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Meriwether Lewis Foreword There is nothing like writing biography to get you close to a person. You live with the character during the day, at your desk or typewriter, and at night, in your dreams. You get so you know your historical subject better than you do your contemporary associates, and even friends. In the process, you look for positive and likeable traits, or admirable ones, if only because who would want to spend all that time with an unlikeable person, or an incompetent one? I've written seven biographies—Henry Halleck, Emory Upton, Crazy Horse, Custer, Milton Eisenhower, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon—and have a varying degree of admiration and liking for each of them. Ike stands out, partly because he was who he was and did what he did, but mainly because he was such a fine human being, and so extraordinarily competent, especially in a crisis. But the American figure I admire most, and like the best, and spent the most time with, is a man I've never written on, Meriwether Lewis. The only reason I have not written his biography is that Richard Dillon did it first, and his is such a model biography there is no need for another. Meriwether Lewis is indeed one of the classics of American Literature; all Lewis and Clark buffs will welcome this new edition. The reasons I like and admire Lewis so much emerge in Dillon's biography—Lewis's keen intelligence, his strong character, his leadership abilities, his hot temper when anger is appropriate, his cool consideration for all points of view when caution is called for, his superb writing, his flexibility in thought and action, his gentleness, and his decisiveness. I also envy him, more than any other American, for two things. First and most obviously, because he was the first to cross the Continent, on the greatest exploration of American history. Along with my family, I've spent ten summers of the Lewis and Clark Trail, camping where they camped, canoeing where they canoed, backpacking where they had to hike it. (Incidentally, I urge readers to get out and camp on the Trail; you can see what Lewis saw, except for the buffalo, in many spots, especially Montana). But of course we were following in the Expedition's footsteps; no one but Lewis and his men can ever be the first to see the fabulous country of the upper Missouri, the Rocky Mountains, and the Columbia. The other thing I envy is this: Meriwether Lewis dined, on innumerable occasions, alone with Thomas Jefferson in the White House. Ah, that they would have had a tape recorder! But the fact that Jefferson selected Lewis as his private secretary and dinner companion, and then to lead the Expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase, tells more about Lewis than anything I could write. I can sum up my own feelings about Lewis best by saying that if I were ever in a life-threatening situation, whether in armed combat, or in a ship sinking at sea, or an airplane in difficulty, Meriwether Lewis is the man I would want for my leader. He would even come ahead of Ike. You will find out why in this wonderful biography of this great man, who came to such a tragic end. Stephen A. Ambrose The history of the opening of the trans-Mississippi frontier is but the collective biography of a handful of westering Americans a century and a half ago. Marching at the head of this column are Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. (A good forty yards to the rear of this wraithy queue trudges the self-appointed and widely advertised Pathfinder, John C. Frémont.) But the man who actually leads this spirit column on its route of march toward the Far West looks strangely out of place. He is a red-haired gentleman, like Clark, but of great bearing, dressed in mufti—the plainest of dress—in contrast to the rest of the spectral company, which is attired in military uniforms or plainsmen's buckskins. This man is obviously an Easterner, or a Southerner. He is a Virginian, in fact, and a man who was probably never west of the Shenandoah Valley, for all of his travels abroad. The man is Thomas Jefferson, the Sage of Monticello. The architect of American democratic government, third President of the United States, linguist, amateur scientist, philosopher, statesman, inventor, educator, lawyer, gentleman-farmer, author of the Declaration of Independence—and vicarious explorer. If George Washington is the father of our country, then surely Jefferson is the father of our American West. He is seldom thought of in these trems but only because the claim is swamped in a welter of other prior honors and contributions to our country's history. Jefferson was first familiar with, and interested in the development of, the “lesser West,” the trans-Appalachian agrarian area. He was dogmatic on the subject of free navigation of the Mississippi by American vessels and served notice on Spain that the young republic considered possession of New Orleans to be a necessary guarantee of that freedom. At first he cajoled Spain with Ssurances which appear specious