When I go to a restaurant, I am usually satisfied with a 10-oz steak.  I might go for the 16-oz one if my dad is buying.  But I can’t imagine eating much more than one pound of beef.  Not so with the 31 men on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, as described by Stephen Ambrose in Undaunted Courage:

“Moving the keelboat and pirogues upriver required a tremendous effort from each man; consequently, they ate prodigiously. In comparison with beef, the venison and elk were lean, even at this season [September]. Each soldier consumed up to nine pounds of meat per day, along with whatever fruit the area afforded and some cornmeal, and still felt hungry” (165).

Ambrose addresses the matter a little later in the journey:

“Working as hard as they did in such extreme cold weather, the men ate prodigiously, six thousand calories or even more per day. A modern athlete seldom consumes more than five thousand, but the calories the men were getting in 1805 contained very little, if any, fat. Consequently, no matter how much they ate, the men were always hungry” (200).

I cannot relate.

One footnote I marked as a potential family vacation spot.

“It is today as Lewis saw it. The White Cliffs can be seen only from small boat or canoe. Put in at Fort Benton and take out three or four days later at Judith Landing. Missouri River Outfitters at Fort Benton, Montana, rents canoes or provides a guided tour by pontoon boat. Of all the historic and/or scenic sights we have visited in the world, this is number one. We have made the trip ten times” (228).

That sounds like a good family trip!

Stephen Ambrose, in Undaunted Courage, notes that the westward movement of Americans towards the Pacific Ocean was inevitable.

“This absurd notion showed how little Jefferson knew about Americans living west of the Appalachians. With the [Louisiana] Purchase, or even without the Purchase, there was no force on earth that could stop the flow of American pioneers westward. Good, cheap land was a magnet that reached all the way back to Europe. The pioneers were the cutting edge of an irresistible force. Rough and wild though they were, they were the advance agents of millions of Europeans, mostly peasants or younger sons of small farmers, who constituted the greatest mass migration in history” (Ambrose 1996: 124).

On another subject, he discusses the use of flogging in the early years of America.  In one case, two soldiers on the Lewis and Clark expedition got drunk while on guard duty (toward the beginning of the trip).  One was sentenced to one hundred lashes on his bare back.  The other was given fifty lashes “well laid on.”

“Flogging was cruel, but not unusual. Slaveholders had seen it all their lives. Officers in the army saw it done on a regular basis to their own men. In this case, it fit the need perfectly. It allowed the men to let out their anger in a direct, physical way. It caused Collins and Hall great pain. But the expedition didn’t lose their services; both men were at the oars—groaning, but at the oars—that afternoon. After a couple of sleepless nights tossing and turning, they would be all right. Besides, there was no guardhouse on the boat to lock them up in” (Ambrose 1996: 148-49).

Are we better off today, eschewing such a practice?  One observation I can make from the book: after a few incidents early on that required punishment, the soldiers were very disciplined and orderly throughout the rest of the very difficult expedition.

I have just finished reading Stephen Ambrose’s biography of Meriwether Lewis in Undaunted Courage.  This is a fascinating work primarily concerned with the Lewis and Clark expedition of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803-1806.  I have marked certain sections of the book and may share more in a couple of coming posts. 

Ambrose’s observations about the state of movement in 1800 are very interesting.

“In addition, it seemed unlikely that one nation could govern an entire continent. The distances were just too great. A critical fact in the world of 1801 was that nothing moved faster than the speed of a horse. No human being, no manufactured item, no bushel of wheat, no side of beef (or any beef on the hoof, for that matter), no letter, no information, no idea, order, or instruction of any kind moved faster. Nothing ever had moved any faster, and, as far as Jefferson’s contemporaries were able to tell, nothing ever would” (52).

In a footnote, he observes that there are exceptions (a bullet, light, sound), but it was a different world when nothing moved faster than a horse!

A couple of pages later, he described how radically the situation had changed only sixty years later.

“Describing the mind-set of the time, [Henry] Adams wrote, ‘Experience forced on men’s minds the conviction that what had ever been must ever be. ‘ But only sixty years later, when Abraham Lincoln took the Oath of Office as the sixteenth president of the United States, Americans could move bulky items in greater quantity farther in an hour than Americans of 1801 could do in a day, whether by land (twenty-five miles per hour on railroads) or water (ten miles an hour upstream on a steamboat). This great leap forward in transportation—a factor of twenty or more—in so short a space of time must be reckoned as the greatest and most unexpected revolution of all—except for another technological revolution, the transmitting of information. In Jefferson’s day, it took six weeks to move information from the Mississippi River to Washington, D.C. In Lincoln’s, information moved over the same route by telegraph all but instantaneously” (54).

I wonder if we appreciate too little just how much the world has changed so very quickly.  Of course today one can stand nearly anywhere on the planet and talk instantly with someone anywhere else.  Maybe even a video chat!