Analysis: Botanical findings of the Lewis and Clark expedition
04/02/2004
NPR: Talk of the Nation/Science Friday
You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow.
In May of 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark headed out from St. Louis on the first leg of a voyage that would take them through what is now Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, over the Rocky Mountains, on to the Pacific Ocean and back. The journey, made by boat and on foot, took nearly two years and ensured that Lewis, Clark and Sacagawea would be familiar names to us now--a little harder to pronounce--nearly 200 years after they set up that Missouri River--they set out on the Missouri River. Well, Thomas Jefferson, then president of the United States, all 17 states at that time, selected Lewis to make this journey west to find a passageway across the land, a direct route from sea to sea. He was an accomplished amateur scientist himself, and Jefferson sent Lewis to the best scientific minds in the colonies to prepare Lewis for his trip, for the journey, so he would recognize--know what he was doing along the way. And Jefferson instructed the party to record the natural history they encountered and to bring back specimens
of the important plants they found.
We're going to take a look at that expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and talk about the duo as botanists. What were they looking for? What did they bring back? And what can we learn from those plant specimens 200 years later? What was science like back in those days? We're going to talk about all of this with our guests, Dr. Richard M. McCourt and Dr. James L. Reveal.
FLATOW: Let me start out by asking you, Richard McCourt--you have a very interesting line in this paper that you wrote in the Plant Science Bulletin, and you say, you know, `Everybody knows about this expedition, but very few people understand or realize the richest trove of natural history specimens that they brought back.' Why do you think no one knows about that?
Dr. McCOURT: Well, nobody knew about it for about a century, it seems, anyway. They were directed to collect these specimens because that was how you did science in the 19th century, and still in the 20th and 21st century, too. But when they got back, the specimens were sort of waylaid or mislaid, to some extent, and went through a rather circuitous route, so that some ended up being stored in a somewhat neglected room in Philadelphia for nearly a hundred years. Others went across the Atlantic and finally came back and ended back up in Philadelphia. But they were written up in 1813 and then not studied to a great deal after that. So a lot of people didn't know about it. And most recently, I guess, it's just that nobody's come around to look at the plants too much, except that's changed over the past few years.
FLATOW: Yeah. I'd like to get into that story a little bit later. Let's retrace our roots back.
Dr. McCOURT: Sure.
FLATOW: Let's go back to Thomas Jefferson, president at the time of this expedition. He sent them out to collect these. Why? Why did he think about doing that? This was not the main purpose of that expedition.
Dr. McCOURT: It wasn't the main purpose, but it was, to Jefferson's mind; probably one of the primary things he wanted to get back from the West was new species of plants and animals, too, but he was particularly interested in
plants. He said it was his passion at various times, and he once said that the most valuable thing you could do as a citizen would be to domesticate a new species or variety of plant. So when he told Lewis to go out, he wanted him to
make sure that he looked for new species of plants that might become horticulturally useful or scientifically of interest, and so he made sure that he had training for it. He sent him to Philadelphia before the trip--actually a
year before 1804, in 1803--where he got kind of a crash course in botany from the leading scientist of the time, Benjamin Smith Barton, who was a professor at Penn, the University of Pennsylvania here. So he was really keenly interested in this. Remember, he was a farmer, a farmer all his life, and he made notes about his plants and grew...
FLATOW: Right.
Dr. McCOURT: ...some of the plants that Lewis collected.
FLATOW: You just go to Monticello, you see the kind of science he was interested in.
Dr. McCOURT: Exactly. It's still there. It's maintained by the people there now.
FLATOW: Yeah. Jim Reveal, what kind of training did he get? He had to be taught what to look for, what to see?
Dr. REVEAL: Well, fortunately, his mother was an herbalist; therefore, well known and well schooled in the local plants of Virginia. Lewis actually attempted to go west as early as the 1780s, when Jefferson was attempting to get an expedition across the country while in the Washington administration. So Lewis had a degree of training, and Dr. Barton helped improve that to the point that he was knowledgeable and instructed to collect the following: plants of agronomic importance, Jefferson's first passion; plants of horticultural importance, Jefferson's second passion; and then things that might be of nice nature to horticulture. So those were his basic instructions. And overlying all of these, of course, was Jefferson and Lewis' own passion of medicinal plants, plants used by the American natives.
FLATOW: Dr. Reveal, where did the expedition do most of its collecting?
Dr. REVEAL: It first began up the Missouri River. Jefferson, understandably, felt that the expedition should go up the river some distance before they started to collect plants, because there were collectors nearby St. Louis. So Lewis began to collect mainly in July of 1804 in what is today Kansas and then Nebraska. Most of those collections were then sent down the river in the spring of 1805, and they reached Philadelphia through Jefferson later that
year. The expedition then continued on from North Dakota into the Pacific Coast in 1805, but all of the specimens up to Lemhi Pass in Idaho and Montana were lost the following year due to river flooding when they buried their specimens, as was common in the time, and were going to come back for them. So the material that we have, the bulk of some 232 specimens that we have that are genuinely Lewis and Clark specimens, were gathered on the return trip in 1806.
