The president paused, fully commanding their attention, sipped from his glass, and said, “Now, we say commerce drives the world, but that’s only in a surface sense. Far more
than gold, much as they’re often intermixed, the world is driven by dreams. And the cosmic dream of the West goes back to the beginning. Listen to Homer, the blind poet, eight hundred years before Jesus graced the world. Where does he place the Elysian Fields, the final reward for the heroes of Greece, but in the misty west at the earth’s ultimate extremity. And the west, he says, was a place of joy—remember the lines? It’s where ‘life is easy to man, no snow falls nor rain but always ocean sendth forth the breeze of the shrill west to blow cool on man.’”
He chuckled and raised his glass. “Not bad, old Homer.”
“Not bad, indeed, Mr. President,” said Ned Thornton, with an easy grace that made Lewis instantly envious. “Our own great Alexander Pope, if you’ll permit me, gave us Homer’s view of Elysium thusly.” His voice deepened and his delivery gave shape to noble words so they rang in Lewis’s mind.
“Joys ever young, unmix’d with pain or fear,
Fill the wide circle of the eternal year:
Stern winter smiles on that auspicious clime:
The fields are florid with unfading prime;
From the bleak pole no winds inclement blow,
Mould the round hail, or flake the fleecy snow;
But from the breezy deep the blest inhale
The fragrant murmurs of the western gale.”
“‘The fragrant murmurs of the western gale.’ Splendid!” Mr. Jefferson cried. “I see you in a new light, Mr. Thornton, that you should have committed to memory so salient a passage.”
“I fear I can take no literary credit, Mr. President. A kind lady in Mayfair gave me these words on a scented sheet. She was forecasting that I would find Homeric joy in the New World, and I have to say that she was quite correct. So, you see, I have read them many times.”
Lewis glanced at Anna. The lady in Mayfair with the scented sheet had seized her attention, but as the conversation
went on she slumped back in her chair. He saw that she was interested only in her own immediate, and he imagined that her immediate had a wondrous excitement far beyond his own experience.
Had they ever studied medieval maps? Mr. Jefferson was asking. “Not for geography, of course, since our modern age has so overtaken their knowledge, but for their imagery, all the strange places and strange names crying of ancient tales of sea dragons and castles of gold and races of men immense in size and unholy in beauty, islands of Amazons, those amazing women who, ’tis said, cut off their right breasts the better to draw their bows, who really are an analogous expression in myth of the true power of women. Looking to the west, always to the west. Valhalla beyond the setting sun where Norse heroes go to meet Odin. Mallory placing Arthur at last on the mystical Isle of Avalon where—I remember those words so well—‘falls not rain, or hail, or any snow, not ever wind blows loudly …’”
Summoning up such images of mystery and romance, Mr. Jefferson’s voice took on a hypnotic note. Lewis felt swept along on a wild current, but impatience was rising as well. He knew the immediate west as no one here possibly could. He had soldiered and slept on the ground and faced starving times when acorns were salvation, while these men had slept in feather beds; so while classical imagery was thrilling, he also wanted to cry out that Homer could only dream but we can go!
“Our own Native Americans tell us the great spirits lie beyond the setting sun,” the president was saying, “where the souls of the departed return to their maker. The Spaniard, Cabeza de Vaca, wandering lost for months in the American West, tells us that he never lost faith ‘that going toward the sunset we must find what we desire …’
“So, of course, when Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Americas, so clearly not the Cathay of silks and spices, what could everyone believe but that this untimely land mass blocking the route to glory was a mere shoal, just another obstacle lying between them and that wonderful sea of legend that washed the golden sands of Cipangu?
“And what are they really postulating but the Garden of the World, that place of human joy, that Eden where all cares are lost and innocence can be reclaimed, where man can live in peace and plenty, forever content in gentle sunlight, at one with God or the gods, as the case may be? From Homer on it is the idea of the garden of human perfection that has driven the western image. And can any of us really say that that garden of glory where all good lies doesn’t await us today in the far unknown reaches of our own North American continent?”
