Our American “Odyssey”: Ambrose on Lewis & Clark

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Go to hillsdale.edu to sign up for their free and terrific online courses. Stephen Ambrose was one of America's leading biographers and historians. Ambrose passed in 2002, but his epic storytelling can now be heard here at Our American Stories, thanks to those who run his estate.

Here's Ambrose to share some stories from his number one New York Times bestseller, Undaunted Courage, Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the opening of the American West. The Lewis and Clark expedition began in the White House on January 18, 1803, when President Thomas Jefferson sent a special secret message to Congress requesting an appropriation of $2,500 for an exploration west of the Mississippi River. There was a little bit of cost overrun. But that goes with the territory. Isn't that right, Senator?

That just goes with the territory. You know it's going to be cost overrun. Lewis and his co-commander, William Clark, discovered hundreds of new plants and animal species and saw and described sites that no man had ever seen. Much of what they saw has been altered in the past two centuries, but pristine sites on the trail can still be seen and appreciated.

Some of these localities are privately owned. Others have been protected by law, our assurance to our grandchildren and their grandchildren that Americans will always be able to see some part of the Lewis and Clark expedition that they saw. It's our national epic. Our Odyssey. The journals of Lewis and Clark are our national poem. It was our greatest feat of exploration. Thanks to Lewis and Clark, we unified the continent, created a country that is democratic and that stretches from sea to shining sea. And we began the process of unifying the American people. The core discovery included Frenchmen, Welshmen, Irishmen, Englishmen, Scandinavians, an African-American slave, a teenage Indian woman, and her son. These people came from all across the United States and they formed a team. Lewis was the first man ever to go from tidewater to tidewater.

No one else had ever done that. He left Washington DC and went to Astoria, Oregon. In the process, he traveled through Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon.

And he brought us all together. He was the first American citizen to stand on the Continental Divide. He explored the Louisiana Purchase, which extended only to the Continental Divide. Louisiana Purchase was all that land drained by the Missouri and Mississippi River.

Lewis got to the headwaters and looked down on the drains of the Columbia River and thus added that great Northwestern Empire of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington to the United States. It was a federal project. The leaders were captains in the United States Army.

The Corps of Discovery consisted of a platoon of sergeants, corporals, and privates. Congress appropriated the funds for supply. Jefferson never spent federal money more wisely or better than when he made the Louisiana Purchase.

The United States Congress never did better than it would voted the funds to support the expedition. In the 19th century, our best brains went to work on discovery and description of nature. Lewis and Clark, Charles Darwin, so many others. In the 20th century, we put our best minds to work on making better weapons. The drive was to conquer nature. Henry Ford, who put the world on wheels, the Wright brothers, who put us up in the air. And then on the weapons, many, many, many. But Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who gave us the culmination of the drive to conquer nature in the atomic bomb.

Nowadays, Bill Gates and so many others. When I was a kid, everybody over 50 years old, maybe even over 40 years old, remembers this in this country. The phrase, that's history, was the worst put down you could give. That's history. Who the hell cares? That happened.

Forget it. Well, we've turned to history in this country. I've been a history teacher all of my life.

And I've seen this go up and down. And at the time of the Vietnam War, it was awfully hard to get students interested in history. Thomas Jefferson, he was a slave holder.

George Washington, he was a slave holder. The United States in World War II, well, we dropped the atomic bomb, and that was a big mistake. And so they didn't want to know anything about American history. And it's not only our older folks, but it is the kids. They want to know, where did we come from? Who are we? How did it happen that we became the richest and the freest nation that ever was? It happened because of men like Jefferson and Washington and all of our other heroes.

And we need to make sure that our kids are aware of that. Indeed, and that is what so much of what we do is about. It's why we love these history stories. Where did we come from?

How did it all happen? And my goodness, there's no bigger and better adventure story than the Lewis and Clark story and a great federally funded project. And without the federal funds, this would not have happened.

And what a good use of money. Jefferson buying all of that land, buying it for a song, one of the greatest investments this country has ever made in property. When we come back, more of Stephen Ambrose on his book on Daunted Courage, here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.

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RingCentral, simpler communications. ["The Star-Spangled Banner"] And we return to historian Steven Ambrose, the author of Undaunted Courage, as he speaks about the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the American West, Bernard Devoto. Devoto's editing of the journals of Lewis and Clark in the 1950s became the Lewis and Clark flashpoint for Steven Ambrose, as well as the American public.

