A journey of discovery inside Lewis and Clark

Without question the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06 holds a treasured place in our national psyche. Ever since the expedition’s journals were published in 1814, a cottage industry of scholarly books has appeared analyzing everything from the Corps of Discovery’s cooking recipes (a favorite dish being white sausage pudding) to their espontoons (6 feet and 1 1/4-inch half-pikes with an iron tip used by 18th century infantry officers). There are also over a dozen Lewis and Clark instructional manuals now in circulation, many of them adopted by “re-creation” history buffs eager to build bull boats (buffalo skin watercraft used by the Mandan and Hidatsa tribes on the Missouri River) and assemble Flintlock rifles (the 1795 model that the Army used in 1803). It is fair to argue, in fact, that the Lewis and Clark saga, on the eve of its bicentennial, has now eclipsed the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the defense of the Alamo as our Great American Epic, a story unmatched for sheer dramatic wallop and enduring fascination.

The person most responsible for reigniting our national obsession with the Corps of Discovery was the late historian Stephen E. Ambrose, whose mega-bestseller “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West” (1996), reminded a new generation that trans-Mississippi America was once a wilderness teeming with buffalo herds, grizzly bears and native peoples. His book was followed by a first-rate Ken Burns documentary for PBS and a popular IMAX film. The Lewis and Clark rush was -- and still is -- on full bore. An estimated 30 million people, in fact, will soon retrace some part of these intrepid explorers’ 8,000-mile journey from Missouri to Oregon just to claim a small part of the legend for themselves.

While Ambrose was writing “Undaunted Courage,” I accompanied him one summer canoeing up the Missouri River retracing the footsteps of Lewis and Clark. The pristine scenery was magnificent, and at night, around a roaring Montana campfire, we would read passages from the journals out loud. Lewis, the primary author of the journals, had modeled his reports after Jefferson’s “Notes on the State of Virginia.” Just as Jefferson had done, Lewis not only described vast prairies, raging rivers, towering mountain peaks and delicate fauna, but he also offered keen observations on the people the Corps of Discovery encountered, such as the French at St. Charles and the Sioux in the Great Plains. The journals, overflowing with keen observations, illuminate Lewis as both gifted writer and astute naturalist. (Part of the present-day charm of the journals, however, is deciphering or decoding the language, for both explorers wrote English phonetically. In the world of Lewis and Clark, “scenes” are “seens” and “geese” are “gees”; I could offer a hundred similar examples with little effort.)

But what is missing from these priceless journals -- or for that matter, from the hundreds of books written about the expedition itself -- are introspective character profiles of the leading players in the rugged drama. Too often history has portrayed Lewis as a one-dimensional figure: a rough-and-ready Virginian whose mentor was Thomas Jefferson. Ambrose recognized this deficiency in “Undaunted Courage” and tried to rectify it. Last year, as he battled cancer, he composed an unpublished novel tentatively titled “The Journals of George Shannon,” named for the youngest member of the party, in which he tried to bring the elusive personalities of Meriwether Lewis and Sacagawea to life. His reason? The historical evidence was too scant, he believed, to write honest biographies of their lives. After years of research, he concluded that only a clever novelist or first-rate psychiatrist could capture the obstinate Lewis and the cunning Sacagawea in all their complicated grandeur.

The New York-based Brian Hall, author of two previous novels and a handful of nonfiction books, has brilliantly accomplished what Ambrose hoped to do. “I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company” -- the title is Lewis’ words to Clark inviting him on the expedition -- fills in the blank pages of the Lewis and Clark journals, offering marvelous character studies of five key participants in the historical trek: Lewis, whose voice dominates the narrative; William Clark, the no-nonsense co-captain of the expedition; Sacagawea, the lovely Shoshone girl whose face now adorns the U.S. dollar coin; Toussaint Charbonneau, the French fur trader who purchased Sacagawea and made her his wife; and York, an African American slave owned by Clark.

Hall, a spellbinding prose-stylist, writes with the kind of ethereal poetic sweep found in the historical novels of Michael Ondaatje and Wallace Stegner. With consummate skill he weaves the true 1804-06 journey with a deep psychological probe of his enigmatic characters’ mind-sets. To his credit, he stays as close to the historical circumstances surrounding the expedition as can be hoped for in fiction. His goal in writing “I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company” was to enhance our knowledge of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, not warp it with a phony gaggle of postmodern conceits or hindsight braggadocio.

There is, in fact, a seamless narrative flow to “I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company,” which earmarks this hybrid book as approaching the coveted status of classic American literature. The Lewis and Clark enthusiast who reads this novel will feel that he or she understands what made the central characters in this nationalistic drama tick: At last an author grapples with Lewis’ brooding depression, York’s humbling subjection to racism and Sacagawea’s raw pain at having her son given away by Clark. In other words, the loathsomeness of the Corps of Discovery’s racism toward Native Americans and African Americans is not candy coated or brush stroked out of the epic; it is a central theme. Hall has clearly done his homework learning the ancient rituals and spiritual viewpoints of every tribe the expedition encountered on its walk to glory.

