Contemporary enthusiasts and scholars of American exploration have devoted considerable attention to the western expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1803- 6). Among these biographies, narratives and commentaries, writers seek to order the diverse and abundant materials generated by the expedition. The mix and miscellany of the journals have prompted critics to manage their studies by separating public and private aspects of exploration, and by distinguishing the explorers' frontier adventures from their in-country histories. They separate home from highway, risk from routine. Yet, at the core of this cardinal exploration narrative, in the nearly two and a half years that Lewis and Clark lived among and traveled through native communities, elements of adventure and domesticity are bound together. This paper will examine how the explorers improvised a moveable home by borrowing domestic elements from the local communities they encountered. I will argue that the achievements of the expedition depended upon the explorers' realization that western territories were the dwelling places of native people. That is, Lewis and company envisioned the ordering of a new American border precisely because someone else was at home.
In the journals of Lewis and Clark, adventure (that which privileges chance, risk, and the unknown) mingles with domestic elements, such as intimacy and routine, to create a balance that eases the trauma of dwelling in ever-new terrain. This dialectical pattern in the journals highlights the contradictions inherent in the larger American narrative of expansion and settlement. Ultimately, the journals offer us a glimpse of the home Americans have fashioned at the site of adventure, and the adventure abiding within the American home.
The adventure of arriving at new vistas is often joined in the journals with a domestic gesture giving the narrative a sense of return to the familiar. New experiences, however strange and ineffable, become entwined in familiar images. Most notably, elements of native domesticity (such as forms of communal order, family affection, or recognition of place) are routinely borrowed and abandoned whenever the explorers need to strengthen a sense of community in the wilderness. When the party finally approached Indian guide Sacagawea's tribal home in August, 1805, for example, her reunion with family and community provided the explorers with something more than assurance of their travel route. Her recognition of place (and the affectionate bonding of Indian family) steadied the wildness of Lewis's experience. Being the first to see new terrain had little meaning if the experience was not somehow placed into a hierarchy; and that social order was, ironically, an Indian one. Sacagawea realized that she was home, and when Lewis recorded her experience with his own, he created a text ostensibly narrated by one who was simultaneously returning and arriving for the first time--a very satisfying formulation indeed.
The more intense the infusion of risk and danger, the more pronounced the journals' domestic image according a feeling of familiarity. In the most remote, mountainous stretches of their journey, for instance, Lewis and Clark write of enduring bonds with their domestic counterparts in the figures of Two venerable Nez Perce chiefs. These Indian leaders, Twisted Hair and Tetoharsky, were knowledgeable about travel routes and local communities, and they offered the voyagers a sustaining stream of information and advice. In journal entries of that period, "our two chiefs," or "our old chiefs" become a cord upon which the expedition's new adventures and experiences are strung. In these two Indian leaders, Lewis and Clark found parallel, domestic versions of themselves: experienced and familiar where they were not, and focused on the welfare of both travelers and inhabitants in an adventurous scene where the explorers had to minimize such concerns. Ultimately, the journals offer a history of exploration as an oscillation between adventurous and domestic domains, and between the Anglo-American and native agents of those spheres.
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