The Morning After Glory:
I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company
By Bruce Collier February 27, 2003 Issue

Next year marks the bicentennial of the Corps of Discovery’s exploration of the Louisiana Territory, or, as your American History teacher called it, the Lewis and Clark expedition. A great deal of scholarly and literary attention has been devoted to the subject. Undaunted Courage, by the late Stephen Ambrose, is among the more recent non-fiction accounts. Filmmaker Ken
Burns produced a PBS documentary; fiddle tunes and all, a few years back.

In the 1950s, Hollywood paired Fred MacMurray and Charlton Heston in The Far Horizons. All of the above emphasize the epic quality of America’s most famous road trip. While not ignoring the heroics, novelist Brian Hall’s I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company offers us instead a cast of all-too-human characters.

Hall, a novelist and writer of non-fiction, says he lived with his subject “a mere four years,” which gives an idea of the wealth of material on the expedition. Interestingly, and sadly, Lewis (officially the commander, but more of that later) was never able to pull together the mass of notes, sketches, and specimens collected on the journey into a definitive account of the
expedition. Various members of the corps published their own, often highly
personal, accounts, some for the purpose of a making a quick buck while public interest was at its height.

Perhaps inspired by that, Hall’s work is itself not a straightforward chronological narrative. Instead, he tells the story through the voices of Lewis, Clark, the Shoshone woman Sacagawea, and her husband, the French trader Toussaint Charbonneau. Each character’s story stays strictly within
the limits of his or her own perspective, sometimes presenting the same event in a totally different fashion. This makes the book a little challenging at first, particularly in those chapters told from the perspective of Sacagawea. Her stream of consciousness style first hits you like a foreign language, but with a little patience, and a little reading aloud, it begins to sink in. Particularly deft
is Hall’s subtle change in her style, which becomes more westernized as her acquaintance with the whites and their languages deepens.

If you know little or nothing about the expedition, this book is not the way to learn the facts. For that, try Ambrose or Burns. Unlike most historical novels, this book contains not a single map, not even inside the covers. A number of the more famous incidents on the expedition are barely mentioned, or passed over lightly. Much of the book deals with what happened after the expedition returned to civilized territory.

Following months of celebrations, testimonials, hand clapping and backslapping, Lewis and Clark find themselves asking the 1807 equivalent of “now what?” For Clark, it was marriage and an appointment as Agent for Indian Affairs in the Louisiana Territory. For Lewis, governorship of same. Disappointed at not having been commissioned as co-captain of the expedition (as Lewis had promised but could not deliver), Clark stoically resigns himself to eternal second-bananahood.

Lewis, by contrast, seethes daily with the frustrations of his post. Barely in his 30’s, an outdoorsman from childhood, Lewis must now sit at a desk. His task—imposing order on a huge patch of ground populated by dispossessed Frenchmen, Spaniards, culture-shocked natives, and hordes of American speculators—proves all but impossible. If you’ve ever been to Louisiana, you’ll see what he was up against. Sinking into alcoholism and depression, Lewis dies of a gunshot wound, possibly self-inflicted.

On the whole, the equable Clark seems to have had a greater capacity for contentment than the mercurial Lewis. His somewhat bleak philosophy is:“The world is what it is.”

Despite this, I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company is much more than just a “warts and all” deconstruction of a great historical event. In the early chapters, Hall skillfully conveys that Jeffersonian combination of practical science, earnest optimism and cockeyed anthro-politics that powered the endeavor. The expedition was very much the brainchild of Thomas Jefferson. In a series of early scenes with Lewis, Jefferson comes off somewhat like the absent minded president, spit balling an odd wish list of schemes for exploration, science, and commerce with the aborigines. His list of things for Lewis to do include: find the Northwest Passage (if there is one), determine the existence of descendants of the prehistoric mammoth, check out possible connections between the Indians and the Welsh, and so on.

One comes away from the book with more questions than answers. Did European and Native American culture get off on the wrong foot with Lewis and Clark? Aside from the collection of data, much of the expedition consists of the explorers trying to figure out which Indians are friends, which are enemies, and which are only friends of friends or enemies of enemies. The Indians see the white men as curiosities, inexplicable but formidable, possessed of highly desirable trade goods. Neither side is particularly evil or noble.

Life for all is mostly a matter of staying warm, dry, fed and un-killed. Which in the end makes the expedition all the more heroic, performed as it was by ordinary people under extraordinary conditions. Remarkably, only one man was lost. Think of that next time you watch Survivor. (Top)

I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, by Brian Hall. Viking, 419 pp available in local retail book stores and libraries.

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