What is the legacy of Lewis and Clark?
This is our first great road story. Lewis and Clark place us on the road, they put us in the middle of a human community, a community as diverse and complex as any in America today. And then they put that community in motion because we are a people in motion. We find ourselves in that story, whether we place ourselves in that community or we stand alongside and watch that community as it goes by. This is a very large story. It’s not just the story of Lewis, Clark, Sacagawea, a dog and Thomas Jefferson. This is a story that has hundreds and hundreds of actors in it. It’s a story of continental sweep and eventually of global significance. We know who we are by the stories we tell. This is one of the emblematic American stories. Someone once said that the Civil War was our American Iliad. This is our American Odyssey. Lewis and Clark offer us an extraordinary gift; they give us that sense of awe and wonder and then they let us encounter strangeness. We do not learn by only encountering pe
