The Fate of the Corps by Larry E. Morris, Yale University Press, $30/£20, ISBN 0300102658 Reviewed by Adrian Barnett
HISTORY is sometimes reduced to events appearing briefly in the spotlight, given continuity by hindsight and research. But what happens to the characters after the glare has moved on? With The Fate of the Corps, Larry Morris seeks to answer this for one of the most famous events in the history of exploration, the 1804 expedition of William Clark and Meriweather Lewis.
Organised at the behest of the president, Thomas Jefferson, this 34-person adventure began in St Louis, Missouri, and made its way by boat and on foot across North America to the Pacific ocean. Returning in 1806, the scientific odyssey had encountered societies, territory, geological features and species all previously unknown to westerners. Picked for their frontier skills, the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition were a mixed lot. Many were better prepared for the prairie than for the fame that followed possibly the most famous event of its kind in North American history.
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Using historical sources from published books, diaries, newspapers and land deeds to census records, Morris has pieced together the lives of almost all of the expedition and guides. With land grants and back pay, several of the rank-and-file soldiers simply settled down to become farmers; others sold their land and drank the money. Some became prominent politicians, mountebanks or murderers (sometimes simultaneously).
Others, bitten by the exploring bug and unable to find peace or a place in an increasingly structured east coast society, returned to the frontier, guiding the ever-increasing trains of homesteaders and pushing ever westwards as more and more lands lost their pristine appeal.
Morris tells their stories in an able and engaging manner, mixing individual psychoanalysis with social and political snippets to give a fine feeling for the individuals and their motivations, the times in which they lived and the preconceptions under which they operated. But The Fate of the Corps is the story of a society in rapid transition, of towns and industry growing apace, a frontier expanding ever westward and – as the balance of power changed – an alteration in the perception of Native Americans from equals inhabiting sovereign nations to near-vermin.
Morris has provided a cogent, coherent and fascinating history of a neglected chapter in the history of exploration. It is true that expeditions can be life-changing events, but we seldom appreciate the extent of this. An analysis like Morris’s is unusual. So well and so interestingly has Morris addressed his subject, that it would not surprise me if The Fate of the Corps launched a genre in historical travel writing: the post-expedition history, a scientific What Katy Did Next.