Download our Logo
Vol. 31:1 ISSN 0160-8460 March 2003
Editing the Journals of Lewis and Clark
by Gary E. Moulton
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark have been called "the writingest explorers of their time." President Thomas Jefferson instructed them to keep meticulous records on the geography, ethnology, and natural history of the trans-Mississippi West they explored from 1804 to 1806. In leather-bound notebook journals they filled hundreds of pages with such observations. The result is a national treasure-- a complete look at the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and Pacific Northwest, reported by men who were intelligent and well prepared, at a time when East Coast Americans knew almost nothing about these regions.
Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark exploring unknown territory west of the Mississippi River. National Archives.
A narrative based on the journals was published in 1814. Most of the journals were then deposited in the American Philosophical Society (APS) in Philadelphia, but they lay largely unused and almost forgotten for nearly a century until an edition of all known materials was published in 1905. That work, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites, was a superb tool for studying the expedition, but over the years it suffered the kinds of erosion that besets all such editions. New manuscripts were discovered, new information became available with which to annotate the journals, and editorial procedures underwent profound changes. These deficiencies led to a project to publish an entirely new comprehensive edition of the Lewis and Clark journals.
In 1967, expedition scholar Donald Jackson may have been the first to call for a new edition. Jackson noted what had been apparent for some time: that using the multiple published editions of the journals was difficult, and that some kind of unified work was needed. At the time, there were at least five versions of expedition materials, some out of print and in varying degrees of completeness. However, Jackson's call for action went unheeded for nearly a decade.
In 1977, an article recommending the reissue of Lewis and Clark's journals caught the attention of Steve Cox, then with the University of Nebraska Press. Cox turned to the university's Center for Great Plains Studies to discover the level of interest. The Center's board of directors immediately embraced the idea of sponsoring a new edition of the journals.
In studying the feasibility of such a project, the Center engaged Donald Jackson as a consultant. Jackson was successful in obtaining the cooperation of manuscript-holding institutions. Not only did these institutions agree to share their materials with the anticipated project, but the principal holding institution, the APS, came on as a cosponsor.
By mid-1979, the project to publish a completely reedited version of the journals was under way at the University of Nebraska with me as editor. The Center for Great Plains Studies and the APS were its cosponsors, all the manuscript-holding societies were cooperating, and the University of Nebraska Press had agreed to be publisher. The NHPRC had endorsed the project, and we had submitted our first grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
Our first application to the NEH was turned down. I rewrote the proposal, cutting the monetary request and trying to correct some deficiencies. The downsized proposal was accepted in 1980, and the NEH funded the project generously thereafter. In later allocations, the NEH stipulated that the project had to find matching money to go along with the Endowment's outright award. On the second grant, I had to secure more than $42,000 in outside money over 3 years to tap a like amount from the NEH and meet our budgetary needs.
That $42,000 was an incredible amount of money to me. The APS and the University of Nebraska Foundation came up with about half of it, but I still needed more than $20,000. Fortunately, I had already begun to make friends with Lewis and Clark buffs. One gentleman, Robert Levis of Alton, Illinois, had told me to drop him a line if I ever needed any help. Now I sent Bob a well thought out and carefully worded letter. I was astonished when he replied that he would be happy to cover the entire amount.
That wasn't necessary, because soon I met Robert Betts of New York City at a Lewis and Clark conference in Philadelphia. At a reception in Independence Hall, he told me he wanted to give the project $5,000. Later, he handed me a check for $7,500, saying he'd sweetened the pot a little. These individuals and 10 other private supporters, plus the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, have aided the project financially over the years.
The first volume of the new edition, Atlas of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was published in 1983. The maps were published first so they could be used as a resource and reference tool for succeeding volumes. Not all of the 129 historic maps in the atlas came directly from the hand of Clark, the principal mapmaker, but all were closely associated with the expedition, and most of them were Clark's handiwork.
