by Andrea Wulf
IN MAY 1804, after a winter spent just outside St. Louis, the center of the fur trade along the Missouri, Lewis began his 4,000-mile journey into the unknown and toward the Pacific Ocean. With him was his expedition partner, William Clark, with whom he had served in the army, and a party of more than forty men. Their provisions included one ton of dried pork, six hundred pounds of ammunition, canoes, surveying instruments, a microscope, and gifts for the indigenous population such as several kilos of colored beads, phosphorus and 144 “cheap looking Glasses.” Amid this plethora of goods, Lewis and Clark also found room for America’s first botanical textbook, the Elements of Botany—fresh from the printing press and written by Barton, who had taught Lewis in Philadelphia—and publications by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus that explained the classification of plants and their botanical descriptions.
As private secretary to the president, Lewis had witnessed Jefferson’s enthusiasm for plants firsthand, including the extensive botanical letters that arrived at the White House alongside all the usual political correspondence. The horticultural world was clearly excited to have a gardener president and Lewis would bear all of this in mind during his expedition. In Cincinnati, on his journey from Washington, D.C., to St. Louis, he asked a gardener to dispatch cuttings of fruit trees to Monticello, knowing how much Jefferson treasured his orchard. In St. Louis he procured “some slips of the Osages Plums and Apples”—the so-called Osage orange, a thorny tree from which Native Americans made bows. It could be clipped into impenetrable hedges and would, by the mid-nineteenth century, become the most commonly planted tree in America. He collected roots against snakebites, discovered a serviceberry that was superior in “flavor and size” to the one he knew from Virginia and thought the “yellow currant” (Ribes aureum) was “vastly preferable to those of our gardens.” Like Jefferson, Lewis observed plants for their possible uses as edible or medicinal plants but also for their ornamental value.6
Over the next months the expedition members battled against the strong rapids and collapsing embankments of the Missouri River passing through today’s Nebraska and Iowa. While Jefferson was mourning the death of his youngest daughter, Mary, who had died in childbirth, the Lewis and Clark expedition rowed along the Missouri, weaving through a landscape that promised to fulfill Jefferson’s hopes. They saw prairies which seemed like a Garden of Eden abounding with buffalo herds and deer. The grass, Clark wrote in his journal, would make the “sweetest” hay, and stunningly colorful flowers were growing in a living tapestry as far as the eye could see. They gorged on delicious fruits, saving what they didn’t eat for Jefferson’s orchard, and were dazzled by the perfumed blossom swaying with the grass in the wind. Nature, Clark exulted, had “exerted herself”—the scenery was “magnificent,” and the prairie, Lewis wrote, “fertile in the extreem.” As they progressed on their northwesterly route into today’s South and then North Dakota, the landscape changed, opening into vast plains with endless horizons. Lewis, who like Jefferson had been brought up in the mountains and forests of Albemarle County in Virginia, was struck by the immensity of the country that unfolded before them.
As Lewis and Clark traveled, they collected countless specimens and objects to send back to the White House: seeds of new vegetables, flowers and blossoms; dried, mounted and labeled specimens of plants (including information they had obtained from the Native Americans about their “virtues and properties”); skins of the animals they had shot; living birds and Indian artifacts such as buffalo robes. To ensure that their collections arrived safely in Washington, Lewis sent, in April 1805, a small group of his men from their winter quarters in Fort Mandan (in today’s North Dakota) back to St. Louis, whence the trunks were dispatched to the White House. The men had also spent a whole day catching an animal that was entirely new to scientists—the black-tailed prairie dog. It took five barrels of water and the whole expedition crew to chase the squirrel-like animal out of its labyrinthine warren.
Among the cargo was an ear of a variety of corn cultivated by the Mandan tribe, which Jefferson would grow for many years in Monticello. The Mandans were farmers, and their corn and other crops helped the expedition through their first winter. As temperatures dropped so low that the water in the cottonwoods froze and the trees exploded like cannons, Lewis bartered with the Mandans for food. Their choice to stay the winter near the village had been prudent because not only was the tribe hospitable toward the expedition members, but the village was also the central trading point in the northern plains.
