On how to turn a black man white, a white man black, and other curious scientific hypotheses of the Age of Enlightenment...

A plate from Buffon's Histoire naturelle: sometimes science smells bad.

I've just had an old Facebook meme brought to mind this week.  It was called, more or less, 25 Things About Me, and perhaps you remember it, too.  Users were invited to author a note that listed twenty-five lesser-known facts about themselves; and these ranged from the very light and trivial to the astonishingly intimate, each based of course on the disposition of its confessor.  Once posted, one tagged to the note twenty-five other friends deemed worthy of sharing, and in so doing obliged them to generate in turn lists of their own.  And so it went as the meme spread throughout the site's usership.  Actually, it was pretty good as far as Facebook things go - definitely more interesting than playing Farmville - and it came at a time when I think users were less leery than today and definitely more interested in exploring the potential of online social networking platforms.  It was even referenced by Jimmy Fallon in the "Weekend Update" segment on Saturday Night Live.

I mention the 25 Things today in part because I participated, too; and really, since I am considered wordy, I was pretty happy to do so.  An observation (or maybe a warning), though: it garnered a far more varied range of responses than originally speculated - but that's another story altogether.  It's mentioned today mostly to resurrect a particular entry on the list:

19. I find that if one looks at the history of human culture, of human thought and belief and social attitudes and mores, the vast and contradictory and now often disproved mass of it all tends most often in my eyes to point to an enduring arbitrariness as a quality of the human condition. I believe that at least half of what we believe today is false or a construct of convenience or at best a charming naiveté, but I could not tell you which half. 

Well, so I felt in January of 2009, and I still do today.  I'm pretty sure that half of what's rolling around in your head and mine is pointless, that only time will sort it out, and that frankly by that time we'll probably be dead.

I'm guessing one could call this a kind of epistemological skepticism.  It's the product of education and my experience of the everyday, too.  When I started college, I knew I wanted a liberal arts sort of underpinning to my education and ended up with a B.A. in Religious Studies, with a minor in English.  This was after a lot of major-dabbling, and here I think my family would gleefully interject that one might read major as either a noun or an adjective, if not both.  Originally the program culminated in a degree in Philosophy, with a concentration in Religious Studies; and when a separate and distinct Religious Studies major emerged, I jumped ship.  But whatever the title, what the substance of either really breaks down to is a bunch of different people entertaining a bunch of different and often wildly contradictory ideas - of both truth and Truth - over the great expanse of human history.  And so at some point one is compelled to ask: Well, so much certainty in the thinkers and believers, but how can it all be true? 

The answer of course is that it can't; that a lot of it is actually bullshit. Or blindness. Or wishful thinking.  Yet people lived and died making of these sorts of things the compasses of their lives, pretty much none the wiser we can see today.  And speaking of today, I don't know that a look at our world exactly encourages optimism that humanity has improved its interior lot: any cursory glance through the average Facebook news feed will illustrate that.  To be clear, though, I definitely do not mean to say that we should abandon the endeavor of human thought as futile.  Nor am I really positioning myself here a conscious proponent of agnosticism.  Rather, I do favor a healthy sort of self-skepticism: the self-consciousness to know that what you hold to be true, you may do so not for its content and correspondence to reality, but often for what the holding does for you.  And finally I am saying this: enjoy the history of human thought, because it is fucking hilarious.

So what actually prompted this remembrance of Facebook past is a bit of hilarity found in my latest read, another of the terrific books I picked up along my tour through Virginia last fall.  The book is titled Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose: Natural History in Early America, and it's written by Lee Alan Dugatkin, a professor of biology at the University of Louisville.  I won't
 attempt to abstract the entirety of its contents, but the better part of the book examines
 the origins and effects of one of the less-enlightened ideas coming out of the so-called Enlightenment: the Theory of American Degeneracy.  And (news to me in 2012 and maybe you, too) basically this was a very widely embraced belief of the 18th and 19th century that every living thing - man included - either born of or once integrated into the landscape of the Americas basically went to shit. 

Say whaaat?

The idea was birthed from the pen of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, (1707-1788) - a preeminent natural scientist, mathematician, and later director of the Royal Gardens in France.  So sweeping was Buffon's influence that he's often credited as "the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century."  His popularity is due in large part to his persuasive and eloquent writing style, which prompted the widespread readership of his 36 tome Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, as it appeared in successive volumes from
 1749 to 1788.  And not only among his scientific peers but also the literate lay-public,
 especially participants in the idea-fueled salon culture of 18th century France. 

