River of Promise: Lewis and Clark on the Columbia by David L. Nicandri Clay S. Jenkinson

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 112, no. 1 The last few pages of the book provide intriguing insights to the enigmatic figure of Senator Henry Jackson. An avowed cold warrior and an advocate of a strong American military, the “Senator from Boeing” was also a liberal on domestic issues, authoring some of the nation’s most important environmental laws and arguably the most significant political figure in bringing sovereignty to Indian people. Pacific Northwest tribes, in particular, worked closely with Jackson — even during his termination days — because he had a remarkable capacity to listen. Jackson’s association with Gerard, Trahant concludes, led to“steady progress on tribal control”(p. 116). Even in his two presidential bids, unlike other candidates, Jackson never used his successes on behalf of Indians to advance his candidacy. Trahant has special praise for the senator’s willingness to bring Forrest Gerard to the Senate Interior Committee and for refusing to use Indians as props to promote himself. Despite minor flaws — redundancies and too many lengthy quotations — this is a very revealing book. William G. Robbins Oregon State University River of Promise: Lewis and Clark on the Columbia by David L. Nicandri foreword by Clay S. Jenkinson University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2010. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 325 pages. $29.95 cloth. $18.95 paper. When considering the Lewis and Clark Expedition and all the attention it received just a few years ago, it is hard to imagine that anything can or should be said about the subject — at least for a while.It is a pleasant surprise,then,to find much that is new and important in David Nicandri’s River of Promise: Lewis and Clark on the Columbia. As Clay Jenkinson notes in the book’s foreword, Nicandri provides a unique, close reading of the journals that will “inspire and pave the way for other scholars” in the post-bicentennial era (p. xiii). Nicandri is both a historian of the nineteenth -century Pacific Northwest, with a particular talent for the finer details of local history, and a long-time director of the Washington State Historical Society. The latter position made him a key player in the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial and provided a deep understanding of the event’s broad significance as well as its banal boosterism. This unique experience indirectly informs much of the book, which is equally concerned with enlarging scholarly understandings of the expedition as it is with reinterpreting stories and events associated with locally celebrated sites along the Columbia River drainage. This twin effort, and the skills Nicandri honed in the study of local histories, has been strengthened by the application of literary analysis. The result is a level of intellectual creativity that allows River of Promise to range, in the course of a single page,from minute details about the missteps of a packhorse in the Bitteroot Mountains to the narrative tropes and grand imperial concerns of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century exploration. River of Promise has several theses, but much of the book, as Nicandri notes in his preface, is devoted to correcting “a significant shortcoming in the literature of the expedition [that stems from] the relatively small amount of analysis given to the voyage down the Snake and Columbia Rivers compared to the Missourian phases” (p. 3). As Nicandri makes plain, the Corps of Discovery found the area west of the Continental Divide to be more challenging than conditions on the Missouri River. It is in the Columbia drainage that Jeffersonian expectations about geography,commerce,and national destiny were most thwarted and challenged ,and that ideas and actions of the Corps of Discovery are most telling in their efforts to  Reviews resurrect or craft new geopolitical, personal, and interethnic understandings from scratch. By the time Lewis and Clark reached the lower Columbia River in October 1805, they were moving through a world already mapped by the British and dealing with Native peoples already connected to global trade networks. Lewis and Clark also feared (rightly) that they had not found the headwaters of the Columbia River, let alone the best route from eastern North America to the Pacific. Instead, their efforts seemed to confirm that Alexander MacKenzie, whose writings they carried...