Snowbound and Eclipse

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “Ah, I see the captain was a little loose with his spelling,” Conrad said, “but that is easily remedied. I suppose you mean to condense these items, and perhaps improve them?”

  “Yes …”

  “I would recommend it. Now, what about the illustrations?”

  “Well, I know little about publishing, Mr. Conrad, and perhaps you can advise me.”

  “What have you?”

  “Field notes, including drawings; pressed plants; some feathers, pelts, bones, seeds … and of course the maps. Clark has some gifts, and he put them to good use. The maps are most important to all, I suppose.”

  “We can have them copied and I can make a plate. The drawings, Captain, are up to you. It is your project. Bring us an edited version of your journals—I’m sure a man of your experience can reduce them quite nicely. You’ll need to prepare the drawings, maps, all of it, just as you wish us to produce your books.”

  “Have you good artists here?”

  “You have come to the very place,” Conrad said.

  “We are in a great hurry,” I said. “Mr. Jefferson is fairly demanding publication as soon as it can be arranged.”

  Conrad smiled for the first time. “We are honored to attend to such a project, Captain, and I assure you of our utmost cooperation. You need not complete the work before submitting it to us; in fact, the sooner you begin submitting your material, the better; I will have typesetters upon it instantly.”

  “Up to me, then.”

  “Yes, it is, sir.”

  “I suppose we should discuss costs.”

  I gave him the particulars, and he told me he would get back to me as soon as he could do the calculations.

  I lost no time in contacting my old friend Doctor Benjamin Rush, from whom I had outfitted the expedition with a fine closet of medicines. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and most important for me, the nation’s preeminent physician. He had charged me to make certain medical observations of the savages during the trip: time of puberty, the menses, condition of teeth and eyes, diseases of old age, and the like, and now, with utmost joy, I had the answers for him. Eagerly did I make for his home on Chestnut Street.

  “Ah! The conquering captain!” the jowly old man exclaimed upon descrying my ingress into his musty brown library in the wake of a pale servant. We shook hands warmly, and the doctor promptly ordered a glass of port apiece so we might progress through our business in ample humor. “Tell me, tell me. Everything!”

  “Ah, it is a joy to be back, and the pills, sir, Rush’s pills, so prevailed over all manner of dispositions that I count them a universal salvation. The men, sir, called them Thunderclappers, and indeed, Doctor, they were the sovereign of all maladies. I only wish I had more with me, but I ran out of everything.”

  The Thunderclappers were mighty doses of calomel, which consisted of six parts of mercury to one part of chlorine, and the Mexican cathartic jalap, the pair of them a purgative that brooked no argument from any mortal bowels. I dispensed them freely, not only for bowel troubles, but as a general cathartic to purge the blood and intestine.

  “I received constant petitions from them; buffalo meat especially bound them up, and I was able to end their distress with great success!”

  Rush laughed. “And did you collect answers to my questions?”

  “I did, sir. The customs and practices varied so much from tribe to tribe that I can scarcely recount them now, but I plan to include my entire observations in a final volume. I’ve engaged Conrad to do the journals, and am already at work.”

  Rush listened to my practiced tales of grizzly bears, the great falls of the Missouri, the sicknesses of the men, and all the rest, nodding as I spoke.

  “I shall arrange a banquet directly,” he said. “There are men in the society aching to hear what you have accomplished, and aching, my young friend, to pay you appropriate tribute.”

  Again I was awash in pleasure, and our visit proceeded with utmost joy. I could see, after the better part of an afternoon, that the grand old man was tiring, so I made haste to wind up my discourse. But one matter stayed me.

  “Before I take my leave, sir, I have a matter of medicine to discuss, a delicate matter. It involves my corps, sir. Many are in St. Louis, still soldiers. During the expedition they came into intimate contact with various dusky women of the tribes, and to put matters plainly, contracted various maladies which I endeavored to heal by liberal application of mercury ointment and calomel.”

  “What diseases, Captain?”