Thomas Jefferson to the rescue...

Dugatkin spells out Buffon's stance pretty well in the preface of his book:

In his massive encyclopedia of natural history, Histoire Naturelle, Buffon laid out what came to be called the theory of degeneracy.  He argues that, as a result of living in a cold and wet climate, all species found in America were weak and feeble.  What's more, any species imported into America for economic reasons would soon succumb to its new environment and produce lines of puny, feeble offspring.  America, Buffon told his readers, is a land of swamps, where life putrefies and rots.  And all of this from the pen of the preeminent natural historian of his century.

There was no escaping the pernicious effects of the American environment - not even for Native Americans.  They too were degenerate.  For Buffon, Indians were stupid, lazy savages.  In a particularly emasculating swipe, he suggested that the genitalia of Indian males were small and withered - degenerate - for the very same reason that the people were stupid and lazy. 

The environment and natural history had never before been used to make such sweeping claims, essentially damning and entire continent in the name of science.  Buffon's American degeneracy hypothesis was quickly adopted and expanded by men such as the Abbé Raynal and the Abbé de Pauw, who believed that Buffon's theory did not go far enough.  They went on to claim that the theory of degeneracy applied equally well to transplanted Europeans and their descendants in America.  These ideas became mainstream enough that Raynal felt comfortable sponsoring a contest in France on whether the discovery of America had been beneficial of harmful to the human race.

Books on American degeneracy were popular, reproduced in multiple editions, and translated from French into a score of languages including German, Dutch, and English; they were the talk of the salons of Europe and the manor houses of America. And it wasn't just the intelligentsia of the age who were paying attention - this topic was discussed in newspapers, journals, poems, and schoolbooks.

Wow. Can you imagine such crap being proposed - as scientific truth no less - about these big, beautiful Americas of ours?  This level of ridiculousness, it's a challenge to fully wrap one's head around it.  Yet that this was a commonly held and enduring prejudice is equally dumbfounding: these ideas were readily picked up by intellectual leaders like Voltaire, Kant, and Hegel.  Even Charles Darwin came to the Americas with degeneracy on his mind - in 1831, forty-three years after Buffon's death.

Well, I doubt anyone would question the eternal spring of Eurocentrism.  But it's not often one has cause to envision the American "Founding Fathers" on the short end of the social stick, themselves obliged to buck against a strange sort of pseudo-scientific, multi-tentacled racism.  Against taxation and the lack of representation, yes; but a real second-class human gradation on grounds other than the economics and geographic far-flungedness, no. 

Thomas Jefferson and fellow 18th & early 19th century leaders knew from experience the idea of degeneration to be complete garbage, and they were also acutely aware of the damaging effect such a belief would have on the future progress of the fledgling America.  Jefferson, whose passion and pleasure was natural science, made it is his mission to combat the sentiment and particularly to have the influential Count Buffon recant.  His strategy was to present the Count with proof contradictory to his claims of degeneracy and diminution, in part with a taxidermied specimen of the towering American moose - as Dugatkin recounts in his aptly-named Jefferson and the Giant Moose.  It was his work in collecting data to rebuff the Count that Notes on the State of Virginia - Jefferson's only published true book - was compiled and penned, an almost accidental bi-product of the endeavor.

Apparently the Comte de Buffon was of a school of natural scientists who generally did not often venture out into nature.  Instead they formulated theory based on both observations made from specimens in the great cabinets being amassed at the time, as well as taking data from the flow of often fanciful published reports of travelers and explorers.  And it should be noted that the authors of these accounts were, in the interest of boosting readership, seldom above the occasional outrageous claim.  Buffon actually did have access to some live animals in the royal collection, and apparently he also experimented in making observations of animals in captivity - as the following passage amusingly illustrates:

Buffon was also able to gather data directly on some species, albeit in very unnatural settings.  One such setting was his family estate, where he cordoned off one area and attempted to create a "semi-wild" environment that he stocked with foxes, hedgehogs, cats, chickens, dogs, badgers, and a monkey named Joko.  Though Buffon was able to gather some data at Montbard, most of the time his collection of animals went about chasing each other, burning themselves near fires, and begging their keepers for food.  Buffon gathered  a bit more reliable data at the Royal Menagerie, where he verified what he had heard about zebras and elephants by observing them person. 