But don’t take Hall’s penchant for telling the Native American side of the story the wrong way. “I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company” is not a politically correct, effete novel wallowing in the debunking of manly Jeffersonian-era heroes. One feels a new compassion in this novel for Lewis as he struggles with “black fogs” and visions of doom. Take, for example, Hall’s imaginative interpretation of how Lewis felt when he returned from the wilderness to St. Louis, anointed by President Jefferson as an authentic American hero. “Lewis must concede that it was not entirely degrading, this adulation,” Hall writes. “His admirers would bow before a performing bear, if that were the nine days’ wonder; yet the agent be ever so interchangeable, the phenomenon was real, and it was as heady as brandy: the breath of fame and fortune blowing from him, so that in every room he entered, along every path he trod, he saw it rippling outward across bodies and faces, a force, turning them toward him, flushing, a brightness sparkling in his eyes. Lewis the burning glass, the striking steel ....But was his heart made of flint that even in this, his season of glory, he saw causes for derision and doubt? When he was served his first meal in heaven (if ever he got there), would he taste ashes beneath his nectar and ambrosia? He was a divining rod for ashes!”

Death is a major theme in the novel as Lewis’ so-called courage starts appearing to be a manifestation of chronic depression. Lewis, a confirmed bachelor, is portrayed in this narrative as a solitary figure full of ungodly anguish. By the novel’s end, it is clear why Lewis, full of crazed hubris and opium pills, put a pistol to his head, committing suicide on the Natchez Trace.

But there are also light, pleasant moments in “I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company.” Hall showcases his ability to write about the American West in vivid and elegiac ways. He crafts landscape word pictures like George Catlin did with a paintbrush when he traveled up the Missouri River decades after Lewis and Clark. The reader encounters such images as “grass moon” and “scattered sticky-trees” and “rain needling down from low clouds” and “the purl and hiss of the invisible river.” There is a dreamlike, hallucinogenic quality to many of the nature passages in “I Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company” which makes it seem as if Hall is sitting on a cloud, watching an awestruck Corps of Discovery encounter such scenic wonders as Great Falls and the Pacific Ocean with sketchbook in hand. Encounters with animals -- both domestic and wild -- in the novel are rendered memorable due to the poetic essence of Hall’s prose. For example: “He saw a horse do a clog step with its front hooves and fall white-eyed backward into a ravine, its back breaking with a soggy crack on an unlucky rock,” or “It would seem that the Bear God, like Jehovah, when Moses beseeched Him to show His glory, chooses to reveal only his hind-prints.”

Midway through this novel, there is a marvelous scene, a frozen moment really, which is the best paragraph ever written about Lewis because you can temporarily feel the essence of his soul. He is 30, standing near some slender willows, contemplating how they have endured for millenniums against the brutal rush of the Missouri River. “He had never so clearly apprehended why poets were fond of equating time and rivers,” Hall writes. “The Missouri was a clock, ticking out the centuries. You could read the time on its face by the destruction it had wreaked on Louisiana. From the river’s side, beyond smiling meadows where venerable oaks held sway, you saw the hills -- but those were not hills at all, they were the banks of a drainage ditch cut through the plain above. But that was nothing. When you climbed to that plain, you saw the thing that unstrung your knees. Ten, twenty miles away, alone in all the space to the four horizons: a hill, six hundred feet high, with a top as flat as a threshing floor: evidence of a former plain as vast as this one that, but for this forlorn remnant (which one might dub, with a nod to its incomprehensibility, Alone Man), was entirely washed away. Contemplating -- trying to contemplate -- that unimaginable stretch of time, all else -- say, the forty-mile bend that pinched each year a foot tighter until it was left behind as an oxbow, that filled an inch each year to become a marsh, that dried through twenty decades to meadow, that grew an oak forest, that was pitched entire into the water to drown when the river shrugged its shoulders and undermined it all in a matter of minutes -- all that seemed as nothing, as the blink of an eye.”

In his seminal essay “False Documents,” E.L. Doctorow cogently explained the advantage novelists have over historians. According to Doctorow, “history is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history, perhaps as super history.” “I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company” is a super history that conjures a counter myth to weigh against the official stories best told in “Undaunted Courage.” Hall should be commended for helping to create and re-create a transfixing moment in the onward march of America as a land from sea to shining sea. “The novelist’s privilege is to play the fool,” Hall writes in a brief, self-effacing afterword, “rushing in where historians refrain from treading.” *