Clark Expedition Research Articles

William Clark's world: describing America in an age of unknowns

William Clark, co-captain of the famous Lewis and Clark Expedition, devoted his adult life to describing the American West. But this task raised a daunting challenge: how best to bring an unknown continent to life for the young republic? Through Clark's life and career, this book explores how the West entered the American imagination. While he never called himself a writer or an artist, Clark nonetheless drew maps, produced books, drafted reports, surveyed landscapes, and wrote journals that made sense of the West for a new nation fascinated by the region's potential but also fearful of its dangers. William Clark's World presents a new take on the manifest destiny narrative and on the way the West took shape in the national imagination in the early nineteenth century.

Voicing the Voiceless: Double-Consciousness in When Winter Come

Voicing the Voiceless: Double-Consciousness in When Winter Come Leah Bachmann (bio) For his second book about the Lewis and Clark expedition When Winter Come, Frank X Walker explores the voices of characters forgotten by history. The central character York, William Clark’s slave, and the Native Americans that the Corps of Discovery encountered on their trip have been absent from history or been mythologized through stereotypes. Walker shows his readers that the colonized men and women, both African Americans and Native Americans, have more depth than has previously been depicted. Colonialist literature, like the journals of Lewis and Clark and the history written after their journey, depicts these marginalized men and women as two-dimensional stock characters. Abdul R. JanMohamed states that part of the purpose of the colonialist writing is to “dehistoricize and desocialize the conquered world” (68). As a post-colonialist writer, Walker rehistoricizes and resocializes the history written during or soon after colonization. Through this attempt, Walker shows the double-consciousness of the colonized people who up until this point have had no context and been described as caricatures, stereotypes, or left out of history completely. It is through this exploration of double-consciousness that Walker can begin to create and the reader can begin to relate to an identity for the colonized people. In his first book about the Lewis and Clark expedition, Buffalo Dance, Walker recognizes the often historically overlooked York. After completing more research, Walker realized that York’s story was not complete. In the introduction, Walker states his aims for When Winter Come: “It seeks to validate the voices of enslaved African Americans and Native peoples during a time in American history when their points of view were considered invalid” (Introduction). Walker’s second book gives a voice to Sacagawea, York’s enslaved wife, and York’s Nez Perce wife along with York himself, which leads to a more complete depiction of the journey. Walker uses the Native American culture as a foil that allows York to understand himself and his lack of an identity outside of the one imposed on him by [End Page 42] his master. By comparing the Native Americans’ pre-colonial identity with York’s colonized identity, Walker shows the reader how complex York’s character is. In his essay “The Souls of Black Folk” written in 1904, W. E. B. DuBois coins the term double-consciousness. DuBois is specifically discussing double-consciousness as an African American’s struggle to reconcile his or her two separate identities: a self-consciousness and an imposed consciousness. Du Bois says that African Americans do not have a true self-consciousness, but rather they see themselves through “the revelations of the other world” (694). He writes, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” (694). While DuBois is writing after the end of slavery, this idea of double-consciousness is revealing when considering Walker’s When Winter Come. Walker shows York continually struggling to understand his identity. As he travels on the expedition and meets different Native American tribes, his eyes are opened to men and women who have formed their own identities outside of colonization. Walker creates an environment in which York and the reader can begin to explore the dual nature of identity after colonization. While preparing to write both books, Walker did extensive research into the life of York and his experience on the expedition. One book that Walker found particularly useful was Robert Betts’ In Search of York. Betts takes the reader through York’s depiction in history, both in Lewis and Clark’s journals and in subsequent history and novels written about the trip. It is important to note that Lewis and Clark’s journals do not depict York simply as a stereotype. Through the journals, it is clear that York contributed strongly to the success of the expedition. York is not a central figure...