Now that's what I call science. I mean, really, need one be so heavy-handed with the natural bit?

From Buffon's volumn on Ornithology. I don't know what the hell is going on here, but it's starting to look like a Walton Ford painting...

The human detail of Buffon's American degeneracy theory reflects a larger overarching racial interest.  I suppose one might give him credit for subscribing to monogenism (according to Wikipedia, "the concept that all races have a single origin"), which really might have seemed like a progressive idea at the time. The fact that it has its own definitive name is, I think, evidence that it has not always been regarded as a given.  But, and here Eurocentrism springs again eternal, Buffon and colleagues believed Adam & Eve - that is to say, the mint, in-the-box collector's edition of man - were Caucasian, and "that other races came about by degeneration from environmental factors, such as the sun and poor dieting."  Buffon's ideas of environment-based influence in an organism's outward physical expression of course predate Darwin's theories on evolution and natural selection - and they also offer a sort of naiveté that is actually rather amusing to read.  Writes Dugatkin:

The second pattern Buffon discerned centered on climate and skin color. Because humans were all part of a single race, Buffon believed that skin color was, in part, a direct result of climate.  Africans, for example, were dark-skinned, but they would become light skinned if they were moved to northern climates for a few hundred years.  Buffon went so far as proposing a direct test of this hypothesis: "To put the change of colour in the human species to the test of experiment, some Negroes should be transported from Senegal to Denmark, where the inhabitants have generally white skins, golden locks, and blue eyes, and where the difference of blood and opposition of colour are greatest."  Then, in order to remove the effects of racial mixing on skin color, Buffon suggested that "these Negroes must be confined to their own females, and all crossing of the breed scrupulously prevented.  This is the only method of discovering the time necessary to change a Negro into a White, or a White into a Black, by the mere opposition of climate."  From there it would become the anthropologist of the future's job to see what sorts of changes would take place in these African Danes...

Well, I have to say I would also be interested in the progress of those Danish Africans unwittingly transplanted to an isolated existence in Senegal:  "Hello, are you black yet?... No, not yet? OK, will check back in another hundred years..."


So why then did a nonsensical idea like the theory of degeneracy gain such traction in Europe?  Apparently, part of it was anxiety over emigration and the economic potential of the New World.  Monarchs, aristocrats, and the established order were concerned over the fact that people were increasingly less bound to the status quo.   They could now buy a tract of land and simply leave - both Europe and eventually Monarchical governance, too.  Abbé de Pauw, author of Philosophical Researches on the Americans and by far the most cunty of the pro-degenerists, is credited with writing to incur the favor of his patron, Frederick the Great, who had in fact instituted an agency in Hamburg "whose sole function was to prevent emigration to the New World, and instead to attract potential newcomers to Prussia."

Well, it's interesting to me that Buffon's theory - which was in large part constructed from observations of natural curiosities of the cabinet  - is today itself the curiosity.  And as anti-American as it was, in an interesting twist the very theory of American degeneracy and subsequent battle to disprove it is, according to Dugatkin, what gave rise to our national self-image of  "America as a beautiful, vast, resource-rich region, and its inhabitants as healthy, hardworking people in tune with nature."  And so that's an idea that - even if it might fall into that 50%-chanced realm of the bullshit we cling to - is certainly worth hanging on to all the same.
 

- a.t.s

On the painter & showman George Catlin, documentarist of the now quite lost 19th century Native America, & appended with a small gallery of the artist's work...

So, if you've followed along thus far then you know too well that I've been reading an abridged edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark; and it has proved very satisfactory to present here many of the interesting details recorded within its pages.  Of course this is often accompanied by much of my sometimes lighthearted, sometimes very earnest commentary, and so I mean this very much in the latter sense when I add that I hope you enjoy it all as much as I do...

One thing I find especially compelling about the journals is that they open an incredible window into a world that no longer exists, but once truly did; a world then as now quite alien.  In penning and posting these essays, I find myself turning again and again to the paintings of George Catlin for their illustration.  He's a natural (and I think equally fascinating) choice for the task:  like Lewis and Clark, his work is also primarily documentary in nature and it, too, offers a glimpse into a world that has long since disappeared.  And furthermore it was Catlin's prescient sense of its impermanence that spurred the artist to document Native America in what has become one of our most exceptional, expansive bodies of American painting.

