We here at Um are still suffering through a heat wave. What does this mean for you, loyal readers?
So. Way back in the very early 1800s, Merriweather Lewis and William Clark found themselves charged with the duty of being the first representatives of the United States government to cross the continent that had only recently found itself subject to the so-defined concepts of, say, nationality. While preparing for the trip, Lewis borrowed a copy of Antoine Simon Le Page du Pratz‘ L’Histoire de la Louisiane–a history, for those of you who can’t guess at the French, of the lands included in the then-recent Louisiana Purchase (really, did you have to click? really?) written by a duder who happened to have lived there when Louis XV was still in charge of that territory. In those pages, he (and then-President and prompter of Lewis and Clark’s expedition, Thomas Jefferson, who also had a copy) found all kinds of awesome stuff about indigenous flora, fauna, and the organizations of people that predated European involvement.
All good stuff for relative continental n00bs who hadn’t really spent much time west of the Appalachian mountains, no?
Oh you just wait.
In his history, Du Pratz featured the story of a Yazoo indian named Moncacht-Ape. Spurred by what Du Pratz reported as a curiosity about the origins of native Americans, Monchact-Ape hauled his ass up the Missouri river and then continued west. All the way west, in fact, until he bumped into some folks living along the Columbia River close to the Pacific Ocean–and then eventually to the coast itself.
Does that route ring a bell maybe? Something like, DING, that’s the very route that Lewis and Clark ended up following. No? Yes?
Anyway, the U.S. expedition had a different goal–and that probably did more to inform their choice of path than did the wanderings (however intriguing) of a duder whose intellect they likely held little in the way of respect for. Still, the similarities here–and the fact that Du Pratz work found its way into the collections of both Jefferson and Lewis are pretty neat, no?
Well we think that they are.
1 Comment
June 11, 2008 at 7:57 am
Interesting indeed! Conspiracy theorists, start your engines.
Also, glad you’re back in the saddle, i was getting so bored with the intarwebz…sniff sniff.