Lewis and Clark in their own Words: Description, Evaluation, and Conquest

The well-known expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark between 1804 and 1806 is an undoubted landmark in the history of North American exploration: its journey from St Louis, Missouri, to the Pacific coast mapped North-Western territories and added significant information concerning both land and people. In this contribution I will rely on a digital edition of the journals compiled during the expedition, in order to assess the ways in which representation and evaluation are conveyed, especially in relation to interactions with Native nations. After an overview of the corpus under investigation, I will rely on a discourse-historical approach to discuss what ideological stance emerges from lexical choices and whether this justifies the near-mythical quality associated with the expedition more than two centuries later.