In This Issue | Lewis and Clark | Northwest Education

Summer 2003

The stories of the Lewis and Clark expedition draw many of us in as inexorably as the Corps of Discovery paddled and pulled its canoes across the continent.

For me, the first good tug was reading Stephen Ambrose's book, Undaunted Courage, which spun Lewis and Clark's journal entries into a gripping narrative.

Not at all a history buff, I bought the book because newspaper reviews had made Ambrose's storytelling sound irresistible. It was. I read it at bus stops and lunch breaks. I read it in the evenings; in the morning with my coffee. I read passages to my husband: "Honey, listen to this: 'The men's labor was...such that each private ate as much as nine or ten pounds of meat per day.' Can you believe that?!"

The high adventures the Corpsmen described in their journals—capsizing boats, attacking grizzly bears, thrilling encounters with Native people—are page-turners, but it is the small detail that brings the humanity of the trek to me most vividly: their meals, their stomach upsets, Lewis's careful ministration of Sacagawea's "female trouble," the power of an old Nez Perce woman to reassure her tribe's men that Lewis's small band was peaceful.

The images stayed in my mind long after I'd finished Ambrose's book.

"How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?"

The question was Nathaniel Hawthorne's, says historian James P. Ronda in his classic, Lewis & Clark Among the Indians. For Ronda, a book set him onto a new course of scholarship. After reading Passage Through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest by John L. Allen, he focused his research on the roles Native people played in the expedition. "Books make a difference; reading changes lives," Ronda says.

While the course of my life didn't change, I did begin to cross paths with others who were also drawn to this story. Later, joining the editorial team of Northwest Education, I "inherited" this issue of the magazine—with its Lewis and Clark theme—from former editor Suzie Boss. Though moving on to a new job, she was easily persuaded to write the lead feature story. I met with NWREL's Patricia Nida, who helps teachers integrate expedition stories into classroom learning, and she told me about the rediscovery of 100-year-old student portfolios that commemorated the centennial of the expedition. Nida has written about these treasures in Rediscovered Portfolios.

Then I fell in step with Larry McClure. He's education liaison for the National Council of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial, a member of the Oregon Chapter of the Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, and recently retired from NWREL. Many of the story ideas in this issue of Northwest Education are his; two of them he wrote. It seems just about anywhere along the trail to Lewis and Clark, you'll find McClure's footprints: in classrooms, at workshops, and trailside.

Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery: An Illustrated History

"I started writing in the margins about all of the things we teach in school that fit with this story," he says. Think of President Thomas Jefferson's 16-page instructions to Meriwether Lewis as today's education standards. The math, science, writing, and social skills the Corps members needed for the success of the mission aren't dissimilar to the skills kids need today to succeed in life. Think of the teamwork and leadership. The cultural diplomacy and understanding.

"To me, you can take just any part of the story and make it leap back into the curriculum," says McClure. "It's reality-based learning." And what makes the story of the expedition most real are the journals, those books that changed the course of history and, 200 years later, are still changing lives.

—Denise Jarrett Weeks