Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West

by Stephen E. Ambrose

This was too much for Senator John Quincy Adams, who wrote a parody ridiculing Jefferson as a “philosopher” and a man absurdly credulous. Adams wrote about what Lewis did not find: mammoth or mammoth bones, Welsh Indians, salt mountain. As far as Adams was concerned, Lewis was extravagant in his storytelling: What marvels on the way he found He’ll tell you, if inclin’d, sir— But what really set Adams off was Barlow’s proposal to rename the Columbia: Let old Columbus be once more Degraded from his glory; And not a river by his name Remember him in story— For what is old Discovery Compar’d to that which new is? Strike—strike Columbia river out, And put in—River Lewis!4 As to Barlow’s line about Lewis teaching the Columbia its path to the sea, Adams wrote in a footnote, “Here the young HERO is exhibited in the interesting character of school-master to a river.” Malone comments that this bit of doggerel “revealed more wit than most observers would have expected of the sober Senator from Massachusetts and a more partisan spirit than his public actions showed.”5 Jefferson, wisely, never followed up on Barlow’s proposal. So Columbus, already defrauded of the name of a hemisphere, kept his river.

His successful voyage was an inspiration in itself. As for information, he had filled in the main outlines of the previously blank map of the northwestern part of the current United States. He may have regarded the expedition as a failure by the time he died. No trade empire had been established, or appeared possible anytime in his generation. The Indians controlled the Missouri River and were at war with one another. British traders still encroached on American territory. Lewis’s glowing reports on the soil and climate in present Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska had not set off a land rush; there was still plenty of land to be had in Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. The State Department was making no effort to claim sovereignty north of the forty-ninth parallel. The government was pressing no claim to the Oregon country. These things would come, but only with the steamship and the railroad. Until they did, the Louisiana Purchase—save for New Orleans—was exactly what Lewis called it in his Indian-policy paper, a “barren waste.” Had Lewis lived, he would have seen steamships and railroads.II