COLUMBUS DAY
Part 2 – Did the Lewis & Clark Expedition Follow the Columbus Pattern?
Columbus
served the Spanish monarchs in Westward Exploration
There is nothing in the stories
regarding the Lewis and Clark expedition to suggest that either Captain
Meriwether Lewis or Second Lieutenant William Clark had the negative
self-aggrandizing character displayed in Columbus. They were soldiers, chosen
for a task based on exceptional talents for a multi-purpose expedition from St.
Louis up the Missouri River and then westward from its origin to the Pacific
Ocean via the Columbia River. They were selected for the task by President
Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had long desired to explore the territories west of
the Mississippi River, even before he became president when the western
boundary of the United States the Mississippi River. It was
after the 1803 Louisiana Purchase that the Lewis and Clark expedition was
commissioned. The expedition was a lengthy one beginning in 1804 and ending in
1806. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 had nearly doubled the size of the United States.
The Lewis and Clark expedition
Source of graphic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_and_Clark_Expedition
I wish to credit a brief online
conversation with Melissa Wade on Twitter with helping me to think of about the Lewis
and Clark expedition and about how it fit into a pattern of exploration and
exploitation. She had expressed disappointment on Twitter with the University
of Oregon’s decision to have their “uniforms honor the Oregon Trail and Lewis
& Clark.” That led to a bit of a conversation and I appreciated her
perspective. In her perspective it was honoring a Westward expansion that led
to a continual minimizing of the territories in which the indigenous people of
America had lived for centuries. I wondered if there was a way we could
celebrate the courage of those who explored while acknowledging the negative
aspects of our Westward movement. Certainly some of America’s darkest actions
took place as we moved westward. One can ask whether America’s “Manifest
Destiny” which imagined an American Republic to stretch from sea to sea was all
that much different from a nation seeking lebensraum. It certainly
became clear in the Westward movement that no tribe of indigenous people would
be permitted to halt America’s Republic from stretching from the Atlantic to
the Pacific.
As I thought of the Lewis and
Clark expedition, I decided to start by thinking of the Louisiana Purchase itself which preceded the expedition. If modern international law was
being applied, there would be international criticism regarding the
Louisiana Purchase. The vast territory then owned by the French had few
French residents. There were settlements growing at New Orleans, Saint Louis, and
Saint Charles, but beyond the Mississippi River there were mostly only fur
trappers and traders. The vast majority of people living in the territories were the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Were these indigenous people ever
given the right to vote on ceding their tribal authority to either the French
government or the American Republic? Of course not! The American
government took the perspective that Native Americans had no actual sovereignty, while the presence of a few settlers and a European government's claim of sovereignty over vast Western Hemisphere territories could be regarded as legitimate ownership of the territories. Therefore when the French government offered the United States the right to purchase the vast Louisiana territory it was viewed as a legitimate transfer of authority even though the vast majority of people living in the territory had never ceded authority to either of our nations. Our purchase which transferred the native populations under our authority was purchased from a government whose leader was Napoleon Bonaparte. One of the obligations of the
Lewis and Clark expedition was to tell the American Indians with whom they came
into contact that the United States now held sovereignty over the tribes of the
territories. The expedition was equipped with weaponry to answer any objection
to the news. Whether or not the translators always made this clear is something
I wonder about. The translator for much of the expedition was Toussaint Charbonneau,
whose wife Sacajawea journeyed along with the expedition and also helped out at
times. She gave birth on the expedition to a son named Jean Baptiste
Charbonneau. The son’s accomplishments are worth reading about here. I can
imagine a savvy fur trader with knowledge of the indigenous people maybe
downplaying the sovereignty issue when speaking to the various tribes.
Statue
of Sacajawea Bismarck, ND
Wonderful
accompanying story with this photo
The reality that is true for both
Columbus’ voyages and the Lewis and Clark expeditions is that they were done in
service to sovereign governments. The monarchies of Europe were in many ways
limited governments. Monarchs preferred streams of income outside of taxation.