FLATOW: Rick McCourt, you hear about the plants that were collected, barely made it back with us today. So tell us a little about how the plants came to end up in the herbarium at your institution at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philly. It almost didn't happen, did it?
Dr. McCOURT: It almost didn't. When--the first winter, they sent back about 60 specimens to the American Philosophical Society before they really headed out further west. Of those, 30 have been just irretrievably lost. We don't know where they are. But the other 30 were kept. Then they lost a few on the way out, as Jim mentioned. The rest they brought back and handed over to Benjamin Smith Barton. Lewis brought them back and gave them to him to study because he was going to write up a companion natural history volume to the whole publication of the journal. Well, that never happened because Lewis died--he committed suicide in 1809--and Barton really handed off the project to somebody else.
That somebody was Frederick Pursh, a botanist and a gardener, a working man at the time in Philadelphia. He studied the plants, drew pictures, and he talked with Lewis once before Lewis went off to never return, and sat around waiting for things to happen. Eventually, nothing did. So he left and gave the plants eventually back to William Clark.
Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, he had taken about a third of the collection with him, without permission, basically. You could say it was purloined or an unauthorized loan--I'm not sure what you would call it. But he
took them with him for further study. He went all the way over to England, studied them there, and came back but left the plants in England. So they eventually, through a very interesting series of events, were almost bought by
other Europeans. But at the last minute, at the auction where they were sold after the gentleman died who owned them, an American bought them. And he brought back with him 47 plants and they came to Philadelphia eventually and sat in the herbarium here for a while.
Meanwhile, the rest of the plants were boxed up and placed with the American Philosophical Society, the scholarly institution established by Ben Franklin in Philadelphia. And they just sat there in that box until 1896, when
another botanist rediscovered them and published an article and said, `Look, these things are still here,' and sort of summarized what was known to them. And they all came together at the museum where I work, the Academy of Natural Sciences in about 1897, 1898. And they've been there ever since. So you can see they kind of came together and dispersed and came back together again, and finally they're here together. Now there are still nine over in England that were in a different box, sold at the auction. And they're still at the Kew Gardens [in England] over there in their collection.
FLATOW: Do they know they belong to us, over there?
Dr. McCOURT: They do. Actually, I know that their director and I sort of jokingly thought maybe this would be a good time for another loan he could give us, but he said it would taken act of Parliament to actually give them back. But he'd be happy to loan them for a while. And with the best of intentions of returning them, we might take him up on that.
FLATOW: We can call them plants of mass destruction and go get them, I think.
NPR: Talk of the Nation/Science Friday
You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow.
In May of 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark headed out from St. Louis on the first leg of a voyage that would take them through what is now Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, over the Rocky Mountains, on to the Pacific Ocean and back. The journey, made by boat and on foot, took nearly two years and ensured that Lewis, Clark and Sacagawea would be familiar names to us now--a little harder to pronounce--nearly 200 years after they set up that Missouri River--they set out on the Missouri River. Well, Thomas Jefferson, then president of the United States, all 17 states at that time, selected Lewis to make this journey west to find a passageway across the land, a direct route from sea to sea. He was an accomplished amateur scientist himself, and Jefferson sent Lewis to the best scientific minds in the colonies to prepare Lewis for his trip, for the journey, so he would recognize--know what he was doing along the way. And Jefferson instructed the party to record the natural history they encountered and to bring back specimens
of the important plants they found.
We're going to take a look at that expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and talk about the duo as botanists. What were they looking for? What did they bring back? And what can we learn from those plant specimens 200 years later? What was science like back in those days? We're going to talk about all of this with our guests, Dr. Richard M. McCourt and Dr. James L. Reveal.
FLATOW: Let me start out by asking you, Richard McCourt--you have a very interesting line in this paper that you wrote in the Plant Science Bulletin, and you say, you know, `Everybody knows about this expedition, but very few people understand or realize the richest trove of natural history specimens that they brought back.' Why do you think no one knows about that?
Dr. McCOURT: Well, nobody knew about it for about a century, it seems, anyway. They were directed to collect these specimens because that was how you did science in the 19th century, and still in the 20th and 21st century, too. But when they got back, the specimens were sort of waylaid or mislaid, to some extent, and went through a rather circuitous route, so that some ended up being stored in a somewhat neglected room in Philadelphia for nearly a hundred years. Others went across the Atlantic and finally came back and ended back up in Philadelphia. But they were written up in 1813 and then not studied to a great deal after that. So a lot of people didn't know about it. And most recently, I guess, it's just that nobody's come around to look at the plants too much, except that's changed over the past few years.
FLATOW: Yeah. I'd like to get into that story a little bit later. Let's retrace our roots back.
Dr. McCOURT: Sure.
FLATOW: Let's go back to Thomas Jefferson, president at the time of this expedition. He sent them out to collect these. Why? Why did he think about doing that? This was not the main purpose of that expedition.
