FLYOVER COUNTRY

Looking back at Lewis and Clark.

- BY CALEB CRAIN

In the national mythology, the expedition belongs to the morning of the story.

If Meriwether Lewis and William Clark hadn't gone up the Missouri River in 1804 and then down the lower Columbia River in 1805, there might today be less United States and more Canada. Lately, I have been having trouble imagining how that could be seen as a bad thing. Lewis and Clark have long had their skeptics. “The crossing of the continent was a great feat, but was nothing more,” Henry Adams wrote, more than a century ago, in his history of Thomas Jefferson’s Presidency. An inventor named Robert Fulton was about to assemble a steamboat in New York City that would make more money and, in Adams’s opinion, advance civilization much further.

Of course, Adams was an Adams, self-serious and dour; Lewis and Clark are favorites with the sunny-minded. When Stephen E. Ambrose, in his bestseller “Undaunted Courage,” from 1996, narrated the explorers’ encountering of the White Cliffs of the upper Missouri River, he not only quoted at length Lewis’s rhapsody about those Gothic-looking towers of eroded sandstone (“So perfect indeed that I should have thought that nature had attempted herre to rival the human art of masonry”), he also supplied, in a footnote, the name of a local boat-rental company, in case readers wanted to witness the glory for themselves.

In the national mythology, Lewis and Clark belong to the morning of the story—back when the waterfalls hadn’t been choked by dams and there were still bands of Native Americans in the Rockies who had never seen a white person. The tale is scenic. There are stirring ups and downs. But if the American idea—the experiment of letting people rule themselves, in the hope that they will grow into the necessary trust and wisdom—is now foundering, or better instantiated in other countries, what sets the expedition apart from any other long camping trip, full of rain, mosquitoes, and, intermittently, the sublime?