Why were the explorers such poor spellers?
Noah Webster’s Spelling Book (1782-1783) was the forerunner of his Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806). But English spelling had long been standardized in Samuel Johnson’s famous Dictionary(1755). That’s why Jefferson, Benj. Franklin, John Adams, Benj. Rush and all the other educated contemporaries of Lewis and Clark spelled the same way and well. English spelling was definitely standardized. Shakespeare and his contemporaries spelled more or less the same 200 years earlier. Captains Lewis and Clark were hired for their frontier skills and leadership ability. They had no access to a dictionary while recording their journals. Since none of the Indian languages they encountered had writing, they wrote Indian words phonetically.
