Jewel of Our Collection: A Facsimile of the Original Lewis and Clark Manuscripts

"It would be such a curiosity as the world has never yet seen and make a great sensation."

Elliot Coues could hardly contain his excitement about his plans to reproduce faithfully the long-forgotten original manuscripts of Lewis and Clark. More than a century later, contemporary scholars are just as excited about the end result: the most true-to-form facsimile of the original manuscripts known to exist, carefully reproduced by Coues’ secretary, Mary Anderson.

The extraordinary manuscript is the jewel of Lewis & Clark College’s vast collection of expedition-related literature, which contains copies of every known publication, foreign and domestic, made from the Lewis and Clark journals.

The importance of the Coues-Anderson manuscript is hard to overstate. In the years following the expedition, numerous versions of Lewis and Clark’s journals were published as editors sought to create a compelling narrative while deciphering inscrutable penmanship and inconsistent spellings. When Coues secured access to the original journals, he hoped to publish a verbatim copy in addition to the annotated version of the 1814 edition of the journals he was hired to produce. Stephen Dow Beckham, Dr. Robert B. Pamplin Jr. Professor of History, says Coues’ choice of Anderson as the copyist was critical; Beckham calls her a meticulous, experienced transcriber who was familiar with the handwriting of the times.

The resulting material, Beckham says, is a journal copy "frozen in time," which provides considerable insight into both the expedition and how other editors interpreted it. He currently is collaborating with Clay Jenkinson, humanities scholar in residence; Doug Erickson, College archivist and head of special collections; and Jim Kopp, director of Watzek Library, on a digital and print edition of the facsimile, which will include the manuscript’s history and its implications for current scholarship.

"It’s a national treasure," says Jenkinson, "and there’s an urgency to get something written about it, because most people, if they’re aware of it at all, don’t know the first thing about it, except there is a facsimile of the journals."

The excerpt below is a brief retelling of how this one-million-word treasure arrived at the College, and is part of the College’s forthcoming book, The Literature of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, a bibliography with interpretive essays, coauthored by Beckham, Erickson, Jeremy Skinner, assistant archivist, and Paul Merchant, editorial assistant.

Beckham takes up the story in 1891, when publisher Francis Harper hired Coues, a natural-history scholar and prodigious writer, to re-edit the period’s most popular Lewis and Clark journal edition, the Biddle-Allen narrative.

During his work on the Biddle-Allen narrative, Coues tracked down the original journals of Lewis and Clark. He found them in the library of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, where they had been stored and forgotten since deposited there in 1818 by Nicholas Biddle. The lack of interest in these materials confirmed that the Lewis and Clark Expedition had slipped from public awareness. With the emergence in the 1880s of the graduate seminars of Herbert Baxter Adams at Johns Hopkins University and the development of history as a field of instruction in American colleges and universities, Coues’s discovery became fortuitous. A new generation was poised to "re-discover" the adventures of the Corps of Discovery. To assist him in his editorial work, Coues persuaded the American Philosophical Society and its tenacious librarian, Henry Phillips Jr., to loan him manuscripts. Coues took these documents to Washington, D.C., in 1892 to study and organize them....

In the course of his work, Coues embarked on what could have become an even more substantial project—the reproduction of the original journals of Lewis and Clark. Jefferson Kearny Clark, a descendant of William Clark, endorsed Coues’s project. Coues hovered over the original notes and journals, "the mine opened in Phila.," as he referred to it in a letter to Harper. He continued:

There are 18 bound note books, and 12 small parcels of other Mss., making in all 30 codices, and I think something like 2,000 written pages. Of course we shall not be idiotic enough to ever let the Mss. go out of our hands without keeping a copy. I have an expert copyist already at work, making an exact copy, word for word, letter for letter, and point for point. I do not know how the expense will come out; if you will authorize the expenditure of $150, I will make up the balance, whatever it will be, and the copy thus become[s] our joint property. I think most probably, after our present edition, if that turns out as well as you have every reason to expect, you will want to bring out another volume reproducing the orig. Mss verbatim. It would be such a curiosity as the world has never yet seen and make a great sensation....

Coues was right, but he had not fully assessed what he had discovered. The Lewis and Clark writings, 1804-06, were one of the largest collections of manuscript material by American authors on a single subject written to that time. The journals, field notes, and correspondence exceeded the sermons of Puritan pastors, the diary of William Byrd of Westover, and histories of many other events. While the correspondence of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and others ran to more pages and covered a far broader sweep of time, the Lewis and Clark manuscripts were in a class by themselves. Coues sensed this. At the same time, he treated the originals badly. He peeled off the brass clasps on the notebooks, declaring them "a nuisance," and gave some of them away as Christmas presents to friends. He wrote freely on the original manuscripts and wrestled them into what he termed "perfect order," a series of thirty "Codices," each duly paginated....

Coues continued to take great interest in the facsimile crafted by Mary B. Anderson. In mid-December 1893, he wrote to Harper: "The copying of the L. & C. Mss. has been completed, and now we own the only cops. in existence after the original, made with great care & skill, and practically perfect. It is a very valuable piece of property!"...

Coues anticipated editing the original journals into a major publication on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. However, Harper did not embrace the project. Instead, he persuaded Coues to edit the journals of Zebulon Montgomery Pike as his next project. Sometime, however, between 1894 and his death in 1899, Coues expended considerable effort toward studying and annotating the facsimile edition. Of particular utility was the Map of the Missouri River From its mouth to Three Forks, Montana, a work in eighty-four sheets printed by the Missouri River Commission, 1893-94. In neat handwriting, Coues entered hundreds of notations from this river atlas on the facsimile. He recorded modern place names, distances in miles, inserted missing words, provided first names of some fur traders, and initiated the process of documentary editing. In some instances, he noted spellings that varied from those in the Biddle-Allen edition of 1814....

Francis Harper retrieved the facsimile after Coues’s death in 1899 and took it to New York. There, the project—filed in sixteen folio boxes and wrapped in sheets identified in Coues’s handwriting—lay forgotten for seventy years, perhaps because no one except Harper realized it existed. On a book-buying trip to New York City in 1970, George Tweney, a Seattle rare-book dealer, called on the firm of Lathrop Harper, Inc., in Manhattan. After visiting with Douglas Parsonage, who had worked for years for the firm, Tweney gained permission to browse. Tweney’s tale continued:

‘Come out into the workroom,’ [said Parsonage], ‘I may have something of interest out there. ‘This was the room where incoming books were unpacked, and outgoing orders were prepared for shipment. Under the long work bench in a corner of the room, Parsonage pointed out a cardboard carton to me that seemed to be full of a jumble of loose papers, and scrawled on the side of the carton were the words ‘Lewis and Clark.’ He said, ‘I don’t know exactly what is in that box, but you are welcome to take a look.’

Upon returning home, I began to go through the papers page by page. Even then I did not really recognize their significance, but it wasn’t hard for me to put all the pages in their proper order, and to discover that they were sequentially bundles of codices. Of course, I recognized their similarity to the Lewis and Clark manuscripts in the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, because I had seen those papers on several previous occasions. My ‘find’ easily sorted into all the codices, as I later discovered, and as they had been named by Elliott Coues. The pages are all uniformly 9" x 5 3/4" in size, and I later had them all enclosed in folding cases for safekeeping. There are a total of sixteen cases, some codices being short enough to include several or more in one case.

The remarkable manuscript facsimile edition arrived at Lewis & Clark College in 2000 with the purchase of George Tweney’s collection of materials relating to the Lewis and Clark Expedition.