A Voyage of Discovery

I’ve been reading a lot about Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and the Corps of Discovery this past year. Maybe devouring is a better word. After reading a plethora of books I decided to go to the source and this summer have been working through the journals of Lewis, Clark and others whose notes on that great adventure of 1804-06 survive.
It’s fascinating to read the daily musings, rants and descriptions from these adventurers. Since they lacked spell checkers in those days (or even dictionaries) it’s slow reading. That slowness, however, lets you savor their moments of terror, starvation and discovery.
Their listings of birds previously not seen or described by white men are intriguing. Because the journals where not published for nearly 100 years after they returned (and that’s another fascinating story) many of the birds they named, now carry different names. (As any academician will tell you, it’s not who makes the discovery, it’s who publishes first that gets the credit.) Here’s Meriwether Lewis’ jottings from 1805 while sitting in soaking clothes in a leaky hut in Oregon: “… a small Crow, the blue crested Corvus and the smaller Corvus with a white brest, and the little brown ren, a large brown sparrow, the bald Eagle and the beatifull Buzzard of the columbia still continue with us.”
Some we can figure out: Steller’s Jay, Winter Wren, California Condor (which they ate); others we can only wonder about.