THE Lewis and Clark expedition that began preparations in 1803 had everything: grand adventure, heroism, friendship and scholarship. It was modelled on Captain Cook's voyages and its sponsor, Thomas Jefferson, meant it to document, command and profit from what lay beyond Missouri. Although the dream of a north-west passage to India ended the moment Meriwether Lewis and his dog Seaman crossed the continental divide, new dreams replaced it—America as a continental power and dreams of the west itself, of cattlemen, silvermen, railwaymen, and the rest.
Two centuries on, modern writers and historians still have a hard time matching the sweep of Lewis and Clark's own journals. This is especially true of Brian Hall, whose third novel is based on the expedition's main characters. His narrative judders between primitive Indian voices and delicate American ones, with the French trapper somewhere in between. Extracts from the expeditionary journal are more intriguing than the narrative he spins around them. Mr Hall gains only towards the end when the journals peter out and his imagination begins to bloom. Suffering acute depression, Lewis shoots himself and dies slowly: “He picks up a leaf. His hand is bloody, but...Red maple. Acer rubrum. He turns the leaf over. The feel of it in his hands. He will miss this.”
Thomas Slaughter opens his extended essay on Lewis and Clark with a Joseph Campell-like comparison of creation myths. Some of the Indian peoples the expedition encountered had an Eden of their own. “Lone Man is born to a Mandan virgin, who conceives him by ingesting a kernel of corn.” His chapters are called “Dreams”, “Possessions”, “Hunting Themselves” and, inevitably, “Being First”. The chapter on the nature of possession is illuminating. Who owns a horse on the prairie? Was it wrong for the Sioux to pilfer from the expedition? We are reminded that Lewis and Clark traversed a land that no longer exists. The oceanic prairie has been sectioned and buffalo have been replaced by cattle and slaughter-houses; the coho salmon that Lewis sketched with such interest is nearly extinct in the rivers where the expedition found it in abundance. Lewis and Clark are more than adventurers, Mr Slaughter maintains. We keep returning to them because “they are a better guide to our souls than our skins.”
After so much male angst it is refreshing to turn to Virginia Scharff's sassy reflection on the movement of women through the west. The first and strongest of her subjects is Sacagawea, an Indian woman who proved an invaluable guide and translator for Lewis and Clark. Despite her posthumous fame—she appears on American currency and in textbooks—little is certain about Sacagawea. Her name changed with the different Indian nations the expedition passed through: Flirt, Lost Woman, Chief, Grass Woman. She may have lived until 1884 in Wyoming's Wind River Indian reservation or she may have died 60 years earlier and a thousand miles away. Her obscurity, Ms Scharff argues, has been the fate of most women in the west, in contrast to Lewis and Clark.
This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "Lonesome doves"