曳-海滩的拼音
g Men
They spent roughly a thousand
days and nights together, from the rainy October
morning
they left the falls of the Ohio until
they finally pulled their canoes out of the
Mississippi three
years later in St. Louis.
They slept in impossibly close quarters, often
sharing the same
buffalo-skin teepee with an
Indian woman, a French-Canadian interpreter and
their baby. They,
and several enlisted men,
kept journals whose published throw weight equals
13 volumes, 30 lbs.,
18 in. of bookshelf and
approximately 1 million words. All that evidence
notwithstanding, the
more we learn about the
two captains who gave their names to the Lewis and
Clark Expedition,
the more powerful becomes
their pull on our imagination.
Historians
traditionally distinguish them by contrasting
their personalities — the brooding
Meriwether
Lewis played off against the genial William Clark-
Jeremy Irons hitting the road with
John
Goodman. Gary Moulton, editor of the explorers'
journals, says,
but they may have been
exaggerated.
were both Virginians. They were
both Army officers, six-footers and experienced
outdoorsmen,
who first met eight years before
the expedition when they were serving in Indian
campaigns in
the Ohio Valley. They shared with
their friend Thomas Jefferson a passion for such
Enlightenment
sciences as ethnology,
paleontology, zoology and botany.
They were
both fearless spellers. Clark took observations,
ate slices of
millions,tracked Indiansand was
proud to serve the 's
spelling is more
famously imaginative — he found 27 different ways
to spell the word Sioux. (In
fairness, even
the best-educated Americans displayed erratic
spelling until Noah Webster's
dictionary
standardized spelling two decades later.)
Older than Lewis by four years — they were 33
and 29 when the expedition began —
Clark was
the more experienced soldier and frontiersman. His
five older brothers had fought in
the American
Revolution. One, General George Rogers Clark, had
led raids that kept the lower
Great Lakes
region out of British hands. As an Army officer,
William had trekked the Ohio Valley,
leading
troops at least once in a skirmish with Indians.
and as brave as Caesar,
But by 1803 George
was sinking into alcoholism, and William had
resigned his commission in
part to help settle
his brother's debts. The two were living together
on a point of land
overlooking the Ohio River
just below Louisville when William received an
astonishing letter from
his old Army buddy.
For the previous two years, Lewis had been
working in the White House as Jefferson's
private secretary. Like Jefferson, Lewis had
lost his father at an early age; now he was in
daily
contact with the President, who was
practically a surrogate fathers to him. Lewis told
Clark that
Jefferson had placed him in charge
of a mission to explore
America, or that part
of it bordering on the Missouri & Columbia er,
Lewis
wanted Clark to be his co-commander.
Jefferson had once discussed a similar mission
with
George Rogers Clark. But now, leaving
George in his family's care, William accepted
and ”—just in time to prevent Lewis from
signing up his backup choice, an
Army
lieutenant named Moses Hooke.
Lewis and Clark
got along well from the start. When Clark's
anticipated commission as a
captain instead
came through as second lieutenant — a misstep that
still rankled years later —
they never
told their men and treated each other as equals —
placing them among the few
effective co-CEOS
in organizational history.
They apportioned
their operating responsibilities: Clark was the
better boatman and
navigator, Lewis the
planner and natural historian, often walking
ashore far ahead of the vessels
being
laboriously hauled against the Missouri's current.
Clark clearly had the cooler head. He
brokered
the crucial early compromise that ended a
staredown with the Teton Sioux The more
mercurial Lewis hurled a puppy into the face
of an Indian who angered him, and killed a
Blackfeet
in the corps's only violent
incident.
During the long winter at Fort
Mandan, near today’s Bismarck, N.D., Lewis and
Clark
encountered Charles McKenzie, a British
trader who later wrote, “[Captain Lewis] could not
make
himself agreeable to us. He could speak
fluently and learnedly on all subjects, but his
inveterate
disposition against the British
stained, at least in our eyes, all his eloquence.
[Clerk] was equally
well informed, but his
conversation was always pleasant, for he seemed to
dislike giving offense
unnecessarily.
