Exploring Lewis and Clark
Reflections on Men and Wilderness
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
This provocative work challenges traditional accounts of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition across the continent and back again. Uncovering deeper meanings in the explorers’ journals and lives, Exploring Lewis and Clark exposes their self-perceptions and deceptions, and how they interacted with those who traveled with them, the people they discovered along the way, the animals they hunted, and the land they walked across. The book discovers new heroes and brings old ones into historical focus.
Thomas P. Slaughter interrogates the explorers’ dreams, how they wrote and what they aimed to possess, their interactions with animals, Indians, and each other, their sense of themselves as leaders and men, and why they feared that they had failed their nation and President. Slaughter’s Lewis and Clark are more confused, frightened, courageous, and flawed than in previous accounts. They are more human, their expedition more dramatic, and thus their story is more revealing about our own relationships to history and myth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this interesting but overwrought reconsideration of the Lewis and Clark expedition, Slaughter (The Natures of John and William Bartram) performs a"deep reading" of the travelers' journals and examines contemporaneous sources to probe the lines between history and myth. His investigation, which is thematic rather than chronological, suggests that the fable of Sacajawea's leading role in the expedition disguises the fact that she was a slave ("we have mythologized our history by denying her enslavement, her life, and her voice"), and that the explorers were the first wave of environmental despoliation, bolstering their masculinity by slaughtering buffalo, bears and especially snakes. The expedition was a clash of civilizations, pitting the Indian's holistic worldview, in which" the past and the present, nature and human are one," and"the white men's distinction between waking and dreaming makes no sense," against Lewis and Clark's rational, secular mindset, which was stuck in"linear, sequential time" and oblivious to the"spiritual implications of hunting." Slaughter's revisionism--especially his account of the contentious relations between Clark and his slave York, and his skepticism about the explorers' complaints of Indian thievery--often provide a needed corrective. But some may find his theorizing about the ways in which the expedition serves as"a better guide to our souls than...to our skins" overly academic--not hard to follow, but somewhat difficult to swallow.