At some point Dolley stopped listening. Tom could be fascinating, he could spin intellectual castles in the air that swept you away on dreams, but he also could ramble on for an hour or two; and meanwhile Mr. Lemaire was in the doorway giving her increasingly urgent glances. Plates and wineglasses had been cleared, fresh glasses placed but the dessert wine not poured. On a table beyond Mr. Lemaire she could see the dessert laid out in crystal dishes. A specialty of Chef Julien that involved folding whipped egg whites into whipped cream, it was designed to be eaten within a quarter hour.
She cast an imploring glance at Jimmy, who shook his head sharply. One didn’t interrupt the president. The three diplomats were listening with apparent interest. So was Albert Gallatin, who was well schooled in the classics, but Hannah wore a look of bored tolerance. Dolley surmised that as a western Pennsylvanian, Hannah felt she already knew more than she needed of the West. Upon reflection, it seemed to Dolley that Mr. Yrujo wore a rather calculating look; she was amused to see his wife stifle a yawn and wondered if the former Miss McKean’s new husband was still giving her exhausting nights.
Anna looked as if her mind was far away, perhaps on Mr. Cutts, who now occupied much of her time, but Merry was listening carefully, his earlier confusion gone. Maggie was giving the president rapt attention; her husband took a small book from an inner pocket and wrote a note with a stub pencil.
Mr. Lemaire shrugged and spread his hands. The beaten egg white had collapsed. And Mr. Jefferson talked on and on … .
Though memory of that sweet pressure on his foot burned in Lewis’s mind, he was drawn ever more deeply into the president’s discourse, for now the talk had turned to the desire that he most understood, the simple hunger to know that drives the explorer and the inventor. Myths, dreams, notions of paradise to the west were fine, but it was the beckoning unknown that had called him since he was a boy.
The wide Missouri pouring into the Mississippi from the west, mass of muddy water so large it must drain a range reaching into the heart of the continent—what lay up that river? What lay beyond the Great Bend already known, beyond the villages of the Mandan Indians that French traders had opened, beyond and into the hidden mists? Did it reach clear to the Stony Mountains with their glittering peaks, and were those mountains really no more demanding than the Blue Ridge, a western range matching an eastern range? Wondrous were the tales of distant vastness here on our own continent, and Lewis burned to see them. And the president was circling the same idea in his own meandering way.
“That hunger to know is more, mark you, than mere curiosity, curiosity being no more than the mainspring of gossip. Rather it is the lure of the unknown, the wonder of what might be. Look at the moon, so cold and distant. Our best glasses tell us merely that it has hills and valleys. What mystery! Will man go there someday and perhaps find a new race that has mastered arts unknown to us?”
There was a sudden loud snicker. Lewis’s head jerked around, and across the table he saw Mr. Yrujo bury his face in his napkin, his shoulders shaking. It was outrageous. The Spaniard was too handsome, quite beautiful in fact, and the core of dislike Lewis had felt for him hardened.
Mr. Jefferson, however, didn’t seem offended. He smiled and said, “Mr. Yrujo doubts such thoughts.”
“Well, sir,” the Spaniard said, not at all abashed, “it’s so patently impossible one can hardly take it seriously.”
“But that is the stuff of dreams, my dear Mr. Ambassador. The impossible becomes possible and then feasible and then one day … oh, I make no predictions as to the moon, but what interests me is the persistence of dreams and, specifically, of man’s dream of the unknown West. For that is what gave the attitude of the Americas, which attitude shapes what we are and what we know today.”
Lewis felt a sudden jolting awakening, as if Anna had poked him with a sharp stick. This was the stuff of his own dreams, but more was at stake than any individual. The president was showing them the nature of America, but there was more than that too. The West beyond the Mississippi was Spanish territory. We had a foothold in the Pacific Northwest, but already the British pushed us there. France was reasserting itself, in Santo Domingo and perhaps even on the Mississippi. And here was the president of the United States laying the theoretical groundwork for an American position with the diplomatic representatives of the three critical nations. Lewis cursed his own thickness. This was no rambling monologue; it went straight to the American role on the continent. Pay attention!
