The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  Getting this corner of the continent organized and alloyed into the Union proved a mammoth task. In six years’ time, this immense tract of land, extending from the Divide to the Pacific, would have its first formal name—the Columbia District. As such, it would be a formally organized fur-trading region of the North West Company, one of the two major beaver-fur suppliers in Canada. When ten years later the North West merged with its rival, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the region became known as the Columbia Department—although the Americans, who claimed free and open access to the territory along with Britain, preferred to call it Oregon Country. In 1818 the northern boundary of the country was set—by agreement, it should pass along the forty-ninth parallel, which went back east to the Great Lakes, en route traversing what the treaty documents called the Stony Mountains. In 1846, with yet another treaty, the federal government finally wrested total control of the lands away from London and named its new possession Oregon Territory. Last of all, in 1859, the most southwesterly quadrant was awarded formal statehood and named what it remains today: Oregon.

  But of course none of that was in place when Lewis first breasted the ridge. What lay before Lewis that August was territory that had in fact been explored—though only to a very minimal extent and almost entirely from the distant Pacific—by sailor-explorers, a few of whom had been bold and curious enough to take their boats upriver along the Columbia. No one nation had initially claimed the land for any particular purpose—not Britain, Spain, France, or the United States, although a company operating from Montréal, the North West Company, was generally considered to have supervision. So what Lewis saw—the far snow-dusted mountain peaks and the rivers he thought would lead to the Columbia, were still Indian territories, still a confection of places to be brought into the federal fold.

  In the mid-1990s, by which time Montana and Idaho had each been states for almost exactly a century, I spent $40,000 for a small tract of land in this corner of Montana, just to the north of the Chief Joseph Pass. Its fate tells much about one corner of the economy of the modern American West.

  The land consisted of eighty acres, in the valley of the Bitterroot River between the towns of Hamilton and Darby. Lewis and Clark passed directly along this same valley, heading north through easy, beautiful country, before turning to the west and crossing over the snow-filled Lolo Pass into the headwaters of the Columbia. They remarked only casually on its beauty; I was captivated by it—by the views of the great jagged mountains to the west, by the chuckling of the waters of the impossibly clear and cold trout streams, by the green of the lush grasslands, by the smell of balsam firs, by the fugitive presence of bears and mountain lions and great stags, and by woods filled with birdsong. The small towns, too, had an easy, late-Victorian charm to them, and people still left their doors open and the keys in their cars and their children quite free to roam as wild as they wished. The big city of Missoula to the north was a friendly place, with a good university, fine bookshops—all that was needed for civilized life. My plan was to build a small log cabin on the land, to write there, and to live out an imagined Western dream.

  Two things rapidly became apparent. The first was that others of far greater resources had much the same idea. Hollywood was starting to embrace the Bitterroot Valley. My immediate neighbors all turned out to be famous: a rock star named Huey Lewis and two actors, Christopher Lloyd and Andie MacDowell. Then there was talk that bankers and great figures of the financial world—Charles Schwab most notably—were considering buying ranches nearby. This led to the second realization: that the style of life I envisioned was something I could ill afford. Besides, I lived at the time in Hong Kong, eight thousand miles away across the Pacific Ocean. Montana might be heart-stoppingly beautiful, but it was beauty I was going to have to live without.

  So a year after I bought the land, I did the dull and responsible thing: I sold it—this time for $80,000. My melancholy was somewhat assuaged by having made a tidy profit. Yet the decision saddened me. It rankled. Montana had long been central to my dream, and it was trying to have to accept that it was not to be.

