It was the biggest Boy Scout trip ever.

At the same time, it was the equivalent of shooting a manned rocket to the moon.

It was the Lewis and Clark Expedition and, in Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, Meriwether Lewis occupies center stage as the captain and, along with Thomas Jefferson, dreamer and planner of the voyage.

Jefferson bought the continent-stretching piece of land then known as Louisiana and wanted to know what was in the package. Who might be the right man to send up the Missouri River, to take a look?

Jefferson had known Lewis when the latter was just a boy. Later he hired Lewis as his personal secretary. If ever there was a man born to answer the president’s burning curiosities, it was Meriwether Lewis. He “inherited the energy, courage, activity and good understanding of his admirable mother.” He’d been in the army, so he knew how to pack for the barebones camp life, how to command, and how to watch for enemies lurking in the forest. He was also a man of the Enlightenment, scientifically curious, compelled to walk in the woods, to observe, collect and record what he found.

Just imagine Jefferson and Lewis, papers spread over a table day after day, making lists. “How many men? With what skills? How big a boat? What design? What type of rifle? How much powder and lead? How many cooking pots? What tools? How much dry or salted rations could be carried? What medicines, in what quantity? What scientific instruments? What books? How many fishing hooks? How much salt? Tobacco? Whiskey?”
Did they roll out maps on the table? If they did, those maps were made of hearsay and conjecture. Jefferson believed the trickling headwaters of the Missouri River lightly kissed the source of the Columbia somewhere in the tops of the mountains. Prove it, my man, said Jefferson to Lewis. Take along a sextant and fix, for all time, the longitude and latitude of rivers and junctions along the way. And find that tribe of Welsh Indians (a persistent myth of the day).

I guess the point of today’s Boy Scout trips is to imagine how the expeditioners felt when they saw new things. What’s this little dog poking out of a hole in the ground? Oh, my! Woolly cows! Thousands of them! What did Lewis feel like, discovering (and drawing) new trees and birds?

Along the way, they met a few tribes of Indians. Given the attitudes of the day, it went about as well as you’d expect. Some tribes pilfered. Others gave great advice.

We learned Lewis and Clark in our history classes back in Idaho, so I thought we owned the two explorers. I’ve since run into “the famous Lewis & Clark expedition” signs in Louisville and Charlottesville, so those towns also think they own the famous pair. And just last week, my husband and I drove the back roads of Missouri, where a logo of two men, one fur-capped, the other pointing out there, popped up in the most unexpected places.

Add Ambrose’s book to your pile, somewhere near the top.

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