“Why did Europeans strike ever westward?” the president was asking. “Why, upon finding the New World, were they so sure that a way west would reveal itself? Dreams, dreams all. The New World presented itself as a barrier blocking the route to our desires? Never fear—straits parting the land mass, as the Red Sea was parted for Moses, certainly would be found.
“Verrazano thought he’d seen the western sea across a narrow spit of land. Cartier sailed into the Saint Lawrence and was sure he’d found the straits. And when no straits were found, then there must be rivers that could be ascended to a vast inland sea that also had western outlets down which vessels could glide straight to Cipangu. And the inland sea, never found, faded to a great lake with outlets east and west, and then to a small mountain lake, and then to what we know today, that great rivers lead us to the mountains of the
West and so it has narrowed down till there must lie our Northwest Passage.”
The president sat back in his chair, a wineglass poised in his hand, his voice warm, thoughtful, easily heard but not loud; it were as if he were a teacher, leading an exploration in which he was participant rather than guide.
“And surely,” he was saying, “logic tells us that if such a river falls out of the eastern side of those mountains and runs eastward to the Mississippi, then another must issue to the west. And if that is so, the two should be more or less opposite each other, and that suggests we can find a cut in the mountains at elevation sufficiently mild as to allow easy portage between the two rivers, the one on the east, the other that we’ve long imagined as the Great River of the West, the mouth of which we now know … .” He chuckled. “Logic so insists, and if logic doesn’t, desire does, and together the two are irresistible.”
Lewis had heard of the Northwest Passage all his life. To find it was one purpose of exploration. Yet so firmly was it ingrained in the fabric of American thought that it was almost disorienting to hear the admission that it might not exist.
The president reminded them of Captain Gray, the American who, in 1792, had discovered an immense river pouring into the Pacific, which he named for his ship, the
Columbia,
and claimed for the United States. Lewis knew Gray’s story well. His discovery had prompted Mr. Jefferson’s long-ago plans for an expedition that Lewis had dreamed of leading.
The volume of the Columbia’s water tells you it drains an immense range, Mr. Jefferson said, and hence must be the outlet of the postulated Great River of the West, which flows from those same Stony Mountains that surely feed the Missouri on the east.
So what of Alexander Mackenzie’s new book just in from London? This fur-trading captain for Britain’s North West Company had tramped the far northwest as Lewis had only dreamed of doing; he claimed he had discovered a water passage to the western sea nearly ten years before.
“Now, with the greatest respect, Mr. Thornton, I judge he did no such thing,” Mr. Jefferson said. “Mackenzie says he found a route with an easy portage at a mere three-thousandfoot altitude that connects to the headwaters of the Columbia. But he is very far north and I think it impossible he’s on the Columbia, for I believe that river issues directly from the western side of the mountains, and that it is more or less opposite the headwaters of the Missouri on the opposite slope. After all, the latitude of the Columbia’s mouth matches that of the Missouri.”
“And are all those calculations, Mr. President,” asked Ned Thornton with his engaging smile, “based on logic or on desire?”
“Both,” Mr. Jefferson said. “Plus a powerful distaste for the idea of Britain having the Northwest Passage via Canada while we are lacking.”
Lewis turned a sharp eye on the president. As if lighthearted and casual, he had gone to the heart of the Pacific Northwest conundrum. Such was the way of men of skill in dealing with great issues. For an instant Lewis wondered if he would ever learn, and then his mind darted back to the mix of politics and geography. The Spanish were only a short-term problem; in two or three decades the westward tide of American settlers would cancel the Spanish hold on the center of the continent. But in the far northwest, if the British succeeded in making themselves masters of the mouth of the Columbia, we could forget the dream of a continental nation. It was so clear. We needed to saddle up and get on out there!