Catlin's work is particularly apropos to the endeavors of Lewis and Clark since so much of it was painted not too long after the expedition's original journey, the documentation produced by the two parties often overlaps the same tribal cultures, and Catlin himself even accompanied the later-career William Clark in a diplomatic mission up the Mississippi river in 1830.  I think he's apropos to Amicus Curiositatis, too - specifically because he was not just a painter but also played the roles of collector, curator, and showman; Coupling his paintings with an equally impressive array of indigenous artifacts (and even live indigenous peoples themselves), he created a sort of traveling cabinet of curiosities that toured the United States and continued to even greater reception in Europe.   George Catlin was, in fact, himself an amicus curiositatis, and an amicus rerum mirabilium to boot...

Portrait of No-ho-mun-ya, or "One Who Gives No Attention" -  Iowa tribe, 1844
From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

No-ho-mun-ya accompanied Catlin to Europe and died in Liverpool before the exhibition departed for Paris.

So then you see, I think he's a good match all around - as both illustrator and subject as well.  And as I wind down the meditations on Lewis and Clark,  I want to share more of his terrific paintings and think, too, that a short biography of the painter is in order:

George Catlin was born in Pennsylvania in 1796, where his interest in Native Americana was piqued in childhood from, among other things, listening to his mother's tales of her own frontier childhood and capture by Indians.   Later Catlin studied law and apparently never actually received much formal art training; but at some point in his early adulthood he was struck with a sense of the impermanence of the Native American - as they looked and lived and were then, which is to say their existence as an unaffected, autonomous culture - and in a stunningly life-changing move, he left law and headed to the western frontier.  

Catlin took it upon himself to document the appearance, style, and presence of the Native American.  In 1830 he accompanied Clark up the Mississippi and soon after made then-frontiersy St. Louis his base for subsequent artistic expeditions along the rivers and into the lands of numerous indigenous tribes - including many that we encounter in the Lewis & Clark journals, such as the Mandan, the Hidatsa, the Blackfeet, and so forth.  The result of his artistic output during the 1830s was a stunning collection of six hundred plus paintings that read today like bright Polaroids of a past mostly gone to shadow.

George Catlin not only collected painted imagery but also the artifacts and handicrafts of the Native American tribal civilizations among whom he traveled and worked.  In the 1840s, he amassed together both paintings and artifacts and took his "Indian Gallery" back east.  The exhibition was supplemented with Catlin's own lectures and even the presence of actual Native Americans themselves.  It is often noted that the paintings were hung in salon style, which is to say the walls were fairly paved with canvases - hung closely next to one another, above one another, and so forth.  Definitely a far cry from the style of today, where museums bewilderingly seem to pride themselves on how little of their collection is actually on display.

"Ah-móu-a, The Whale, One of Kee-o-kúk's Principal Braves" Sac and Fox tribe, 1835
From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Catlin's Indian Gallery never proved as profitable as he had hoped.  Eventually he packed up the collection - live Indians and all - and headed for a tour of Europe, where by default appetites for the curiosities of  Native America were significantly less-sated.  The poet Charles Baudelaire wrote upon seeing the exhibition in Paris: "M. Catlin has captured the proud, free character and noble expression of these splendid fellows in a masterly way......"   Though I think it should also be noted that at this time, in the interest of further enhancing the expensive-to-maintain production, Catlin took to dressing Caucasians in American Indian costume and presented them in various tableau vivant-style vignettes.  So really, I'm not sure that anyone today (or then) is exactly sure what they hell they were looking at, in Paris, in the 1840s.  But pretty exotic entertainment in a world before television and internet, one has to admit!

Financial troubles persisted, and though he had tried consistently but unsuccessfully to sell his collection en masse to the United States government, eventually Catlin was forced to sell his 607 paintings to private hands.  They were purchased in 1852 by the wealthy industrialist Joseph Harrison, who unfortunately kept them not on public display but stored away in a factory.  However, the collection remained more or less in tact.