Here again is Ambrose. This is a man spending eight, 10, 12 hours a day all alone with the journals of Lewis and Clark, editing. He wrote almost to the day, 150 years after the expedition began. He wrote this on April 15th, 1953. He wrote, it is generally agreed that the journals are an American classic, and certainly they are by far the most interesting as well as the most important original narrative of North American exploration. Nevertheless, few people have read them.

That was disconcertingly true in 1953, and it was Bernard Devoto who changed that. As Devoto says, the journals of Lewis and Clark are one of our national literary treasures. Their exploration of the western two-thirds of the continent was our epic voyage. Their account of the expedition is our epic poem. Sitting at the campfire after an exhausting day using a quill pen that had to be dipped into the inkwell every other word, balancing those leather-covered journals on their knees, Captain Meriwether Lewis and William Clark managed to write with prose that is distinguished for its verve, sharp imagery, immediacy, and tension as they described the events of the day as well as the land and its people and its flora and fauna. Devoto recognized it as something that I have learned, and he practiced it and I have copied him, and that is that reading the journals of Lewis and Clark puts you in the canoe with them and trekking over the Lolo Trail and wintering over in North Dakota and at the mouth of the Columbia and all that is in between. You see the country through their eyes.

It unfolds before you, the lower Missouri, the great bend of the river, the junction with the Yellowstone, the white cliffs and the Missouri River breaks, the great falls, three forks, Lemai Pass, the Columbia Gorge, and on to the Pacific. And they do this, they take us with them with a vividness that is enhanced because you see with the fresh eyes of the first literate men to see such sights. Throughout, surprise is achieved, better than in most novels and nearly all history books. What they experienced, we cannot because there is no unexplored continent left. No matter where we go, we know about the country in advance because we have seen pictures, we have studied the maps, we have read about it.

We have read about it. But it's one of the glories of the Lewis and Clark journals that we can visit their campgrounds and see what they saw. It is accessible in a way that Columbus's voyage or Admiral Byrd's flights over the poles or the experience of the other great explorers are not.

In the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon, large structures of the Lewis and Clark Trail are nearly pristine. For Devoto, there was no greater joy than sitting around the fire at a Lewis and Clark campsite after a day of hiking in their footsteps or canoeing in their wake, reading aloud from their journals, the captain's accounts of what had happened to them on the day they were there on that spot and getting the circle around the fire to lean forward just a bit so as to not miss a single word. As Devoto notes, the charm of the writing is increased by their run-on sentences. They were as good at this style as William Faulkner or Gertrude Stein, and of course by their spelling. They lived in a pre-dictionary age when freedom of spelling was the rule. Captain Clark had 26 different ways to spell the word Sioux. Not one of them correctly.

Not one of them correctly. The combination of puzzling out what the word is and the run-on sentences can be a bit daunting at first. But when you stick with it, you get the reward, soon enough learning how to catch their rhythm and pace so that you can almost hear them speaking to you aided by the spellings, which are as close as the captains can get to how they said those words. And by the pace of the action, as the captains move along from danger to near disaster, to challenges overcome, to moments of triumph, most of all, that marvelous moment when they reach the coast and William Clark wrote his immortal line, Ocean in View, ah, the joy.

These entire sentences brought together by a strong verb at the end. Beyond the immediacy of the writing, the captains never ever flash forward or flash back, which is the best way to write history. Beyond this immediacy, an attribute that helps make the journals so gripping to DeVoto and all of us who have come to these journals through DeVoto is their range and breadth. This includes the colorful cast of characters and the variety of subjects covered, as well as the high drama, Sacajawea, the teenage Indian mother and her infant son, Pomp, York, the slave, John Coulter, the discoverer of Yellowstone Park and our first mountain man, and all the other enlisted men. And George Dreyer, the hunter and interpreter, Sergeant Floyd, the only man to die, and the 28 enlisted men, each one gets caught in a snapshot taken by the captains and preserved in the journals, snapshots of this little incident or that anecdote that brings the characters to life, providing portraits and personality clues. The Indian characters are utterly fascinating.

Kamawiat of the Shoshones, Big White of the Mandans, Comoal of the Clatsops, Black Buffalo of the Sioux, Old Toby of the Shoshones, Broken Arm of the Nez Perce. The captains recorded their conversations, always done in the sign language, their customs, their dress, their economy, their politics and their individual quirks. By themselves, the captains' passages on the Native Americans they encountered, some of them like the Shoshones and Nez Perce who had never before seen a white man, these are an invaluable contribution to our literature and to our ethnography. The principal characters are, of course, the captains.

