Mapp, Paul W.

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W&M ScholarWorks Arts & Sciences Articles Arts and Sciences 2012 William Clark's World: Describing America in the Age of Unknowns Paul W. Mapp William & Mary, pwmapp@wm.edu Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/aspubs Recommended Citation Mapp, P. W. (2012). Peter j. Kastor. William Clark's World: Describing America in the Age of Unknowns.(Lamar Series in Western History.) New Haven: Yale University Press. 2011. Pp. 344. $45.00. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Arts and Sciences at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Arts & Sciences Articles by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact scholarworks@wm.edu. Lukasik shows that Cooper was less concerned with dis-cerning the absence of character than exploring the in-visibility of its presence, uncovering the “invisible aris-tocrat.” One is reminded of the poor but lovely andvirtuous servant girl of eighteenth-century sentimentalfiction who turns out to be well born. And, in a finalinversion and unmasking of the physiognomic fallacy,the title character of Melville’s novel Pierre; or, The Am-biguities (1852) is seduced by the power of a female faceand its likeness to his father’s, renounces his family andinheritance to atone for his father’s sins, comes to re-alize that he has mistaken a look for a face, and, ulti-mately, dies due to his lack of judgment, all the whilepreserving his distinguished family’s unblemishedname. Such was the fraught relationship between phys-iognomy and social distinction in early America, onethat Lukasik outlines with the precision of silhouette.KATE HAULMANAmerican UniversityPETER J. KASTOR. William Clark’s World: DescribingAmerica in the Age of Unknowns. (Lamar Series in West-ern History.) New Haven: Yale University Press. 2011.Pp. 344. $45.00.In William Clark’s World, Peter J. Kastor considers therelation between representations of the North Amer-ican Far West and the westward expansion of theUnited States. In contrast with many works about Meri-wether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discov-ery, Kastor’s study concentrates on the aftermath of theLewis and Clark expedition rather than the journey it-self, and on the career of the underappreciated andlong-lived Clark instead of the words of the poetic anddoomed Lewis.This focus on Clark and post-1806 perceptions of theFar West enables Kastor to explore the question at theheart of his insightful and intriguing book: how did theUnited States move from the apprehensive understand-ing of the regions beyond the Mississippi evident in theproductions of Clark and his peers in the early decadesof the nineteenth century—an understanding in whichthe transcontinental destiny of the republic was lessthan manifest—to the brash approach to far westernexpansion characterizing the 1830s and 1840s? Kastorgrounds his response in a wide and thorough exami-nation of explorers’ journals, geographic treatises, per-sonal and governmental correspondence, and manywell-selected and elegantly reproduced maps. He tracesClark and his contemporaries through the mazes of thenascent United States publishing industry that wouldmake the Far West known to Anglo-Americans. Henavigates with Clark around the rudimentary structuresof a U.S. government that was trying to determine thebest approach to North America’s western reaches.Instead of offering a full biography of Clark, Kastoruses Clark’s life as the narrative center of a larger storyof national transition. As Clark moved from westernexplorer to frontier administrator, the eastern repub-lic’s tentative probes into the western unknown gaveway to the United States’ conquest of a continent. InKastor’s subtle and perceptive rendering of events,early nineteenth-century administrations were far moreconcerned with the governance of territories acquiredby the Louisiana Purchase than with novel imperialprojects. The earthy, practical explorers working forthem produced portraits of the Far West in which theregion’s perils stood out as much as its promise. In part,this was because the region was filled with fearsomemountains, unforgiving deserts, imposing Indian na-tions, and jealous representatives of foreign powers. Itwas also because explorers seeking fame, fortune, andposition had every interest in emphasizing the difficul-ties of the obstacles they had deftly and heroically over-come.As early as the 1810s, however, advocates of westernexpansion could begin to use the achievements andworks of Clark and his contemporaries selectively insupport of a more aggressive approach to the Far West.Western enthusiasts could draw valleys and rivers fromthe maps and journals of western scouts while omittingthe Indian communities commanding them. They couldadd expansive U.S. boundaries to maps that had high-lighted physical features rather than political claims. Asthe imperatives of multiplying, franchise-wielding,land-hungry Euro-Americans displaced concerns aboutthe difficulties of western settlement, the most zealousproponents of territorial acquisitions could simply dis-regard the cautions of Clark and others.These expansionist imperatives raise the most sub-stantial question about the western representationsKastor so knowledgeably and lucidly considers: to whatextent did the way some Americans depicted the FarWest affect the way other Americans acted toward it?Kastor’s book emphasizes the power of representationsto shape reality by influencing behavior, but the bookoffers many indications that rising demands for farwestern lands were producing visions of the region asmuch as they were being generated by them. It oftenappears that Anglo-Americans were coming to the FarWest regardless of what figures like Clark had to sayabout it.This points to one limitation of Kastor’s semi-bio-graphical approach. The great virtue of centering onClark is that his tangible life makes accessible the oftenabstract topic of spatial representation. The semi-bio-graphical structure of the book, however, often obligesKastor to follow the trajectory of Clark’s life rather thanthe logic of key arguments. This pulls the book awayfrom the kind of sustained ratiocination needed for areally conclusive statement about the connections be-tween geographic representation and expansionist re-ality.Biographical conventions also draw attention awayfrom one of Kastor’s great achievements. Authors ofbiographical or semi-biographical studies are oftencompelled to trumpet the important or representativefeatures of figures like Clark. But Clark’s less significantand typical qualities are in many respects more instruc-tive. A persistent puzzle of the Lewis and Clark Expe-Canada