Looking Back at Lewis and Clark

History is usually written in the third person, even though it has to be lived in the first, and Fehrman takes advantage of the rich and deep documentation of the Lewis and Clark expedition to try to reconcile the discrepancy. The book adopts the perspectives not only of Lewis and of Clark but also of other members of the expedition, including an enslaved Black man named York, whom Clark brought along as a personal servant, and of five Native Americans whom the explorers encountered. Fehrman doesn’t attempt to speak in the voices of his subjects. He merely focusses on what each individual experienced and knew, while keeping in mind how much they didn’t experience and didn’t know—an analytic technique that historians have always been free to borrow from novelists but often lose sight of in the scramble to accumulate data. With subjects who haven’t left journals or letters, Fehrman guesses their state of mind by making inferences—some credible, others less so.

Fehrman tells the story of the expedition’s first winter camp from the perspective of John Ordway, a sergeant who grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. To climb out of poverty, Ordway had enlisted in the Army, at the time a violent and hierarchical institution. Officers flogged enlisted men, with or without the courtesy of a court-martial, and sometimes had them branded or even executed. One in four enlisted men deserted. When Lewis went looking for recruits, almost everyone at the fort where Ordway was stationed volunteered.

Ordway comes across as methodical and reliable. He carried his journal on a cord around his neck and wrote in it every day, though he unfortunately didn’t start the writing until May, 1804, when the expedition got properly under way, so Fehrman is forced to rely in this section on notes by others and a couple of letters that Ordway mailed home. Fehrman wonders whether, after the Army’s harsh discipline, the milder treatment that Lewis and Clark meted out puzzled Ordway. During that prefatory first winter, living in close quarters without much to do, the expedition’s young men distracted themselves with drinking, brawling, and stealing a neighbor’s hog, and the captains responded only with lectures and an order to build the camp’s laundress a hut. The lenity, in Fehrman’s opinion, was part of a conscious experiment, a decision to “bend the army’s rules not toward cruelty but toward generosity, consensus, and trust.”

As the winter deepened, Lewis and Clark dealt with their own boredom by making long visits to nearby St. Louis, leaving Ordway in charge. Several men refused to follow his orders; at least two threatened him, one while loading his gun. When the captains got back to camp, they convened a court-martial. Military law specified a jury of officers, but Lewis and Clark sometimes impanelled expedition members instead, a move that Fehrman sees as an extension of their democratic experiment, and he thinks they did so on this occasion. The rebels, upon conviction, “promised to doe better in future,” Clark reported in his journal, and weren’t punished for these crimes. Mercy worked so well, in fact, that a few days after the court-martial, when Lewis and Clark divided the expedition into three squads, the soldier who had menacingly loaded his gun “asked to serve under Ordway, the man he’d threatened to kill,” Fehrman claims. He may be overestimating the democratic spirit here. What Clark wrote was that the men were “duly ballotted for,” and that could mean they were sorted by lot, not that they chose their sergeants.

In any case, the mildness didn’t continue. In June, one soldier got fifty lashes, and another a hundred, for privately tapping a keg of whiskey, and in August a sentry who fell asleep got a hundred lashes in the course of four days. When a soldier tried to desert that month, Clark authorized George Drouillard, a half-French, half-Shawnee scout and tracker hired by the expedition, “to put him to Death” if he resisted recapture. Once caught, the deserter had to run the gantlet four times—that is, walk four times through facing lines of fellow-soldiers holding weapons to strike him with, a punishment that Fehrman grimly describes as “one of the regular army’s few democratic flourishes.” A Missouria and an Oto chief who happened to be present pleaded unsuccessfully for his pardon. An Arikara chief “Cried aloud” at a later flogging, Clark reported, and told the explorers that “his nation never whiped even their Children, from their burth.” That seems to have been the last instance of corporal punishment on the expedition, but was it because a democratic spirit had taken hold? Or fear?