Dissecting the Columbia

Abstract

Meriwether Lewis Dissecting the Columbia AnIntroduction Euro-american explorers had seen much of theworld before they directed their attention to the northwest corner ofNorth America. Mariners from Spain, Great Britain, and theUnited States had circumnavigated the globe before theymade their way to the rugged, natural resource-rich coastline of present-day Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. In the late eighteenth century, adventuring mariners sought out resources and the illusive Northwest Pas sage. Meanwhile, land explorers had charted theMississippi River Valley and traders had made theirway up theMissouri River to Indian villages as far north as present-day North Dakota. Hudson's Bay Company and North West Company fur traders had fanned west fromHudson Bay and 354 OHQ vol. 105, no. 3 ? 2004 Oregon Historical Society Woodcuts by Jim Todd,Missoula, Montana. Used bypermissionof theartist. Montreal to theContinental Divide; and one of them, Alexander Mack enzie, had trekked across the continent to the Pacific Ocean in 1793.These explorations were part of what historian William Goetzmann has called the Second Great Age of Discovery, a burst of aggressive investigations of continents and seas far distant from Europe. The Lewis and Clark Expedition was the first of a succession of ex plorations of the trans-Mississippi West that carried out dual missions of imperialistic claim and scientific discovery. The expedition was also part of a broader exploration of regions that had not been mapped or described by Euro-Americans, an effort thatwould occupy scientific explorers for most of the nineteenth century and would take them to Africa, South America, and the Arctic. In the American West, Zebulon Pike, Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis, Charles Wilkes, John Fremont, Stephen Long, and John Wesley Powell carried out missions similar to Lewis and Clark's. Acquiring accurate information about topography, watersheds and river systems, flora and fauna, and natural resources served nationalistic and scientific purposes. It is also important to remember that the Corps of Discovery and subsequent expeditions went west as official government parties, most as military contingents. They were meant, as President Thomas Jeffersonwrote in his instructions toMeriwether Lewis in 1803, Dissecting theColumbia 355 CarletonWatkins, photographer, OHS neg.,OrHi 21096 Cape Horn, Columbia River, 1867 tobe investigations, "to be takenwith great pains & accuracy, tobe entered distinctly & intelligibly for others as well as yourself." In practical terms, Jefferson's instructions required thatLewis and Clark catalog the regions they traversed. That meant a purposeful, careful, and often meticulous survey of the environment. Nowhere in their trekwas thismore important than in theColumbia River Basin. The United States had not acquired the region and had only Capt. Robert Gray's 1792 survey 356 OHQ vol. 105, no. 3 of themouth of the Columbia River as a pretext for a claim. The explor ers' discoveries in the basin provided theU.S. government with its first detailed description of the region, the result of scientific observations and notations thatLewis and Clark recorded in their journals. The voluminous journals of the expedition ? including daily entries, maps, field notes, course and distance records, miscellany, and collected plants ? document the explorers' observations in fine detail. Reading the journals, we learn what they discovered and often the conditions of discovery, from their first descriptions of plants and animals to the location of Indian villages and the geography of the Columbia country. Reviewing and analyzing their descriptions of theColumbia River Basin environment provides an opportunity to see the landscape as they did and to ask questions about what they understood, what subsequent scientific investigations have discovered about the region, and what enormous ecological changes the river has endured since 1806. My interest in Lewis and Clark comes from a broader set of questions about environmental change in the Columbia River Basin, especially how we have understood theways inwhich human activity has altered the landscape. It is, in large part, a focus on the history of place and how we have understood the changes over time. Scientific observation ? by Lewis and Clark and scientists since their great exploration ? provides a baseline for understanding what has happened since the expedition, and that becomes a prime justification for studying it. As important, though, are the explanations we have offered for Lewis and Clark's experience on...