a “sulphat of lime”have recorded dates of collection indicating they were notgathered in the locale of Calumet Bluff; these include FortMandan mineral specimen No. 6 (collected on August 21,1804), specimen Nos. 13, 20, and 49 (August 22, 1804),specimen No. 8 (August 23, 1804), and specimen No. 35(September 4, 1804, based on mention of the Quicurre[Niobrara] River). The description of the remaining“sulphat of lime” specimen is too imprecise to be specifi-cally assigned only to Calumet Bluffs (Fort Mandan min-eralogical specimen No. 63, described as a “Specimen of aSubstance extremely common & found intermix’d with

the loose Earth of all the Cliffs & Hills from the CalumetBluff to Fort Mandon”).

In summary, it appears that Seybert erred in assigningthe specimens labeled as Seybert Collection Nos. 803 and804 exclusively to an area near Calumet Bluff. Based onthe information recorded in the A.P.S. donation book,these two specimens could have been collected as fardownriver on the Missouri as the confluence with FloydRiver (where the expedition departed on the morning ofAugust 21, 1804) and as far upriver as Fort Mandan. Assuch, the description of the provenance of these specimensin future A.N.S. literature should be expanded to encom-pass a wider range of the potential collection localities.

To this day, most of the specimens sold by Seybert tothe A.N.S. in 1812 remain segregated from the academy’sgeneral collection of minerals—they are kept in a cabinetbuilt for them circa 1825. 33 Could the cabinet perhaps holdsamples collected on the expedition? That’s unlikely, be-cause a catalogue of the Seybert collection compiled in1825 (representing the specimens in the cabinet) lists 157fewer specimens than the catalogue Seybert compiled circa1812. One can reasonably assume that among the 157 miss-ing specimens were those collected on the expedition, be-cause nowhere in the 1825 catalogue is there any refer-ence to Lewis or Clark. All or most of these 157 speci-mens—including those collected by the captains—wereprobably integrated into the academy’s general mineralcollection between 1812 and 1825.34

Do any Lewis and Clark specimens still exist in theA.N.S.’s general collection? It is a difficult question toanswer because the academy eventually reorganized itscollection, placing its non-mineralogical rock and sedi-ment samples in a separate “petrologic” collection. Many,if not most, of the samples collected by Lewis and Clarkwould be classified as petrologic. In 1993, the academy’spetrologic collection was formally transferred to anotherPhiladelphia institution, the Wagner Free Institute of Sci-ence.35 At the time of the transfer, the academy transcribedcomplete information from every label in the collection;no references to Lewis or Seybert were found.36 In prin-ciple, an expert in western mineralogy could examine theWagner specimens and identify those representative offormations along the explorers’ route.37 Unfortunately, theentire collection was crated and placed in storage, makingit inaccessible to researchers at the present time.

OTHER POSSIBLE EXPEDITION SPECIMENS

The captains may have collected other mineral and fossilspecimens unaccounted for in the expedition literature or


at the Academy of Natural Sciences. Samuel GeorgeMorton, a physician and amateur paleontologist, makestantalizing reference to expedition-related fossils in a num-ber of articles published between 1830 and 1842. In one,for example, Morton notes that “Lewis and Clark, in theirexpedition to the Columbia river, procured a few fossilsat the great bend of the Missouri river.”38 Morton has thecaptains collecting invertebrate fossils such as Baculites(an extinct cephalopod) and Gryphaea (an extinct oyster-like mollusk).39 Unfortunately, neither of these was listedin the Fort Mandan shipment or in the A.P.S. donationbook, and they do not appear in Peale’s museum acces-sion book or Sybert’s inventory catalogues. Perhaps thefossils mentioned by Morton have a separate, unknownhistory of collection and disposition, or maybe he justerred in crediting the captains with these discoveries. Aresolution to this question awaits the discovery of writ-ten documentation substantiating a Lewis and Clarkprovenance.

***Despite the survival of so few Lewis and Clark mineral

specimens, we can say for certain that some of them woundup in Philadelphia and that for a time they were displayedin the celebrated museum of Charles Willson Peale. 40 Themuseum had other rock and mineral specimens besidesthose collected by the captains. John C. Greene and JohnG. Burke, two historians of Jeffersonian-era mineralogy,argue that the collection as a whole “must have done muchto stimulate public interest in mineralogy and geology”and may have been used by Benjamin Smith Barton, per-

haps the preëminent naturalist of the day, in his lectureson natural history.41

Most of the information on natural history in the Lewisand Clark journals lay dormant for a century, a result ofthe failure to produce the proposed scientific volume con-taining, as a prospectus put it, “the information acquiredby Captains Lewis and Clarke in the several departmentsof botany, mineralogy and zoology.”42 By 1905, when thejournals were at last published in a definitive scholarlyversion edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, virtually all ofwhat the captains had discovered had been subsequentlyre-discovered by others.

Still, it’s reasonable to believe that the rock, mineral,and fossil specimens collected by Lewis and Clark mayhave positively influenced scientific inquiry; perhaps theywere used to illustrate points in Barton’s lectures or moti-vated additional research while on display at the A.N.S.

Whatever their impact on nineteenth-century science,it is certain that Adam Seybert thought highly of them.Seybert had more than thirty Lewis and Clark specimensin his possession and attempted to identify them all.Patrick Gass’s fossil fish jaw, Saurocephalus lanciformis,was described and illustrated by natural historian andphysician Richard Harlan in 1824,43 and it is evident fromSamuel George Morton’s publications that the purportedLewis and Clark specimens stimulated other fossil col-lecting in the geographic areas where they were suppos-edly found. I believe that the expedition specimens playeda small but consequential role in facilitating the emergenceof mineralogy as a useful science. They also help validate

Saurocephalus lanciformis

The only known surviving fossilspecimen from the expedition, aportion of a fish jaw classified asSaurocephalus lanciformis,collected by Patrick Gass onAugust 6, 1804, along the SoldierRiver in present-day HarrisonCounty, Iowa. In 1824, this speci-men was described and illustratedby natural historian and physicianRichard Harlan in the Journal ofthe Academy of Natural Sciencesof Philadelphia, making it the firstgeological discovery from theexpedition to be published in thescientific literature.

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the expedition’s role as a model for the later U.S. geologi-cal surveys of the American West.44

Foundation member John Jengo, a professional hydrogeologistand environmental consultant, lives in Downington, Penn-sylvania. He writes technical geological papers and general-interest articles on geology and finds time to travel a portionof the Lewis and Clark Trail each summer. He wrote aboutthe Missouri Breaks in the May 2002 WPO.

NOTES

1 Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis and ClarkExpedition, 13 volumes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1983-2001), Vol. 4, pp. 225-226. All quotations or references tojournal entries in the ensuing text are from Moulton, by date,unless otherwise indicated.2 Ibid., p. 232.3 Ibid., Vol. 2, pp. 500-501. Clark describes this incident in bothhis field notebook and journal. In the first he says that Lewis“was near being Poisened by the Smell in pounding this Sub-stance I belv to be arsenic or Cabalt.” In the second he indicatesthat Lewis also tasted the substance.4 Donald Jackson, ed., Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedi-tion, with Related Documents: 1783-1854, 2 volumes (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1978), Vol. 1, p. 162.5 Ibid., pp. 192-193.6 Dated May 5, 1805, Jefferson’s letter to Peale proves that theshipment arrived safely in Washington, D.C. Peale subsequentlyrecorded all these specimens except the salt concretion in hismuseum accession book (a folio formally referred to as theMemoranda of the Philadelphia Museum) on May 10, 1805. SeeLillian B. Miller, ed., The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Pealeand His Family, Vol. 2, Part 2 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Uni-versity Press, 1988), p. 828; and Memoranda of the PhiladelphiaMuseum, 1804-1841 (Philadelphia: The Historical Society ofPennsylvania), p. 5.7 In his journal entry for November 22, 1803, Lewis conciselydescribes encountering “several pieces of wood that had beenpetrefyed” (Moulton, Vol. 2, p. 103), while Fort Mandan miner-alogical specimen No. 39 is listed as “Petrefactions obtained onthe River ohio in 1803.” The Fort Mandan mineralogical-speci-men numbers used in this article follow those recorded in theDonation Book of the American Philosophical Society; seeMoulton, Vol. 3, pp. 473-478. Any reference to a mineral speci-men in the narrative prefaced by “Fort Mandan mineralogicalspecimen” refers to those minerals sent back East from FortMandan in April 1805.8 Fort Mandan mineralogical specimen No. 14.9 It appears that Clark also collected a specimen of the mineral(s)that Lewis had experimented with on August 22, 1804, and sub-sequently sent it to his brother Jonathan from Fort Mandan. Inhis letter to Jonathan, Clark stated that the minerals “are dan-gerous when burnt & pounded as we experiancd.” See James J.Holmberg, Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan

Clark (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press in associa-tion with The Filson Historical Society, 2002), p. 86. Whetherthis specimen was a duplicate of one of the many samples col-lected on August 22, 1804 (i.e., Fort Mandan mineralogical speci-men Nos. 10, 13, 18, 20, 38, 49, 51, 56, or 68) or an entirely newspecimen is not known.10 Jackson, Vol. 1, p. 235.11 Ibid., p. 260 (Jefferson to Charles Willson Peale, October 6,1805), p. 263 (Jefferson to Peale, October 9, 1805), and p. 264(Jefferson to Peale, October 21, 1805). The minerals containedin this shipment are noticeably absent in Peale’s museum acces-sion book (Memoranda of the Philadelphia Museum, 1804-1841,p. 8) because they went directly to the A.P.S. rather than to Peale’sPhiladelphia Museum.12 American Philosophical Society, Early Proceedings of theAmerican Philosophical Society ... Manuscript Minutes of itsMeetings from 1744 to 1838 (Philadelphia, 1844), p. 379.13 Jefferson was aware of Seybert’s singular expertise becausethey both served on the Historical and Literary Committee thatissued a circular letter in 1798 encouraging the scientific com-munity to contribute information to the A.P.S. regarding the“Natural History of the Earth.” Gilbert Chinard, “Jefferson andthe American Philosophical Society,” Proceedings of the Ameri-can Philosophical Society, Vol. 87, No. 3 (July 14, 1943), p. 270.14 Moulton, Vol. 3, pp. 473-478.15 Ibid., Vol. 4, pp. 334 and 335n. Lewis states that Clark’s selec-tion of articles to be deposited included “my specimens of plantsminerals &c.” collected between Fort Mandan and the GreatFalls.16 Ibid., Vol. 8, p. 419.17 The possibility that Lewis may have personally delivered thesurviving post-April 1805 specimens to Philadelphia is sug-gested in a letter Jefferson wrote to Peale on December 21,1806, which states in part, “I expect Capt Lewis here to-dayor tomorrow. I presume that after a while he will go on toPhiladelphia and carry some of his new acquisitions.” Miller,Vol. 2, Part 2, p. 992.18 Jackson, Vol. 2, pp. 469-470. One can only guess why Lewiswould wait three years to send these additional specimens. Norcan we be absolutely certain that the items were collected onthe expedition, although it’s reasonable to assume they were—the shipment included, according to Peale, “Indian dresses, pipes,arrows, an Indian pot entire, Skins of Beavers.”19 Ibid., p. 476.20 Ibid., p. 478; Memoranda of the Philadelphia Museum, 1804-1841, pp. 43-45. Peale had recorded the pre-expedition speci-mens donated by citizens of St. Louis (the first shipment) in hismuseum accession book as being “presented by Mr. Jefferson,”making no mention of Lewis or Clark (see Memoranda, p. 5). Itis also apparent that he was not the recipient of the Fort Man-dan specimens (the second shipment), which went to the Ameri-can Philosophical Society. It is possible, and even probable, thatthe minerals mentioned in Peale’s December 1809 entry in hismuseum accession book were just those items collected afterthe westward-bound expedition departed Fort Mandan.


21 Jackson, Vol. 2, p. 490.22 Moulton, Vol. 3, p. 473.23 See Seybert’s Catalogue of Minerals as reported in John C.Greene and John G. Burke, “The Science of Minerals in the Ageof Jefferson,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Soci-ety,” Vol. 68, Part 4 (July 1978), pp. 29-30. Seybert’s explana-tory notes in this catalogue are very similar to the descriptivemineralogical comments he added to the donation book of theA.P.S. augmenting Lewis’s original specimen descriptions; seeMoulton, Vol. 3, pp. 473-478.24 Jackson, Vol. 2, p. 470.25 Perhaps out of respect for the captains’ exclusive right to bethe first to publish their discoveries, Seybert refrained from pub-lishing his work on the expedition specimens. For example, thereare no Lewis and Clark specimens included in Seybert’s paperentitled “A Catalogue of some American Minerals, which arefound in different Parts of the United States,” published in 1808in Volume V of the journal The Philadelphia Medical Museum,even though Seybert had ready access to the Fort Mandan min-eralogical specimens by this time.26 Greene and Burke, p. 28.27 Earle Spamer, the managing editor of the A.N.S.’s scientificpublication, states that the collection was purchased in 1812 byJohn Speakman, a founding member of the Academy of Natu-ral Sciences, who subsequently donated the collection to theA.N.S. (Personal Communication, June 19, 2002.) Greene andBurke state that Seybert sold his collection directly to the A.N.S.in the summer of 1812; the A.N.S. procured boxes in 1813 tohold the specimens and purchased glass cases in 1814 to displaythem. (Greene and Burke, p. 39.)28 Seybert’s Catalogue of Minerals as reported in Greene andBurke, pp. 29-30.29 For further discussion about how Lewis and Clark historianshave misjudged the captains’ geological skills, see John W. Jengo,“Mineral Productions of Every Kind”: Geological Observationsin the Lewis and Clark Journals and the Role of Thomas Jeffer-son and the American Philosophical Society in the GeologicalMentoring of Meriwether Lewis,” in Robert S. Cox, ed., “TheShortest and Most Convenient Route: Lewis and Clark in Con-text,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 2004,Vol. 94, Part 5, pp. 136-214.30 Moulton, Vol. 8, p. 107.31 Earle E. Spamer, Richard M. McCourt, Robert Middleton,Edward Gilmore, and Sean B. Duran, “A national treasure: Ac-counting for the natural history specimens from the Lewis andClark Expedition (western North America, 1803-1806) in theAcademy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia,” Proceedings ofthe Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, Vol. 150, April2000, p. 50.32 Moulton, Vol. 3, p. 478. Lewis also commented under FortMandan mineralogical specimen No. 62 that “I can hear of noburning mountain in the neighborhood of the Missouri or itsBranches, but the bluffs of the River are now on fire at Severalplaces ... The plains in many places, throughout this great ex-tent of open country, exhibit abundant proofs of having been

once on fire—Witness the Specimens of Lava and Pummicestonefound in the Hills near fort mandon.” [A reference to Fort Man-dan mineralogical specimen No. 67.]33 Spamer, et al., p. 50.34 To explain their absence from the 1825 catalogue, some havehypothesized that Seybert did not include the Lewis and Clarkspecimens in the collection he sold to the A.N.S. in 1812. (Greeneand Burke, p. 39.) But the A.N.S.’s general collection containsspecimens included in the circa-1812 catalogue, indicating thatat least some, if not all, of the Lewis and Clark specimens werepart of the collection purchased from Seybert. More likely, theabsence is due to their probable removal from the Seybert col-lection sometime before the 1825 re-cataloging.35 Spamer, et al., p. 51.36 Spamer, personal communication, June 19, 2002.37 At least one specimen—the shonkinite rock collected on May31, 1805—would be readily identifiable because of its rarity andunique mineralogy; see John W. Jengo, “high broken and rocky”:Lewis and Clark as geological observers,” WPO, May 2002), pp.22-27. Also John W. Jengo, “Broken Masses of Rock and Stones”:Lewis and Clark as Geological Trailblazers, The ProfessionalGeologist, Vol. 39, No. 10 (November 2002), pp. 2-6.

