The Same River(s) Twice

I’m riding the Lewis and Clark route this spring. I’ve ridden this route before. This time, I’m doing my homework:

• A book-length poem about George Shannon;

• a somewhat hagiographic biography of Meriwether Lewis,

• another extremely hagiographic day-by-day summary of the Lewis and Clark expedition,

• a book on the scientific discoveries Lewis and Clark made,

• a novel based on Sacajawea’s life

• a novel based on Sacajawea’s son’s life,

• the Journals,

• websites from places like the National Park Service and the Smithsonian with information about the Blackfeet, Sioux, Shoshone, Mandan, Otto, and Pawnee peoples.

I also need to get my body in shape for the 3000-mile bike ride coming up in May.

In some ways, the fact that I’ve done this ride before makes planning easier. The itinerary is easier. I go down the spreadsheet of camping sites and hotels, typing in the statistics: miles to ride, hills to climb. Because I’ve got a little experience behind me, I feel those miles and hills. I know-or I think I know—when I’ll need to punch in a rest day.

That’s spreadsheet number one. Spreadsheet number two is the fun one. I’m trying to collate the stories from the journals and link them, whenever possible, to places my bicycle will take me. My route is curated by the Adventure Cycling Association, and it follows the general direction of the Lewis and Clark expedition. But roads, rivers and trails don’t always align— and when they do, sometimes the roads are not that safe for bicycling.

Also, that old adage about never entering the same river twice is quite literally true. Rivers are not static creatures. At every bend in the river, the water accelerates on the outside bank, rubbing the land, picking at it, until the bank caves. Eventually the whole course of the river changes.

There was an island that, one windy morning in June, 1804, would have shred the keelboat into useless splinters if the men hadn’t jumped out of the boat with ropes and anchors and held it fast for 40 minutes until the storm passed. William Clark called it “Sand Island.” Maybe it was a sand bar. Maybe it was actually an island. I think it was somewhere near Miami, Missouri. I don’t think it exists today. I think the river left it behind. I won’t get near it. My Adventure Cycling Association-curated route veers away from the river after Arrow Rock. I’ll be riding about 2 hours south of where I think that happened. I suppose it’s possible to make that detour, but I want to finish by August.

I wonder if Alexander Willard was one of the men on the keelboat. He had just been court-martialed for sleeping through his watch two days before. He was given 100 lashes. Now, this gets confusing. They way it’s worded in the Journals, he was to be given 100 lashes over the period of 4 days, which makes me think he was whipped 25 times each night. Stephen Ambrose says he was given 100 lashes each night, for a total of 400. I can’t imagine how painful that must have been, but I think Ambrose must be right. John Collins got 100 lashes for dipping into the whiskey almost a month before—a much lesser crime than sleeping through a watch. For Willard to get away with 25 lashes a night—compared to Collin’s 100 lashes in one night—doesn’t seem possible. Either way, imagine rowing a heavy keelboat after two nights of whippings on your back. Imagine jumping into the river with ropes and anchors and pulling with all your might.

The men (and later, woman) on the expedition were a part of a military operation, subject to military discipline. They were instructed (the captains, at least, and some of the sergeants), to keep journals, record and collect flora and fauna, take celestial records, etc., but they were organized as a military unit. Jefferson and Madison, Hamilton and the others were discovering, synthesizing, and inventing new ideas about civilian governance, but there was nothing new about military structure and discipline.

Well, that’s not completely true. Lewis and Clark were co-commanders, sharing equal authority on the ground. But even there, on paper back east, Lewis was the clear leader. How do you create a democracy based on individual liberty that is policed and defended by authoritarian principles? How do you chink that cultural fissure?

The Journals of Lewis and Clark are folk literature. They’re raw, immediate, uncorrected. There’s nothing explicit in the writing about the elemental ideas of democracy—freedom, rights, equality. They don’t boast of bringing freedom to the west, or defending freedom from the British or French.

There’s one interesting moment when the captains allow the men to make an advisory vote. When Sgt. Floyd dies, the men nominate and vote for a replacement. I’m not sure if this was presented as an advisory vote, but the captains agreed to their decision. (Alexander Willard, the poor guy who slept through his watch and received 100 lashes for four consecutive nights, ran unsuccessfully for the office. If Willard had won, would the captains have vetoed them?)

But the expedition was not democratic. In a democracy, you are allowed to leave. In the military, desertion was a capital offense, and when 2 people did try to run away, they were chased down. In a democracy, people are allowed to speak freely. At another time on the expedition, there was a court martial for sedition.

Liberty prizes self-reflection and self-expression. The last time I took this trip, I sat on the very spot William Clark sat, high on a cliff, as he sketched a map of the headwaters of the Missouri River. I was in awe, almost in spite of myself. It was a sunny day, a few wisps of clouds, the Gallatin River to my right, the Missouri meandering ahead and below me, green grasses with patches of bare ground, a few scraggly trees. Sitting there felt like freedom. Maybe William Clark felt some of that.

Before I go on, let me say this: John Ganz’s “Unpopular Front” is one of my favorite email newsletters. He seems to have devoured every word of political theory available to humankind, and he lovingly extracts and explains the nuanced and conflicting opinions of a huge array of thinkers. This is one of those places where plagiarism etiquette gets complicated. There’s no way I could have voiced the my thoughts here without having read Ganz. There’s also no way that I am representing his ideas in a fair and adequate manner. So I’ll just leave it at that. If you want to get deep into ideas about political philosophy, read his amazing newsletter.

Well. Here goes: There’s a thread in liberal thought that, Ganz point out, goes back to Jean Jacques Rosseau. Rosseau romanticized the Spartan military ideals of discipline, military adventures, violence. One of the complicated parts of US history—or any history of a democratic nation that had to violently overthrow its non-democratic predecessor—is that military action is incompatible with democracy. People fight for a more equal society with greater participation and freedom to develop the individual, but the tools are nondemocratic, hierarchical, unfree.

This conflict is permanent. Any society that depends upon a permanent standing military depends upon a culture of inequality. There are ways around that. You can have rules that separate military and police activities. You can have officer training that teaches the values of civil rights, respect for the constitution, appreciation for the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. That training served us well when the former President tried to call in the military to squelch protests about the murder of George Floyd.

It seems a lot to ask of a rank-and-file soldier who has sacrificed so many levels of his or her personal life, freedom, and agency, to wish those freedoms for the people back home. And it shouldn’t be surprising that the ranks of authoritarians back home have personal histories in the military. Militias try to imitate the hierarchies of the services. And under the banner of “freedom,” they try to transfer those hierarchies to civilian life. They reflect back upon the Spartan ideals; stoicism, harsh living, discipline, chain of command. These qualities are supposed to raise the individual to a higher level. The contrasting liberal ideal is that the individual is allowed the freedom to develop spiritually, come to his/her/their own identity in their own way.

Forty-one years after the keelboat and two pirogues left St. Charles, Henry David Thoreau built his little cabin on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s land on Waldon Pond. Much of Thoreau’s life, however, was spent on rivers. He might have been as good or better a boatman as either Lewis and Clark, but anyone on that expedition would scoff at his relatively tame adventures. And yet, for all of his faults, Thoreau was his own kind of explorer. Harriet Tubman might also scoff. Her adventures were physically and spiritually more dangerous that anything Lewis and Clark had to do. And her discipline could have been just as harsh.

But every one of them make up a part of an American identity. If we repress any of their stories—or if we tell them without candor—we lost the soul of America.