From the WSJ Opinion Archives
FROM THE HEARTLAND
The Corps of Discovery
Cheers for Lewis and Clark--and jeers to anyone who disparages their achievement.
DILLON, Mont.--My wife and I are headed for Lemhi Pass, where the Lewis and Clark expedition first crossed the Continental Divide in August 1805 after nearly a year and a half of incredibly hard travel, and we are getting increasingly nervous. Even two centuries later, reaching the pass isn't easy.
First we travel about 30 miles west of Dillon, a town of about 13,000 that is the center of the Big Hole Valley, on a county road that seems to deteriorate with every passing mile. ("Dips," warn frequent signs--and they aren't kidding.) Then we turn north on a gravel road and drive for six miles, passing the Bar Double TT Ranch (actually, through its barnyard, complete with a "Speed Zone" sign). Then the gravel turns to rutted dirt as we climb another six miles into the mountains astride the Montana-Idaho border.
The route is not without its charms. We pass a young bull moose alongside a creek that Meriwether Lewis (wrongly) took to be the headwaters of the Missouri River. And when we finally reach the top, at 7,339 feet, we are rewarded with a stupendous view of the snow-capped Bitterroot Mountains to the west. Lewis's description in his journal is appropriate, even today: "immense ranges of high mountains still to the West of us with their tops partially covered with snow."
But if we are nervous about our little trek, think how Lewis and Clark must have felt when, after more than a year of arduous travel, they beheld the view. They and their patron, Thomas Jefferson, firmly believed that once having reached the Continental Divide, they would look down on the Columbia River flowing to the West, offering the prospect of relatively quick passage to the Pacific Ocean by canoe. Instead, they saw only mountainous obstacles--and months more of extreme hardship. Thanks in part to Sacagawea, of course, they made it through a more direct route far to the north, but a morning's excursion for us was a nearly fatal detour for the Corps of Discovery.
That Lewis and Clark went forward, however, underlines the difference between their thoughts and the thoughts of modern Americans. The difference is particularly striking in how thoughts on man's relationship to the environment have changed. The bicentennial of the start of the expedition begins in January with commemoration of the (secret) letter President Jefferson sent Congress requesting $2,500 to explore the newly acquired Louisiana Territory and find a possible water route to the Pacific. Jefferson and the captains had a high appreciation of the natural wonders of the American continent, but at heart it was a military mission--and the strategic purpose was clear: turn America into a continental power.
For some Americans today, however, the Lewis and Clark expedition is shaping up as an elegy to a lost Arcadia, a natural world fallen victim to the plow, ax and concrete of the white man. Lewis and Clark, in this view, were the advance team for the rape of the American West.
There is, to be sure, still wonderment at the "undaunted courage" of Lewis and Clark and their band of 25 men, in the title of Stephen Ambrose's marvelous day-by-day account of the expedition. But much of the emphasis will be on what a National Park Service lesson plan for teachers cites as the "environmental loss" of the past two centuries. In addition to the usual protests by American Indian activists, environmentalists are gearing up to use the Lewis and Clark bicentennial to call for setting aside vast new tracts of wilderness. As a writer on the Sierra Club Web site summarizes things, the Corps of Discovery needs to be replaced by a "Corps of Recovery."
And in a Time magazine essay last summer, contributing editor Walter Kirn asserted that the most "suitable" lesson to be drawn from the bicentennial is this: "If we as Americans could see the future, we might never set to work creating it."
But it was precisely their vision of the future that gave Lewis and Clark the undaunted courage required to achieve what they did. Not only would Lewis and Clark not mourn what came after them--a huge democratic country that would one day be wealthy enough to set aside vast amounts of land as wilderness (and buy the expensive camping equipment needed to commune with it). They might even marvel at the notion that a tourist could get up and down from Lemhi Pass in a morning in a "gas guzzling" sport-utility vehicle, tour the beautiful Red Rock Wildlife Refuge in the afternoon, and be back in Bozeman, Mont., late that afternoon in time for a hot shower, a steak for dinner and a good night's sleep in a soft bed.
In the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville reported that while Europeans (and a few Eastern intellectuals) talked a great deal about the American wilds, "Americans themselves never think about them." They were too busy hacking an existence out of the wilderness and draining its mosquito-infested swamps.
So let's hope that the Lewis and Clark bicentennial keeps things in perspective. The Corps of Discovery set out to expand U.S. trade and open up the West to settlement. This might mean fewer untrammeled areas--though it's worth remembering that the Indians had already exerted powerful influences on the natural landscape, including the "Indian road" that Lewis and Clark followed to the summit of Lemhi Pass--but it also meant undeniable progress for mankind.
Had Lewis and Clark decided to give up after reaching Lemhi Pass--"sorry, Mr. President, but we've had enough, and besides, it would be wrong to intrude on Nature"--it is hard to imagine that things would have turned out better for the world, or even the environment.
Mr. Bray is a staff columnist at the Detroit News. His OpinionJournal.com column appears Tuesdays.