They fascinated Devoto, as they do all of us. On virtually every page, the captains reveal a bit more of their personalities. Lewis gets angry and snaps at one of the men.

Clark sees Charbonneau strike his wife, Sacajawea, and I abraded him severely. The Sioux challenge the expedition and Clark feels himself grow warm with indignation and determination not to be bullied. Lewis sees the Rocky Mountains in his overjoyed. These and countless other vignettes make the captains appealing and approachable to the point that you feel they are old friends. They complimented each other on the expedition. Lewis was the better botanist, Clark the better boatman, Lewis the better zoologist, Clark the better cartographer. And they compliment each other as writers. Clark could be lyrical, but as Devoto points out, more often he was a stick to the point, no wasted words kind of a writer.

Lewis was more introspective, more likely to share his worries and hopes. The single word that stands out in these journals is sharing. Through them, you cross the continent by canoe, by horseback, by foot, with Lewis and Clark as your guide. You are with them when they discover a new animal, a new plant, a new fish, a new Indian tribe.

Another feature, whatever your hobby or interest, there is something in there for you. For birdwatchers, you get the first description ever written of dozens of new species, the first attempt to ever put down on paper what the song of the Western Meadowlark sounds like. For hunters, you're present for the greatest hunting experience anyone ever had, better even than the Indians, because the men of the expedition had rifles. When Lewis at the Great Falls wrote that he had just seen the biggest buffalo herd he had ever seen, that meant it was likely the biggest herd any white man ever saw. And you're listening to Stephen Ambrose talking about the remarkable memoirs of Lewis and Clark, as he called it, their epic poem, and indeed, it is America's epic poem. It is the Odyssey, it is our Odyssey.

More of this remarkable story, the story of Lewis and Clark told by the best there is in the business, Stephen Ambrose, here on Our American Stories. When the world gets in the way of your music, try the new Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2, next gen earbuds uniquely tuned to the shape of your ears. They use exclusive earbuds to help you in your ears, they use exclusive Bose technology that personalizes the audio performance to fit you, delivering the world's best noise cancellation and powerfully immersive sound, so you can hear and feel every detail of the music you love. Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2, sound shape to you.

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RingCentral, simpler communications. And we continue with our American stories in Steve and Ambrose talking about undaunted courage, his terrific number one New York Times bestseller about Lewis and Clark and their expedition. And he spent quite a bit of time in the last segment talking about Bernard Devoto and the importance of his editing of the Lewis and Clark memoirs. Let's return to Stephen Ambrose. For botanists, for zoologists, for cartographers, for ethnologists, for scholars, of the military, for medical historians, there's something here for everyone.

Now I gush, and I know it, but you think I gush. Where do you read Devoto's introduction to the journals of Lewis and Clark? Now why was it that for all of these years, 150 years after the expedition, the American people who knew the outlines of the story had not read the journals.

That's a story in itself. For 100 years after they were written, the journals remained unpublished. The only account available of the expedition was a paraphrase. This was Meriwether Lewis's fault. After returning to Washington in November, 1806, he promised Thomas Jefferson, almost a father to him, and William Clark, the best friend a man ever had, that he would get to work to prepare the journals for a printer. But then he suffered from what has to be described as the all-time case of writer's block. He just didn't get anything done. He always found a way to put off the work. A fortune was awaiting him with publication.

So high was the interest in the United States and in Europe about his discoveries. But when he died of his own hand in 1809, Meriwether Lewis had not prepared a single line for the printer, and he had actually lied to both Jefferson and Clark about it, assuring them that he was getting on with the work. With Lewis's death, Clark asked Jefferson to prepare the journals for publication, and surely he was the ideal man to do it. But Jefferson demurred.

He had retired and was devoting his time to Monticello and the University of Virginia. Clark felt diffident about his own skills and sought an editor for the work. Eventually, he found Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia, who agreed to take on the task.

Biddle was in the happy position of having married the wealthiest woman in America, so he could well afford to take a couple of years off and work on this most interesting project. In 1815, Biddle published a narrative account of the expedition based on the journals and completely true to the original, but still a paraphrase of the captain's writings. It was not until 1904 that a complete edition of the journals as written by the captains appeared. It was edited by Ruben Gold Thwaites of the Wisconsin State Historical Society and published by Dodd Mead and Company in eight volumes. For the first time, the world got to see what the captains had written. But eight volumes is a staggering sight to any reader other than a Lewis and Clark scholar.

