A Soul-Searching Birthday

By editor

Jackson, Beaverhead County, Montana

It is a rare man who can sit beside a river he has just discovered, having crossed a continent to find it, and conclude that he has done nothing with his life.

On the eighteenth of August, 1805, Meriwether Lewis found himself in a state of comparative solitude. The great machinery of the expedition had temporarily paused. Captain Clark had departed that morning with a detachment of men and the newly acquired Shoshone guides, bound for the Columbia. The frantic negotiations for horses, the diplomatic ceremonies, the desperate need to secure a route over the mountains before the snows fell: all of this had moved down the valley with Clark. Lewis remained at Camp Fortunate with a few men, the baggage, and the quiet.

He spent the day airing the stores and cutting raw hides into thongs for pack gear. It was the kind of deliberate, necessary labor that leaves the mind free to wander. And on this day, his mind turned inward, for it was his thirty-first birthday.

"This day I completed my thirty first year," he wrote in his journal that evening, "and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world."

What follows is one of the most remarkable passages in the literature of American exploration. Sitting in the center of a vast, unmapped wilderness, having achieved what no man of his nation had ever achieved, Lewis did not congratulate himself. Instead, he weighed his life against the only scales that mattered to him: the advancement of human knowledge and the happiness of the human race.

He found himself wanting.

"I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation," he wrote. "I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended."

It is the eternal lament of the conscientious mind. We are always aware of the books we have not read, the languages we have not mastered, the hours we have let slip through our fingers like water. Even here, surrounded by the raw material of a thousand new sciences, Lewis felt the sting of his own perceived ignorance. He wished he knew more, so that he might see more clearly.

But he did not linger in despair. The wilderness demands action, and Lewis was, above all, a man of action. "Since they are past and cannot be recalled," he concluded, "I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself."

He would live only four more years. He would not see his thirty-sixth birthday. But in those four years, he would carry the knowledge of a continent back to the world, fulfilling the vow he made to himself on the banks of the Jefferson River.

We go to the woods, or to the mountains, to front the essential facts of life. Lewis went further than most, and in the quiet of Camp Fortunate, he fronted himself. The river still runs through the valley, indifferent to the men who pass beside it, but the words remain, the record of a mind that demanded as much of itself as it did of the wilderness.

See also

• A Soul-Searching Birthday at Jackson, Beaverhead County (Erected by Montana State University (Bozeman), Bureau of Land Management, Montana Stockgrowers Association)
• Camp Fortunate, detailing the broader context of the Shoshone encounter
• Reunion at Camp Fortunate, covering the arrival of Clark and the main party