The Fifth Generation: A Nez Perce Tale (review)

Reviewed by: The Fifth Generation: A Nez Perce Tale Loree Westron The Fifth Generation: A Nez Perce Tale. By Linwood Laughy. Kooskia, ID: Mountain Meadow Press, 2009. 258 pages, $23.95. In September of 1805, the Lewis and Clark expedition emerged from the Bitterroot Mountains into what is now North Central Idaho. Half starved from their arduous journey, they were fed and befriended by the local Nez Perce, being the first white men they had encountered. According to an epigraph to Linwood Laughy's first novel, The Fifth Generation: A Nez Perce Tale, Nez Perce oral tradition predicted this meeting with white men coming from the East and stated that it would result in difficult times for the tribe for five generations. Following the story of Isaac Moses, who embodies the fifth generation, the novel weaves together 150 years of history. In alternating chapters, we see the Nez Perce world change utterly, and the heartache of Isaac's family is revealed as they and their community struggle to keep pace. At the center of the story is the spiritual rift created by the missionaries Henry and Eliza Spalding, which divided the Nez Perce in two: Christians who acquiesced to white demands and non-Christian Dreamers who clung to their traditional beliefs. We see the treaties of 1855 and 1863 squeeze the people onto a smaller and smaller reservation as gold prospectors and settlers move into the Nez Perce homeland; we see the war of 1877 and the epic but ultimately futile journey made by the Dreamers; we see the people divided still further, from one another and from the land, by the Dawes Act and the allotment system. In a particularly moving scene, Laughy recreates the heartache of forced assimilation at the Carlisle Indian School: Mary did not dance. The drumming in her soul had been lost along the tracks of the Union Pacific, in the sand hills of Nebraska, in the cemetery behind Hatfield Hall where Carlisle's youthful dead were buried in the Pennsylvania night—brown skin and black hair with names like Rachel, Sarah, Jonah and James. No sound of drums, no sweetgrass smoke, a hurried prayer to a god who spoke neither Nez Perce nor Sioux, Hidatsa nor Crow. (22) It's a familiar story of betrayal and loss, but through Isaac, Laughy presents the potential for renewal. Taking receipt of a government check issued to each of the Nez Perce in recompense for gold extracted illegally [End Page 109] during nineteenth-century gold rushes, Isaac is confronted with a choice: he can drink away the money in the Boots & Saddles Bar or he can reclaim his life. Under the guidance of the aging shaman, Raven Eye, Isaac reconnects with his family's past to discover his true identity, thus becoming the vehicle for carrying the Dreamer traditions into the future. A North Idaho native and historical tour guide, Linwood Laughy knows the landscape and history of the region intimately. Through exquisitely crafted prose, he brings a distant world to life and shows how the past remains with us always, shaping the present and influencing the future. Loree Westron University of Chichester, Chichester, UK Copyright © 2011 Western Literature Association

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

 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...

Old Bear: Mandan Medicine Man

OLD BEAR (MAH-TO-HE-HAH) was a Mandan medicine man—according to the nineteenth-century painter George Catlin, the most important medicine man of his tribe. Catlin believed that the Mandan were a “dying race” and he wanted to use his paintings to preserve as much as he could of their culture.1 Catlin portrayed Old Bear with his body painted in various colors, with medicine pipes adorned with eagle feathers in his hands and fox tails attached to his heels.2 The Mandan Indians lived at the mouth of the Knife River—a tributary of the Missouri River—near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota. One translation of the word “Mandan” is “Those Who Dwell by the Water.”3 The Mandan were unlike many other Plains Indian tribes in that they were not nomadic hunters, but instead lived in permanent villages made up of large, round earth lodges approximately 50 feet high and 40 to 60 feet in diameter. A sacred cedar post, surrounded by an open plaza, marked the center of each village and served as the focal point of religious and public activities. At one end of the plaza stood the tribe's medicine or ceremonial lodge—the most important building in the village.4,5 Mah-to-he-hah, Old Bear, A Medicine Man. Painting by George Catlin, 1832. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. The Mandan villages were located at the junction of several major trade routes, putting the Mandan in contact with both native and non-native groups from as early as the early 1700s. Consequently, they had access to some of the most valued trade items of the time, including buffalo hides, obsidian, copper, shells, and guns. The Mandan themselves were purveyors of important trade goods, such as their surplus crops of squash, pumpkin, corn, sunflowers, and beans, as well as high quality local flint used for stone tools found all over the North American continent. In general, the Mandan were accommodating and peaceful in their interactions with non-native peoples, as demonstrated by their willingness to take in and feed the entire Lewis and Clark Expedition in the winter of 1804 in exchange for a steady stream of trade goods.6,7 When Catlin met Old Bear in 1832, he was surrounded by students whom he was instructing in the mysteries of the material medica—herbal remedies—and ceremonial practices. At first Old Bear refused to have his portrait painted but then acquiesced and, when it was finally finished, was delighted with the results. Catlin, no doubt, had paid careful attention to the details of Old Bear's ceremonial attire, which he painted with meticulous accuracy. The painter later claimed that Old Bear would lie for hours in front of his picture, gazing at it intensely, and spoke highly to others about Catlin's talents.2 The medicine men were able to treat the normal ills of the tribe, but were often powerless against the new diseases introduced by white settlers. In the early 1780s, for example, a smallpox epidemic drastically reduced the Mandan population from about 3600 to approximately 1250.8 Their fate worsened in 1837—a mere five years after Catlin's visit—when yet another smallpox outbreak swept through their villages, reducing their numbers to approximately 150. Although the Mandan have lived with the Hidatsa and Arikara as the “Three Affiliated Tribes” on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota since 1934, their numbers have never fully recovered.5

