Newspaper Article

Epic Journey Displayed Our Spirit

Dayton Duncan. Dayton Duncan is the author, with Ken Burns, of "Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery," the companion book to a PBS documentary film

1997

Overview

NEARLY 200 YEARS AGO, in late November of 1805, the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition huddled near the mouth of the Columbia River, having become the first American citizens to cross the continent by land. Far from home and pinned down for weeks by a relentless Pacific storm that William Clark (in his own imaginative spelling) called \"tempestous and horiable,\" the small band of explorers nevertheless found a tangible way to commemorate their remarkable achievement: They began carving their names into tree trunks - so many times, it appears from Clark's journal entries, that few trees near their sodden campsites escaped their knife blades. Those tree markings (and in most cases the trees themselves) have long since disappeared. But the story the Corps of Discovery left behind remains embedded in our national consciousness, and each generation etches it anew with a fresh flourish. The overwhelming public response to our recent PBS documentary - in some cities it even outdrew the primetime commercial networks - is merely the latest evidence of the persistent appeal of Lewis and Clark. Why is that?

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