38 Samuel George Morton, “Description of Some New Speciesof Organic Remains of the Cretaceous Group of the U. States:With a Tabular View of the Fossils Hitherto Discovered in ThatFormation,” Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Vol. 8(Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1842), p. 3. Thanks toElla Mae Howard for bringing Morton to my attention.

39 Samuel George Morton, Synopsis of the Organic Remains ofThe Cretaceous Group of The United States. Illustrated by Nine-teen Plates. To Which is Added An Appendix, Containing a Tabu-lar View of The Tertiary Fossils Hitherto Discovered in NorthAmerica (Philadelphia: Key & Biddle, 1834), p. 25.

40 The only known surviving mineral specimens collected byLewis and Clark are among the essential expedition artifacts inLewis & Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition, now tour-ing the U.S. (See www.lewisandclarkexhibit.org for places anddates.)

41 Greene and Burke, p. 37.

42 Jackson, Vol. 2, pp. 547-548.

43 Richard Harlan, “On a new fossil genus, of the order EnalioSauri, (of Conybeare),” Journal of the Academy of Natural Sci-ences of Philadelphia, Vol. 3, 1824, pp. 331-337, plate 12. Harlan’spaper begins, “About sixteen years ago, there was deposited, byLewis and Clark, in the cabinet of the American PhilosophicalSociety, a fossil organic remain of some unknown marine ani-mal. During the expedition of these gentlemen up the river Mis-souri in the year 1804, this specimen was found in a cavernsituate[d] a few miles south of the river, near a creek namedSoldier’s Run.”

44 John W. Jengo, “Geological Trailblazers: Observations ofWestern Geology in the Journals of Lewis and Clark,” Geologi-cal Society of America Abstracts, Vol. 35, No. 6 (October 2003),p. 605.


Apair of historic butlittle-known paint-ings of the Lewis and

Clark Trail can be seen for thefirst time by the public. The twoprivately owned landscapes, theHeart of the Gates of the RockyMountains, of a landmark on theMissouri River near Helena,Montana, and Fort Rock atThree Forks of the Missouri, aformation overlooking theThree Forks of the Missouri,were painted a century ago bythe Montana artist Ralph EarllDeCamp. Neither has ever been publicly exhibited. Bothpaintings are landscapes executed by DeCamp that ap-pear as black-and-white illustrations in Olin D. Wheeler’s1904 travelogue, The Trail of Lewis and Clark. 1 The twopaintings went on display at the Lewis and Clark His-

toric Trail Interpretive Center inGreat Falls in May and will re-main there through June of nextyear.2

DeCamp was also a photog-rapher and cartographer; he tookmany of the photos in Wheeler’sbook and created all of its maps.As an artist of the trail he neverachieved the fame of his Mon-tana contemporaries Charles M.Russell, Edgar S. Paxson, andO.C. Seltzer, narrative artistswhose paintings often illustratedmoments of high drama on the

expedition. DeCamp, by contrast, often painted landscapesin which people are absent or are far less significant. Nar-rative painting and landscape art are different genres thatdefy comparison, and an artist working in one cannot bejudged by the standards of the other. There is a muted

BY JILL CARLSON JACKSON

LANDSCAPES PRESERVED

FOR HISTORYThe Lewis and Clark paintings and

photographs of Ralph Earll DeCamp

This photo shows DeCamp, under an umbrella, sketching inthe field near Helena, sometime in the early 20th century. Inthe photo at the top of the page, taken in 1933, the artist poseswith palette and canvas in his studio.

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dignity to DeCamp’s work, and critics today regard himas one of Montana’s premier artists.

THE ARTIST’S EARLY YEARS

Ralph Earll DeCamp was born in Attica, New York, onSeptember 17, 1858, the only child of Horace and RenetteEarll DeCamp. In 1867 the family moved to Wauwatosa,Wisconsin, near Milwaukee. Here DeCamp received hisfirst formal lessons in painting. His instructor was FrancisA. Lydston, a Boston-trained artist adept at many genres.3

The DeCamps moved again, this time to Minnesota. By1871 they had settled in Moorhead, a bustling port townat the head of navigation on the Red River, a commercialwaterway linking the upper Midwest to Canada. TheNorthern Pacific Railway reached Moorhead fromBrainerd, Minnesota, in the east, in early October of thatyear.4 This company would figure prominently inDeCamp’s career.

The teenaged DeCamp was regarded as a prodigy —he graduated from high school before turning fifteen, andby seventeen he was exhibiting and selling his paintingsin a local bookstore.5 The influence of Moorhead’s water-front can be seen in the artist’s lifelong fascination withwater, a prominent feature in both his photography andpainting. As his friend Charles M. Russell later noted, “that

boy can sure paint the wettest water of anybody I know.You can hear his rivers ripple.”6

DeCamp had a knack for mechanics as well as art andworked as an engineer at a sawmill and aboard a steam-boat. At age eighteen he built a 25-passenger steam launch,dubbed Nameless, which he successfully operated for sev-eral years. The young artist-engineer-entrepreneur was alsothe co-owner of a threshing business.7 His personal life wasthriving, too. By age 20 he had married Edna Blanchard,the daughter of the local sheriff. A son, Eddie, was born ayear later, but a year after that, in June of 1880, Edna died,and DeCamp found himself a widower at age 22.

Perhaps seeking a change of scenery and new direc-tions to ease his emotional trauma, DeCamp headed toPhiladelphia to study art, leaving Eddie with his parents.His departure was announced in the Moorhead DailyAdvocate in December, 1880. In a letter published in theFargo, North Dakota, Daily Argus the following Septem-ber, DeCamp declared the East “a grand country for anartist, there being plenty of material to fill a sketch bookwith, and I have not been idle.”8

Within a year or so he was back in Moorhead. In 1884,a sketch he made of a train accident figured prominentlyin a court case. DeCamp’s sketch caught the attention ofCharles Fee, an executive of the Northern Pacific Rail-

DeCamp’s painting of Fort Rock, an overlook at the Three Forks of the Missouri, was one of two landscapes he executed in 1902 reproduced inOlin D. Wheeler’s The Trail of Lewis and Clark. The figure in the foreground is presumably William Clark removing cactus spines from his feet.

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way. Fee recruited him to produce art for the NorthernPacific, and in June of 1885 DeCamp set out forYellowstone National Park with a Norwegian photogra-pher, Ole E. Flaten. Finding the park buried in deep snow,they took a side trip to Helena, where it was so hot thatDeCamp wondered “how anybody could stand the sun’srays and breathless air. I wouldn’t live here if they gaveme the state.”9 Flaten and DeCamp soon returned toYellowstone and later went on to Idaho and Washington.The Northern Pacific purchased many of the paintingsDeCamp produced from the sketches he made on this trip.

Despite his unfavorable first impression, DeCampmoved to Helena in 1886. It would be his home for mostof the next fifty years. He loved Montana and made itsstunning scenery the primary subject of his painting andphotography. Never trusting his art to support him,DeCamp found employment in Helena, first as managerof the Helena Abstract and Title Company and later as adraftsman for the U.S. Surveyor General’s Office, an ex-perience that would stand him in good stead in his latercartographic work for Wheeler.

