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 | UNDAUNTED COURAGE
JUNE 20, 1996TRANSCRIPT |
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President Thomas Jefferson had a dream: create one democratic nation spanning an entire continent. He sent explorers Lewis and Clark to find a Northwest Passage, and their tale is awe inspiring. David Gergen engages author Stephen Ambrose.
An extended, RealAudio version of this interview is available.
Read more about Stephen Ambrose's Book: Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
Read more about Stephen Ambrose and his participation in MacNeil-Lehrer Productions' recent PBS special on presidential character.
DAVID GERGEN: "Of undaunted courage," that's what Thomas Jefferson said of Meriwether Lewis, the man to whom he entrusted the opening of the West. Jefferson might also have said that it turned out to be a cracking good tale, and as he knew better than anyone else, also represented a turning point in American history. Refresh our memories, if you will, about that famous journey.
STEPHEN AMBROSE, Author, Undaunted Courage: Well, the Lewis and Clark expedition, 1804 to 1806, was designed to do many things, Jefferson being such a multi-faceted person. But first of all, just find out what's out there. You had 2/3 of the continent, the greatest unexplored mass in the world, at the turn into the 19th century. And he just wanted to know what was out there, one.
He was looking for a Northwest passage, i.e., a completion of the process that Columbus started in 1492, finding a way to use water to get to Oregon. And he thought the Missouri River would run up into the Rocky Mountains, put your canoe in your back at the headwaters of the Missouri, one day portage, put it in on the Columbia said, and float on down to Astoria.
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
STEPHEN AMBROSE: So that's one thing that Jefferson was looking for. He also wanted to know what's out there in Louisiana. We just bought Louisiana and nobody knows what's there. He wanted to know what's the flora and fauna. And this expedition was fabulously successful as a scientific expedition, 168 new species of plants Lewis found, 128 new animals, birds, and fishes. He wanted to get contact with the Indian tribes so that you could begin the process of establishing an American fur trading empire in the West.
But most of all, what Jefferson wanted was to create a nation that stretched from sea to shining sea. And this was a brand new thought in world history. There was no nation that stretched across the continent and no one had thought of a nation stretching across a continent until Thomas Jefferson, the most imaginative and inventive of all of our Presidents, that's what I want. Even more than that, he wanted an empire of liberty, that we're going to take the Constitution with us, we're not going to make a colony out of the Trans-Mississippi West, we're going to make them into states someday.
DAVID GERGEN: Now the journey is often thought to really start at the mouth of the Missouri as it runs into the Mississippi. Take us from there. Where did they go?
STEPHEN AMBROSE: Well, they wandered their way up the Missouri River, making about 10 miles a day. Remember, in this period, nothing moved faster than the speed of a horse. And they're going up-stream against a five-mile current of a very big river. So they very slowly made their way up. They finally by the 4th of July had gotten past the bend at Kansas City and were now going North. And then in October of 1804, they were into the Dakotas.
By early November, they had gotten to present-day Bismarck, North Dakota, where they had to go into winter camp, and then until March of 1805, they were stuck there at Fort Mandan. Then in the spring of '05, they set off across the Missouri River, headed West, into today's Montana, going past the junction with the Yellowstone River, onto the Great Falls of the Missouri River, a long portage in July of 1805, around the Great Falls, took 'em the whole month to make that portage. Then following the Missouri River up into the Rocky Mountains to today's Idaho-Montana border at a place called Lemy Pass where Meriwether Lewis became the first American citizen to step into the Pacific Northwest and establish an American claim.
DAVID GERGEN: Over the Continental Divide.
STEPHEN AMBROSE: Over the Continental Divide for Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Then through the Bitterroots which were tremendous, are tremendous big mountains. What he had hoped to be a one day portage turned out to be a two-month portage.
DAVID GERGEN: And a perilous one.
STEPHEN AMBROSE: And very perilous, the closest they came to losing everything was in the Bitterroot Mountains, the closest they came to starvation. They finally made it through the Bitter Roots. It was September but the snow was deep. Clark wrote in his journal, "I have never been so cold in my extremities in my life." There was no game in those mountains.
Today people pay a thousand bucks for a permit to hunt up there, but those animals that are there today, the elk, the deer have been driven up from the plains by ranchers, so very near to starvation, and they came down finally into Idaho and met the Nez-Perce who nursed them back to health. Then they were finally able to make canoes, cut down cottonwood trees, hollow them out, and make, I say canoe, it's really a dug-out. It's a big, cumbersome--
DAVID GERGEN: Right.
STEPHEN AMBROSE: --craft, and float on down coming to the Cascades and the Columbia and the Great Falls of the Columbia and these tremendous rapids on the Columbia, all gone today because of the dams.