  It must have been twenty years later that I returned. I stayed with the realtor who had sold me the land and who had then sold it for me. She had prospered, mightily. She and her husband lived in a stupendous mansion, had property on the Pacific coast of Canada, and lived, by their own admission, tremendously well. The land boom I first noticed had been sustained, had become overwhelming. Huge houses were being built high up in the hills, expensive restaurants were everywhere, the local airstrip was busy with private planes, and the road through the valley—the very track Lewis and Clark had taken two centuries before—was jammed with shiny four-wheel-drive trucks. People were complaining about the difficulty of getting help, because for working people there was suddenly nowhere affordable to live locally, and in cafés I heard wealthy newcomers expressing amazement that their gardeners or pool boys had to drive sixty miles each way to get to work.

  For four days the realtor and I explored the valley, fascinated, mouths agape at the way everything had changed, so dramatically and so very quickly. But the rich outsiders who had bought into the Bitterroot Valley were never there, someone remarked: they spent just a few days, then went off to some other equally opulent corner of the world—and, my friend remarked, by doing so they created a kind of absence, a kind of poverty. The sense of community that had made the valley towns so special had evaporated. The beauty and solitude of the place, the kind of world that Norman Maclean and Wallace Stegner had so loved, was fast vanishing. It had much more to do with money.

  And with that, my friend drove me down to my land. She had been waiting to tell me about it. She hadn’t wanted to depress me further, she said. I wasn’t quite certain what she meant.

  So we drove down the old road, bumped across the stream, and came to a small paved highway that hadn’t been there before. We breasted the ridge where there was a fence and a “Private, No Trespassing” sign. We parked the car. The air was heavy with the smell of pine needles and horse dust. Everything began to look and feel familiar, and then, as we rounded a bend in the track, there at last was my land—a long sloping parcel of yellowing grass and rock, and on it, a house of such appalling vulgarity as quite beggared belief. Eaves and arches, wings and columns and a mighty porte cochere, all done in white and ocher stucco, with a long black Escalade parked outside.

  The house must have been unimaginably expensive. But what of the land, the eighty acres I had briefly cherished? My friend coughed discreetly and looked at her feet before replying. It had last been put on the market, she said quietly, for one and a quarter million dollars.

  There is indeed something—for some—quite magical about Montana.

  SHORELINE PASSAGE

  From here it was downhill all the way for the explorers. Sacagawea was in her element here: this was Shoshone country, and she knew the language, remembered friends, and could and did persuade the local people to supply packhorses for the difficult trek downhill. As soon as the expedition members discovered among the forests and the crags the most navigable of the swarms of westbound streams—the frighteningly all-whitewater Lochsa, and then what they called the Kooskooskee, but which is now the Clearwater—they began their descent in earnest.

  They built themselves another clutch of canoes by hollowing out ponderosa pine trunks with hot embers, then set off, screaming down mountain rivers that had a combined length of no more than 120 miles (in a straight line less than 80) until the hills flattened out and the rapids became ever more sluggish and steady waters.

  When they had left the Bitterroot Mountain headwaters of the Lochsa River, they were at 7,000 feet. When they reached “the leavel pine Countrey” at the end of the Clearwater River, which coincides with the western edge of the Rockies, they were only 740 feet above sea level. The party had thus descended almost a hundred feet with every westward mile of travel, reaching with stark suddenness the bone-dry grasslands of what is now eastern Washington
State. The Snake River joins and takes over the Clearwater here, with a river-bisected pair of towns once colorfully known as Ragtown and Jawbone Flats but now called the more respectful and anodyne Lewiston and Clarkston.

  Down on these waterless and treeless flats, the men’s moods seemed changed. They were now more like stable-scenting horses, creatures who were beginning the run for home and could scarcely be persuaded otherwise. They began to chew up remarkable daily distances—the now placid nature of the river helping, of course—and the team plowed across the prairies like men possessed.

  The sea now tugging them west was still some hundreds of miles distant, but there was growing evidence that it did indeed lie not too far away now, just below the western horizon. One of the local Indian parties showed the explorers a sailor’s jacket, another a red-and-blue blanket made of cloth—both from one of the maritime expeditions that had already explored and charted the West Coast. They then saw sea otters in the river one day; and then, crucially for history, they glimpsed far away the snow-capped summit of one of the volcanoes of the coastal ranges known as the Cascades.

