The Heritage Lewis and Clark Left Us

The frontier is part of the American soul.

By Will Tanner, Author of The American Tribune

222 years ago, two Virginia-born gentlemen–Meriwether Lewis and William Clark–embarked upon a grand journey across America’s vastly expanded and theretofore unexplored Western frontier. One that stretched, for the first time, all the way to the Pacific. What they asserted dominion over as they crossed it in their moccasins and pirogues was not just land, but a natural wonder full of beckoning adventures and incredible beauty because it was something unique: untouched and undeveloped land in which one could feel the pull of the natural world. This was something unique, and must remain protected.

The Western Difference Lewis and Clark Discovered

To explore and map the frontier was nothing new. Gov. Spotswood’s Knights of the Golden Horseshoe expedition crossed the Blue Ridge for the first time, and that frocklicksome band of adventurers drinking toasts of brandy and claret as they discovered the Shenandoah and opened it to eventual settlement. Division and settlement of the Ohio River Valley had been a focus of Virginians from Thomas Lee to George Washington, along with other colonials like Benjamin Franklin, and the British attempt to shut American settlers off from it was an impetus to war.

Young Captain Lewis’s mentor, Thomas Jefferson, was instrumental in crafting the Northwest Ordinance that mapped and divided the Northwest Territory. Lieutenant Colonel George Rogers Clark of the Virginia militia, elder brother of William Clark, launched a stunning campaign over the course of 1778 and 1779 to secure this territory for America. It was in the Kentucky region of this territory that the Rogers family moved when William was in his teens.

Throughout the colonies, such stories were typical. Explorers and frontiersmen pushed westward, perhaps on their own initiative or perhaps on behalf of their state, claiming the land and developing much on the pattern set in the Tidewater: an unbroken mixture of small and large farms that turned the frontier into the settled world.

But the expedition upon which Lewis and Clark embarked on May 14 of 1804 was different than those past expeditions and the campaigns that secured them. They were all pecuniary pursuits meant to open seemingly inexhaustible tracts of land to settlers. Spotswood’s associates traveled to and bought up the Shenandoah to make large fortunes larger, not out of a love for the Natural Bridge. Thomas Lee, Peter Jefferson, George Mason, and others engrossed hundreds of thousands of acres for the Ohio Company not to revel in the then-buffalo-trodden beauty of Kentucky’s bluegrass, but to turn it into riches through the planting of tobacco.

The expedition that Peter’s son Thomas organized and sent Lewis and Clark upon was to be different. It was to be scientific and a grand adventure. It was to map the West and catalogue its riches not just so that some of them might be exploited, but so that they might be known and that the American nation could appreciate the glory of that which it had gotten from Napoleon for cents an acre. Such was why they catalogued, sketched, and preserved so many species. Even those with little commercial use had much beauty, and that beauty was in itself a good thing to be appreciated.

The scenes Lewis stumbled upon as Clark and the men painstakingly pushed, paddled, and sailed the keelboat and pirogues up the muddy Missouri before marching through the Lemhi Pass and over the Bitterroots were incredible. Entire landscapes swathed in buffalo. Vast throngs of pronghorn dotting the plains. Nary a man-made structure in sight. No boundary lines bringing fencing and fields of tobacco or grain to the virgin soil. Just nature, and its beauty. A world full of opportunity spread out beneath his feet, and stretched from horizon to horizon.

What’s more, so much land had been acquired so quickly that it could not be engrossed by rapacious landlords nor settled by stolid farmers any time soon. Eventually, civilization would march across it as thin arteries of wood and steel linked East to West. But not for decades after Lewis and Clark pointed the way to them.

What unfolded in the West was different than the East. Vast forests, mighty mountain ranges, arid plains, and valleys so beautiful they could represent Arcadia sat untouched for generations with nary a soul nearing them. The tyranny of distance meant that these glorious lands, far from those hostile waterways Lewis and Clark attempted to use in the desperate and futile search for a Northwest Passage, would remain virgin for many decades.

Protecting Our Heritage

Then, as the frontier closed and Americans turned inward, the rapacious claws of ever-marching industry tried to grasp them. To fell the redwoods, dam the rivers, exploit that which was beautiful so long as it was unexploited. Fortunately for America, Teddy Roosevelt was there to protect a slice of America and keep it beautiful so that we might get a glimmer of that untrammeled charm of the American landscape that Lewis and Clark’s expedition first set sight upon. Not all of America could–or should–be kept in such a state. But a few of the more beautiful places would be, so that the sense of adventure into the unknown and unsettled that had always been part of our national heritage could be preserved for future generations.

At Yosemite, Glacier, Yellowstone, and elsewhere, we can experience just a bit of what our ancestors did as they built the world anew. We too can hike to fish in pristine rivers. Instead of gazing upon endless stretches of strip malls and apartment complexes, we can get a burst of adrenaline if a bear or moose wanders near. Lewis and Clark too had their troubles with bears! We can see those herds of bison, and be reminded of the dangers they pose as well as their stunning–and distinctly American–beauty.

To hike to the top of a peak and look out upon nothing but nature is an experience now rarely available, but is one our ancestors experienced and, hard as exploring and settling the frontier was, one they cherished.

We, lacking such spectacles in an overdeveloped world, ought cherish them all the more. They are our heritage, our birthright, and integral to our spirit.

A century and a quarter after Teddy Roosevelt protected that uniquely American birthright from the rapacious plutocrats who would have wiped it away for a bit of oil, cheap lumber, or ore and coal, the vultures are once again circling. They enviously gaze upon what remains of the untrammelled American Western wilderness, scenes the likes of which Lewis and Clark first saw and countless Americans have since been inspired by. Petitioned by developers and like special interests, the usual suspects in the Senate attempted to sell it off, claiming that studding the wild hills with yet more strip malls and condos would be the “American” thing to do. It would not be. It would be an act of rank and gross betrayal, a stunningly Esau-like casting away of the birthright for a bit of temporary gain.

The frontier is part of the American soul. We no longer have a real frontier, but we have been left with a few reaches of land that represent it. A few places left unengrossed, undeveloped, and untouched.

To walk through them, to fish in them, to look out upon them with wonderment is what was first done when Lewis and Clark expanded the American dominion with their march to the sea and back. We must preserve that for future generations, as it has been preserved for us, so that future generations of Americans too can look out upon the incredible and be inspired by it.

Will Tanner, a graduate of Washington & Lee University and the Wake Forest School of Law, is the author of The American Tribune newsletter. You can follow him at @Will_Tanner_1.