Leading Men

摘要

They spent roughly a thousand days and nights together, from the rainy October morning they left the falls of the Ohio until they finally pulled their canoes out of the Mississippi three years later in St. Louis. They slept in impossibly close quarters, often sharing the same buffalo-skin teepee with an Indian woman, a French-Canadian interpreter and their baby. They, and several enlisted men, kept journals whose published throw weight equals 13 volumes, 30 lbs., 18 in. of bookshelf and approximately 1 million words. All that evidence notwithstanding, the more we learn about the two captains who gave their names to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the more powerful becomes their pull on our imagination. Historians traditionally distinguish them by contrasting their personalities―the brooding Meri-wether Lewis played off against the genial William Clark―Jeremy Irons hitting the road with John Goodman. Gary Moulton, editor of the explorers' journals, says, "The differences existed, but they may have been exaggerated." In reality, the two men had far more in common. They were both Virginians. They were both Army officers, six-footers and experienced outdoorsmen, who first met eight years before the expedition when they were serving in Indian campaigns in the Ohio Valley. They shared with their friend Thomas Jefferson a passion for such Enlightenment sciences as ethnology, paleontology, zoology and botany.