DAVID GERGEN: Right. Now, I--as a child one learns about the nasty Indian encounters they had. Only when I came across your book did I understand that actually they were saved a couple of times by Indian women.
STEPHEN AMBROSE: They were. First of all, Sacajawea, the most famous American Indian woman in our history, saved them on a lot of occasions. She was a 15-year-old girl with a baby on her back who made the whole expedition and on a number of occasions when they were close to starvation using her native skills she dug up roots with a stick and was able to feed them.
She did something, David--I interrupt to get into this--that you and I and all Americans will never ever be able to repay her for. One day on the Missouri, they had a sail up on the, on the dugout, the wind switched, caught the sail, the dugout went over. There were six men in it, four of 'em started swimming frantically toward shore. The other two were yelling at each other. And meanwhile, the journals of Lewis & Clark, our greatest national literary treasury, our odyssey, were floating away down the Missouri River, and this 15-year-old girl was the only one with presence enough of mind to swim back there and grab those journals and save them for us.
DAVID GERGEN: What about this expedition impressed you about the courage of these men?
STEPHEN AMBROSE: Well, it was undaunted, and they never flinched, from running rapids, from crossing snow-covered mountains in late September without any provisions, all of the challenges were just met head on. There was never a thought in anyone's mind of retreat. As to personal courage, one day Lewis was out on the prairie around Great Falls, he was looking for a portage route, and he saw--it's wonderful country--and he "saw the biggest buffalo herd I ever saw."
That means the biggest buffalo herd that any white man ever saw. He said there was 10,000 buffalo at a minimum in his immediate eyesight. He wanted to have lunch, and so he decided he would shoot a nearby calf and have the tongue for his lunch. And he took aim, and his rifle shot true--I love that phrase that they use--my rifle was true--and he got it in the lungs, and then he made a mistake. He forgot to immediately reload, which was all but automatic with him, but in this case there was blood spurting out of the buffalo's nose, and he got intrigued with the sight, and he was watching that buffalo sink to its knees, and he looks to his right and here comes a grizzly.
He immediately looked around, no trees, the river was a hundred yards away. The grizzly was coming on fast. He could reload that Kentucky long rifle of his in 15 seconds. I shoot black powder. It takes me two and a half, three minutes to load the damned thing, but he, he could do it that fast. And he didn't have 15 seconds. So he made an immediate judgment and then started retreating towards the river, thinking, I'll go slowly. The bear started to speed up and was gaining on him, so he turned and ran full blast to the river. The bank was maybe five feet high. He jumped into the river, and then he turned on that bear--he had his rifle in one hand and he had his S pontoon in the other.
The S pontoon was a pipe about six feet tall that he carried as a walking stick and as a weapon of last resort, and he turned on that bear who came right into the river after him, and he had presence enough of mind to think, I can get out where I'll be in chest-deep water, and that bear will have to swim, and maybe I've got a chance. So he got out to the chest-deep water, turned on that bear, started poking S pontoon into the bear's nose, and as he wrote later, "The gentleman declined to comment."
DAVID GERGEN: (laughing) Let me ask one last question. We talked earlier today and you said if you'd written this book 20 years ago, you don't think you would have gotten a very warm embrace, the positive reception it has from American readers.
STEPHEN AMBROSE: Not even close, not even close.
DAVID GERGEN: Tell me why.
STEPHEN AMBROSE: Because people 20 years ago--Nixon had just resigned, Saigon had fallen, the cynicism in this country was very deep and very broad. I found out on D-Day, the 50th anniversary, that there's been a recovery from that and that the American people today are yearning for a hero and a sense of national unity, and that's why D-Day's anniversary was such a big event, and that's why the reception of this book is so much better than it would have been 20 years ago. Meriwether Lewis is a character almost beyond belief, except he's got some very serious character flaws, and so he's a hero that we can identify with.
DAVID GERGEN: He wound up committing suicide.
STEPHEN AMBROSE: He wound up as a suicide. He was an alcoholic. He was a manic depressive. He was a speculator in lands and lost his shirt. The government was calling in his chits and denying his expenses--he got--he was broken in every way by the time he died, but he's one of our greatest national heroes.
DAVID GERGEN: And people are looking for that. It is our tale of Ulysses, isn't it?
STEPHEN AMBROSE: Yes, very much so. This is our odyssey. And as I say, the journals are our greatest national literary treasure, and I urge people to read those journals, get the Bernard De Voto, one volume.
DAVID GERGEN: (laughing) Thank you very much.
STEPHEN AMBROSE: Thank you.
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