Nothing reveals the captains
more than their treatment of Sacagawea. Lewis
could be aloof,
dismissing their interpreter's
wife as
eat and a few trinkets to wear I
believe she would be perfectly content
anywhere.
formal Clark nicknamed her
educate her son Pomp, ”
Either captain
could assume sole leadership in a pinch — and
often did. When Clark was
waylaid with a
boiler on his ankle and abrasions on his feet from
dragging the boats up the
shallow Beaverhead
River, Lewis forged ahead to find the Shoshone and
the horses they
desperately needed to cross
the mountains. But just a few weeks later, when
the entire party was
near starvation on the
Lolo Trail, it was Clark's turn to strike out
ahead to hunt for food. If there
ever was
tension between them along the way, it was not
recorded. Each captain consistently
referred
to the other as
mean it. After he was
accidentally shot in the backside by Pierre
Cruzatte on a hunting trip, Lewis
spent the
next three weeks lying on his stomach in a canoe
while Clark cleaned and dressed his
wounds
every day. The party trusted both leaders
completely. Perplexed at the junction of the
Missouri and Manias rivers, the men
unanimously the [north] fork to be the
Missouri,Lewis noted. But when the captains
overruled them (correctly), said very
cheerfully that they were ready to follow us
anywhere we thought proper to direct.
We know
these details because Lewis and Clark kept perhaps
most complete journals in the
history of human
exploration. We can look over their shoulders as
they and their party of 31
contend with
hunger, disease, blizzards, broiling sun, boiling
rapids, furious grizzly bears and
unrelenting
plagues of tormenting “mosquitos.” We know about
the Indians who helped them,
and we know that
they had to eat dogs and horses to survive. We are
in the canoe with Clark
when he writes,
had sought for so long.
Jefferson had
given Lewis an unambiguous mission: to find
water communication across this
continent.
failed. What Jefferson hoped would
be a
portage across parts of Montana and Idaho
that included some of the most rugged wilderness
in
North America. If nothing else,
later traders and settlers, appalled by the
expedition's experience,
learned where not to
go and found a friendlier route along the Platte
River across Nebraska and
over South Pass in
Wyoming.
Rather than admit failure, Jefferson
devised a solution any spinning politician would
recognize: he changed objectives. The
expedition, he advised Congress,
which could
have been expected.，he said, was actually the
understanding
tribes of Indians hithertci'6
unknown,
plants and animals that Lewis and
Clark had collected along the way.
The last
task of the voyage — publishing their account —
fell to Lewis. He had kept the
raw notes and
journals he and Clark had painstakingly carried to
the Pacific and back with the
goal of editing
them into final form. But besets8 by
administrative battles in his new job as
Governor of Louisiana Territory, frustrated in
his romantic aspirations and sinking into a
depression fueled by alcohol and possibly
disease, Lewis developed one of history's
monumental
cases of writer's block 59 He never
turned in a single Iine.
On Oct. 28, 1809,
Clark read the shocking report in a Kentucky
newspaper that Lewis had
killed himself on the
Natchez Trace, near Nashville, Ten. “I fear O! I
fear the weight of his mind
has over come
him,
debated, though most historians believe it
was suicide.) A month after Lewis' death, in a
remarkable letter published in May in James
Holmberg's Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark
to
Jonathan Clark, William wrote that, in his
final delirium,6' Lewis would apparently conceive
he herd me Coming on, and Said that he was
certain [I would] over take him, that I had herd
of
his Situation and would Come to his
relief.
In one sense, Clark did exactly that in
taking over the project. After further delays,
including
the bankruptcy of the original
pubfisher, the journals finally came out in a two-
volume edition in
1814 that left out most of
the expedition's significant scientific
discoveries.
What it did include was a
cartographic masterpiece: Clark's map of the West.
For the first
time the blank spaces on the
continent had been filled in with generally
accurate representations
of mountain ranges
and rivers. Prominently marked on Clark's map were
the names of dozens of
tribes that lived
there, in bold type that continues to undermine
the notion that the West was
ever an
unpopulated wilderness.
The press run was a
paltry 1,417 copies. It sold poorly. Two years
later, Clark still had not
received his own
copy. By that time the nation was beginning to
forget about Lewis and Clark.
Well-publicized
explorations led by John Charles Fremont through
the Rockies to California and
John Wesley
Powell down the Colorado River eventually eclipsed
the Voyage of Discovery in the
public's
imaginings of the West. Yet publishing would
revive69 their reputations. New editions of
the journals were published in 1893 and
1904-05, bringing the sagato life a century after
it
happened.
When the men of the Corps of
Discovery had arrived back in St. Louis in 1806,
the residents
“Huzzahed three cheers.” But
they otherwise did not seem to know what to make
of this crew or
its achievement. Two nights
later, they feted the captains at William
Christy's inn. There they
raised toasts to,
among others, President Jefferson (polar star of
discovery
Columbus ( Industry (
is the best
support of government
final toast, they seemed
to be at a loss for words. Finally they settled
for saluting
services [that] endear
them to every American heart.
It has been that
way ever since.
From Time, July 8, 2002