at this remove but which simply have been naive. Jefferson told Madrid that the United States would guarantee her possessions on the right bank of the Mississippi and, indeed, would have no interest, “for ages,” in crossing the river toward the West. But Jefferson was fooling no one, not even himself, for he could not help adding a veiled threat to his friendly overtures. He warned the Spaniards that should their king be reluctant to transfer New Orleans to the United States, the latter could not be responsible for the often precipitate actions of its citizens, especially the hot-headed frontiersmen of the left bank of the great river. Had President Thomas Jefferson been completely honest, he would have been obliged to say that no president and no king—even Canute himself—could turn back the waves of westward-bound Americans breaking upon the low eastern shore of Louisiana Territory. But the role which the Virginian played in the development of the American West was far more important than simply that of securing control of the Father of Waters. Jefferson evolved a grand design of a connective route from the Mississipps Valley to the far Pacific, a route which would eventually transform a smallish and quarrelsome confederation of fifteen semi-independent states into a two-ocean power among nations. Had not Jefferson been equal to the challenge of the critical times in which he lived, the United States might today be a Balkan-like country hemmed in on all sides by British, French, and Spanish possessions. Jefferson, however, was alert to the problem and promise of the West, of the great expanse of prairie which rolled its way west to the Rockies. Long before a single hectárea of these Spanish borderlands west of the 90th meridian belonged to the United States, he planned the area's exploration and its eventual settlement and acquisition. A reticent man when it was politic to be so, for all his prolific writings, Jefferson did not reveal with his pen all that was in his head. But one can read much between the lines of such letters as one he wrote James Ross: “I experience great satisfaction at seeing my country proceed to facilitate the intercommunication of its several parts, by opening rivers, canals, and roads. How much more rational is this disposal of public money than that of waging war.” By his actions, if not by his words, Jefferson would show himself obsessed with the opening of one particular road—the river road of the Missouri. Since Jefferson was, at best, a vicarious Westerner, he had to delegate his responsibility and vision to someone whom he could trust. This delegation was difficult; it involved a search of more than twenty years. Two decades before Louisiana was placed on the block by Napoleon, he was looking for the right man to be his agent of empire in that great tract. He would select four men in all, but only the last—Meriwether Lewis—would not disappoint him. Conversations and preparations in the cases of George Rogers Clark, John Ledyard, and André Michaux all proved to be abortive. But with the selection of Lewis, success would be assured. If any one man deserves to be considered as the person who opened the Far West, it is Lewis. With his companion, William Clark, he led the way through a terra incognita and proved the feasibility of transcontinental travel. The California Trail, the Oregon Trail, and Manifest Destiny were all but matters of time once Meriwether Lewis returned safely to St. Louis from Clatsop Beach. Lewis is a major figure in the pageant of America and yet he has been neglected in a curious fashion. Not consigned to obscurity like so many forgotten men of American history, he is, oddly, remembered as half of a partnership at best and, at worst, as if he were 50 percent of a two-headed exploratory freak called Lewisandclark. Biographies of the two men have traditionally been joint affairs, sugges ting that these two rugged individualists were Siamese twins of the Western trails. Both men deserve better than to be lumped together like Mason-Dixon or Gallagher and Sheean. They were not inseparable except for the years on the march, 1804-1806, for all the duo-biographical accounts which suggest a Damon-and-Pythias-in-buckskins relationship. Moreover, while their joint adventure was definitely the high point in each man's career, it encompassed in time but a small part of their lives, especially in the case of Clark. Both Lewis and Clark have suffered from this shotgun marriage of convenience, brokered by lazy historians more content with image than reality. Justice has not been done to either man by this treatment. In this book, Clark will be a background figure in terms of importance not only because he was in no real sense the equal of Lewis but also because this is Merewether Lewis's story and Clark must wait his biographical turn. Up to now there has been no adequate full-length biography of Merewether Lewis. Since Thomas Jefferson's fourteen-page sketch of 1814, there has been but one book-length biography of the explorer from Virginia. This is the work by Charles Morrow