HELENA ARTISTS’ CLUB

Helena was home to other budding artists, includingthe young Charlie Russell, and in 1888 they banded to-gether to form a sketch club; DeCamp served as its firstpresident. The club sponsored periodic weekend out-ings and met twice weekly to sketch models inDeCamp’s downtown apartment, which he had outfit-ted as a studio.10

DeCamp sometimes took his easel into the out-of-doors and painted directly from nature. Most of the time,however, he appears to have worked in his studio fromsketches or photographs made in the field. This can beseen by examining his 1904 painting Box Cañon and aphotograph he took of what is clearly the same scene (topand bottom, right). They are very similar except for theabsence in the painting of a few details such as the tree tothe left of center in the photograph. DeCamp had a fac-ulty for capturing the landscape accurately and in detail.According to David Hilger, DeCamp’s brother-in-law andthe former owner of the painting, the scene is a stretch oftrack on the Montana Railroad once known as the Jaw-bone, located on Sixteen Mile Creek near Lombard.11 (TheCorps of Discovery passed the mouth of this creek, whichMeriwether Lewis named for expedition member Tho-mas Howard, on July 26, 1805.)12

One of the artist’s favorite locations near Helena wasthe Gates of the Mountains, so named by Lewis in June

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DeCamp’s photo of a train passing through a box canyon on SixteenMile Creek, Montana, (top) is virtually identical to the painting he didof the same scene (bottom). Their similarity illustrates his preferencefor working in the studio from photos and sketches made in the field.

of 1805. To get to the Gates, DeCamp often took a steamexcursion boat owned by David Hilger’s father, Nicho-las, a local judge and rancher. A photograph of the Hilgerranch which appears in Wheeler’s book was almost cer-tainly taken by DeCamp. It was here that the widowedartist met and fell in love with Margaret Hilger, the judge’sdaughter, who was ten years his junior. The couple elopedin 1891. Their decision caused “considerable turmoil” forthe judge, according to Margaret’s sister, but DeCamp andhis new father-in-law were soon “on the best of terms.”13

Ralph and Margaret had one child, a son, Renan, born in1896. When Renan was growing up, mother and son wouldoften accompany DeCamp on his field trips. Margaret wasan accomplished musician and took her violin along, play-ing while her husband sketched and photographed.14


PARTNERSHIP WITH WHEELER

In the summer of 1902, DeCamp was approached by theNorthern Pacific Railway to accompany Olin G. Wheeleron a trip through the Bitterroot Mountains. Wheeler, theNorthern Pacific’s director of advertising, was retracingLewis and Clark’s trail from St. Louis to the Pacific forThe Trail of Lewis and Clark, a two-volume narrative thatwould appear in 1904, during the expedition’s centennial.The work was an expansion of the 1900 edition of Won-derland, a lavishly illustrated annual published by theNorthern Pacific to promote tourism along its scenicroutes.15 DeCamp was one of a number of photographerswho signed on to the project, and Wheeler also enlistedhim to draw the book’s maps.

Wheeler and DeCamp, along with a guide and a cook,traveled eastward from Kamiah, Idaho, on a pack trainover the western leg of the Lolo Trail. Wheeler was con-ducting field research for both his book about Lewis andClark and an article about the expedition planned for the1903 edition of Wonderland. DeCamp, for his part, tookcountless photographs, drew sketches, and made carto-graphic notes.16

DeCamp photographed using the wet-plate process.This meant carrying, in addition to a bulky large-formatcamera, a supply of glass plates and a portable darkroomfor preparing and finishing negatives. The process requiredsetting up the camera and composing the picture, thenretreating to the darkroom to coat a plate with a solutionof collodion and silver nitrate. The plate was then placedin a light-proof container and slipped into the camera foran exposure that could last several minutes.17

Rain, mud, and worn-out pack animals forced an earlyconclusion of what was nonetheless a productive trip.Wheeler’s editors did not attribute any specific photo-graphs to DeCamp in either Wonderland 1903 or The Trailof Lewis and Clark, but we can say with confidence thatat least 28 photos, nine maps, and two paintings in thebook are the work of this versatile artist. Unfortunately,the original negatives and any prints made from them havedisappeared.

DECAMP’S PLATE-GLASS NEGATIVES

In 1978, Dan Hilger, grandson of the formidable JudgeNicholas Hilger, gave the Montana Historical Society 350of DeCamp’s plate-glass negatives. Although none of theimages produced from them appear in Wheeler’s book,many are of the Lewis and Clark Trail and are importantdocuments of the explorers’ route as it appeared a cen-tury ago. Three of them are shown at right.

DeCamp’s photo of Fort Rock may have been one of a series he tookwhile conducting field research for his painting (page 28) of this Lewisand Clark site, which overlooks the Three Forks of the Missouri.

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This DeCamp photo shows Eagle Rock, a landmark on the Missouri up-stream from Great Falls, where Lewis spotted a herd of bighorn sheep.

DeCamp took this photograph of the summit of Lewis and Clark Pass,traversed by Lewis in July 1806, on the homeward-bound journey.


The first photo—of Fort Rock—was also the subjectof one of the two DeCamp landscapes that appear inWheeler’s book. Fort Rock overlooks the Three Forks ofthe Missouri. The photo shown here is owned by the Mis-souri Historical Society. DeCamp probably based hispainting of Fort Rock (page 28) on this and other photo-graphs he may have taken, for the formation seen in thepainting is clearly the same Fort Rock we see in the photo-graph (opposite). The painting also shows a pile of rocksand a figure removing prickly-pear spines from his moc-casins. This is presumably Clark, who complained aboutthe prickly pears at this site in his journal entry for July26, 1805.18

The second photo is of Eagle Rock, on the MissouriRiver between present-day Great Falls and Helena. It washere that Lewis on July 18, 1805, sighted “a large herd ofthe Bighorned anamals on the immencely high and nearlyperpendicular clift opposite to us.”19 He expressed amaze-ment at the bighorn sheep’s surefootedness on such verti-cal terrain. In the foreground of the photo we see an oldsod-roofed homestead, evidently abandoned. Its inclusionin the picture serves as a focal point while also fulfillingWheeler’s purpose of documenting changes along the trailsince the explorers’ day. Although the sod house is longgone, today’s Eagle Rock and its immediate environs arelittle changed.

In the third photo, entitled “Summit Lewis and ClarkPass,” the lighter-colored dead vegetation in the fore-ground contrasts starkly with the darker forested hills inthe background. This area, too, looks much the same to-day. The misnamed Lewis and Clark Pass is on the Conti-nental Divide immediately west of Great Falls. Lewis (butnot Clark) crossed it on July 7, 1806, during the returnjourney.

DeCamp was particularly noted for his paintings ofthe Gates of the Mountains. He was enthralled with thisdramatic, cliff-lined stretch of the Missouri, which hedepicted in a painting, entitled The Heart of the Gates ofthe Rocky Mountains (top right), that appears on page347 of The Lewis and Clark Trail. Wheeler’s book in-cludes no less than three photos of the Gates. We cansay with certainty that DeCamp took at least one of them(right, bottom) because the handwriting of the captionin the lower left-hand corner is identifiable as his.20 Theview shown in his painting isn’t exactly replicated in anyof DeCamp’s five photos of the Gates in the MontanaHistorical Society’s collection.

DeCamp’s paintings of Fort Rock and the Gates of theMountains exemplify, respectively, his talents for depict-

ing water and his use of soft pastel colors to illuminateMontana’s big sky. In both paintings the sky is dynamicand full of depth, and in the Fort Rock scene the colorshint at a brewing storm.

THE ARTIST’S LATER YEARS

In 1911, DeCamp was asked to execute six landscapes foran expansion of the Montana State Capitol, in Helena. Thestate commissioned him to paint four more in 1927. To-day these ten paintings, whose subjects include the Gatesof the Mountains and the Bitterroot and West Gallatinrivers, can still be seen in the capitol’s law library. By thenDeCamp had retired from his day job in the surveyorgeneral’s office. His wife, Margaret, died suddenly inNovember of 1934, and DeCamp moved to Chicago thefollowing January to be with son Renan, an electrical en-gineer. That summer he returned to Montana for whatturned out to be his last visit. In March of 1936 he suf-fered a stroke and died several weeks later, at age 77. He is

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Top: DeCamp’s painting of the Gates of the Rocky Mountains is one oftwo of his landscapes found in Wheeler’s The Trail of Lewis and Clark.Bottom: This photo by DeCamp is one of three photos of the Gates inWheeler’s book. The caption in DeCamp’s handwriting (lower left) con-firms that he was the photographer.