I was amazed at the beauty, elegance, and precision of Clark's cartography. With no apparent training, working with crude and often unreliable instruments, and using dead reckoning for distances, he produced work that leaves one in awe of his draftsmanship. Clark's maps are a model of cartographic excellence, and his example was admired and emulated by generations of explorers and mapmakers.
As for the journals, I decided to keep Lewis and Clark's materials together and to publish the diaries of the enlisted men in separate volumes. This followed the plan adopted by Thwaites, and for many reasons seemed the most sensible approach. Journal volumes 2 through 8, published between 1986 and 1993, cover the diaries of Lewis and Clark. Volumes 9, 10, and 11, comprising the enlisted men's journals, were published in 1996 and 1997. Volume 12 is the botany book.
The principal goal of the new edition was to present users with a reliable, definitive text. Earlier editors, pressed for time and working virtually alone, were not able to make multiple and careful readings of their transcriptions against the original text. Perhaps that explains why one editor had Clark struggling to the top of a hill near the Pacific Coast and saying, "I cue my hare [hair]," when the captain actually wrote that he had cut his hand. Every effort was made to prepare an accurate transcription that is nearly identical to the original text.
The new edition also gives readers a thorough explication of the journals. Scholars have been hampered by the paucity of notes in earlier editions, and users complained about inaccuracies and obsolescence. We aimed to be thorough, accurate, and complete in our annotation, but we understood that we were preparing source material to be borrowed from and enlarged on, and that we were supposed to be writing footnotes, not essays. Our general rule on annotation was to treat matter in the notes in relation to its prominence in the text.
The most difficult areas to annotate were in geology and botany, largely because I was least knowledgeable about the subjects and was slow to find the right people to help me. Once I secured the services of Robert N. Bergantino of Butte, Montana, for aid in geology questions, and the advice of A. T. Harrison, formerly of Lincoln but now in Sandy, Utah, in botany, I could move the process along.
Linguistics, another field of study for the captains, proved the most demanding and time-consuming for me. Following Jefferson's instructions, Lewis filled numerous loose sheets with vocabulary notes as he passed through an incredible array of native languages.
One of the more interesting results of the linguistic work was when we uncovered a phantom Indian tribe. When Lewis and Clark met native peoples, they always asked for their tribal name and the names of nearby tribes. When the party met Chinookan speakers along the Columbia River in October 1805, one informant identified a neighboring downriver group as the Chil-luckit-te-quaws. We found them identified as such in American Indian literature, with a reference to an expedition passage but no modern name. Linguistic work unraveled the mystery. In Chinookan, the term means "he is pointing at him." Lewis or Clark must have pointed downriver and asked the name of the neighboring people, and got a reply to the action rather than to the question. A nation of native people vanished in the light of linguistic analysis.
I wish I could say that the current great interest in Lewis and Clark has come as a result of my work, but that would not be true. Many of the important published works on the expedition that have come out in recent years were either under way or were in print before I started getting books out. John Allen had already completed his study of the expedition's geographic endeavors, and James P. Ronda was well into the book that became Lewis and Clark among the Indians. Even Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage was in planning, although he was not able to devote time to the writing until the 1990s. What the new edition provides for recent writers is easy access to the complete corpus of expedition journals and annotation that touches on the full range of the diaries' discussions. It also expedited the production of Ken Burns' and Dayton Duncan's film on the expedition.
It has been my privilege and great honor to serve the Corps of Discovery for this generation. My Lewis and Clark colleagues and I stand as the fourth generation of expedition scholars. I hope that I can pass on the love and joy of working with these materials as I received the same from Nicholas Biddle, Elliott Coues, Reuben Gold Thwaites, Ernest Staples Osgood, and their contemporaries. May my work and theirs inspire future students of the expedition to new areas of study and help to keep the story alive for another 200 years.
Gary E. Moulton is the editor of The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Earlier versions of this article appeared in Montana: The Magazine of Western History (Summer 1998) and Documentary Editing (March 1999).
