Il racconto di Lewis e Clark: Dai diari del Corps of Discovery alla costruzione dell’immagine pionieristica

Among general audiences, the names of Lewis and Clark evoke images of the pioneering times when the road that led West was still untraced. Statues, paintings, tourist brochures, and even set phrases like “the Lewis & Clark Expedition” normally represent them as lone explorers while on occasion admitting the aid of one Native woman; it is relatively seldom that any prominence is given to the fact that the Corps of Discovery was in fact a much larger, multilingual and multicultural group. However, is this heroic image what emerges from the journals compiled during the expedition itself, or is it a later construal? This essay sets out to answer this research question by investigating the digitized copy of the Nebraska edition of the Lewis and Clark Journals and other relevant materials.