The Northern Great Plains as Viewed by the Lewis and Clark Expedition

The Northern Great Plains as Viewed by the Lewis and Clark Expedition DOI:10.2458/azu_rangelands_v32i5_kirby

DANIEL ROYOT. — Divided Loyalties in a Doomed Empire: The French in the West from New France to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2007, 282 pp.)

DANIEL ROYOT. — Divided Loyalties in a Doomed Empire: The French in the West from New France to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. (Newark: U of Delaware P, 2007, 282 pp.)

Mars Surface Exploration Caching from an Orbiting Logistics Depot

E XPLORATION missions on Earth have used the principle of caching for centuries. Caching involves prepositioning discrete quantities of supplies at specific locations along a route in order to lighten the burden or extend the range of an exploring party. Historical missions that made use of caching on Earth are the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1803–1806 [1] and the ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917 [2]. Caching may play an important role in the future of manned planetary exploration as well. Without it, exploration sorties are inherently limited to a specific distance from a base or landing location given by the type of transportation vehicles used, the size of the crew, the mix and quantity of consumables, operational rules, and the nature of the terrain. For manned lunar missions, for example, this distance has been estimated at 3 km for exploration on foot, 5–15 km with unpressurized rovers, and up to 30 kmwith pressurized rovers [3]. In part, exploration range is determined by the quantity of consumables that can be carried along, limiting the amount of useful exploration that can be done at distances greater than 30 km from the landing site or base. Similar issues exist for manned Mars exploration. This Note explores the concept of storing caches in a logistics depot on orbit and deliberately deploying them to the surface to extend human exploration range.Wewill useMars as the motivating context, but the idea may apply to other situations as well. We first introduce the concept and then perform initial sizing of such a depot. This Note does not explore the full tradespace of orbital depots and caching architectures. Caching in space exploration can be implemented as two different architectures: direct entry from inspace trajectory and orbital entry from a low Mars orbit. While the direct entry does not contain the Martian orbit insertion maneuver and can be more efficient in terms of required V, this Note only considers the orbital entry because of the following two reasons. First, the short time gap between deployment decision and actual landing of the supply unit provides meaningful flexibility to operate on orbit. Secondly, advanced propulsion systems such as a nuclear electric propulsion system (NEP) and solar electric propulsion can significantly reduce the cost resulting from the orbit insertion, and the efficiency gap gets very small. Let us consider an orbiting logistics depot that is composed of a cluster of supply units deployed to aMartian orbit. Each prepackaged supply unit contains supply items (fuel and consumables) that allow extending the range of humans exploring the surface of Mars. Figure 1 shows the orbiting depot concept and its concept of operations. Typically, one or more surface vehicles start exploration from a base and return to the base before all fuel and consumables (e.g., fuel, food, water, and oxygen) have been expended. This is the case of an unassisted surface route, yielding a total distanceD. In this case, the amount of fuel and consumables that can be used during a single route is determined by the capacity of the surface exploration vehicle. Now suppose that there is a logistics depot in Martian orbit and it is possible to command the depot to drop a supply unit (pod) filled with a known mix and quantity of consumables corresponding approximately to a vehicle’s capacity. If the supply unit lands at such a location that the surface exploration vehicle can reach the unit before it runs out of consumables, the vehicle’s range can effectively be doubled to 2D. This is the case of the depot-assisted surface route shown in Fig. 1 (right) along with a simulated pod landing error ellipse. In the following sections we discuss the most important design decisions for such an orbiting depot, including orbit selection, individual supply unit design, and depot operations. These calculations are meant to establish a realistic “strawman” for the concept. Studies regarding detailed design in the context of specific surface exploration campaign strategies are left for future work.

