The Myths and Myopia of Lewis and Clark

THIS BICENTENNIAL is just approaching the starting gate, and already it's in overdrive. Exactly 200 years ago this month, Capt. Meriwether Lewis set out on his epochal expedition across a mysterious continent and made it all the way toPittsburgh. There he gathered supplies and tried to get a boat built to float down the Ohio River and prepare for the real journey. The boatbuilder balked and fumbleda less than glorious beginning. Never mind. Two hundred years later, the bicentennial hype is chugging along under full steam.

No paltry National Sacagawea Week or Lewis and Clark Month here; President Bush has proclaimed a four-year celebration of the Voyage of Discovery, through 2006. Nearly every state, town, and visitors center in the journey's path is scrambling to clamber aboard and, in the words of USA Today, "grab a piece of the huge tourism pie associated with the 200th anniversary." In October, Louisville, Ky., will stage a re-enactment of Lewis and Clark's rendezvous. Next May, Wood River, Ill., will re-enact the Corps of Discovery's departure after wintering. St. Charles, Mo., will re-enact the start up the Mighty Mo. Leavenworth, Kan., will re-enact its stop-off to celebrate July 4, 1804, with a blast of the swivel gun and an extra whiskey ration. (Don't expect free drinks in what's now one of the driest states in the union.) And so on, with pageants, festivals, symposia, fireworks, and flyovers at 12 more stations of the crossing designated to host "national signature events," all the way to Fort Clatsop, Ore., and back. Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam War Memorial and the closest thing this country has to an official artist, will create four sculptures at key Snake and Columbia river confluences for the bicentennial Confluence Project. Where the festivities go, newspapers and networks will surely follow; The Seattle Times, which maintains a Web page for breaking Lewis and Clark news, got the jump with nearly seven broadsheet pages in one May week.

Even places with more tenuous connections to the expedition will milk it for all it's worth. Harper's Ferry, W.Va., where Lewis stopped to shop, will hold a party and open a permanent Lewis and Clark exhibit. As for this Lewis and Clark heartland, never mind that the heroes passed their most wretched months in the Northwest, grumbling about the rain and rot and "thievishly inclined" natives (who were already expert at dealing with thievishly inclined white traders). Never mind that they fled the Washington side of the Columbia River for Oregon, where the game was better. We can expect a continuing rich diet of Lewis lore and Clark kitsch.

At untold points between, more Lewis and Clark centers will open, and more reincarnated explorersmany more than composed the original Corpswill turn out in three-corner hats, buckskin tunics, and elk-hide moccasins to sample the joys and a few of the ardors of roughing it 1805-style. Even before the bicentennial boom, the Corps of Discovery was second only to the Civil War as a refuge for those generational cross-dressers known as historical re-enactors.

THE PILGRIMS and Pocahontas are pass鬠and Columbus has been tarnished. But the Lewis and Clark Expedition endures as our favorite national creation mythmore cherished even than the Revolution and constitutional birth pangs that established the republic, perhaps even more sacrosanct than the Civil War. If the Civil War is our Iliada sprawling tragedy of war and purgationthen the Voyage of Discovery is our Odyssey: a more intimate epic of discovery, survival, and redemption, and everything else Hollywood loves.

It's easier to like The Odyssey than The Iliad. Like The Iliad and the Civil War, the Revolution and Constitutional Convention are messy affairs, crowded with murky characters, mixed motives, and political crosscurrents. Though they happened just a few years before the expedition, they seem much more distant. Their heroesWashington, Franklin, Madison, Lincolnare marble eminences, lofty and unapproachable.

But Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are perfect epic heroesordinary guys summoned to an outsized mission, the first Boy Scouts, our own Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee. Theirs seems a pure and simple quest, moral clarity incarnate. They appeal to both the anarchic and patriotic elements of American vanity: They light out for the country like Huck Finn and, at the same time, bear the nation's destiny in their steady hands. Their heroism is tempered and highlighted by their sympathetic weaknesses: Lewis' fierce mood swings and Clark's notoriusly haphazzird spelinge. As George W. Bush well knows, we like our heroes to trip over the language now and then. Brings 'em down to our level.

FOR BUSH, PRESIDING over this patriotic joyfest is one more in a run of lucky breaks. Lewis and Clark suit his administration's agenda better than any spectacle Karl Rove could concoct. When the Corps of Discovery reached the Pacific, staking a claim to the "Ouragon country," the United States became a continental power and embarked on the path to global power. The first steps toward Texas and California, Cuba and the Philippines, Kabul and Baghdad, were paced along the Missouri Valley in the spring of 1804. Thomas Jefferson's proto-imperialist venture, so contrary to his anti-imperialist principles, glows brighter than ever in an era of unabashed neo-imperialism. His continental ambitions, and the stratagems and rationalizations employed to achieve them, offer a legitimizing precedent to the global-supremacist ambitions of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Wolfowitz.