and the United States 523AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2012Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/117/2/523/31089 by Serials Dept -- College of William and Mary user on 23 October 2019dition is why it is so fun to write about but so difficultto integrate into the larger historical narrative of theUnited States. Kastor suggests an answer. Western ac-counts and images like Clark’s that emphasized westerndangers and the rare heroism needed to surmount themill suited a burgeoning United States that would cometo deny all barriers to the western movement of tens ofthousands of ordinary people. Kastor skillfully and ap-propriately uses Clark as a guide through issues of west-ern exploration, representation, and expansion. In do-ing so, he helps us to see that Clark was, in his relationto some of the larger trends of the nineteenth-centuryUnited States, a guide pointing to a North Americanpast rather than the American future.PAUL W. MAPPCollege of William and MaryANDREW J. LEWIS. A Democracy of Facts: Natural Historyin the Early Republic. (Early American Studies.) Phil-adelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2011. Pp.204. $39.95.Once in a while a book pulls together the scholarshipof a generation, synthesizes it into a coherent and per-suasive account, and thus becomes the platform fromwhich new scholarship must necessarily launch. This isone of those books. In this survey of how Americansthought about and practiced science from the 1780s tothe 1840s, Andrew J. Lewis uses archival research andperceptive analysis to deepen our understanding of sci-ence in the early American republic. To some degree,Lewis tells a familiar story. One well-known arc ofchange is the shift in this period from natural history asa unified investigation into all terrestrial natural phe-nomena to its disaggregation into modern sciences likegeology and zoology. Another theme is the concern toroot American identity in the natural world, a topic thathas become a virtual cliché among scholars of earlyAmerican science. However, this book is about muchmore than either of these concerns: Lewis is interestedin how people think, and that makes all the difference.In five chapters, each structured around a story,Lewis examines the tension between claims by elite mento authoritative knowledge and assertions by more or-dinary men of the right to think for themselves, as wellas the tension between establishing matters of fact andthe processes of reasoning from those facts to causalityand meaning. Chapter one recounts debates over swal-low submersion, the belief that as winter approachesswallows sink into ponds and hibernate until the returnof warm weather. Observations by credible witnesses ofswallows seeming to plunge into water in the fall and oftorpid swallows warming themselves in the spring sunwere pitted against assertions that examinations of birdanatomy and experiments in which swallows plainlydrowned when plunged into water made swallow sub-mersion implausible. Here educated men’s desire tolead an “empire of reason” (p. 16) was undercut by theiraspiration to distance themselves from what they saw asthe premature and inaccurate systematizing of Euro-peans (epitomized by the degeneracy theory ofGeorges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon) and by moremodest men’s belief in their own abilities to observenatural phenomena reliably. Hence the epistemic val-orization of credible eyewitness testimony, coupledwith widespread hopes that the American natural worldwould have possibilities for knowledge undreamt of inEurope, shifted Americans toward “a democracy offacts” in which any credible man could participate.While elite men were successful in establishing formalscience in college curricula, learned societies, and pub-lishing ventures, Americans moving across the Appa-lachians in pursuit of economic opportunities foundelites’ knowledge of natural history of variable benefitas they sought to commodify natural resources. Chapterthree addresses interpretations of the origins of thegreat mounds found in the trans-Appalachian West.The refusal of white Americans to believe that contem-porary Native Americans were related to ancientmound builders has drawn many historians’ attention asan example of race-making in the early republic. Lewisacknowledges this issue but here concentrates on howand why the nascent field of archeology reopened aspace for speculation about phenomena, especiallyamong non-elites. In the 1820s the development of a“theology of nature,” the subject of chapter four, sim-ilarly contributed to the reopening of a space for think-ing about causality, particularly in the emerging field ofgeology. In the final chapter, Lewis describes how ed-ucated men, now often specializing in geology, success-fully obtained government patronage from states eagerto locate mineral deposits and canal routes. Thus Lewisanalyzes the reasons for the initial diminution of elitecredibility in realms of science, the rise of widespreadparticipation in natural “fact-making,” and the slow re-assertion of the claims of educated men to superiorknowledge, as well as the broader movement away fromsystem-building and causal explanation followed bytheir relegitimation, however “unsteady, unstable,[and] sometimes unconscious” (p. 1) these movementswere.This book should find a wide audience. Lewis buildson the work of a generation of historians of science whohave shown how critical the participation of people be-yond the educated elite was to the development of sci-ence, how diverse and interpenetrated the subjects ofscience were before the development of modern disci-plinary divisions, and how thoroughly scientific inquirywas embedded in wider cultural developments. Histo-rians of the early republic will find a jargon-free accountof this aspect of their era. While they will certainly alsonotice the absence of attention to race and gender, thisomission allows Lewis to tell a complicated storyclearly. Historians of nineteenth-century science willfind this an admirable case study useful for comparativework. The citations are a guide to virtually all of theimportant recent literature on this subject from bothsides of the Atlantic, which graduate students embark-524 Reviews of BooksAMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2012Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/117/2/523/31089 by Serials Dept -- College of William and Mary user on 23 October 2019

William Clark\u27s World: Describing America in the Age of Unknowns

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William Clark\u27s World: Describing America in the Age of Unknowns

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