This is one reason so many monarchs in the age of exploration invested in
exploration. The lands and conquered people would be forced to by Europe’s
weaponry to submit to demands that would fill the treasuries of Europe's governments. By subduing the native population of the Western hemisphere, European governments were relieved of the burden of increasing taxes on their own people. A way to increase government spending without increasing taxation on the home population was a seemingly shrewd goal for a monarch. The American Republic ran in something of
a similar way. When the United States was under the Articles of Confederation
it was established that territories would be auctioned off and sold in township
blocks throughout the territories administered by the Federal Government. What
had been legislated for the Northwest Territory under the Articles of Confederation would now be applied to most of the territories formed from the Louisiana Purchase. As long as the federal government could receive income for
land sales, there would be little need for unpopular taxes. As long as the government ignored the indigenous people already living on the land,
there would be plenty of unused land for the auction block.
By the time of the Louisiana
Purchase, the United States was already becoming a nation divided between Northern free states and Southern slave states. The Louisiana Purchase was larger in the north than in the south. By 1820, southern slave states began
to be concerned that most of the Louisiana Territory existed north of the
Mason-Dixon Line, which had become the dividing line between free and slave states. The first compromise regarding slavery was the 1820 Compromise that accepted Maine's desire for statehood as a free state, while letting Missouri enter as a slave state despite being located almost wholly above the Mason-Dixon Line. Pro-slavery southerners soon began moving settlers into Mexican territory between the Rio Grande and Red Rivers. After the settlers entered Mexico agreeing to recognize Mexico's sovereignty and its abolition of all slavery, the Texan Americans brought their slaves and soon were in rebellion. When independence was declared, slavery was quickly legalized. The practice of exploration laying the foundation for exploitation was repeated in America's Louisiana Purchase. Lewis and Clark were sent to explore a region where the people living there would be instantly made subjects of the state without recognized rights. The issue of how many of the states would be free and how many slave was left unresolved.
The plight of the indigenous people seemed to become a
matter of the American conscience far later than the issue of slavery. A section of the Louisiana
Purchase was set aside as Indian Territory. An exploration that included
Washington Irving had concluded that it was barely habitable and President
Andrew Jackson decided that such an area would be a good place to have an Indian Territory.
During his presidency he ordered the forced removal of tribes from the American
southeast to the newly designated Indian Territory. We now know this removal as
the “Trail of tears.”
I believe that to some degree we can
appreciate how the Lewis and Clark Expedition exhibited courage and
fortitude of explorers moving into, what for them were unknown areas west of the Mississippi
River. But we must never forget that soon our nation was making wars
against the indigenous people that were never consulted regarding who would be
their sovereign. In 1776 we had declared ourselves independent shouting “no
taxation without representation", and then within thirty years we were declaring to indigenous people that they were now under American authority because we had purchased their territory from the French even though no indigenous tribe had been consulted or represented by the French government. But we treated as wholly legitimate the French sale of lands mostly inhabited by indigenous populations. We became their sovereigns though we offered them no representation in our government.
But perhaps one act of democracy can
be remembered from the Lewis and Clark expedition. On November 24, 1805 the
expedition was facing a difficult winter camp along the Columbia River. They
voted on moving the camp to the south side of the Columbia River in hopes of
finding more food sources. Clark’s slave and Sacajawea were both allowed to
vote on the decision. It may well have been the first time in American history
where both a woman and a slave had the vote and it counted. One of the
realities is that while America’s westward expansion included atrocities
against the American Indian, and expansion of slavery – there was also a
frontier tendency towards counting the contributions of everyone involved. We have a tangled history full of wrongs and yet somehow there was a tendency as America moved west to begin to believe that everyone involved was worthy of being recognized and having their voice heard. Perhaps that was one of the things we have learned to celebrate
about the Western movement. But that should be quietly celebrated because so much must be lamented as we moved westward destroying indigenous tribes in our way or taking our slaves with us as we went. I speak as a white man who can be tempted to think that because
some things are better that past wrongs no longer matter. But somehow I can’t
imagine that is true. That is why this series won’t be finished without one
more blog.
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