When the boxes and trunks arrived at the White House in late summer 1805, Jefferson laid out the contents for inspection. The prairie dog and a magpie had surprisingly survived the long journey intact and were temporarily moved into the room where the president usually received his visitors.7 The botanical specimens went straight to the American Philosophical Society and to the botanist Barton in Philadelphia, while Jefferson kept some of the artifacts “for an Indian Hall I am forming at Monticello.” When Madison mentioned that William Hamilton (one of Jefferson’s regular horticultural correspondents and the owner of The Woodlands in Philadelphia) was keen to receive rare plants from the expedition, Jefferson—always happy to share—dispatched several of the seeds, including “Mandan tobacco” (Nicotiana quadrivolus).
Jefferson packed, sent, delegated and examined—and though Congress had granted the money to the expedition, he alone was in charge of the scientific booty. With him as president, the White House had become the nexus of science, a control room of scientific inquiry. At dinner, botany, geography and explorations joined farming and agriculture as the favorite topics of conversation. The range of Jefferson’s interest was huge—from lunar observations and the close examination of worms that attacked Lombardy poplars to practical experiments that entailed standing in the rain wearing a coat made from waterproof cloth. Jefferson used the East Room, which has subsequently been used for lavish state dinners, for something he thought much more important: the storage of fossils. Where today foreign dignitaries sip cocktails on the lawn, Jefferson briefly kept two living grizzly bears that arrived from the West.8 Thinkers and scientists across the United States were delighted to have “a Philosopher … at our Head.” Jefferson was, one of William Bartram’s protégés said, “the enlightened philosopher—the distinguished naturalist—the first statesman on earth, the friend, the ornament of science … the father of our Country, the faithful guardian of our liberties.”
While Jefferson sorted and distributed the spoils from the expedition, Lewis and Clark pressed westward, equipped with as much information as they could gather about the lands beyond. Accompanied by a French-Canadian fur trapper and his Shoshone wife, Sacagawea,9 whom they had hired as translators, they now followed the Missouri west through what is today North Dakota and then Montana. Almost exactly one year after they had left the buzzing trading port of St. Louis, the members of the expedition were enraptured by the Great Plains and the bountiful herds: the “country is as yesterday beatifull in the extreme,” Lewis wrote on 5 May 1805. Three weeks later, they rowed beneath the majestic White Cliffs of the Missouri River Breaks, which had taken form during the Ice Age. Lewis thought that nature had carved these sandstone cliffs into huge buildings adorned with columns, alcoves, parapets and grotesque statuary, some ruined and crumbling. “So perfect indeed are those walls,” he cried, “I should have thought that nature had attempted here to rival the human art.”
After traveling more than 2,500 miles along the river from St. Louis they saw the snowcapped Rockies bounding the West in the distance with the fertile plains below. At the beginning of June 1805, three months into Jefferson’s second term as president, Lewis and Clark described a pastoral idyll that would later entice settlers to the West: a “wide expance” boasting “innumerable herds of living anamals,” “it’s borders garished with one continued garden of roses” and “lofty and open forrests.” The birds sang “most inchantingly” and the soil was rich. These were, Lewis said, “the most beatiful
ly picteresque countries that I ever beheld.”
Five days later Lewis, who had temporarily split off from the main group to reconnoiter, reached the first of the Great Falls of the Missouri. Nothing he had seen during the past year had prepared him for the noise of the roaring water, the rainbows that danced in the spray and the dramatic eighty-foot drop into the river. Lewis was lost for words, “disgusted” by his inability to express this transcendent sensation. He wished, he wrote in his journal, that he could draw like the landscape painter Salvator Rosa or use his pen like a poet. The scenery was enchantingly unique, Lewis enthused, a “sublimely grand specticle”—“sublime” being the only term that seemed appropriate to describe his feelings of awe and astonishment. Lewis’s journal entry echoed Jefferson’s language more than two decades earlier in his Notes on the State of Virginia, when he had described the Natural Bridge as “the most sublime of Nature’s works” and the Potomac River’s precipitous passage through the Blue Ridge Mountains as “one of the most stupendous scenes in nature.”
