The Story of Sacajawea: An Indian Love Lyric

FORWARD THE NATION. ByDonald Culross Peattie.G. P. Putnam’s Sons.$2.50

The exploration of our Far West struck its most heroic note at the very beginning. The expedition of Lewis and Clark through the newly purchased Louisiana was one of the most successful in the history of exploration and incomparably the most important in the exploration of the United States. It is one of the greatest American stories and — apart from the journals of the two captains — it has never been properly told. If a writer of the first rank should undertake to write this story, American literature would be enriched by a great book. A quite ordinary writer could produce a memorable book by telling the story simply and faithfully.

Mr. Peattie has not told the story simply, faithfully, or with informed historical understanding. He has told only a part of it, rather less than a third. He has told that part lyrically and imaginatively but with a displacement of emphases that ends by misrepresenting it. He has written a romantic, even sentimental novel which takes no more liberty with facts than historical fiction usually takes, but falsifies and — what is worse — prettifies a story which a wiser historian would have permitted to stand foursquare on its own dignity. His prose is ardent, his narrative has brilliance and nervous life, and anyone who reads it will appreciate its patriotic fervor. But it is an arty book and it is not Lewis and Clark, it is not the story of our greatest exploration; it is not, even, Mr. Peattie’s heroine, Sacajawea.

Mr. Peattie moves a little uncertainly in the details of history. He gets Tennessee into the Union before Kentucky. Although he is a naturalist, he has buffalo galloping at four thousand pounds on the hoof, fully twice the weight of a full-grown bull. He has the Union Pacific laying track through South Pass and appears to believe that this pass, the nerve center of Western history, lies between the Uinta and the Wasatch Mountains. No railroad has ever gone through South Pass, and neither the Uintas nor the Wasatch are anywhere near it. He has some warrant for his account of Sacajawea’s later life, since Grace Hebard has spent years erecting an elaborate theory on the slenderest evidence, but here was a good place for skepticism, since Dr. Hebard has not convinced many historians.

It is not the details of history in Mr. Peattie’s book to which one demurs, however, but the implicit thesis, the central effect. Sacajawea, his heroine, is certainly an American heroine, and she was certainly a woman of extraordinary courage, loyalty, ingenuity, and dignity of spirit. It is quite true that her knowledge of the Shoshoni country and her relationship to a Shoshoni chief saved the expedition at one of its many crises. She was far more valuable to it, and far more of a man and a gentleman, than her worthless husband. Both the captains respected and liked her, though it is Clark who speaks of her with personal tenderness and not, as Mr. Peattie says, Lewis. But her spirit was that of an Indian; if she is a great person she is great as an Indian squaw achieving an understanding of white men’s values, and even in fiction she would have been more memorable as a neolithic mind bridging the gulf between the races than as a creature of poetry.

Furthermore, Sacajawea was a subordinate character on the expedition and in writing her up Mr. Peattie has necessarily written the two great captains down. It was just what the common label calls it, the expedition of lewis and Clark, whereas Mr, Peattie makes it Sacajawea’s discovery of the Northwest Passage. He gets into the book little of the soul-stirring adventurousness of the expedition and even less of the achievement that has made it important ever since. The stretch of greatest heroism was the one between the Shoshoni country and the mouth of the Columbia, to which he merely alludes, and some of the most important explorations (as well as some of the events that proved crucial) belong to the return trip, of which he says nothing at all. It is to be hoped that his fervor and fine prose will not deter anyone who may have been contemplating a book about Lewis and Clark. They are still there for anyone who may want to use them, great leaders of men, great diplomats, great explorers, and the proprietors of a story so great that it docs not need the services of fiction. BERNARD DEVOTO