A mid-October 2002 telephone call from longtime friend, historian, and author Thomas P. Lowry was exciting and intriguing. He informed me that he and his wife, Beverly – his equal as a researcher – had finished a manuscript highlighting an often-ignored but lasting medical problem that haunted members of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, and the Native peoples they encountered, nearly two centuries ago.
Tom inquired, “Would you be interested in reading the manuscript and, if warranted, writing the foreword?” After voicing concerns about time constraints and weighing them against a busy schedule, I answered, “Yes.”
My decision to do so was reinforced by my interest in Lewis and Clark, which predated my infatuation with the Civil War. This later romance began in the winter of 1936–37, when my father, a Marine Corps veteran of the Great War and a Montana rancher, read to me John Thomason’s Jeb Stuart .
Some six years before, Sarah Evans Morse, my maternal grandmother – a women’s rights crusader, educator, and social worker – introduced me to the Corps of Discovery and to Lewis and Clark. This was only natural, because Sarah Evans had come to Montana in the mid-1890s, fresh out of college, to teach in the Indian School at Crow Agency. By 1908 she held elective office as superintendent of schools in Yellowstone County, and for many years before her death on January 10, 1933, she served as executive secretary of the Montana Tuberculosis Association, a position she had held since 1916. Her office was in the state capitol in Helena, and on my first visit to the building, as a first-grader, as well as on subsequent visits – the most recent in 1999 – I have always been impressed with the gigantic Charles M. Russell painting of the Corps of Discovery’s meeting with the Flathead Indians in Ross’s Hole.
As a divorcée with only one child, Sarah Morse always spent Christmas vacations at my parents’ Sarpy, Montana, ranch, bounded on two of the four fence lines by the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservations. On these visits she fired a youthful fantasy with Montana history, particularly the trials and tribulations of the Corps of Discovery. A born teacher, she took my brother and me on winter walks through the snow while sharing with us passages from the expedition’s journals. To make the walks more relevant, she assigned each of us a role: Sarah was Sacagawea; my brother was Meriwether Lewis; and I was William Clark, as I felt better able to relate him, both then as well as today.
Following my introduction to the Civil War, and after a required course in Montana history in eighth grade, my interest in the Corps of Discovery ebbed for more than three decades. It did not return until the late 1960s, some twelve years after I joined the National Park Service as a historian. At that time, the service was preparing for publication, in 1975, of Lewis and Clark – Historic Places Associated with Their Transcontinental Exploration (1804–1806) .
Because of my background and familiarity with most of the Montana sites, I was elated to work closely with the author and editors of this project. Like all volumes in the National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings series, the Lewis and Clark volume was site-oriented.
Having returned to my Montana roots, I read with keen interest the critically acclaimed and masterful Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the West by my friend Stephen Ambrose. The enthusiasm engendered by Ambrose’s blockbuster, which spent more than ten weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, and the approach of the Bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition afforded a challenging opportunity. In August 1999, I led an eight-day, seven-night van tour for History America of the route followed by the Corps of Discovery from the Great Falls of the Missouri to the confluence of the Clearwater and Snake Rivers at Lewiston, Idaho. This honed my knowledge of and appreciation for what they accomplished.
Earlier, my years at military school and four years spent in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II introduced an unsophisticated youth to a major problem that has plagued the military since 1498 – venereal disease. Back at St. John’s Military Academy, I remember our ROTC lectures on the subjects of health and sanitation, which included information about venereal disease, then a no-no in public high schools. It covered transmission of venereal disease, Capt. Allen E. Smith’s cautionary warning that you don’t get gonorrhea from toilet seats, and his stern words that the only sure prophylaxis is “to keep your pecker in your pants.” In the Marine Corps, the boot camp lectures were more specific and were supplemented with gruesome photographs of the ravages caused to the body by syphilis. There was the monthly “short arm” inspection by naval corpsmen and the warning that time spent in sick bay would, like brig time, be added to the perpetrator’s enlistment term.
Capt. Meriwether Lewis readied himself for the expedition that would be gone for several years from civilization, as white America knew it, through a review of relevant literature. Among the problems he foresaw was how to recognize and combat the venereal diseases that could be anticipated, resulting from sexual contact with the Native peoples. How Lewis and Clark met and mastered this challenge occupies center stage in Tom Lowry’s Venereal Disease and the Lewis and Clark Expedition .
Lowry’s more than forty years as a doctor, in both public and private practice, and his and his wife’s sleuthing skills have led to a number of books, including the critically acclaimed The Stories the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War . Lowry’s latest endeavor enlightens us on health problems – so frequently ignored – that plagued the expedition and the Native peoples with whom they interacted. Too often in our reverence for our forebears, we see them through the eyes of a Puritan. Thanks to Dr. Lowry, however, we can better understand their foibles and hardships and can appreciate what Lewis and Clark and the men of the Corps of Discovery accomplished in combating venereal disease as well as other ills and injuries.
It is a mark of their skill that during the expedition only one man died (Sgt. Charles Floyd), and he of a ruptured appendix, a condition not fully understood until a century later.
EDWIN C. BEARSS
Historian Emeritus
U.S. National Park Service