Description:
Montana journalist Benjamin Long's retracing of the Lewis and Clark expedition is an American elegy. Long calls his mode of exploration "backtracking"--the opposite of following. "If you follow," an old trapper once explained to the author, "the animal is just reacting to your presence, trying to avoid you. Backtracking, you study the evidence as the animal laid it down." Armed with such knowledge and "weary of careers that found us impounded in our cubicles," Long and his wife quit their jobs, sell the house, and embark on their own Corps of Rediscovery in an old Subaru, hoping to uncover some sort of truth about the Western territory nearly two centuries after America's most famous explorers. That truth, sadly, is mostly about loss. "Of all the passages from the journals of Lewis and Clark," writes Long in the introduction, "the ones that fueled my imagination-fire were those with images of wilderness and wildlife." In this spirit, each subsequent chapter of Backtracking is devoted to a life form that Lewis and Clark encountered on their two-year odyssey. On the Great Plains, Long pays a visit to beleaguered prairie-dog towns, whose residents intrigued Clark enough that he sent one on a long trip back East, where it "lived out the rest of its days in a Philadelphia museum." Like Old West ghost towns, the legendary prairie-dog towns have seen their citizenry dwindle to bust--from an estimated five billion residents to perhaps three million--bringing an entire ecosystem to near-collapse. Another mammal Lewis and Clark could hardly avoid was the grizzly bear, with Lewis famously recording, "I must confess I do not like the gentleman and had reather [sic] fight two Indians than one bear." Long and his wife, however, must detour away from the original trail with a team of wildlife biologists since "the bears can no longer be found anywhere along the explorers' four-thousand-mile route." And so on, with American bison, Westslope cutthroat trout, sharptail grouse, wolves, and more vanished. If this all sounds a bit depressing, at least Long proves an informed and companionable guide along the way. Much has changed in the 200 years since Jefferson first commissioned Lewis and Clark to investigate the newly bought Louisiana Purchase. What hasn't abated is the desire to seek out America's remote natural riches. --Langdon Cook
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