Word: jefferson
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...knew? Not Lewis, not Jefferson, not the Indians. In July 2002 we don't know either. Particularly since the events of last September, we sense that there's something enormous and strange ahead of us--in the darkness, over the mountains, through the trees--but we have no idea what it is or how far off. To find it, face it and live to write the story, we'll have to be resourceful, lucky, patient, flexible and observant, much as Lewis and Clark were. We'll have to row into the current of our ignorance, one stroke at a time...
...they couldn't see the future either. The Indians had an illusion of their own, even more magnificently mistaken than the captains' vision of the Northwest Passage: peace everlasting with this strange new race. The corps carried shiny medallions to foster this dream. The coins showed President Jefferson on one side and a symbolic handclasp on the reverse...
After 8,000 miles and 28 months of travel from their start near St. Louis, the corps returned to a hero's welcome as joyful as it was short-lived. Jefferson, according to historians, soon grew disappointed in the enterprise. It had failed to substantiate his western dreams of a well-watered garden convenient to the Pacific where generations of self-sufficient farmers would live in democratic bliss, free from old, corrosive political controversies such as slavery. As for peace with the Indians, and among the Indians, well, those medals certainly were handsome. And then there was Lewis, of course...
...reality, the two men had far more in common. They were both Virginians. They were both Army officers, six-footers and experienced outdoorsmen, who first met eight years before the expedition when they were serving in Indian campaigns in the Ohio Valley. They shared with their friend Thomas Jefferson a passion for such Enlightenment sciences as ethnology, paleontology, zoology and botany...
...previous two years, Lewis had been working in the White House as Jefferson's private secretary. Like Jefferson, Lewis had lost his father at an early age; now he was in daily contact with the President, who was practically a surrogate father to him. Lewis told Clark that Jefferson had placed him in charge of a mission to explore "the interior of the continent of North America, or that part of it bordering on the Missourie & Columbia Rivers." Moreover, Lewis wanted Clark to be his co-commander...