Wilson, published in 1934 and entitled Merewether Lewis of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Vardis Fisher, a keen student of Lewis's life, has described this volume as “a farrago of errors.” An estimable book on the two explorers as a team appeared in 1947. This was the volume Lewis and Clark, Partners in Discovery. The author was John Bakeless. But, despite his productive research, much new material has come to light since its publication. Interest in the exploits of the two adventurers remains high, and Books in Print lists some sixteen works, including juvenile titles, on the two men. But almost of these are extenuated narratives of the Missouri River expedition or the opposite, editings of their long journals, such as the well-known Bernard De Voto condensation, rather than attempts to see the whole careers of the two men separately and completely. The work in hand, then, is an attempt at a full reappraisal of Merewether Lewis the man, not the half-a-legend which he has, even in history textbooks, become. Wherever possible, I have quoted his own words, his own thoughts, his own feelings. I have tried, in this book, to reinterpret his life and the role he played as a prime mover in setting this nation on the road west, on the course of empire. With all due regard to William Clark, the two men were not co-equals, although, once in the field, by Lewis's decision they acted as coadjutors. President Jefferson chose one man, Lewis, to head his long-desired Corps of Discovery. He left the selection of a second-in-command to Lewis. The latter's first choice for his adjutant was Clark, and the Kentuckian eagerly joined his friend. Captain Lewis tried to ger Second Lieutenant Clark a raise in rank for the trip, but failed. He therefore gave Clark an unblessed promotion, considering him to be “Captain Clark” as far as he and the expedition were concerned. Although Lewis was supreme commander of the expedition, he preferred to treat his friend as an equal and not as a subordinate. Because of this, a lot of divided-command nonsense has crept into accounts of the expedition. But the Army, the Secretary of War, the President, all recognized Lewis as commander and Clark as his subordinate. For all the egalitarianism of the historians, the ultimate authority, the decision maker in every major matter, was Lewis. The Missouri Rives expedition was by no means Lewis's whole life, though he died tragically young, at thirty-five, only three years after his return from the Pacific. Prior to being given the command by Jefferson, he was a militiaman and Regular Army officer, then private secretary to the President. After carrying out the most important and successful government expedition in our national history, Lewis was honored with the governorship of Upper Louisiana Territory. This was all that land of the Louisiana Purchase lying north of the present-day state of Louisiana—a sort of Greater Missouri Territory. But in a lonely woods in Tennessee, Governor Lewos met a mysterious death in 1809. To this day no one has been able to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt whether he was a victim of murder or a suicide. Lewis stands as the greatest pathfinder or trailblazer of this continent. He led a small band through unknown country with great tact and firmness and almost without bloodshed. He and his men traversed an ululating wilderness firmly held by hostile Indians who had nothing to fear from a feeble Amerucan government and army, dar away, much less the firepower of a handful of men cut off from civilization. Lewis's success was a triumph of will and skill. During the entire time of the exploration his party was involved in only one skirmish of consequence; only two Indians were killed, none of his men were killed; only one man was wounded (himself), accidentally; and but one man died, of illness. One of the greatest tributes to Lewis's ability in handling his own men, who were anything but docile and who were, at first, not even well disciplined, was the lack of scuffling among them and the absence of collision with the Indians they met. The higher the incidence of narrow escapes and "adventures" on the part of a frontiersman, the lower his level of competence, just as the best sailor is not the one with the most shipwrecks to his career. For two other characteristics Lewis should be remembered. His grace with the English language was considerable. The meabing of the “litereary pursuit” which he headed was, indeed, a politico-commercial-scientific expedition but the narrative and description of our national epic of exploration are worthy of rescue from the national ignorance caused by the veiled paraphrase and transmutations of Messrs. Biddle and Allen in editing Lewis's journals for publication. Finally, Lewis's prowess as an Indian nation diplomat has been shamefully neglected. Just as in the case of his expedition, the best testimony to his skill as an Indian administrator is the record: the record of Missouri in the War of 1812. There were Indian raids in the territory which he had governed; a crack