  “Why, they are ordinary soldiers, sir, and as one might expect they took little care. The tribes are oddly wanton and at the same time strict; a husband might offer a guest the favors of his wife, and yet if the wife engaged in such conduct on her own account, she might be severely chastised or beaten.”

  “Yes, yes?”

  “Well, sir, I applied your remedies for what they vulgarly called ‘the clap,’ and of course for lues venerea, which many of them caught, and then caught again and again. Now, upon returning to St. Louis I contracted for their care with a French physician, a most estimable man, but of course he’s isolated from the advances of science.

  “I’ll be returning to St. Louis soon, and thought to ask you whether there might be new remedies opened to science, known to you but not known to a physician so isolated. I have always looked after my men, sir, and continue to take their part even after the corps has been disbanded.”

  “Something for the men of the corps, you say?” There was a question in Rush’s eyes.

  “Yes, sir. For them. The captains, of course, were above such things—at least I have every right to believe that Captain Clark stayed carefully aloof. He brims with health.”

  Rush nodded. “Mercury is all we have,” he said. “But in many cases the disease simply vanishes. Mercury in steady courses usually inhibits the disorder. Salts of arsenic or bismuth are sometimes employed, but they are dangerous and without proven effect.”

  “Then the St. Louis physician, Doctor Saugrain, has followed the right course?”

  “I imagine,” Rush said tersely.

  “I am comforted that all is being done that can be. Some of them, Private Gibson especially, are sick.”

  I left with a new supply of Rush’s Thunderclappers, and turned to other business.

  But awaiting me at Mrs. Wood’s boardinghouse was an issue of the National Intelligencer that had been forwarded to me by Mr. Jefferson himself. I made haste to discover what within its columns had occasioned the delivery to me, and found a letter from one McKeehan, of Pittsburgh, Sergeant Gass’s publisher, slandering me in every sentence; declaring that my real purpose in suppressing the publication of other journals was my own profit; and much more of that bilious sort of thing. He even took the liberty of recording my very thoughts, or so he imagined!

  “I’ll squeeze the nation first, and then raise a heavy contribution on the citizens individually; I’ll cry down those one-volume journals and frighten publishers and no man, woman or child shall read a word about my tour unless they enter their names on my lists, and pay what price I shall afterwards fix on my three volumes and map.”

  I was enraged, and for a while thought to challenge the man on the field of honor. My motives are as lofty as I can manage them, and I wish to produce a sound, educated, and thoroughly accurate account of the voyage of discovery, including every plant and animal we revealed to mankind, and every feature of the land we traversed. Profit doesn’t even enter into it.

  But the more I thought on it, the more I decided to forgo the satisfaction of honor. I contain, within my mind, a vast body of knowledge, which I alone possess, which my field notes only hint of, and not even Will Clark can imagine. The possibility that a ball from a dueling pistol might forever darken my mind, and deprive the world of the greatest body of information since the discoveries of Columbus, stayed me from that course. In the end I chose to ignore the scurrilous assault
on my integrity, and proceed.

  I returned to my printer, Conrad, who supplied me with an estimate: four thousand five hundred dollars to publish the journals and the scientific material and maps, and the supplement dealing with Indian glossaries and ethnographic observations. That was far more than I could afford, but Conrad had worked out some costs, and recommended that we offer subscriptions to the complete set, three volumes, published octavo, running four or five hundred pages each; the price to be thirty-one dollars. I agreed.

  Worse, the entire burden of preparing drawings, engravings, the map, reducing the astronomy observations to longitude, and finally the editing, would be borne by William Clark and me, and was not included in Conrad’s services. I feared we would go heavily into debt, and Will Clark would be worse off because he had been paid less.

  I hired a promotions man and commenced work on a prospectus advertising “Lewis and Clark’s Tour to the Pacific Ocean Through the Interior of the Continent of North America,” and soon placed it in the National Intelligencer, where it occasioned much interest.