It was not until 1953, a century and a half after they were written, that the journals became available to the public. That year, Houghton Mifflin Company brought out Bernard DeVoto's one-volume Condensation of the Journals of Lewis and Clark. Since that year, it has been continuously in print and read by hundreds of thousands. The success of this edition, edited by Bernard DeVoto, is well-earned because he did a superb piece of work. DeVoto was one of the literary lions of his day, at the top rank among all American writers, as an essayist, a novelist, a curmudgeon, a pundit, a reviewer, an editor, a Mark Trane scholar, and so much more. He was beloved by a remarkable range of fellow authors. Wallace Stegner was a friend and fan who wrote DeVoto's biography and edited an edition of his letters. Catherine Drinker Bowen, Edith Merless, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and Wallace Stegner combined to do a volume of tribute to DeVoto shortly after his death. For any writer of history, or Americana, that is as great a tribute as could be imagined. Born in Ogden in 1897, he came east of Boston, where he spoke for his native West through his column, The Easy Care for Harper's Magazine. He had been a soldier in World War I.

During World War II, he devoted himself almost completely to the history of the West. His trilogy, The Year of Decision, 1846, across the wide Missouri, and the country of New York, Missouri, and the course of empire, is magnificent in its sweep and scope, and is still read today. I was an undergraduate when DeVoto was turning out this great trilogy, and I can remember the eager anticipation that we had when we knew another book was coming from the typewriter of Bernard DeVoto. DeVoto's account of early 19th century America and its westward movement is triumphant, full of hubris and genuine accomplishment. Bold, forward-looking, dynamic, on the march. DeVoto's work has a moral certainty to it that was appropriate to the generation that had overcome the Depression, defeated Hitler, defeated Mussolini, defeated Tojo, held back the communist Chinese and Korea, held back the Soviet Union along the banks of the Elbe River. In DeVoto's long narrative of the Lewis and Clark expedition in the course of empire, he uses words that come spring directly out of that World War II experience. For example, the captains never appease any potential enemies, they know better.

They face them down. After completing the narrative of the course of empire, DeVoto turned his attention full-time to editing the journals. It is his great work. He opens with a disclaimer. This condensation of the Lewis and Clark journals cannot be used instead of the original edition for the purposes of scholarship. He has that one right, but he was even more right when he added, it has been edited for the general reader. In the journals as published by Dodd Mead, the original eight volumes, editor Ruben Gold-Thwaites included everything the captains wrote, much of which was repetitious.

Clark often copied Lewis's journal. Much of the original journal is too detailed for anyone other than a professional naturalist. Long descriptions of birds, plants, animals. What you get from DeVoto is the heart of the story. Without sacrificing any of the narrative or very much of the natural history.

Bernard DeVoto is no cloistered scholar. He got out on the trail. He canoed in the wake of Lewis and Clark. He walked in their footsteps over the Lolo Trail. He followed them on horseback through Idaho. He traveled where the captains did, saw what they saw.

To some degree, experienced what they had experienced. One of his favorite sites was on the Lolo Trail in Idaho, cussed over the Continental Divide at Lolo Pass along today's US Highway 12. There is a magnificent grove of gigantic cedars standing beside the fast flowing and incredibly beautiful Loxer River. There, DeVoto liked to pick his tent and read the journals and think about the captains.

And there his ashes were scattered. The site today is marked by the state of Idaho as the Bernard DeVoto Grove. And it is maintained as it was when Lewis and Clark came through. When Lewis and Clark came through, this is an altogether fitting tribute to this great American.

Thank you. And you've been listening to Steven Ambrose saluting another historian. And that man is Bernard DeVoto. Without whose work on Daunted Courage would not have been possible. Taking what only research scholars could have poured through and poured through it himself, lived the trail himself and ended up writing, well, the book that would prompt Ambrose's undaunted courage. Steven Ambrose on Lewis and Clark and also on a great historian, Bernard DeVoto.

All of these stories here on Our American Story. When the world gets in the way of your music, try the new Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2. Next gen earbuds uniquely tuned to the shape of your ears. They use exclusive Bose technology that personalizes the audio performance to fit you. Delivering the world's best noise cancellation and powerfully immersive sound. So you can hear and feel every detail of the music you love. Bose QuietComfort Earbuds 2. Sound shape to you.

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