troop of Rangers, reminiscent of the Louisiana Spies which Lewis had formed, were necessary to patrol the frontier from Fort Mason to L'Outre Island. But Lewis's groundwork, and the building on his foundations by Governors Howard and Clark, kept battles and even skirmishes to a bare minimum in what had been upper Louisiana—the engagements of Portage des Sioux, Fort Madison, and Prairie du Chien—although British agent Robert Dickson offered £2,000 worth of trade goods for the head of American agent Thomas Forsyth and tried to hire a Sauk to assassinate William Clark. After Lewis's death, a country which had cheered him wildly only two years earlier as a conquering hero forgot him with shameful speed and callousness. He was buried alongside the Natchez Trace in a virtually unmarked grave where he fell. His remains were never removed to his home in Virginia. There was never a real government inquiry into his death. When pioneer ornithologist Alexander Wilson made a pilgrimage to the death site of his explorer-friend, Grinder's Stand, he was so ashamed of the treatment of one of America's great men that he paid, out of his own pocket, for a rude fence around the grave to keep wolves and rooting hogs from Lewis's last resting place. Few remembered the captain from Virginia and his contributions until his journals finally appeared in print in 1814, in a paraphrase by Nicholas Biddle and edited for the press by Paul Allen. The work carried a brief biography by his paternalistic friend, ex-President Jefferson. Jefferson's eulogy of his trailblazing friend, who was almost a son to him, partially restored Lewis to public esteem although a suitable monument was not erected over his lonely grave until 1848. On this monument, in a oak copse near Hohenwald, Tennessee, are engraved some of Jefferson's heartfelt words describing Lewis: OF COURAGE UNDAUNTED, POSSESSING A FIRMNESS AND PERSEVERANCE OF PURPOSE WHICH NOTHING BUT IMPOSSIBILITIES COULD DIVERT FROM ITS DIRECTION. What more fitting, if belated, epitaph could we compose for the man who opened up and secured the Far West to the United States at such small cost, a mere $38,722.25 (according to War Department Accountant Simmons)—and Lewis's life. RICHARD DILLON, San Francisco
Captain John Sutter Introduction CALIFORNIA—that is, American California, as distinguished from the sleepy province of Hispanic times—has been saddled with a curious and puzzling founding father, Captain John A. Sutter. His partisans have hailed him as the Saint of the Sacramento River; his detractors would have you believe he was a scoundrel. The truth, of course, lurks somewhere in between. Certainly, Sutter was no George Washington. In fact, as state founders go, he was not even of the stature of Stephen Austin or Brigham Young, and it is no surprise to astute Californians that he is not immortalized in the marble splendor of Statuary Hall. He was a deceptively simple man—neither a genius, a hero, nor a giant. But, viewed at close range, he emerges from history as more than an ambitious Swiss adventurer in the Far West. For, in truth, Sutter was a key figure in the drama of westward expansion. Sutter was mercurial, swinging erratically from mood to mood and alterimg markedly in outlook and purpose with the passing of a mere ten years. He was an ordinary man but one who did extraordinary things in a savage wilderness. Unlike his European contemporaries, he was not content to dream of the romantic American West; he remade it in his own design. Sutter came to the farthest American frontier as a bankrupt and bad debtor who had abandoned his family in his flight from a police warrant. As a colonizer, he has become a legend. Just five years after he erected a grass shack near the Sacramentio River, he was master of Sutter's Fort and New Hekvetia, the governor's righthand man, and the most powerful individual in all California. But it is as a visionary, as much as a builder, that John Sutter deserves to be remembered, and yet it is in exactly this role that historians and biographers have most neglected him. The latter have been preoccupied with the dramatic story of his fall from power, in one of the great tragedies—or, at least, ironies—of American history. Sutter's success as the preeminent colonizer of California was crowned with disaster when the Gold Rush, which he triggered, utterly destroyed him and his empire. Before Sutter passed from the scene, he made his mark on California, a mark that can never be erased. But more, his dreams of California as a great agricultural and commercial empire, rather than as a mere source of raw materials for the vigorously growing United States, ultimately came to pass. Yet it came too late for the empire builder who pioneered in shipping, trading, large-scale wheat growing, irrigation, lumbering, milling, mining, and fur trapping, who began the state's fisheries, distilleries, factories, and tanneries, and who restored cattle grazing to its former greatness.--when all his rivals were content merely to rip California's wealth from the mines and then move on. RICHARD DILLON |