  11. LEWIS

  I must head back to Washington to settle the accounts. The clerks keep pestering me to provide receipts for the drafts levied on the treasury; I keep telling them that they traveled all the way across a wilderness to the Pacific and back, and some got lost. But that doesn’t seem to faze officials: they want paper, or else to lay the bills upon me. I am growing testy about it.

  I did not suppose I would ever weary of Philadelphia, the most civilized precinct of North America, and yet I am, and want to retreat to Locust Hill and begin work on my papers. They banqueted and toasted me here through the spring and summer, so much that my head would be turned by it all were it not for the steadiness of purpose and good character instilled in me by my mother.

  I’ve attended three meetings of the American Philosophical Society, and in each case was besieged by members wanting to know about the West. I am flattered by such attention, and have promised them numerous notes and papers. In May I visited the eminent Benjamin Smith Barton, head of the society, and returned to him a book about Louisiana I had carried all the way to the western sea and back. He was most delighted.

  Nor was that the least of it. Charles Willson Peale, the eminent painter, sculptor, and museum director, has sketched me and done a facial mask. The sketch will become an oil portrait, and the mask a waxworks image of me. C. B. J. Fevret de Saint-Menim, the French artist, has done a fine likeness of me in native attire, especially the ermine coat given me by Cameahwaite. Here am I, at age thirty-three, greatly celebrated by savants and artists and poets. Peale’s museum will be the repository of many of my artifacts. I have employed him as well to illustrate the journals with drawings of the animals we discovered.

  I hired a fine German botanist named Frederick Pursh to plant my seeds, illustrate my books with renderings of my fieldwork, and classify my discoveries, so I have that aspect of publication well in hand. He was commended to me by a local nurseryman and botanist named McMahon, who has tenderly cultivated numerous of the Western species I managed to bring back, though so many were lost in the cache at the Great Falls of the Missouri that I am able to offer only a modest improvement in the knowledge of North American botany.

  I hired the engraver James Barralet to portray the falls of the Missouri and Columbia, and employed Alexander Wilson to portray the birds. And for a hundred dollars I hired the Swiss mathematician Ferdinand Hassler to reduce my field observations to accurate longitude. Will and I had agreed to split the cost of preparing the journals but now I find myself suffering a want of funds, having laid out so much, so fast, to launch our journals.

  So I have been very busy, but not so much that I could not enjoy many a night out with my old friend Mahlon Dickerson, a lawyer of great distinction and as much a man about town as a rural Virginian like me would want to know. He lightens my serious disposition, bantering about frivolous things, which I accept because he is at heart as serious as I am, and not given to triviality, which is the perdition of many a life. We have made a fine bachelor pair, roaming this venerable city, meeting the ladies at various levees, balls, musicales, and lectures, and sometimes escaping town to test our firearms against assorted stumps and toads.

  It was upon one of those social evenings that I encountered the dazzling Elizabeth Burden, a young lady of such grace and fair beauty that I was instantly entranced. There she stood, in a green cotton frock, its waist gathered just under her bosom, with puffed sleeves, all of it summery and cool. I had no difficulty arranging an introduction: that occurred following an ethnology lecture at Carpenters Hall. She was in the company of her eminent father, a widowed ancient history professor at the university, and I sensed at once that here at last was the woman who combined the magnificence of form I cherished with the accomplishments that I considered absolutely essential.

  I was particularly glad I had finally completed my new wardrobe. I had nothing to wear after returning from the West, and Washington was scarcely the place for a gentleman to be outfitted. So within a day of my arrival in the Quaker City, I engaged some tailors and put them to work. I certainly wanted appropriate clothing for my new and prominent life, and took pleasure in looking my finest.

  This Wednesday evening, July 22, 1807, I was splendidly accoutered in cream silk knee-britches, a royal blue coat with brass buttons, white cotton stock, and a fine black bicorne, though it was perhaps too hot for such attire. I kept my coat open so that I might not sweat too much at the armpits.

