Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists by Paul Russell Cutright, and: Lewis and Clark on the Great Plains: A Natural History by Paul A. Johnsgard

Abstract

B o o k R e v ie w s 3 5 3 Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists. By Paul Russell Cutright. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 522 pages, $24.95. Lewis and Clark on the Qreat Plains: A Natural History. By Paul A. Johnsgard. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. 143 pages, $14.95. Reviewed by Leo J. Mahoney Kafkas University, Kars, Turkey May 2004 marks the two hundredth anniversary of the start of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s famous expedition to Fort Clatsop on the Pacific Coast and back to St. Louis more than two years later. Only a century later, in 1905, did Reuben Gold Thwaites finally publish the first complete edition of the expedition’s journals. Eleven years before Thwaites’s work appeared, Elliott Coues published a comprehensive survey of the biological aspects of the expedition’s scientific discoveries. The most accessible, contemporary chronicle of the Lewis and Clark trail, and a sensitive commentary on socioeconomic and environmental conditions in much of the American West, is Dayton Duncan’s literate and thoughtful Out West: AmericanJourney along the Lewis and Clark Trail (1987). If all travel books were as good as Duncan’s, people would stay at home and read them, and the buffalo could resettle those portions of the Great Plains that lay along Lewis and Clark’s route, as the New Jerseyan scholars Frank and Deborah Popper suggested in their article “The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust” in Planning (Dec. 1987). Not surprisingly, the script for Ken Bums’s 1997 film Lewis and Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery was written by Dayton Duncan. Eighteen years before Duncan’s book appeared in 1969, another literate and provocative work on Lewis and Clark’s trail was published by American zoologist Paul Russell Cutright (1897-1988). The University ofNebraska Press reissued Cutright’s classic work last year in time for the expedition’s bicenten­ nial celebration. Cutright’s Lewis and Clark: Pioneering Naturalists is almost as intellectually fetching as Dayton’s Out West. Like Dayton’s chatty travelogue, Cutright’s relation is embellished by reflections on the author’s encounters and ruminations along the expeditionary trail. However, unlike Dayton’s book, which has user-friendly maps of the explorers’ routes, Cutright’s work—sur­ prisingly for a study of natural history along the trail—lacks any helpful maps. Then, too, both Cutright’s and Dayton’s journeys were more successful than NASA’s 1994-1997 efforts to send two satellites named Lewis and Clark into space orbits for topographical and environmental studies. As to Cutright’s lit­ erary abilities, his book is outstanding, especially considering that his stated aim was to record a geographical footprint of Lewis and Clark’s botanical and zoological discoveries as evidence of their claim to scientific preeminence. To cover his research agenda, Cutright included a thorough bibliography 3 5 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F A L L 2 0 0 4 and valuable appendices of plants and animals discovered by Lewis and Clark (cross-referenced to Thwaites and Coues) and a list of where the original Lewis and Clark journals and maps are housed. It is an impressive achievement, though a few criticisms may be in order from a literary perspective. Cutright’s use of language now seems old-fashioned—“Hereabouts Clark commented” and “adequate to their wants,” for instance (344, 107). More seriously, this reviewer detected dismissive indications of what might have been Cutright’s valedictory notions of science as a strictly masculine preserve. For example, Cutright does not seem to have had much tolerance for the Smithsonian botanist Velva E. Rudd, who, he wrote, “Doubtless ... confused” a bundle of dried plants numbered 1-60 “with a shipment of earths, salts and minerals numbered 1-67” (357). Cutright did not like some of Bernard De Voto’s his­ torical ruminations about the Lewis and Clark expedition either; in historio­ graphical matters, though, there is room for differences in the interpretations of the two men. Cutright’s reconstmctions of Lewis and Clark’s observations of natural phenomena...