Jefferson’s fascination with the natural world and Lewis’s awe at the magnificent new landscape came together in the idea of “the sublime,” a concept that had been used since the mid-eighteenth century by English philosophers, poets and garden designers as an aesthetic category to describe landscapes. The idea was distinct from the “beautiful,” which was applied to scenes or objects that were small, smooth, delicate and light. The “sublime,” by contrast, was applied to the vast, rugged and dark. Mountains, in particular, merited this lofty term because seeing them supposedly induced “a sort of delightful horror” and astonishment in the onlooker.
The sublime was associated with breathtaking vastness, and although Europeans had invented the concept, in America, buoyed by the continent’s scale, it would become distinctively patriotic. The Rockies were more commanding than the Alps, and the Potomac was more awe-inspiring than the Danube, Americans would soon proudly believe. Madison’s friend Philip Freneau wrote that the Mississippi was a “prince of rivers in comparison of whom the Nile is but a small rivulet, and the Danube a ditch.” Similarly Adams called the Thames “but a rivulet” compared with the majestic Hudson, and Abigail thought that nature was of “greater magnificence and sublimity in America than in any part of Europe.” While in Europe Adams had even elevated the gentle hills around his farm in Quincy to the “the most sublime object in my Imagination,” and as early as 1791 Jefferson had asked the American artist John Trumbull to paint Virginia’s Natural Bridge so that he could present “to the world this singular landscape, which otherwise some bungling European will misrepresent.” And Washington had encouraged William Winstanley to paint the falls of the Potomac and other scenes, underlining that they should be depicted as “grand objects.”10
Imbuing the grandeur and majesty of landscape with patriotic significance can be compared to the British tradition of using gardens as expressions of political ideology, as seen in Lord Cobham’s garden at Stowe. “For these last forty years,” one British garden writer had told Washington a few months before his death, “there has been a close resemblance between the prevailing system in politics, & that in gardening.” If the natural or “picturesque” style of unclipped trees, soft lines and irregularly planted groves were used in England to express ideas of liberty, then America’s endless horizons, fertile soil and floral abundance would be the perfect articulation of the nation’s vigor and strength. The sublime “wildness” of the vast continent made North America uniquely different from Europe.
Already in 1776 Thomas Paine had aligned the importance of the revolution with the sheer size of North America. In Common Sense he had argued that a small island like England could never govern a continent as vast as America because nature had never “made the satellite larger than its primary planet.” Underlining this was the popular notion that a people were influenced and determined by their surroundings. Similarly, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur had written in his 1782 best seller, Letters from an American Farmer, that “Men are like plants. The goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow.”11 If America’s wilderness shaped its people, so the argument went, they too would be powerful, spirited and unique.
When Lewis and Clark returned to St. Louis in September 1806, almost two and a half years after they had set off, they had crossed a continent alive with the contrasts of the sublime and the beautiful, of deep ravines and gently rolling land, of gushing waterfalls and meandering rivers, of large and small, cold and hot. The Great Falls, for example, had been awe-inspiring, but Lewis and his men also had endured seven-inch hailstones, the vicious thorns of cacti, and the prickly pear that tore their moccasins to shreds when they had to carry their boats around the Falls. Two months after they had heard the thunderous roar of the Great Falls, they had stood, a foot on each side, over the source of the river—the mighty Missouri had become a tiny gurgling stream. As they sweated in the heat of the intense August sun, they had looked across the vast plains at the glistening white snow of the mountains beyond, which suddenly seemed a daunting, impenetrable barrier. “I shudder with the expectation,” Clark wrote when he thought of crossing “those Snowey tremendious mountains.”12
The brutal journey through the snow-covered Rocky Mountains had almost killed them, but amid starvation, freezing temperatures and uncharted danger there had also been stunning beauty. Close to the snow fields they discovered pockets of colorful blossoms—nodding bluebells (Mertensia paniculata), exquisitely sculpted crimson columbines (Aquilegia formosa), yellow pealike flowers (Thermopsis montana) and the strongly scented licorice-root. And as they fought through three-foot-deep snow, they found carpets of yellow glacier lilies. Lewis saw great swaths of quamash of such brilliant blue that they shimmered like lakes in the distance. “So complete is this deseption that on first sight I could have swoarn it was water,” he wrote in his diary.
