Lewis and Clark, on their immortal voyage of discovery, faced many perils: swelling rivers, thundering waterfalls, hostile Indians, blizzards, frostbite, starvation, grizzly bears, rattlesnakes, and the great unknown of the Rocky Mountains. Of these dangers, one of the greatest and most feared was venereal disease.
It is easy today to think of sexually transmitted diseases in moral terms, to see our time as an age of moral decay and shocking promiscuity, and to view our nation’s distant past as a golden age where sins of the flesh were of lesser import and men’s feet trod the narrow path of moral rectitude. Yet the written records of our ancestors tell a different story. Diaries of famous New England clerics of the 1600s reveal burning obsessions. Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705), author of Day of Doom , felt overwhelmed by “unresistible torments of carnal lust” and spent many mornings in anxious prayer because of “filthy dreams and nocturnal pollutions.” Cotton Mather (1663–1728), an even more eminent divine and the author of 450 books, prayed daily to escape his “lascivious thoughts.” James Creeke of Essex County, Massachusetts, was tried in 1682 for “heinous, lascivious and adulterous carriage with Elizabeth, wife of Luke Perkins.” In 1721, Anglican priest John Urmstone despaired of his North Carolina flock: “A nest of the most notorious profligates on earth…chiefly people such as have been educated at some of the famous colleges of Bridewell and Newgate [notorious London prisons].” He hired a maidservant, who turned out to be “a notorious whore and thief” but was “preferable to any that can be hired here.” 1
At the pinnacle of the first families of Virginia were the Randolphs, but even this family’s affairs swirled with allegations of incest, child murder, and miscegenation. 2 At a later period, during the American Civil War, 25 percent of all brides were pregnant and 20 percent of all pregnancies ended in abortion. Startling, perhaps, but in 1760 even more brides were pregnant than in the 1860s. 3
Whole books could be – and have been – written documenting the carnal history of early America. In brief, there is overwhelming evidence that unauthorized, unapproved sexual behavior, even if unacknowledged in most history classes today, has been a major factor in American civilization.
Today, sexual mores, conservative religious opinion, and government policy are very closely tied, but it must be remembered that this union is recent, part of a cycle of alternating liberality and conservatism in our public life. Consider the era of Lewis and Clark. The major religious revival that swept the colonies from 1739 to 1742, the so-called Great Awakening, was followed by lesser waves of spiritual fervor, some termed “New Lights” of the Great Awakening. But there was a countercurrent: the Enlightenment, an age that had produced a new “religion” – deism. The movement had its origin in the 1600s and held that reason was sufficient to prove the existence of God, removing the need for revelation or authority (such as the Bible). Deists believed that God had, indeed, created the world, but afterward assumed no control over people’s lives, much less taken an active interest in human affairs or historical events. To deists, the separation of church and state was both natural and necessary. The new federal Constitution made no provisions for public funding for any church.
Many of the founding fathers were deists, including Thomas Jefrson, who had grave doubts about the divinity of Christ and believed that traditional Christianity was little more than “an engine for enslaving mankind.” Jefferson went so far as to edit and publish his own Bible, in which he eliminated those parts of holy writ that he deemed mere superstition. Jefferson strongly believed in the ascendancy of the rational mind. He was convinced that religion of the fundamentalist, evangelistic type would soon die away and that within a generation “every young man would die a Unitarian.” 4
Meriwether Lewis was a practical man, a traveler, and an army officer who had served at many isolated frontier posts. There the key to survival was action, not theological theorizing or religious rumination. In his years as Jefferson’s private secretary, as Lewis was preparing to lead the incredible journey into the unknown, he absorbed not only Jefferson’s interest in geography, botany, and ethnology but also, it would seem, Jefferson’s rather neutral view of the connection between sexual behavior and religious teachings.
The goals of the Voyage of Discovery were geographic research, mapping, exploration of natural resources, and the establishment of relations with the Indians. An even more fundamental goal was that of returning safely with the journals and biological specimens that were of such interest for political and natural history. The party needed to prepare for venereal disease as a known hazard, not only along the eastern seaboard but in the great sweep of the Louisiana Purchase, a disease most likely brought to the Indians by French, British, and Spanish adventurers. On the Pacific coast, American and British trading ships had already brought syphilis to the Native populations of the lower Columbia River. Lewis and Clark’s thirty virile young men were unlikely to remain celibate for two years; the captains needed to prepare for the consequences of encounters with potentially infected women, not to mention whatever diseases his men may have had previously. When Lewis went shopping for medical supplies, his list included many remedies for venereal disease. In the chapters to follow, we will explore what is known about venereal disease today; what was known in 1803, and the origins of that knowledge; Meriwether Lewis’s medical shopping list; the actual events pertaining to sexual behavior during the journey; the health of the voyagers in the years that followed; and, finally, the legacy of these remarkable years as the West was opened to its European inheritors.
Table 1: Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Their Causes
|
Disease . |
Causative Organism |
|
AIDS |
Human Immunodeficiency Virus |
|
Non-specific urethritis |
Chlamydia trachomatosis |
|
Trichomoniasis |
Trichomonas vaginalis |
|
Yeast infection |
Candida albicans |
|
Chancroid |
Haemophilus ducreyi |
|
Lymphogranuloma venereum |
Chlamydia trachomatosis |
|
Granuloma inguinale |
Calymmatobacterium granulomatosis |
|
Genital herpes |
Herpes simplex virus, type 2 |
|
Scabies |
Sarcoptes scabiei |
|
Crabs (pubic lice) |
Phthirus pubis |
|
Molluscum contagiosum |
A pox virus |
|
Venereal warts |
Human papilloma virus |
|
Syphilis (lues, the pox) |
Treponema pallidum |
|
Gonorrhea (clap, gleet) |
Neisseria gonorrhoeae |