In November 2009, pregnant with my second child, I set out for Lewis and Clark’s winter camp near the mouth of the Columbia River, where it meets the Pacific. Motherhood was a strange new shore to me, a hard wilderness. I wanted to know about these explorers who in November 1805 had arrived here—in the Northwest I love and now call home—miserable, wary, and frightened. I started with children’s books, curious about how the explorers’ wet Pacific arrival has been portrayed as a glossy joy, or a moral lesson, over the past two hundred years. In the University of Washington’s archives I found a nineteenth-century language primer that boiled down the arrival into a handful of one- and two-syllable words. What white Americans teach children about explorers, Indians, and wilderness has changed quite a bit, and in some ways has not changed at all.
Menu