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I would be lying if i were to profess a great and undying passion concerning the Lewis and Clark Expedition; my greatest exposure to it comes from my time in Elementary and High School, a period marked by a great disdain for American history, which I felt was too short and 'boring'. Later, while teaching in Alaska and rooming with a fellow teacher who was raised in Montana, I was exposed to a great many impromtue lectures upon the subject; the expedition was one of his favorite topics and something she taught almost yearly, for personal and selfish reasons (I often wonder if she felt the same way about my long winded diatribes about Wisconsin History and the Germanic invasions of Rome)
However, that isn't to say that the tales of these explorers never exercized a certain spell over me. The thought of this small cadre of men (and a dog) treking across, what was to them, a vast virgin wilderness in appealing to that great romantic part of my own soul. Who wouldn't want to be some of the first white men to see the Plaines, and describe their contents?
While listening to this lecture, I found this old thought returning; I spent a good deal of time fantisizing about what the region would have looked like, smelled like, felt like to these early explorers. What wonder and awe they must have felt, as they crossed the rugged land and recorded it in their journals.
I've apparently come a long way since I snuck books into my High School history class and tried to read them, while not paying any attention to the teacher (Note to Dr. Isern; I quit this practice years ago!)
Hearing these tales of the early explorers was certainly interesting. I was expecially drawn to the store of Pike and his, possible, connection to the Aaron Burr conspiricy. In American history, at least that taught in our public schools, we have a tendency of glorifying out heros and white washing them in the process; there was certainly some satisfaction in learning that this 'hero' might well have been a traitor to the country he had sworn to protect.
More interesting, however, was the discussion on the Great American Desert and its perception in the American collective concious. Considering that this very same region would eventually go on to become the bread basket of the nation, it was interesting to hear that, not only was the opposite long held to be the true, but that this older notion might have had more to it than we could currently believe.
Taking into account the odler definition of 'desert', to be a place that was void of 'civilization', one can see how this view first came to be formed. The Great Plaines certainly was sparcely populated during this period and, of course, very few of the people who were there would have been Anglo-Americans. However, as Webb would point out, the definition of the plaines, is a region that is semi-arid, flat and treeless; all of these same criteria would apply to deserts as well (although, admittingly, the Saharah is certainly more than 'semi' arid).
One thing that I would be interesting in learning more about would be how people began to see the Plaines as valuable farm land and began to till the soil. So many of the early exploreres remarked on how it was useless for agriculture; how exactly did this change? Were their advances in the science of farming, or did people begin to move to the land and realize that these earlier writers who know knoweldge of what they were talking about (how many of these exploreres, after all, were farmers? For that matter, did either Lewis or Clark have any experience in Agriculture; it would see that with Jefferson's passionate idealism realted to yeoman farmers, he'd have chosen people who have some knowledge of the practice to scout out his new land).