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buried alongside Margaret in the Helena Valley.21

DeCamp in his day was known in Montana as an ac-complished artist, but beyond his adoptive state his namenever had much currency. Shy and self-effacing, he neversought fame and rarely exhibited or promoted his works.Thanks in part to the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial, thisgifted but unheralded landscapist is now getting the rec-ognition he deserves.

Jill Jackson served as director of library and education ser-vices for the LCTHF for more than two years. She is cur-rently the director of testing at San Juan College in Farm-ington, New Mexico, and resides in Durango, Colorado. Jack-son can be reached at [email protected].

NOTES

1 Olin D. Wheeler, The Trail of Lewis and Clark (New York:G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904).2 DeCamp evidently gave or sold the paintings to Wheeler, forthey were in the estate of Wheeler’s granddaughter in 1945 whena collector purchased them. In 2004 they were sold to Thomasand Jane Petrie, of Denver, Colorado. The Petries lent them tothe Great Falls interpretive center, which is administered by theU.S. Forest Service. Arrangements for the loan were negotiatedby John R. Howard, a Great Falls art dealer, and the author,who at the time was director of the LCTHF’s William P. Sher-man Library.3 Kirby Lambert, “Through the Artist’s Eye: The Paintings andPhotographs of R.E. DeCamp,” Montana: The Magazine ofWestern History, Summer 1999. Available on the Web at www.his.state.mt.us/education/cirguideswestimagelambert.asp; ac-cessed May 5, 2005.4 Northern Pacific Railway: 2000 Miles of Scenic Beauty (St. Paul,Minn.: Northern Pacific Railway Co., ca. 1929).5 Moorhead Red River Star, April 24, 1875. Two years earlier, inits issue of February 23, 1873, the paper had predicted the six-teen-year-old’s future would be “bright with usefulness in themechanical, and brilliant with fame in the art world.”6 Frank Bird Linderman, Recollections of Charles M. Russell(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), p. 93, as quotedin Lambert.7 Lambert.8 Ibid., quoting the Fargo Daily Argus of September 1, 1881.Accounts in the local press state that DeCamp attended the Penn-sylvania School of Art, but it’s not certain whether a school withthis specific name existed. He may have enrolled at the Penn-sylvania Academy of Fine Arts, even though that institution hasno record of him as a student. According to the academy’s ar-chivist, students typically attended for as long as they wantedor could afford, and no degrees were conferred. Cheryl Leibold,e-mail to the author, May 5, 2005.9 Montana Newspaper Association insert, April 22, 1935, Mon-tana Historical Society vertical files, DeCamp.10 Lambert.

11 David Hilger, personal communication; Montana HistoricalSociety Photo Archives; Martin Plamondon, Lewis and ClarkTrail Maps: A Cartographic Reconstruction (Pullman: Washing-ton State University Press, 2001), Vol. 2, p. 120, map 253.12 Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis & ClarkExpedition , 13 volumes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1983-2001) Vol. 4, p. 430.13 Rose Esther Hilger Nash to Roy P. Johnson, September 1,1954, Roy P. Johnson Papers, Assumption Abbey Archives,Richardton, North Dakota.14 Lambert.15 Olin Dunbar Wheeler (1852-1925) was born in Ohio andserved as a cartographer in John Wesley Powell’s 1874-79 sur-veys of the Colorado River. He worked out of the NorthernPacific’s headquarters, in St. Paul, Minnesota, as director of ad-vertising from 1892 to 1909. Stephen Dow Beckham, DougErickson, Jeremy Skinner, and Paul Merchant, The Literatureof the Lewis and Clark Expedition: A Bibliography and Essays(Portland, Ore.: Lewis & Clark College, 2003), p. 211.16 As far as can be determined, this was the only portion of theLewis and Clark Trail visited by DeCamp for cartographic pur-poses. Most of the nine maps in Wheeler’s book cover portionsof the trail visited by Wheeler but not DeCamp, so a consider-able amount of research must have gone into making them.17 “The Wizard of Photography,” www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/eastman/sfeature/wetplate_step1.html; accessed June 6, 2005.18 Moulton, Vol. 4, p. 432. The captains noted Fort Rock but didnot name it. The name appears in Elliott Coues’s 1893 editionof the journals. See Elliott Coues, History of the Expeditionunder the command of Lewis and Clark (New York: Francis P.Harper, 1893), p. 443, note 31. A photo of Fort Rock from asoutherly vantage appears on page 375 of Wheeler’s book, andit is reasonable to assume that DeCamp was the photographer.19 Moulton. Vol. 4, p. 397.20 Wheeler, p. 355.21 Lambert.

This detail from one of DeCamp’s nine maps in Olin D. Wheeler’s TheTrail of Lewis and Clark shows his skills as a cartographer. It depictsLewis’s exploration of the Marias River on the return journey.


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Reviews

The first of these two collections, partof a growing library of short papers

and presentations occasioned by the200th anniversary of the Lewis andClark Expedition, comes out ofa series of sessions of the DakotaConference on Northern PlainsHistory, Literature, Art, and Ar-chaeology held in Sioux Falls,South Dakota, over a five-yearperiod ending in 2002.

As is true of most such col-lections, the quality of The Lewisand Clark Expedition: Then andNow is more than a little uneven.Some of the papers seem ama-teurish, and many go over pathsnow well worn by previousscholars, but a few make genu-ine contributions. The most impressivepaper is one on Native American tradepatterns by Ralph J. Coffman, Jr. WhileJames P. Ronda’s seminal Lewis andClark among the Indians (1984) remainsthe gold standard in this area, Coffmanhas gone into the latest scholarship inthe field and does a good job of outlin-ing the way these trade relationshipsworked and what the two explorersfailed to understand about them.Laurinda W. Porter’s piece on honoringand gift-giving among the Sioux tribesrelies on native informants and also doesa good job explaining how these nativeconcepts affected their interactions withthe expedition members.

Less successful is John D.W. Guice’s

attempt to persuade us that MeriwetherLewis was murdered and that his re-mains should be exhumed to test thispersistent theory about the explorer’sdeath. Guice offers us no suspects, onlynameless hypothetical bandits along theNatchez Trace. Both Thomas Jeffersonand William Clark, who knew Lewisbest, had no trouble believing he hadkilled himself. This argument should beallowed to die.

Robert C. Steensma’s tribute to Ber-nard DeVoto is pleasant to read, andJerry L. Simmons’s piece on the medi-cal aspects of the expedition summa-rizes neatly the various medicines avail-able to the captains.

The more impressive of these twocollections is Finding Lewis & Clark:

Old Trails, New Directions, whichprints 11 of the 19 papers presented ata conference in Pierre, South Dakota,hosted by the South Dakota State His-torical Society in April 2003. The con-ference attracted not only Ronda (thevolume’s editor), but Gary Moulton,William Foley (one of William Clark’srecent biographers), Elliott West, Pe-ter J. Kastor, and others, all well-knownin the scholarship of the West.

As one might expect, some of the pa-pers are standouts. Kastor summarizesclearly and concisely how the Louisi-ana Purchase affected the political con-text in which the expedition took place.His paper manages, all by itself, to in-fuse this grand American adventure

Two new essay collections reflect on Lewis & Clark

Finding Lewis &Clark:Old Trails, New DirectionsJames P. Ronda & NancyTystad Koupal, eds.South Dakota State Historical Society Press203 pages / $17.95 paper

The Lewis and Clark Expedition:Then and NowDavid Kvernes, ed.Augustana College: Center for Western Studies208 pages / $19.95 paper

story with a historical sophistication ithas too often lacked in the past. W. Ray-mond Wood is similarly clear and con-cise on the changing tribal relationsLewis and Clark encountered on theupper Missouri. Richard Etulain pro-vides us with the first survey I have seenthat takes seriously the fiction—andthere has been a great deal of it—in-spired by the expedition. A paper byJoseph A. Mussulman explains howhis Web site, Discovering Lewis andClark, developed, and his account ofthe rapidly growing opportunities forwhat he calls “hyperhistory” can onlybe described as fascinating. To top itoff, we have Elliott West’s fine essaytaking a step backward and asking theinevitable question about the bicenten-

nial hoopla: Has it “made theexpedition seem more histori-cally weighty than it truly was?”

L&C in historical contextThe answer, says West, is yes.Like Kastor, he wants to put theLewis and Clark expedition intoits wider context. He brings upthe other expeditions that left forthe Far West at the same time, orshortly thereafter. He discussesthe chain of events that led to theLouisiana Purchase, startingwith the impact of tropical dis-

ease on the French troops who died bythe thousands in Haiti and led toNapoleon’s decision to cut his losses inAmerica. History, he notes, is not justa record of brave men doing heroicthings. Much depends on chance, co-incidence, population movements, theevolution of trade relationships, and soon. It’s a wise essay, and much needed.We may indeed have reached the pointwhere we have enough Lewis andClark, and ought to be turning our at-tention to other expeditions and otherfactors in the history of westward ex-pansion. That may be the wrong thingto say in this magazine, but West saysit and it needs to be said.

—Anthony Brandt


YellowstoneSafari

pickup 5.05,page 36

One Vast Winter Count: The NativeAmerican West before Lewis and Clark,by Colin G. Calloway. University ofNebraska Press. 631 pages. $39.95,cloth. Order from bookstores or www.nebraskapress.unl.edu.

If nothing else, the Lewis and ClarkBicentennial has sensitized us to theview that most ofwhat the Corps ofDiscovery “discov-ered” in its journeyacross the West wasalready familiar tothe region’s nativeinhabitants. ColinCalloway’s heftyand thoroughly re-searched study reiterates this pointwhile underscoring the complexity anddynamics of the Native American cul-tures the explorers encountered alongthe way.

Although those cultures may haveappeared static to Lewis and Clark,they were in constant flux as tribes re-acted and adapted to the impact, directand indirect, of Europeans and theirweapons, horses, and diseases. Had theexpedition occurred fifty, twenty, oreven ten years earlier, what the captainssaw and reported would have beenmarkedly different.

When Lewis and Clark encounteredthe Shoshones in August of 1805, forexample, they found this transmontanetribe living in mortal fear of the plains-dwelling Atsinas and Piegan Blackfeet.Yet a few decades before, it was theAtsinas and Piegans who lived in ter-ror of the Shoshones.

As Calloway explains, the change inrelative fortunes can be largely attrib-uted to geography. The Shoshones’proximity to Spanish settlements gavethem early access to horses, which inturn gave them the mobility to cross themountains to hunt buffalo and raid thevillages of the horseless Atsinas andPiegans. Soon enough, the Atsinas andPiegans acquired horses of their ownfrom southern plains tribes. From Ca-

nadian fur traders they also acquiredguns, which the Shoshones lacked.From that point on, the Shoshones en-tered the plains at their peril.

One Vast Winter Count is part of theUniversity of Nebraska Press’s Historyof the American West Series, andCalloway is chair of the Native Ameri-can Studies program at DartmouthCollege. This masterful work of schol-arly synthesis places the expedition intoa broad historical and cultural context,and it has a grand narrative sweep.

✰

Venereal Disease and the Lewis andClark Expedition, by Thomas P.Lowry. University of Nebraska Press.117 pages. $21.95, cloth. Order frombookstores or www.nebraskapress.unl.edu.

This short but brightly, almostbreezily, written volume surveys muchof what is known and (mostly) specu-lated about syphilis and gonorrhea onthe expedition. Lowry, a physician,points out thattreatments for “thevenereals” made upa sizable portion(roughly 15 per-cent) of the medicalsupplies carried byLewis and Clark.These included mer-cury and penis sy-ringes for adminis-tering it. “The Corps of Discovery,”observes Lowry, “fought syphilis withmercury, time-honored by three cen-turies of use, and endured a treatmentthat was almost as distressing as the dis-ease itself.” The journals report byname only three members of the expe-dition diagnosed for V.D. (Silas Good-rich, George Gibson, and HughMcNeal), but it’s clear that others weretreated and that many, perhaps most,of the members had sexual contact withIndians during the winters at Fort Man-dan and Fort Clatsop and suffered theconsequences.

Lowry reviews speculation that Sa-

In Brief: Indians; venereal disease; today’s L&C Trail

Lewis and Clark:What Else Happened?

What else happenedin America whileLewis & Clark

explored the West?www.LewisandClarkandWhatElse.com

88 paintings of the L&C Expeditionby one of the West’s leading artists

CHARLES FRITZ: AN ARTIST WITH

THE CORPS OF DISCOVERY

Farcountry Press $29.95 / www.farcountrypress.com


Reviews (cont.)

Arthur H. Clark(book ad)

cagawea may have suffered from gon-orrhea acquired from her husband,Touissant Charbonneau. He is skepti-cal of the argument by epidemiologistReimert Ravenholt that Lewis con-tracted syphilis from a Shoshonewoman and that the disease’s subse-quent advancement affected his sanity.(“From the journals it would appear thatneither captain had a female bed part-ner during the two-year journey.”) Hediscusses the debate about syphilis’sprobable origin in the New World, not-ing that Columbus himself may havesuffered from “the pox,” which peopleof one nationality tended to blame onanother—English, Germans, and Ital-ians called it the French disease; to Rus-sians it was the Polish disease and toPoles it was the German disease; theJapanese called it the Portuguese disease.

✰

The Lewis and Clark Trail: Yesterdayand Today, by William E. Hill. CaxtonPress. $16.95, paper. Order from book-stores or www.caxtonpress.com.

Hill’s book, the fifth in a series he’sdone on what he calls “The GreatTrails,” including the Oregon, Califor-nia, Mormon, and Santa Fe Trails, isengaging in its way but hard to define.

It’s not really a travelogue, althoughHill traveled and photographed muchof the Lewis and Clark Trail and alsofollowed Lewis’s pre-expedition routedown the Ohio. It’s not quite a travelguide, although it contains the sort ofinformation about historic sites and in-terpretive centers one expects from aguide. It’s also not exactly a history, al-though in a piecemeal way it tells thestory of the expedition and selectivelyprofiles its participants. Students ofLewis and Clark will be familiar withmost of the information found here.

The book’s by far most interestingand lengthy section (totaling 90 pages)is a series of photographs Hill took ofthe trail, broadly defined to includeMonticello, Harpers Ferry, and theOhio Valley. Most of these photos arejuxtaposed with 19th-century drawingsand paintings of the same sites. Thephotos and artwork, mainly by KarlBodmer and George Catlin, are repro-duced in black-and-white.

—J.I.M.

The Seven Sisters formation on the upper Mis-souri as photographed by Hi l l (top) andpainted by Karl Bodmer in the 1830s (bottom).


Washington StateUniversity Press


Dispatches

Comparing Lewis & Clark’s speeches to the Otos and the Yankton SiouxAthick fog greeted the Corps of Dis-

covery and a delegation of YanktonSioux on the early morning of August30, 1804, at Calumet Bluff on the Mis-souri River, near today’s Yankton,South Dakota. Both parties were pre-paring for a council to be held later thatday. This would be the second councilthat Lewis and Clark would hold withan Indian nation, the initial one withOto and Missouri chiefs having oc-curred nearly four weeks earlier, onAugust 4.

