A couple of posts ago I mentioned that I preferred to pick up books for souvenirs more than scented soaps. It's true. One of the books I picked up on my recent trek across Virginia is an abridged publication of The Journals of Lewis and Clark. I purchased my copy in the museum shop at Monticello, which incidentally I will say is one of the best museum shops I've ever perused (and I have perused my share). But that is probably because Thomas Jefferson, America's great Renaissance Man and definitely most beloved interracialist, was such a multi-dimensional party to the formative history of the fledgling States that, once translated into merchandise, his life and passions make for a very diverse and frankly fabulous shopping experience. It was all there - politics, statecraft, history, diplomacy, architecture, invention, horticulture, slave nooky - you name it. If Thomas Jefferson ever set his mind to it, there was some very nicely done representation ready to take home.
I went with Lewis and Clark's journals for a variety of reasons. One is that in the decoration of Monticello - his plantation on the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virgina - it seemed to me that Jefferson created very much a sort of curiosity cabinet or Wonderkammer from the specimens brought back by the exploration party which he himself had commissioned to explore the newly opened Louisiana Purchase lands. Specifically I speak of the Entrance Hall, or carriage entrance off the East Portico. It was here that Jefferson in his later years made his entrance to receive guests in a stage set with the curious grandeur of the still mostly unknown North American continent, in his own microcosmic museum of Natural History and Native Americana.
Scenes from the Entrace Hall at Monticello
I also went with the Lewis and Clark because, aside from a love of discovery and the open road, I have an sometimes morbid fascination with tales of First Contact, which is to say those episodes when two heretofore unbeknownst-to-one-another cultures collide. Of course in the history of The Americas this is going to start with Christopher Columbus dropping anchor off Hispaniola in 1492 and continue into the early 19th century, at least as far as the Merriwether Lewis and William Clark led expedition of 1804 - 1806, which set of from then frontiersy St. Louis and crossed by river and land a Northwestern trail to the Pacific Ocean. Between the tribes of the Dakotas who'd had experience with French fur traders coming down from Canada, and the Chinnooks of the Pacific Coast, who also by this point were in trade relations with the Pacific-sailing "White Man", there was a virgin expanse of Native American existence, especially in the Rockies, that had never had firsthand contact with the European. Lewis and Clark and company would be the first.
I've read about Cortes and the Aztecs, and Pizarro and the Incas, too. I guess one of the reasons I like these stories is that, in some ways, it really is like watching a beautiful train wreck. It's curious and dramatic, and you know it'll end in tears, but the participants don't yet. And also, there is a near extinction to that realm of human experience. Though I guess the 1990's brought us the occasional report of contact with the odd isolated tribe in New Guinea or the depths of the Amazon rainforest, these sorts of things really don't happen anymore; the Earth is all combed over. I suppose the closest we could come to the experience is in contact with extraterrestrial life. So it is that "Who and What the Hell are You?" sort of awe I find terribly fascinating, and one that no doubt triggers a radical recomposition of world construct and paradigm within the minds of its participants.
It is interesting to note that what might have been the single most enriching act in the history of the United States - the Louisiana Purchase, whereupon Jefferson negotiated the acquisition of 828,000 square miles of land, in effect doubling the size of the nation - was also the seed of his own financial ruin. It is commonly known that Jefferson died in debt. Apparently in the Colonial and then early Federalist eras, a rich Virginian was a landed Virginian and all of Jeffersons's wealth was measured and held in land holdings. By opening the gates for a Westward national expansion, he sort of damned himself with Eastward decline: previously pricey Virginia land prices plummeted. Supply exceeded demand.
In full text the journals of Lewis and Clark weigh in at five volumes and exceed thousands of pages, and though considered a national literary treasure, the 1953 version (which I am reading) - abridged and edited by Bernard De Voto - is purported to be an excellent portrait of the journey, weighing in at a fatty but digestible five hundred pages, more or less. Writes Stephen Ambrose in the foreward: "Recording and sharing: that is the essence of Lewis and Clark's journals. You are with them as they discover new animals, plants, fish, Indian tribes. You get the first description of dozens of previously unknown birds, and the first attempt to transcribe the song of the western meadowlark. And you are present for the greatest hunting experiences any man ever had. When Lewis, at the Great Falls, writes that he had just seen the biggest buffalo herd he had ever seen, that means it was the biggest herd any white man ever saw. Botanists, zoologists, cartographers, ethnologists, soldiers, medical historians - there is something here for each to savor."
So why not read Lewis and Clark?
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