  I invited the Burdens to a nearby tavern and they gladly accepted, eager to meet the explorer. I used my status shamelessly, and why not? What better entrée into the lives of strangers? I bought a round of Madeira and cheese and other sundries for the gentlemen, while Professor Burden ordered lemonade with pond ice for his daughter, and I got down to the business of exploring this fair lady as if she were an unknown continent, whose rivers I was gradually ascending to their source.

  “Ah, what beauteous company we share this evening. Tell me, Miss Elizabeth, about your accomplishments, quite apart from being the cynosure of all eyes.”

  She eyed me levelly, and I wondered whether it had been the wrong approach.

  “I mean, you are here attending a lecture on Ohio River tribal ethnology.”

  She smiled at last, and like a sunburst. “It was my father’s wish.”

  “I imagine you profited from it.”

  “I imagine,” she said.

  “You have been reared among books. Have you a library?”

  “Governor, my particular joy lies in keeping a good house for my father, so that he may pursue his vocation. I bring him a tea tray every afternoon at four. I have a good hand. Sometimes he permits me to copy things he needs, or to prepare a draft he will be sending to a printer.”

  “Oh? A copyist you say, familiar with unusual terms and all?”

  “We have Doctor Johnson’s dictionary. It doesn’t always suffice.”

  I began to grow excited. A copyist! And I, with an enormous project looming over me. Not just a copyist, but one who could correct errors and spellings and put things right.

  “I think you perform a most valuable labor,” I said, and turned to the florid-faced professor, who wore his gray hair in a long queue. “You have a great asset, sir, in this fair maid.”

  “I’ve never thought of her as an asset, Governor.” There was a certain asperity in his tone, and I retreated.

  “A helpmeet, then. A daughter who is there, upon your service, doing all that is required to advance knowledge and scholarship.”

  He smiled. “I am the beneficiary, that is true, but I worry about my Elizabeth and her future. She is twenty-three.”

  Ah, I thought, the fine old gentleman is playing Cupid. He’s aware of what a match I would make, and what I can offer a woman. Twenty-three is older than the usual nuptial age, and she had been withering on the vine, and that only improved my chances.

  Once I had properly inventoried her
charms, I began at once to spin stories of my adventures.

  “Mahlon has heard all these, but I always have some additional thing to tell about, and so he’ll just have to listen,” I said.

  She smiled at Dickerson, and I began anew to relive those crucial moments in my existence when I was walking across a wilderness populated by unruly savages, dangerous beasts, hunger and cold and sickness … Thus I entranced her for the evening, and managed to meet several more times, always during the bright June afternoons, to take tea in the company of her aunt.

  I thought surely she would succumb, but then one afternoon she declined my attentions, saying she had a headache, and after that it became more and more taxing to see her, though I found out what lectures her father was attending and sometimes caught a bright glimpse of her in those moments. She was always the soul of courtesy, but I knew that she had rejected my suit. Ah, this business of being a perpetual bachelor is woeful at times, though of course I cherish the liberty it affords me.

  I knew that once again, domestic joy had eluded me, though I could not quite see how I had failed or what I had said that turned her away. St. Louis, probably. A woman so civilized and accomplished might not relish life in a raw town west of the Alleghenies. I could not find anything to fault in my own conduct, save perhaps that quality of which I am most proud, that I am a serious man and take life as a matter of much gravity.

  I made light of it to my boon companion, Dickerson, and made ready to return to Washington to deal with those pesky accountants who could not grasp why I did not have duplicate or triplicate copies of every draft upon the treasury I signed during my preparation and after the corps had returned.

  During this whole period I had not penned a word for Conrad. He was impatient, beseeching me to send him material so he could begin the great project, but I did not feel like doing it, and wanted to do it in a proper manner, with quiet exactitude, and not in Mrs. Wood’s rooming house in a strange city. Mr. Jefferson had been beseeching me as well, saying that the scientific world awaits my journals, and he pressed me so much to begin them that I began turning aside his letters. I had scarcely gotten accustomed to life in civilization, and now I am facing impossible demands. So I am off to Washington to settle accounts, and then Virginia.