Besides this initial body of work from the 1830's, Catlin produced other collections, such as an extensive series of engravings for the 1841 publication of his Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians, as well as two other subsequent publications.  Additionally there is also what is known as his "cartoon collection": produced after relinquishing the initial bulk of paintings to Harrison, Catlin set out to recreate them - working not from life as with the originals but from preparatory sketches and outlines done for his work in the 1830s.  Today the nearly complete collection of original paintings is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York also holds 700 of Catlin's sketches.  His work is in the collections of several other museums and enjoyed by many.  As the website for Gilrcrease Museum - home to an extensive American Indian and Western art collection in Tulsa, Oklahoma, notes:  "Indians loved him.  Catlin's authentic portraits and depictions of the natives' culture and lifestyle are enlightening and fun..."



"Comanche Village, Women Dressing Robes and Drying Meat" 1834–35

From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

So really, I think there is something rather inspiring about this individual.  He left behind what would have undoubtedly have been a very comfortable, conventional career in law and struck out - talented but basically untrained - into what was otherwise an unknown, unprescribed life.  And much of it was lived beyond the borders of what was then considered civilized.  He had an idea and an urge - to see and to capture -and in following those inner impulses throughout his life, he had by his death in 1872 created what was to become a stellar and essentially priceless assemblage of historical and ethnographic knowledge, much beloved and relied upon by many generations since. (Wow!) And you know, through both prosperous times and difficult, he made the most of what he had to work with and, from what I can see, stayed on the path: stayed true to himself and his vision.  So there is probably something we all can learn from this George Catlin.

- a.t.s.

 So, all of that said, let's look at some paintings...

"Wash-ka-mon-ya, Fast Dancer, a Warrior"  Iowa tribe, 1843
From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

"Náh-se-ús-kuk, Whirling Thunder, Eldest Son of Black Hawk"  Sac and Fox tribe, 1832
From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

 

"Bird's-eye View of the Mandan Village, 1800 Miles above St. Louis" Mandan/Numakiki tribe,  1837–39
From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

It is interesting to note that the Lewis & Clark expedition spent its first winter camped among the Mandans who lived (or at least wintered) on the Missouri river.  I imagine their architecture wouldn't have changed much in the following 30 or so years, so it's a fair assumption to say this is what the explorers themselves saw daily.

"Back View of Mandan Village, Showing the Cemetery"  Mandan/Numakiki tribe, 1832
From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The Mandan did not bury their dead but left the bodies to decompose on raised scaffolding.  Once they are clean and sun-bleached, the skulls were arranged in large, geometric circles.

Eeh-nís-kim, Crystal Stone, Wife of the Chief,  Blackfoot/Kainai tribe 1832
From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

When Lewis & Clark passed back through in 1806 other tribes had warned them that the Blackfeet were the terror of the neighborhood, and indeed their passage was not without incident.  Looks like they chilled out a little in the interim.  Although I have never been a big fan of the name Crystal, I can handle it on her.

 "Buffalo Bulls Fighting in Running Season, Upper Missouri" 1837–39
From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Apparently during this season literally thousands of buffalo congregated together.  The buffalo are today an occasional, ornamental novelty and this land is probably an under-occupied subdivision thrown up during the housing bubble...

 

"The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas"  1844-45

 From the National Gallery of Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

This Catlin portrait was made into a postage stamp in 1998.

"Bull Dance, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony"  Mandan/Numakiki tribe,1832
From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

"La-dóo-ke-a, Buffalo Bull, a Grand Pawnee Warrior"  Pawnee tribe, 1832
From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

"Wi-jún-jon, Pigeon's Egg Head (The Light), Going to and Returning from Washington" 

Assiniboine/Nakoda tribe, 1837-39

From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Going, going....  Wi-jún-jon went to meet then President Andrew Jackson and spent 18 months in the United States.  Upon his return home he was filled with, writes the Smithsonian and quoting Catlin, "astonishing accounts of the white man’s cities. They eventually rejected his stories as 'ingenious fabrication of novelty and wonder,' and his persistence in telling such 'lies' eventually led to his murder."   Poor Wi-jún-jon didn't fare too well either in this portrait.

"Cú-sick, Son of the Chief"  Tuscarora tribe, circa 1837–39
From the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

...and Gone.  Cú-sick has been educated in the U.S. and is now both a Baptist preacher and, according to Catlin, "a very eloquent speaker."

(I am indebted to the Smithsonian American Art Museum for the better part of these images.  To further explore their much more extensive collection, and I highly recommend it, check out  "Campfire Stories with George Catlin : Encounters of Two Cultures" .  Additionally, Wikipedia was consulted in the construction of this essay.)

Why not ... read Lewis and Clark?

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?