Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness - Hardcover

Slaughter, Thomas P.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375400788 ISBN 13: 9780375400780

Publisher: Knopf, 2003

Synopsis

Most Americans know that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led our nation’s first trans-continental exploratory expedition, which was sent west by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803. Their journey is one of the most celebrated events in American history and one of the most written about. But most of us do not know any more than what the explorers told us, or what they wanted readers of their voluminous journals to know, or anything other than what they understood about themselves and their wilderness experiences.

Exploring Lewis and Clark probes beneath the traditional narrative of the journey, looking beyond the perspectives of the explorers themselves to those of the woman and the men who accompanied them, as well as of the Indians who met them along the way.

It reexamines the journals and what they suggest about Lewis’s and Clark’s misinterpretations of the worlds they passed through and the people in them. Thomas Slaughter portrays Lewis and Clark not as heroes but as men—brave, bound by cultural prejudices and blindly hell-bent on achieving their goal.

He searches for the woman Sacajawea rather than the icon that she has become. He seeks the historical rather than the legendary York, Clark’s slave. He discovers what the various tribes made of the expedition, including the notion that this multiracial, multiethnic group was embarked on a search for spiritual meaning.

Thomas Slaughter shines an entirely new light on an event basic to our understanding of ourselves. He has given us an important work of investigative history.

About this title

Review:

The story of the Lewis and Clark expedition is one of America's most enduring myths. Of the hundreds of books that have been written on the subject, many perpetuate the heroism of the Corps of Discovery above all else, often at the expense of accuracy. Thomas Slaughter takes a different approach in this fascinating book, choosing to "look beneath the explorers' narrative for different meanings than those they intended us to find," reminding readers in the process that the journals have generally, and mistakenly, been "read as fonts of fact rather than as honed reflections designed for effect." Undoubtedly, some will label this revisionism, but Slaughter sees it as an opportunity to discover what the explorers' true thoughts and experiences were. He explains: "My observations are intended as correctives to our readings, usages, and understanding of the journals, not as a knock on the journalists or what they wrote. All texts are vulnerable to close readings, but explorers' journals are interestingly, revealingly, and essentially so."

Not surprisingly, the myths scarcely hold up to such scrutiny. For instance, Lewis and Clark were not the first white men to travel overland to the Pacific coast, but they often tried to ignore this unpleasant fact by renaming places or landmarks along the way. The importance of "opening the West" is also called into question: "westward movement would have continued without a moment's hesitation had all the expedition members died on the trail," Slaughter writes. He also looks at the lives and roles of Sacajawea and York, Clark's slave, explaining how their status within the group has been exaggerated as a way to make the expedition seem more democratic than it truly was. Slaughter even surmises that the notorious gaps in Lewis's journal and his reluctance to publish it upon their return may have been because Lewis saw the journey as a failure, and therefore felt there was nothing significant to document for posterity.

This book is no exercise in political correctness; rather, Slaughter digs deeply into the available evidence to offer a different perspective on the journey that helped define America, proving that yet another book on Lewis and Clark is not only welcome, but necessary. --Shawn Carkonen

From the Back Cover:

"This book unquestionably establishes Thomas Slaughter as one of the subtlest, most insightful historians writing today. Readers will emerge from this exploration with a new understanding of Lewis and Clark and their famous expedition."
--Thomas Fleming, author of Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America

"Tom Slaughter’s Exploring Lewis and Clark is a sometimes wickedly delightful re-examination of our legend of the Lewis and Clark expedition."
--Kenneth A. Lockridge, author of The Diary amd Life of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674-1744

“[The book] to read first. . . Slaughter marches into the voluminous pages of the journals of the expedition (and the legend that has grown around them) and performs a scintillating close reading, thinking deeply about the attitudes, wishes, and dreams of the men who wrote them. . . Slaughter at his best is wise and observant, even empathetic. . . other chapters, though, delve deep and ask questions that will forever change my reading of these men.”
–Bill Roorbach, Newsday

“A rueful reading of the historical record that delights in considering some of the thorniest questions within it. . . Three million words of firsthand history cannot tell us, but Slaughter gives us some reasonable and altogether fascinating guesses. They could not be timelier. . . and deserve our close attention at the dawn of yet another American empire.”
–Gregory McNamee, Washington Post Book World

“In a provocative new book. . . Thomas P. Slaughter argues that [the mythology of the explorer] was even pursued by Lewis and Clark, neither of whom was what he seemed.”
–Edward Rothstein, New York Times

“Slaughter’s fascinating new book. . . stands on the shoulders of the past century’s scholarship. It also stands some of the scholarship on its head. Where Thomas Jefferson saw ‘courage undaunted,’ Slaughter rediscovers the daunting challenges that inspired both anxiety and valor.”
–John Kukla, Times-Picayune

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0375400788
• ISBN 13: 9780375400780
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256