Dr. McCOURT: It wasn't the main purpose, but it was, to Jefferson's mind; probably one of the primary things he wanted to get back from the West was new species of plants and animals, too, but he was particularly interested in
plants. He said it was his passion at various times, and he once said that the most valuable thing you could do as a citizen would be to domesticate a new species or variety of plant. So when he told Lewis to go out, he wanted him to
make sure that he looked for new species of plants that might become horticulturally useful or scientifically of interest, and so he made sure that he had training for it. He sent him to Philadelphia before the trip--actually a
year before 1804, in 1803--where he got kind of a crash course in botany from the leading scientist of the time, Benjamin Smith Barton, who was a professor at Penn, the University of Pennsylvania here. So he was really keenly interested in this. Remember, he was a farmer, a farmer all his life, and he made notes about his plants and grew...
FLATOW: Right.
Dr. McCOURT: ...some of the plants that Lewis collected.
FLATOW: You just go to Monticello, you see the kind of science he was interested in.
Dr. McCOURT: Exactly. It's still there. It's maintained by the people there now.
FLATOW: Yeah. Jim Reveal, what kind of training did he get? He had to be taught what to look for, what to see?
Dr. REVEAL: Well, fortunately, his mother was an herbalist; therefore, well known and well schooled in the local plants of Virginia. Lewis actually attempted to go west as early as the 1780s, when Jefferson was attempting to get an expedition across the country while in the Washington administration. So Lewis had a degree of training, and Dr. Barton helped improve that to the point that he was knowledgeable and instructed to collect the following: plants of agronomic importance, Jefferson's first passion; plants of horticultural importance, Jefferson's second passion; and then things that might be of nice nature to horticulture. So those were his basic instructions. And overlying all of these, of course, was Jefferson and Lewis' own passion of medicinal plants, plants used by the American natives.
FLATOW: Dr. Reveal, where did the expedition do most of its collecting?
Dr. REVEAL: It first began up the Missouri River. Jefferson, understandably, felt that the expedition should go up the river some distance before they started to collect plants, because there were collectors nearby St. Louis. So Lewis began to collect mainly in July of 1804 in what is today Kansas and then Nebraska. Most of those collections were then sent down the river in the spring of 1805, and they reached Philadelphia through Jefferson later that
year. The expedition then continued on from North Dakota into the Pacific Coast in 1805, but all of the specimens up to Lemhi Pass in Idaho and Montana were lost the following year due to river flooding when they buried their specimens, as was common in the time, and were going to come back for them. So the material that we have, the bulk of some 232 specimens that we have that are genuinely Lewis and Clark specimens, were gathered on the return trip in 1806.
FLATOW: Rick McCourt, you hear about the plants that were collected, barely made it back with us today. So tell us a little about how the plants came to end up in the herbarium at your institution at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philly. It almost didn't happen, did it?
Dr. McCOURT: It almost didn't. When--the first winter, they sent back about 60 specimens to the American Philosophical Society before they really headed out further west. Of those, 30 have been just irretrievably lost. We don't know where they are. But the other 30 were kept. Then they lost a few on the way out, as Jim mentioned. The rest they brought back and handed over to Benjamin Smith Barton. Lewis brought them back and gave them to him to study because he was going to write up a companion natural history volume to the whole publication of the journal. Well, that never happened because Lewis died--he committed suicide in 1809--and Barton really handed off the project to somebody else.
That somebody was Frederick Pursh, a botanist and a gardener, a working man at the time in Philadelphia. He studied the plants, drew pictures, and he talked with Lewis once before Lewis went off to never return, and sat around waiting for things to happen. Eventually, nothing did. So he left and gave the plants eventually back to William Clark.
Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, he had taken about a third of the collection with him, without permission, basically. You could say it was purloined or an unauthorized loan--I'm not sure what you would call it. But he
took them with him for further study. He went all the way over to England, studied them there, and came back but left the plants in England. So they eventually, through a very interesting series of events, were almost bought by
other Europeans. But at the last minute, at the auction where they were sold after the gentleman died who owned them, an American bought them. And he brought back with him 47 plants and they came to Philadelphia eventually and sat in the herbarium here for a while.
Meanwhile, the rest of the plants were boxed up and placed with the American Philosophical Society, the scholarly institution established by Ben Franklin in Philadelphia. And they just sat there in that box until 1896, when
another botanist rediscovered them and published an article and said, `Look, these things are still here,' and sort of summarized what was known to them. And they all came together at the museum where I work, the Academy of Natural Sciences in about 1897, 1898. And they've been there ever since. So you can see they kind of came together and dispersed and came back together again, and finally they're here together. Now there are still nine over in England that were in a different box, sold at the auction. And they're still at the Kew Gardens [in England] over there in their collection.
FLATOW: Do they know they belong to us, over there?
Dr. McCOURT: They do. Actually, I know that their director and I sort of jokingly thought maybe this would be a good time for another loan he could give us, but he said it would taken act of Parliament to actually give them back. But he'd be happy to loan them for a while. And with the best of intentions of returning them, we might take him up on that.
FLATOW: We can call them plants of mass destruction and go get them, I think.