Exploring the St. Lawrence River Region (Exploring the Americas Series) Book

I was initially intrigued by Ronda's promise to help "see" the Lewis and Clark trek from a number of different perspectives of how "The West" was and continues to be visualized by competing groups. "Competing" in both a real and figurative sense, since in 1804-6 the Pacific northwest was by no means assured to the American republic. There was commercial contention from Canadian and Russian fur traders and Spanish interests in the southwest, as well as established stakes by native Americans across the entire landscape.

While I enjoyed reading this collection of essays, at the end I was left feeling like I was still looking for the fulfillment of this revelatory promise. Perhaps my expectations were just pumped-up by the way Ronda talked about the many different "stories" told and implied by the Corps of Discovery's penetrating exploration westward. I somehow didn't find in his book new perspectives that were truly new and informative.

And one of his assertions at the end of his final essay caught my attention as a sort of summary to Ronda's undercurrent treatment of the Lewis and Clark expedition and its mission as defined by Jefferson. In commenting on Lewis and Clark's active remapping and renaming of important geographic features such as rivers, in order to comprehensively identify the Western lands, Ronda writes that "what they did not appreciate was naming as an act of erasure, appropriation and possession" (p. 127). A ridiculous statement. As every explorer has known since the beginning of formal statehood, when you come to a place that you wish to claim as your own you stick a flag in the ground and give it a name and with that all prior history of that landscape disappears.