  This moment—it was Saturday, October 19, and by now they had joined the great flow of the Columbia River—is of great importance because in his diary William Clark gives this mountain peak a name:

  I discovered a high mountain of emence hight cover with Snow, this must be one of the mountains laid down by Vancouver, as seen from the mouth of the Columbia River, from the Course which it bears which is West I take it to be Mt. St. Helens.

  Not unsurprisingly, there is dispute. Some historical geographers insist that Clark could not possibly have seen this particular peak from his reported location—and that the mountain he saw was actually the then unnamed Mount Adams. The distinction is important. For if the mountain he saw was Saint Helens, then he was noting without fanfare something that was transcendentally intercontinental. For the Royal Navy explorer Captain George Vancouver had already seen this mountain, by chance on exactly this October day thirteen years before, in 1792. He had been the one to name it. He had done so in homage to his great friend Alleyne Fitzherbert, who had just been made British ambassador to Spain and had been created Lord St. Helens to add dignity to his posting.

  Vancouver had seen the mountain from its western side. Now William Clark reported seeing its eastern side, and in doing so he was also seeing the first far-side-of-the-continent entity that had already been seen and named by another non-native discoverer. The circle of unveiling had thus now been closed. A great blow had been struck for the geographic and topographic unification of America, for the making of trans-America, and for uniting what would in due course become, even out here, the United States of America.

  Mount Saint Helens is a volcano known these days for its devastating and lethal eruptions (the latest in May 1980). Perhaps now it could be more suitably memorialized as the capstone for this first-ever attempt to unite the American states. It could be seen, if a little fancifully, as the capstone of the idea itself, or more prosaically as the fastening that finally closed and secured the fabric of human knowledge and imperial adventure that now covered the whole breadth of America. If, that is, it was the mountain that William Clark professed to have spotted from his vantage point on the high Columbia.

  But no memorial to the moment stands on the banks of the river. Nothing stands to say, Here was America first United. Instead there are two less agreeable monuments, if you will, to modern American life.

  One, at a place named Umatilla, is a secret and highly secure army base that was built specifically to destroy the nation’s stocks of nerve gas. The troops deployed here started work in the 1990s, and so numerous were the warheads filled with sarin and VX and mustard gas that they are still hard at it twenty years later.

  The other monument, if such it deserves to be called, is an enormous silvery-looking factory—just as secret and secure in its own way as the Umatilla Army Depot—owned by the giant agribusiness corporation Con Agra. It is called Lamb Weston, and though it looks more like a steam-belching power station, it does make food, all of it out of potatoes. Its owners wouldn’t allow me access but instead referred me to a press release, which said in part:

  Potato products are the most profitable food item on foodservice menus today. And no other product is so universally loved, so broadly versatile and available in so many styles, cuts and flavor profiles.

  Local employees said that their plant makes french fries, one of the most popular of the humble potato’s “styles, cuts and flavor profiles,” for McDonald’s.

  From here matters for the Lewis and Clark expedition changed fast, climatically and topographically. The dry plains gave way with startling suddenness to forest—rain forest, in fact, with low clouds and dripping moss. The river picked up speed as it squeezed through the Cascade ranges. There were rapids and small waterfalls—nowadays all smoothed and calmed by a succession of great dams, the Bonneville most notable among them. And then, once past the rapids, it seemed that in the ever-increasing risings and fallings that the team noticed each day, it might well now be affected by tides, from the sea. Sea frets—thick wet fogs smelling of fish and seaweed—began to trouble the scouts in the party, canoeists who were now having to pick their course carefully as they passed along on an ever-widening, shoal-rich estuary.