After breakfast, as Clark noted in hisjournal, the two captains sent traderPierre Dorion, Sr., “in a Perogue to theother Side . . . for the Chiefs and[w]arriers of the Soues.” Dorion re-turned with the delegation in a pirogueat ten o’clock. At noon, Clark endedhis preparation for the parley. Thisprobably included finishing the draft ofa speech he had begun the previous day.Although Clark wrote out the speech,Lewis delivered it, with Dorion doingthe translating. The speech took fourhours to transmit.

Clark’s journal tells us that thespeech expressed “the wishes of ourgovernment” vis-à-vis the Yanktons.From the journal of Sergeant John Ord-way we know that Lewis spoke of hisdesire for the Yanktons to make peacewith their neighbors, the Otos andMissouris, and for their head chief tovisit the “new Great Father,” PresidentThomas Jefferson, in Washington,D.C., the following spring. When theIndians returned the next morning theypromised to do these things. They alsospoke of their need for dependabletrade for clothes, guns, powder, ammu-nition, and whiskey.

Because no copy of Lewis’s speechto the Yanktons was known to exist,for years historians could only infer theessential points of Lewis’s address fromClark’s and Ordway’s journal accounts.They could also assume that it was simi-lar to Lewis’s earlier speech to the Otosand Missouris, which can be found onpages 203-208 of Donald Jackson’s Let-

ters of the Lewis and Clark Expeditionwith Related Documents, 1783-1854.

That situation changed in March2003, when a manuscript of Lewis’sYankton speech was presented to theOklahoma Historical Society. TheYankton speech and several other docu-ments, including a peace-medal certifi-cate signed by Lewis and Clark whichthey presented to the Oto chief Big Axon August 19, 1804, were gifts made byJoan Aitson and her family. Aitson isthe granddaughter of Ralph Dent, thelast chief of the Oto nation, a tribe re-moved to the Indian territory of Okla-homa in the 1880s. For three genera-tions the documents were stored in atrunk that had originally belonged toMadge Dent, Ralph’s wife. It is notknown how the manuscript of the ad-dress delivered to the Yanktons andaddressed specifically to “We oog shen”(the Yankton chief Shaking Hand) cameto be associated with a family of Otos.

Comparing Lewis’s speech to theOtos and Missouris with the one hedelivered to the Yanktons, one noticesstriking similarities. Both speeches con-tain many identical sentences and someclosely similar paragraphs. Each speechbegins with a salutation to the main

chief of the respective tribe, Petit Voleuror Wear-ruge-nor of the Otos and Shak-ing hand or We-oog-shen of the Yank-tons. The two speeches often employ thesame phrases with identical spelling,capitalization, and punctuation, such as“great Chief of the Seventeen great na-tions of America,” “shut your ears to thecouncils of Bad birds,” and “whose basewas washed by the gulph of humanwoes.” Toward the end of each speech,Lewis addressed “our oldest son,” in-forming him that if he could not leavehis nation, then he should send a del-egation of other chiefs “to see your greatfather and hear his words.” Whoeverwent must take the flag and certificatepresented by the captains as proof thatthey came at their invitation.

The two captains’ signatures appearon both documents. Lewis identifieshimself as “Capt. 1st U.S. Regt. Infan-try” on both. On the speech of August4 his signature appears first, but on thespeech of August 30 it follows Clark’s.On the first speech Clark identifieshimself as “Capt. on the Missouri Ex-pedition,” and on the second he is“Captain Expd for N W D.” (A holepartially obliterates the first word in thetitle—“Captain” is my reading of it.The initials “N W D” stand for NorthWestern Discovery.)

Last year, the Oklahoma HistoricalSociety donated two photographic cop-ies of the Yankton speech to the Mis-souri National Recreational River, ad-ministered by the National Park Ser-vice. One set has been laminated for usein the park’s interpretive programs. Theother has been framed and now hangsin the Lewis and Clark Visitor Centerat Gavins Point Dam, near Yankton. Atranscription of the speech is availableto anyone sending an e-mail request [email protected] or call-ing 402-667-2550.

—George Berndt

George Berndt is the national parkranger at the L&C Visitor Center,Gavins Point Dam.

First page of Clark’s manuscript speech

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Chapter News

Flathead Chapter organizes L&C “welcome” for Montana school kidsThe passion of LCTHF members for

the Lewis and Clark story is evidentin programs and activities all across thecountry. Rarely, however, do the effortsof one small chapter reach hundreds ofstudents in a few days.

To commemorate the Corps ofDiscovery’s arrival in Montana, theFlathead Chapter recently organized aneducational event in Kalispell for fourthgraders throughout the region. Morethan six hundred students from 16schools participated in the chapter’sevent, which included presentations onSacagawea, York, tribal cultures, andBlackfeet Indian dances.

Chapter president JoLynn Yenne, aretired teacher, said she always appre-ciated the assistance of others in supple-menting the classroom curriculum. Shedecided to help area teachers and se-lected April 26-29 for the “Welcome toMontana” educational event.

She collected educational materials,curriculum guides, activities, and infor-mation from organizations and muse-ums to prepare packets for 55 teachers.Those same teachers were invited tobring their classes to the event at a lo-cal museum for a variety of learningexperiences.

About one hundred students at atime participated in a two-hour educa-tional experience (one group eachmorning and one each afternoon). Theywere divided into three groups and ro-tated through presentations and exhib-its. The museum’s existing AmericanIndian exhibit included a variety of ar-tifacts and a tipi, which proved verypopular with students.

Each day, the organizers plannedspecial presentations for students. Theyhad Critter Man, the Two MedicineLake Indian Dancers, and a Yorkreenactor. The original three-day eventspilled into a fourth day when interestran high, but it was too late to schedulean additional “special” program, Yennesaid.

Additional programs included a gen-eral discussion of the explorers’ jour-

ney through Montana, the story of Sa-cagawea, and a presentation by areenactor, Honeybear the MountainMan, on trapping and trading.

“You can stand in a classroom andtalk and show videos, but this is phe-nomenal. It’s a true learning experience,”said Benilda Delgado, a fourth-gradeteacher from Whitefish. “They’ll gohome and talk about this for a longtime.”

The Blackfeet dancers perform regu-larly on their reservation and aroundMontana, but this was the first oppor-tunity for most students to learn aboutthe dances. Dancer Joe McKay ex-plained the use of beads, feathers, bone,and leather in the dancers’ clothing. Healso explained the history and purposeof each dance. The group performedfour different dances for the students,accompanied by Grammy nomineeClinton Croff and his father, Ray, sing-ing and drumming.

“The kids are obviously riveted,”said Liz Sorlie, a fourth-grade teacherfrom Helena Flats. “This is a uniqueopportunity for these students in this

place at this time. These are the bestpresentations I’ve ever seen.”

“Welcome to Montana” requiredmonths of planning by several chaptermembers, including a great deal of fundraising to support the event. Sixteenchapter members and friends volun-teered at the event, and four museumdocents volunteered to supervise theIndian exhibit. One individual pre-senter and one group were paid, andseven presenters volunteered their time.The chapter had to rent the museumand pay for some materials in the teach-ers’ packets. The chapter’s total cost forthe event was $1,965. It received do-nations and grants from individuals andlocal businesses. Chapter memberscredited Yenne with doing the bulk ofthe work and never seeming to tire.

“This has been wonderful,” Yennesaid.“I’m a retired teacher just tryingto make sure children enjoy history.”

—Wendy RaneyFlathead dancer performs at Kalispell school.

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Sherry Lacey Gallagher of Great Falls,Montana, has been named director ofdevelopment for the Lewis and ClarkTrail Heritage Foundation. Her focusis developing the foundation’s endow-ment fund to secure its long-term fi-nancial future.

Gallagher has worked in the non-profit field doing grant writing, fund-raising through annual events, andhelping to run a capital campaign for achild-development center in GreatFalls. She previously worked 17 yearsin health-care management.

She grew up in Council Bluffs, Iowa,and moved to Montana in 1977. Gal-lagher lives in Great Falls with her hus-band, Barry, and their two daughters.She is a Rotarian and helps with an an-nual fall fundraiser for the RotaryCamp in the Big Belt Mountains out-side of Great Falls. She is also a 4-Hgroup leader. ■

Gallagher leads fund-raising


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Destination Pacificpickup 5.05,

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Writers rarely if ever note that Sac-agawea’s linguistic skills would havegone for naught had it not been forCharbonneau’s ability to understandHidatsa and speak French. He, too, wasan indispensable link in the cumber-some chain of communication with theShoshones; for example, Cameahwaitto Sacagawea to Charbonneau toLabiche (or Cruzatte or Drouillard) toLewis and Clark, and then back again—over and over. Most commentators onthis stage of the journey pride them-selves for recognizing Sacagawea’s piv-otal role as an interpreter (or as Clarkwould have it, “interpretes”) but gen-erally ignore Charbonneau’s equallypivotal part in the process.

To point out this disparity is not todisparage Sacagawea’s undeniable con-tribution to the success of the expedi-tion but to give Charbonneau his due.Far from being “significantly less im-portant,” as Smith suggests at onepoint in his essay, Charbonneau’s con-tribution was crucial. Plainly, his lin-guistic ability was the complementary“other half” that closed the gap andmade Sacagawea’s efforts understand-able to the captains. In this respect,husband and wife were a team in thetruest sense of the word. Lewis andClark hardly recognized their luck:they got two interpreters for the priceof one since Sacagawea did not get paidfor her services.

However, at the end of the journey,Lewis was not particularly impressedwith Charbonneau and characterizedhim as a man of “no peculiar merit.”Moreover, Lewis chose not to recom-mend him for bonus compensation in-asmuch as he had already been mus-tered out at the Knife River villages inAugust 1806. Clark obviously was notof the same opinion; and he, of thetwo, is generally recognized as theshrewder judge of a man’s characterand abilities.

Even before the corps had arrivedback in St. Louis, Clark had writtenCharbonneau a poignant letter in whichhe regretted his inability to pay Saca-gawea for the important services shehad rendered during the journey. In

Soundings (cont. from p. 44) that letter he also offered to set upCharbonneau as a trader in the St. Louisarea or to settle a tract of land on himso he could take up a more sedentarylife as a farmer if he preferred. Clarkeven offered to pay Charbonneau’stravel expenses to visit his family stillin Montreal. And he offered to take inJean Baptiste—his “little dancing boy,”Pomp—and educate him in St. Louisas if he were his own child (an offer hewould later honor). It is probably truethat most of this outpouring of gener-osity was prompted by Clark’s concernfor the well-being of Sacagawea and herson, but there is a hint of some mea-sure of regard for Charbonneau as well.

In last analysis, it is abundantly clearthat Clark did not consider Char-bonneau “good for nothing.” Clarkkept him on as a government-paid in-terpreter after the expedition was dis-banded. Even after Sacagawea died, in1812 at Fort Manuel, this official con-nection between Clark and Char-bonneau remained in place until justbefore Clark’s own death, in 1838.

For all these reasons, although he of-ten was not a sympathetic figure in thepages of the journals, it seems undulyharsh to characterize Toussaint Char-bonneau as “good for nothing.” He, noless than Sacagawea, made a significantcontribution to advancing the ex-pedition’s objectives at a make-or-breakpoint in the journey. And for that hewas indubitably “good for something.”

Foundation member H. Carl Camplives in Omaha, Nebraska. For anothersympathetic view of Charbonneau, seeRita Cleary, “Charbonneau Reconsid-ered,” WPO, February 2000.

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An item in the May 2005 L&C Round-up (page 38) mentioned the publicationof an article in the Spring 2004 Journalof the Illinois State Historical Societyabout Lewis and Clark’s early plans(later aborted) to locate their first win-ter encampment near the village of LaCharette, Missouri, which at the timewas still part of Spanish territory. In cit-ing the author we got his middle initialwrong. He is Donald L. Hastings, Jr. ■

For the record


Toward the end of his engag-ing essay, “Sacagawea and

Susan B. Anthony” (Soundings,February 2005), Bill Smithlauds Sacagawea and, like somany others before him, char-acterizes Toussaint Charbon-neau as her “good for nothinghusband.” I’m not sure of theparticular criteria he has reliedon to make that judgment, orwhether he may have simplyjumped on the bandwagonstarted long ago by others. I amof the opinion, however, thathis dismissive epithet selec-tively ignores a modicum ofevidence that supports, at thevery least, a more nuanced as-sessment of Charbonneau’srelative merits as a member ofthe Corps of Discovery and of the human race.

There is little doubt Charbonneau could be arrogant, ca-pricious, cunning, abrasive, loutish, and abusive, or that hehad a pronounced proclivity for womanizing. But was heunequivocally “good for nothing”—utterly without any re-deeming attributes? I think not. Here’s why.

Charbonneau first began his affiliation with the expedi-tion at Fort Mandan as a hired interpreter by arrogantly as-serting he would not pull guard duty or do menial choressuch as rowing, gathering firewood, etc. The captains madeit clear the Corps of Discovery was a military unit and hewould have to shoulder his share of the day-to-day dutiesjust like everyone else or he would not be retained. Char-bonneau withdrew in a huff. After a short time, though, hereturned and apologetically asked for reinstatement, therebyaccepting the captains’ conditions. He thus demonstrated ameasure of flexibility and adaptability, decidedly helpful at-titudes to have in a close-knit unit.

Charbonneau was one of three nonswimmers in the corps.He was a confirmed landlubber, but the expedition was pri-marily a maritime venture, which meant he would constantlybe on, in, or near the water. That was enough to raise theanxiety level of any nonswimmer. Although he was demon-

strably an inept sailor andprone to panic in emergencysituations, Charbonneausomehow managed to sup-press his fears sufficiently tofunction in a largely aquaticenvironment.

Conventional wisdom hasit that “a man’s home is hiscastle,” meaning he is sover-eign within its walls. Char-bonneau’s castle on the expe-dition was his Indian-stylelodge (a leather-covered tipi)in which he, Sacagawea, andtheir infant son, Jean Baptiste,took shelter at each encamp-ment. But they were notalone; Charbonneau had in-vited Lewis, Clark, andGeorge Drouillard to share it

with them. It was a generous gesture Charbonneau was notobliged to make.

Food was a constant challenge on the journey. Variousmembers of the corps specialized in hunting game; othersserved as cooks and prepared whatever was available for theseveral messes into which the detachment was divided.Charbonneau’s culinary specialty was boudin blanc—“whitepudding,” a sausage-like concoction encased in a section ofbuffalo intestine. In one of his more colorful, and playful,journal entries Lewis wrote in graphic detail about the in-gredients and their preparation, and described the presenta-tion of Charbonneau’s signature dish to an always famishedcollection of hard-working men who clamored for it as longas the expedition was in buffalo country. No matter his no-table shortcomings, the hapless Charbonneau could redeemhimself through the stomachs, if not in the eyes, of the ex-plorers with bountiful servings of his pièce de résistance.

Because she spoke Shoshone, Sacagawea is rightfully cred-ited with enabling the Corps of Discovery to trade success-fully for the horses needed to get across the Bitterroot Moun-tains and onto the headwaters of the Columbia River. Shespoke Shoshone and Hidatsa, but not English and not French.

Soundings

Rethinking Toussaint CharbonneauSacagawea’s “good for nothing” husband deserves more respect than he typically gets

BY H. CARL CAMP

Soundings continues on page 43

The man gesturing in this detail from an 1833 painting by Karl Bodmermay be Toussaint Charbonneau, who was interpreting at the time forthe German Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, to his left.

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