American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State , and: River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain (review)

American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State. By Stephen Aron. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Pp. 301. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $29.95; Paper, $21.95.)River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain. By Thomas Ruys Smith. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Pp. 232. Cloth, $38.00.)Reviewed by Ann OstendorfJust as the American public turned attention to the Mississippi River at the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, so too have scholars begun revisiting the significance of the river region to the nation. Although both Stephen Aron's American Confluence and Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams present studies of this river, their questions, methods, and approaches present very different but very useful stories of this place.In American Confluence, Stephen Aron tells the tale of what he calls the or the area surrounding the eastern Missouri, western Ohio, and middle Mississippi rivers, from its earliest Native history to Missouri's first years of statehood. This is story whose parts have been told multiple times in many ways before; however, Aron attempts to unify the disparate interpretations by re-imagining them within new framework. Using primarily secondary sources and drawing on approaches from global history, Aron describes place where interculturai interaction, accommodation, and cooperation dominated. The word refers not only to the joining of rivers but also to the meeting of people. By leaving the boundaries of the confluence region purposefully vague, the author successfully expresses history of the place more as contemporaries experienced it; moveable, fluid, and changing. The region remained place of transition for both Natives and colonials, where new trading partners passed through, new arrivals found home, and new colonial administrators divided and redivided their territorial claims. That is, until the arrival of the Americans.Thus, the story reverts to the more familiar political history of aggressive frontier expansion at the expense of the accommodationist precedents, which had been carefully and consciously maintained by the French, Spanish, British, Osage, Shawnee, and Delaware. Although the rivers continued to merge, the confluence of people ended. With American hegemony, the borderland disappeared. Without the ability to play one colonial power off another, Native lost power in the confluence region, especially with the flood of Kentucky and Tennessee settlers after the War of 1812. During this deluge, squatters swept away generations of inclusive intercultural relations (158-59), system Aron implies existed as mutually beneficial to natives and colonists alike. Despite the familiar ending, Aran's retelling of the regional events avoids assuming the inevitability of Missouri statehood and American domination, with more emphasis on how the American actions were radical disruptions with jarring effects on the Native and colonial population already in the confluence region.Although it does not deliver any new research, it is Aron's approach that is most useful for scholars of the region. In some ways this work is an application of Richard White's middle ground theory applied to the region further south. Aron re-envisions the Mississippi Valley historically as place of exchange and adaptation, describing the confluence region as moving, like other borderlands, from contested boundaries between colonial domains to frontier - which he defines as a meeting place of peoples - and eventually to place of oppositional border states (xiii, xvi). During this first change, the Osage dominated; however, their position deteriorated once the region ceased being meeting place between people and became meeting point of north, south, east, and west with the birth of the border state of Missouri. By the 1820s, Missouri's border state status, as opposed to its borderland position, had thoroughly reshaped the interactions of the population. …

Re-making the Teton identity by celebrating ‘Lewis and Clark’

This article examines an attempt to re-make the Teton identity at the site of the bicentennial celebrations of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–1806. The pageant took place in Fort Pierre, South Dakota, in September 2004 at the initiative of the Lakota Heritage Society. The author observed and recorded the performance as a part of his ethnographic fieldwork. The performance was based on two competing narratives: an excerpt from the Lewis and Clark journals made in the aftermath of the actual encounter between the expeditors and the Lakota tribe, and the theatricalised response by the contemporary members of the Lakota. The analysis of the performance demonstrated that by seeking self-restitution, the Lakota performers opted for the rhetorical strategy ‘difference in sameness.’ In the end, this strategy failed to create a new and desired identity.

Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man. by Barton H. Barbour

 Reviews today provides a warning for escape,which did not exist in 1903. Despite a few minor quibbles concerning community context, the author has written a useful and as complete an account of the Heppner Flood and its consequences for the people of that town as records will allow. The book’s ultimate strength is the way it recaptures the human dimension of the story by showing how various individuals attempted to make sense of what happened to them and their community as a result of an overwhelming natural disaster. William F. Willingham Portland, Oregon Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man by Barton H. Barbour University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2009. Illustrations, maps, index. 288 pages. $26.95 cloth. Mountain man stereotypes have long dominated popular images of the fur-trading enterprise in the Rocky Mountain West during the first half of the nineteenth century. Telling and retelling their exploits has made them larger-than-life figures and tended to simplify our understanding of a complex era and a complicated business.In Jedediah Smith: No Ordinary Mountain Man, historian Barton Barbour plays off the typecast roles fur trappers have played in the western American saga by interpreting Smith’s life in the context of an era of aggressiveexpansion.Smith,Barbourargues, was a complex man who did not mistake the historic role of the fur trade enterprise.He was a man who lent his energy to the expansion of American enterprise and political hegemony to the FarWest as“a walking symbol of Jacksonian America” (p. 264–65). Barbour’s treatment of Smith’s life in the West is a comprehensive and thoughtful discussion of the trader’s brief but significant experience in western America. Smith had been born in western New York, where his neighbor was Patrick Gass, veteran of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. Whether because of stories from Gass or other sources, Smith longed for adventure as a teenager and struck out west to St. Louis, where he joined William Ashley’s fur trading enterprise in 1822. By 1825, his prowess and energy made him a business partner, and in 1826, he formed his own company with David Jackson and William Sublette. He spent less than a decade in the Far West, but his explorations contributed significantly to American western expansion, even if he did not meet his own ambitions as a trader. Smith died at the hands of Comanches along the Santa Fe Trail in 1831, at the age of thirty-two. Barbour’s book is not so much revisionist as it is new and complete. There is much here that we have long known about Smith, such as his storied and historic treks across the Rockies, the arid Southwest,California,Oregon,and the Columbia Plateau. Other familiar topics and episodes detailed here include Smith’s near scalping by a grizzly bear in 1823, but there is also new information that fills in murky parts of the trader’s peregrinations, especially the tense relations he had in California with Mexican officials who tried to impede his trapping . Barbour draws on recently discovered documents that bolster his interpretation of Smith as an advocate of American expansion. The author dispenses with the oft-repeated characterization of Smith as a Bible-toting mountain man who tried to convert Indians to Christianity. Smith was deeply religious, Barbour concedes, but“his western career was economically, not ecclesiastically, motivated” (p. 261). Readers of Oregon Historical Quarterly will find interest in the author’s coverage of Smith’s historic transit of Oregon in 1828 and the famous ambush of his party on the Umpqua River near present-day Reedsport by Kelawat-  OHQ vol. 111, no. 1 sets. The attack, which took place while Smith was absent, left more than a dozen of Smith’s men dead or dying and the survivors,including Smith, on foot and defenseless. After they had slogged on north to Fort Vancouver, Hudson’s Bay Company Chief Factor John McLoughlin listened to their tale of disaster and detailed a party underAlexander McLeod to the Umpqua to secure Smith’s property and tamp down the Kelawatsets’ animus against traders. Smith sought vengeance, a reaction that Barbour arguesfitsahard-nosedattitudetowardNatives that Smith consistently exhibited during his...

Connecting Oregon: The Slow Road to Rapid Communications, 1843–2009

 OHQ vol. 111, no. 2 Frank Dillow Connecting Oregon© 2010 Oregon Historical Society The Slow Road to Rapid Communications, 1843–2009 Times were tough on the Missouri frontier in the spring of 1846. Land speculation fueled an economic collapse, which led to bank failures. Farmers, unable to sell their crops, faced foreclosure. Oregon’s land, free for the taking, beckoned James Brown, who, along with his wife Lucinda and two-year-old son Matt,left behind his Missouri home onApril 11,joining the estimated 1,200 emigrants streaming west that summer.1 Many adorned their wagons with banners proclaiming “all of Oregon,” reflecting their support of President James K. Polk’s threats to England to end the two nations’joint occupation of the Oregon Country.2 On October 15, six months after leaving Missouri, Brown settled his family on their square-mile donation land claim along the banks of Silver Creek,land that would become the northern end of Silverton.3 Today, it is hard to imagine just how isolated life was for newcomers to Oregon like the Brown family. In June, shortly after they left Missouri, Polk signed a treaty with England, separating American Oregon from British Canada. Oregonians would not learn about the change until November,nearlyamonthaftertheBrowns’arrival.WithnoAmericanpostal service in Oregon until 1847, after the end of joint United States–British occupation of the area, travelers to or from Oregon carried communications , including mail, newspapers, money, legal documents, and supplies, to be delivered when they arrived.4 As the Lewis and Clark Expedition had discovered, there was no“direct and practicable”route to shorten the miles separating Oregon from the rest of the nation.5 But distance was not the only obstacle. Because information traveled no faster than the person who carried it, even a few words took months to hand deliver across the two thousand miles between Missouri and Oregon.  Dillow, Oregon Communications, 1843–2009 New communication technologies, however, would eventually reduce and then eliminate time and distance from the equation of information delivery.With limited resources in Oregon,it took local commitment to add each innovation, although changes were frequently financed by the federal government or national corporations. In Oregon’s rural areas, small town entrepreneurs and do-it-yourself farmers, including the Browns, cobbled together their local systems. Their contributions can be measured in generations . Matt Brown became one of Silverton’s first postmasters. His son Percy founded the town’s telephone company. Percy’s son and grandsons expanded the business until it was acquired by a national holding company, eventually becoming part of Verizon, one of the largest telecommunication giants in the world. Even before the Browns left Missouri, the seeds for Oregon’s future communications were being planted in Washington, D.C. As Congress John M. Shively became Oregon’s first “Special Postal Agent” in 1847, with his Astoria home becoming the first post office west of the Rocky Mountains. The U.S. Post Office Department contracted with the Pacific Mail Steamship Company to deliver mail from the East Coast. OHS digital no. bb004585  OHQ vol. 111, no. 2 rushed toward adjournment in February 1843, heatedly debating whether to establish military occupation in Oregon to expel the British, Samuel F.B. Morse requested $30,000 to develop his new device, the telegraph. Amid jovial bloviation comparing the “lightening powered” telegraph to hypnotism or speaking to the dead,Congress,in the last hour of the session,approved his request. Fifteen months later, Morse tapped out a sequence of dots and dashes,propelled by electricity through copper cables he had built from his office in the capitol to Baltimore, forty-four miles away. Arriving almost instantly, the signals were translated into the now-famous message,“What Hath God Wrought?” using his own Morse Code.6 The following year, the Post Office Department declined Morse’s offer to sell them his telegraph for $100,000.Similarly, Congress rejected his request for $100,000 to extend the line to NewYork,instead offering $8,000 for continuing operations to Baltimore.Disappointed,Morse organized the Magnetic Telegraph Company and built the first lines connecting Baltimore to New York in 1846. By the time the Browns settled into their...

The Role of Museums in the Preservation and Management of International Heritage Routes

Heritage routes have been existent since pilgrimages began to religious sites. Routes for trade and discovery are also geographical imprints of heritage. Modern techniques for the preservation and management of heritage routes have been employed since the twentieth century, especially with national measures to protect and enhance them, such as the National Trails System Act, which was passed in 1968 in the United States. Heritage routes are designated by local, regional, and national communities to preserve, manage, and profit from the historical, cultural, and natural resources that are inventoried and documented to create the significance of the trail. Heritage routes and tourism have been a collaborative measure. A national promotion of heritage routes and tourism, the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Trail Project (2003-2006) commemorates the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The Texas Plains Trail, organized by the Texas Historical Commission, involves 52 counties in West Texas to coordinate tourism along the trail as well as to promote sustainable development. Thus the preservation and management of heritage routes bring together the wealth of cultural and natural resources into one program. It produces the collaboration of local communities as well as the connection of cultures encompassing geographical boundaries. Museums are a part of the heritage resources that are inventoried in heritage routes. The role of museums in the preservation and management of heritage routes is the subject of this paper.

How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America (review)

254Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober bibliography and discography that help guide the reader to additional sources of information. All in all, this is a well-researched, well-written, and beautifully designed book that will be enjoyed by almost anyone interested in Texas music history. Texas State University-San MarcosGary Hartman How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America. By Carl Abbott. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. Pp. 358. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliographic note, index. ISBN 9780826333124, $34-95 cloth). By invoking the intentionally provocative phrase "Won the West," Carl Abbott's tide alerts readers of two important themes oudined in his story: the centrality and, indeed, "triumph" of cities on the western landscape and the author's desire to situate cities at die heart ofhistorical debates on the American West. Regarding the latter point, his book is as much a history of the Nordi American West as it is a history of cities within it—a relationship inextricably linked. Abbott also traces the changes western cities experienced from their earliest frontier stage to their present-day status as centers for global innovation. The cities of the West evolved from a dependent, almost child-like relationship with the East to themselves being the mature parent, stimulating economic, social, and intellectual change in North America and the world. In short, Abbott asserts, "We can say that the cities ofwestern North America have come into their own" (275). Abbott identifies his study as "Four Centuries of Urban Change"; however, given the paucity of urban development in the West before the nineteenth century , he appropriately focuses on the nineteenth and twentiedi centuries. The book is broken into two distinct periods of transition: 1840-1940, and the West since 1940. After brief mention ofseventeenth- and eighteenth-century trade and mission sites like Sitka, Santa Fe, and San Antonio, the narrative quickly moves to a discussion of gateway centers, such as St Louis, Omaha, Dallas, and Winnipeg (on the eastern boundary) and Honolulu, San Francisco, Pordand, Vancouver , Seattle, and San Diego (on the Pacific rim). It is worth noting that Abbott incorporates the urban development of western Canada into his study, arguing that western Canadian cities followed a similar macro-historical process to that of their United States counterparts—a shared trajectory that includes exploration, trade, missionary efforts, resource extraction, and town development. Whether it is the launch of Lewis and Clark's expedition from St. Louis, the Mormon exodus to the shores of the Great Salt Lake, the rush for gold through San Francisco, labor unrest in Cripple Creek, or the Kaiser shipyards in California, scholars ofthe American West will find familiar subject matter in Abbott's study. In this respect, the author masterfully weaves the history of western North America through the lens of urban development. Urban studies themes also figure prominently in the book, including civic boosterism, the "city beautiful" movement, tourism, neoprogressivism , urban renewal, and grassroots civic activism represented by groups like the Communities Organized for Public Service (cops) in San Antonio. 20ogBook Reviews255 In his telling of the history ofwestern North American cities, Abbott breaks litde new ground. Interestingly, there is not only inevitability to Abbott's urban West, but also the notion that western urban development is a positive good, despite sometimes negative social and environmental consequences. In terms of time and space, the book's innovation lays in its broad sweep and narrow scope, synthesizing copious city histories and larger western studies into a cohesive narrative. The author winds his story effordessly through western urban history—from Larimer's swindle for the future site of Denver in 1858 to the Riverfront for People's rally for park areas along Pordand's waterfront in 1969. Still, much goes unsaid. From the perspective ofTexas history, there is litde discussion ofSpindletop and its early influence on urban development (especially Houston) and little credit is given to Texas cities for Progressive innovations in city government (like the Galveston Plan) or the role of Texans in the founding of La Raza Unida. Of course, these criticisms are typical ofa bold synthesis: everyone wants a little more on their area of interest. University ofTexas-Pan AmericanLinda English Pueblos, Spaniards...

Utopia, historiography, and the paradox of the ever-present

After describing the current crisis in historiography and defining utopianism, I look at theories of history from a utopian perspective. I do so by examining three central concepts (historical rupture, historical erasure, and historical fictionality) by means of three utopian texts – Edward Bellamy's Looking backward (1888), Margaret Atwood's The handmaid's tale (1985), and Richard Gooch's America and the Americans in 1833–4 (1834; 1995). I then move on to look at the practice of history in terms of these concepts with the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–6 as my analytical and exemplary focus. I conclude by suggesting how utopianism offers for historiography a way out of the paradox of the ever-present.

Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727–1834 , and: Divided Loyalties in a Doomed Empire: The French in the West from New France to the Lewis and Clark Expedition , and: In this Remote Country: French Colonial Culture in the Anglo–American Imagination, 1780–1860 (review)

Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834. By Emily Clark. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 304. Cloth, $59.95.)Divided Loyalties in a Doomed Empire: The in the Westfront New France to the Lewis and Clark Expedition. By Daniel Royot. (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Pp. 282. Cloth, $57.50.)In This Remote Country: Colonial Culture in the AngloAmerican Imagination, 1780-1860. By Edward Watts. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Pp. 288. Cloth, $59.95.)Reviewed by Darcy R. FryerWhen Thomas Jefferson negotiated to purchase Louisiana from Napoleonic France, he had two goals in mind: to sustain an economy grounded in small, owner-operated farms, and to guarantee American access to the Mississippi River and the port of New Orleans in perpetuity. Jefferson knew the land he was purchasing for the United States was not quite empty, and he admonished Lewis and Clark to document the indigenous presence in the regions they visited. But Jefferson had little to say about the enduring presence of Frenchmen and women in the same landscape. Like most Americans who had lived through the Seven Years' War, he probably envisioned the presence in North America primarily in the past tense. In fact, as the works of Daniel Royot, Emily Clark, and Edward Watts attest, attitudes, institutions, and Frenchdescended individuals were far from gone in the decades after France ceased to be a political power on the North American mainland.Daniel Royot's Divided Loyalties in a Doomed Empire is a straightforward account of life in Canada and the Illinois Country in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Royot vividly depicts the day-today life of coureurs de bois and their Metis offspring, arguing that the coureurs de bois, often deeply alienated from the colonial authorities and from their land of origin, existed somehow out of (63), while the Metis developed a culture characterized by resignation, stoicism, and fatalism (129). Royot's treatment of Native Americans, who are necessarily prominent figures in his account, seems oddly flat; his descriptions of torture and cannibalism, for example, sensationalize Indian violence without addressing why Native Americans engaged in these practices. The strength of the book lies largely in the detailed narrative. Here is the place to turn if one wants to know where an obscure Indian trader was living in 1 739 or why the Ottawa nation moved westward. In the later chapters, Royot returns again and again to questions such as How were the inhabitants of Upper Louisiana in 1803? (152) and How was Sacajawea? (175). His slightly hesitant answer to both questions is, not very. By the time the British conquered Canada, and certainly by the time that Thomas Jefferson dispatched the Lewis and Clark expedition westward, the French inhabitants of the North American interior spoke vernacular versions of that were over a century out of date and maintained only tenuous connections with the old country. The culture of North America, Royot suggests, became something other than wholly long before it came into contact with Anglo-American lifeways.In Masterless Mistresses, Emily Clark comes to a contrasting conclusion. Clark explores the development of the Ursuline Order of nuns, who arrived in New Orleans in 1727 and labored to educate Louisiana women of all races and social classes through the vicissitudes of French, Spanish, and American rule. As teaching nuns, the Ursulines challenged the medieval Catholic notion that religious women must be cloistered; as mistresses of real estate and slaves, they challenged the colonial equation of proprietorship with masculinity. Clark argues that and, to a lesser extent, Spanish authorities tolerated the Ursulines' autonomy because they understood its basis in a Catholic religious order; AngloProtestant authorities, on the other hand, struggled to reconcile the Ursulines' exercise of power with their belief that women exercised power most appropriately through republican wifehood and motherhood (4). …

Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Campbell McGrath

Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Campbell McGrath

More Than a Single Best Narrative: Collective History and the Transformation of Historical Consciousness

In establishing a collective history, past events are utilized to celebrate a nation’s origins. While analysis of these events is often framed in knowing the single best narrative, the events themselves become of interest when examining how the interpretations remain the same or change over time. The recent bicentennial celebration of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 offers an opportunity to examine such a change. This article investigates how students revealed a historical consciousness in realizing what purpose the expedition serves to a national identity. After analyzing conversations occurring among three eighth-grade students, this article explores the student responses to three interpretations, which bears important educational consequences and implications for the teaching and learning of history.

:Divided Loyalties in a Doomed Empire: The French in the West from New France to the Lewis and Clark Expedition

:Divided Loyalties in a Doomed Empire: The French in the West from New France to the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Lewis & Clark and the Indian country: the Native American perspective

Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country broadens the scope of conventional study of the Lewis and Clark expedition to include Native American perspectives. Frederick E. Hoxie and Jay T. Nelson present the expedition’s long-term impact on the “Indian Country” and its residents through compelling interviews conducted with Native Americans over the past two centuries, secondary literature, Lewis and Clark travel journals, and other primary sources from the Newberry Library’s exhibit Lewis and Clark and the Indian Country. Rich stories of Native Americans, travelers, ranchers, Columbia River fur traders, teachers, and missionaries-often in conflict with each other--illustrate complex interactions between settlers and tribal people. Environmental protection issues and the preservation of Native language, education, and culture dominate late twentieth-century discussions, while early accounts document important Native American alliances with Lewis and Clark. In widening the reader’s interpretive lens to include many perspectives, this collection reaches beyond individual achievement to appreciate America’s plural past.