  On November 6 it seemed that they might have attained their goal. “Ocian in view! O! the joy!” Clark’s line is often quoted. But he was wrong. Though they had done “4,212 miles from the Mouth of the Missouri R,” they were still in the Columbia estuary. It seemed so unfair: ocean waves were breaking into the bay, setting their craft rocking with an intensity as if they had been offshore. But it would be two more weeks of foul weather and disappointment before, at last, Lewis was able to disembark at a spot in full and undeniable view of the true Pacific and carve into a tree, just as Alexander Mackenzie had daubed onto that stone off Bella Coola twelve years before, a simple inscription: “By Land from the U. States in 1804 & 1805.”

  They built a camp on the left bank of the estuary and called it Fort Clatsop out of respect for the friendly local tribe. They spent the winter there, hoping in vain that a ship might come and take them back home by way of Panama, thus sparing them another long trek across the country. In the end, of course, they opted to walk home and reached Saint Louis in late September 1806. They had not found a water route across the country; they had not found the Northwest Passage; but they had forged some kind of relationship with almost twenty distinct Native American tribes, though to what ultimate benefit remained uncertain. They had unified the nation in a purely geographic sense; they had achieved in the very crudest sense what Thomas Jefferson had expected of them. And they had gained a formidable amount of information, thousands of pages of fascination and wonder for all America to pore over for decades to come.

  And Fort Clatsop would go on to become Astoria, after John Jacob Astor, a butcher’s son and flute maker of Walldorf, near Heidelberg, established just to its north the headquarters of the great fur-trading empire that made his one of the wealthiest families in America. The names Astor and occasionally Walldorf are now memorialized almost everywhere—in New York at the Public Library, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Astor Place, and Astoria in Queens; in a novel, Astoria, by Washington Irving; in four American towns called Astor and three others called Astoria; in Britain in both Houses of Parliament; at Cliveden and Mackinac Island; in Waldorf salad; and in scandals aplenty—the catalog of achievement and memorial and fortune is as endless as the family’s present fecundity and its former (since the family’s star is now slightly dimmed) celebrity. There is also, on a hill outside the Oregon terminus town, a marble column of great height built by the Astor family in the 1920s, with an inner staircase that allows visitors to clamber up and see unimpeded the view that Lewis and Clark would have seen in that early winter of 1805.

  Beyond where Fort Clatsop stood and where the city of Astoria now straggles, there was only ocean—the wide, gray, slow-m
oving, and entirely open Pacific Ocean—to be seen ahead. There was no farther point of land to the west. With their arrival at the mouth of the river and their crossing of the bar, America had been crossed and the continent physically unified by the travels and the travails of a party of newly made American men. President Thomas Jefferson’s intention had perhaps not been fully realized—his men had not opened a water route across the country, for the Rocky Mountains had proved to be an impenetrable barrier—but they now had accomplished something of unimaginable courage and determination. They could now declare that they knew—and America knew as well—just where America was.

  The basic shape and size and topography of the continent now being satisfactorily established, all that was needed next, at least in the short term, was to find out just what America was. How had America’s land been made, what was it made of, and how could it best be settled and turned to American use and enjoyment? Or because America would in time become a nation built by peoples from all over the rest of the world, how could the land be employed for the use and enjoyment of all the rest of the planet?

  The explorers had come first, as they always should. The scientists, bent on answering the questions that the explorers had posed, would inevitably come next. And then, guided by what these explorers told of their findings, would come the settlers, who would plant their flags and shovels deep in this hitherto untouched soil, deep in the virgin American earth.

  PART II

  WHEN AMERICA’S STORY WENT BENEATH the EARTH

  1809–1901

  . . . we pass each other alternately until we emerge from the fissure, out on the summit of a rock. And what a world of grandeur is spread before us! Below is the canyon through which the Colorado runs. We can trace its course for miles, and at points catch glimpses of the river. From the northwest comes the Green in a narrow winding gorge. From the northeast comes the Grand, through a canyon that seems bottomless from where we stand. Away to the west are lines of cliffs and ledges of rock—not such ledges as the reader may have seen where the quarryman splits his rocks, but ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains.