Soldiers as Naturalists

By editor

Lolo, Missoula County

Now, if you ever heard tell of the grand adventure of Lewis and Clark, you likely pictured a couple of stout fellows, all grit and gunpowder, blazing trails and waving flags. And that's true enough, in its own way. But what they don't always tell you, not in the Sunday school books anyway, is that these chaps, these rough-and-tumble soldiers, were also, in their spare time, what you might call naturalists. Which, in plain English, means they were poking around in the bushes, squinting at bugs, and jotting down notes about every blessed plant and critter they stumbled upon, much like a particularly earnest schoolmarm on a field trip.

President Jefferson, a man who had more ideas than a dog has fleas, was the one who put this notion into their heads. He didn't just want a map; he wanted a full inventory. He wanted to know what was out there, from the biggest buffalo to the smallest clover. He even had a hankering to find a mastodon, bless his optimistic heart. Imagine that: a couple of soldiers, knee-deep in wilderness, trying to track down a beast that hadn't walked the earth in a good long while. It's enough to make a sensible man chuckle.

Jefferson, he was particular about his information, too. He wrote to Lewis, laying down the law, as it were: "Your observations are to be taken with great pains & accuracy, to be entered distinctly, & intelligibly for others as well as for yourself ... several copies of these, as well as your other notes, should be made at leisure times & put into the care of the most trustworthy of your attendants to guard by multiplying them, against the accidental losses to which they will be exposed." That's a mouthful, ain't it? But the gist of it was: write it down, write it down plain, and then write it down again, just in case a bear eats your first copy.

And write it down they did. These fellows, who could shoot a squirrel's eye out at fifty paces, also had a keen eye for botany. Take Captain Lewis, for instance. On a fine July day in 1806, he noted, with the precision of a man counting his poker winnings, that he "found two speceis of native clover here, the one with a very narrow small leaf and a pale red flower, the other nearly as luxouriant as our red clover with a white flower the left and blume of the latter are proportionably large. I found several other uncommon plants specemines of which I preserved." Now, that's not the sort of thing you expect from a man dodging grizzlies, is it? But there it is, right in his journal, alongside tales of hunting deer and sizing up the local timber.

They weren't just scribblers, mind you. They were collectors. They shipped back bird skins, furs, and even live animals. Four magpies, a sharp-tailed grouse, and a prairie dog, all bundled up and sent off to President Jefferson in Washington, D.C. One can only imagine the look on the President's face when a live prairie dog arrived on his doorstep, probably wondering if it was a new kind of dog or just a particularly plump rat. It goes to show, the things a man will do for science, or at least for a presidential request.

Here, in this very spot in Lolo, Missoula County, they pitched their tents on September 12, 1805. Likely, they were tired, hungry, and probably a bit bewildered by the sheer amount of wilderness still ahead of them. But even then, you can bet your bottom dollar, one of them was probably eyeing a new kind of pine tree or wondering if that strange bird they saw was worth a mention in the journal. Because that's what naturalists do, even when they're soldiers, and even when they're a thousand miles from home, trying to find a mastodon that wasn't there.