“I RECIEVED, my dear Sir, with unspeakable joy your letter of Sep. 23 announcing the return of yourself, Capt. Clarke & your party in good health to St. Louis,” Jefferson wrote to Lewis in late October 1806. The expedition had found a passage to the Pacific (albeit not an easy one), amassed valuable information about Native American tribes (including several “vocabularies”), and collected animal skins, bones (no mastodon, though) and what Lewis described as “a pretty extensive collection of plants.” “Pretty extensive” was something of an understatement—Lewis had brought back a herbarium of around two hundred specimens in addition to the sixty he had sent back to St. Louis from their first winter quarters, almost none of which had ever been documented before.13
The horticultural world was electrified. The plants that Lewis and Clark had discovered would line fields as hedges, add fruits to the American orchards and bring new shapes and color to flowerbeds. When Bernard McMahon, a Philadelphia nurseryman and author of The American Gardener’s Calendar—the first practical horticultural book to deal exclusively with North America—heard of Lewis’s arrival, he immediately dashed off a letter to Jefferson, anxious to procure a “small portion of every kind you could conveniently spare.” Jefferson, who was drowning in presidential duties, was happy to share the seeds. With another war in Europe that once again saw England fighting against France, Jefferson was desperately trying to maintain the United States of America’s neutrality, and closer to home there were additional problems. When Lewis and Clark returned to St. Louis, Jefferson was trying to make sense of the rumors that his former vice president, Aaron Burr, was plotting to attack the Spanish territories in the Southwest in order to create a new nation with Burr himself as a ruler. With all these troubles to deal with and yet another two years left of his second term as president, Jefferson had to admit that he was in no position to do the precious seeds “justice.”
In spring 1807, as Aaron Burr was captured for his alleged conspiracy, the “public treasures” of the Lewis and Clark expedition were dispatched from the White House to McMahon and William H
amilton in Philadelphia. Within a week the first seedlings were pushing through the soil, reported McMahon, who had never seen seeds “in a better state of preservation.” They held the promise of a new land. Dried, shriveled and unassuming, these seeds carried inside them a landscape that no white American other than the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition had ever seen. Once the leaves unfolded and the petals unfurled, gardeners in the East would be able to feast their eyes on the West. When the fruits ripened and the crops matured, they would be able to taste the prairies and the Mississippi Valley. These plants would bring the new American land to life, providing a uniquely visceral encounter with the vast continent that stretched all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Jefferson was delighted by the sheer variety of the expedition’s discoveries, reflecting that “Some of them are curious, some ornamental, some useful, and some may by culture be made acceptable on our table.” McMahon was so excited that he sent Jefferson four letters in two weeks, a running commentary on which plants were coming up—tobacco from the Mandans, prairie flax and four varieties of currants. Soon, he believed, he would be able to send Jefferson “plants of every kind” (almost thirty new species as it turned out). And though Jefferson had given away most of his seeds, that spring in Monticello, he sowed the few that he had kept, including Osage oranges, “Missouri great Salsafia,” “flowering pea of Arkansa,” and “Lilly, the yellow of the Columbia.” He thought the yellow Arikara bean, which had fed the expedition team during their winter in North Dakota, to be “one of the most excellent we have,” and Lewis’s snowberry (Symphorocarpos albus) became one of his favorite shrubs—the alabaster berries that clung to the naked branches throughout winter, Jefferson said, were “some of the most beautiful berries I have ever seen.”
The initial excitement surrounding Lewis’s and Clark’s return was a blend of relief, enthusiasm and pride in their achievement. The president himself could not have hoped for a better outcome, praising the “addition to our knowledge in every department” that resulted from the expedition, which had “entirely fulfilled” his expectations.14 Yet the opening of the West also added a new chapter to the American narrative. Jefferson, Washington and Adams had long understood the potential importance of nature to the national identity but gradually over the next decades the idolization of the wilderness began to seep into the public imagination. Where previous generations had regarded America’s untamed landscape as “hideous and desolate,” a hostile environment that was an obstacle to farming and settlement, it now became an object of national pride.