A New Vision Of America Lewis And Clark And The Emergence Of The American Imagination

• Main Author: Hendrix, James P., Jr.
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln 2001
• Subjects: James Fenimore Cooper; Lewis and Clark; North American intellectural history; North American literature and art; American culture; Washington Irving Jr; Other International and Area Studies; Northwest Passage; St. Louis; Northwest passage
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2259; https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/greatplainsquarterly/article/3259/viewcontent/Hendrix_JR.pdf

When Lewis and Clark awakened in St. Louis on 24 September 1806, one suspects that they felt quite well rested. They had just slept in regular beds for the first time in 864 days. As men who "had forgotten the use of chairs . they must have had a way of standing and a look in their eyes," Bernard De Yoto imagines.1 Now was the time for reverie, and celebration, as the capital of the Northern Louisiana Territory welcomed back explorers who had been given up as lost. Two days later, as the initial fanfare began to subside, Clark told us that they "commenced wrighting." The precise nature of this "wrighting" is unclear. It may have been letters or other routine matters and may even have involved some copying of journal entries.2 But what we do know is that a series of circumstances would delay for eight years the publication of an "official" paraphrase of the journals of Lewis and Clark, and a century would pass before they would be seen in relatively full form.3 But America quickly became aware of the great journey by other means, and this would prove to have a significant impact on the development of an American culture. It is conventional to view Lewis and Clark's expedition as the essential first step in America's trans-Mississippi expansion. William Goetzmann sees the return of Lewis and Clark as not so much the end of a major period of exploration, closing the door on the quest for the Northwest Passage that had dominated since the time of Marquette, but the beginning of a new phase. In the imperial struggles of the times, Lewis and Clark mark for Goetzmann the first important step in a sequence that would result in the "winning" of the American West for the United States.4 I believe it is appropriate to view the expedition of Lewis and Clark as the initial phase of an emerging American imagination, the starting point for what has variously been described as "cultural nationalism" and "cultural patriotism."5 Their journey, and America's marveling over what they did, saw, and reported, is a pivotal point in a ...