Fits and fallacies: Rewriting history, though not in the sense intended

(Response to directed comment, re: “Rewriting history: IUS research team may force rewriting of Lewis and Clark Expedition,” by Tim Deatrick, Tribune Correspondent. Sorry, the article is not archived on-line.)

TD, you’ve been doing pretty good work in the Tribune, especially the article about John Moody’s globetrotting turkey hunt, but this one just isn’t very good.

Rarely has the Tribune’s lackadaisical attitude toward text editing been as glaringly deficient as with your article, which purports to provide a major “scoop,” yet is disorganized and does not provide coherent support for the headline that inaccurately screams above it.

Couldn't you have written about sports, instead?

There may or may not be something to your contention that research into the Lewis & Clark expedition conducted at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, by an IUS student team under the direction of Dr. Claude Baker is “historical” in nature, presumably in the sense of “outstanding” or “epochal,” but if so, the article makes almost none of it clear.

Furthermore, it is painfully obvious that you begin with a preconceived thesis about the effect of Lewis & Clark’s expedition on Native American culture, and look for corroboration to Dr. Baker's university research that has nothing whatsoever to do with the preconceived notion.

There are three rather disjointed assertions:

(1) The research being done by the IUS team and Dr. Baker may result in people realizing that the Lewis & Clark expedition began at Big Bone Lick, not the Louisville area.

(2) Accordingly, Thomas Jefferson’s scientific intentions, and especially his interest in mammoths and the possibility of other large mammals existing on the frontier, can be viewed under a different light.

(3) From all this we can concur with spokespersons for various Native American groups that the subjugation of Native American inhabitants was Jefferson’s prime aim in launching the expedition.

In point of fact, there’s nothing particularly new about Big Bone Lick, neither in the context of Lewis & Clark nor in the sense of Jefferson’s recurring mammoth fixation. Here are just two of dozens of web references on the topic:

Big Bone Lick part of Lewis and Clark legacy

Return to Big Bone Lick

Quotes attributed to Dr. Baker, the IUS research team leader, deal with the general parameters of the research project, and Dr. Baker seems content merely to reconfirm the scientific research aims of Jefferson and the Lewis & Clark expedition’s activities pursuant to these aims: The expedition was scientific, and not a “camping trip.”

Nowhere in your article is Dr. Baker quoted to the effect that the expedition was intended as a means of Native American subjugation, although this, too, is a topic much on the minds of a variety of historians and non-traditional thinkers. As an example:

Lewis & Clark helped rob American Indians

You are so transparently eager to link some or all of the preceding, including Dr. Claude Baker, Big Bone Lick, mammoth bones and Thomas Jefferson, to the subsequent “subjugation” of Native American culture that you must play a shell game with those three assertions.

Unfortunately, like Ms. Stein said, there's no there there.

Because no link exists from what Dr. Baker’s research is accomplishing and what you desperately wants us to believe with reference to Native Americans, you resort to an exceedingly weak rhetorical segue, first benignly quoting Dr. Baker as to the specifics of Jefferson’s scientific intent, then immediately writing that Native American Journalists Association President Patty Talahanagva “seems to agree with Baker” – although the words of Talahanagva’s that follow, which make the point that the Native American perspective about Lewis & Clark is valuable and should be heard, have nothing to do with Dr. Baker’s comments about science on the expedition.

From there, it’s a quick and easy but illogical path back to your preconceived thesis, that the expedition was “a way to subjugate the American Indian” rather than open trade with Native Americans, as Jefferson publicly implied.

As there is nothing in any of this new or novel, exactly what history must be rewritten?