Going East ….to West

I knew of Thomas Jefferson as one of the better presidents of the United States and also for being an architect of the Declaration of Independence. My interest in him arose sharply after I read what President John F. Kennedy had said about him while hosting a dinner for Nobel Prize winners of the Western Hemisphere in April 1962,

“ I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has been ever gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone”

Mukul and Manaswini had planned our visit to Yellowstone while I was still In India. I decided to read about Jefferson’s role in How the West was Won, possibly before undertaking the Yellowstone tour but certainly before writing about it. What you see below, is what I have extracted from various sources and I have tried to acknowledge these sources whenever possible. Italics denote a direct quote. My role has been, therefore, limited to collating of relevant information but even that takes quite some time as I have discovered.

I plan to start with Jefferson in general and his contribution towards extending the American frontier to the Pacific, in particular. I shall thereafter show the linkage between Lewis and Clark Expedition and the National Park of Yellowstone. Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks will be described pictorially while the text would be reduced to the role similar to that of the punctuation marks in a given text. Pictures are far superior to words while communicating about the visible part of our world.. may be the words can best be used for describing / expressing anything abstract and therefore invisible...

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), third president of the United States, combined the roles of lawyer and statesman with those of scientist and architect. He served in the Virginia House of Burgesses from 1769 to 1775. As a delegate to the Continental Congress, he drafted the Declaration of Independence. He later served as Governor of Virginia before becoming ambassador to France and then Secretary of State under George Washington. Vice President under John Adams and leader of the Democratic-republican Party, he became President in 1801, serving two terms.

Important events of Jefferson’s presidency included the Tripolitan War (1801-050; the Louisiana Purchase (1803); the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-06); and the Embargo Act (1807). After his retirement from political life, he devoted himself to intellectual activities at his home, Monticello. At the age of 76, he founded the University of Virginia. He died on July 4,1826.

(Extracted from The Story of the West published by Smithsonian Institution)

Stephen E. Ambrose in his book about Lewis and Clark Expedition -Undaunted Courage –informs us that “when Jefferson took the Oath of Office on March, 1801, the nation contained 5,308,483 persons. Nearly one out of five was a Negro slave. Although the boundaries stretched from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River, from the Great Lakes nearly to the Gulf of Mexico (roughly a thousand miles by a thousand miles), only a relatively small area was occupied. Two thirds of the people lived within fifty miles of tidewater. Only four roads crossed the Appalachian Mountains.”

“The potential of the United States, Stephen Ambrose continues, was if not limitless, certainly vast—and vastly greater if the nation could add the trans-Mississippi portion of the continent to its territory. In 1801, however, it was not clear the country could hold on to its existing territory between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, much less add more western land. The Whisky Rebellion by the trans-Appalachian residents had shown that they were already disposed to think of themselves as the germ of an independent nation that would find its outlet to the world market place not across the mountains to the Atlantic Seaboard, but by the Ohio and Mississippi river system to the Gulf of Mexico.( Jefferson’s own Vice President Aaron Burr was full of plots and schemes and conspiracies to break the west loose from the United States and form a new nation.) This threat of session was quite real since the United States had itself come into existence by an act of rebellion and secession.”

“Louisiana in 1801--that part of North America lying between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains—was up for grabs. The contestants were the British coming out of Canada, the Spanish coming up from Texas and California, the French coming up the Mississippi-Missouri from New Orleans, the Russians coming down from the Northwest, and the Americans from the East. But European ambitions for the inland empire were more theoretical than real, partly because the chief concerns of the contestants were their own wars with one another within Europe, even more because of time and distance, mountains and rivers. In 1801, the European nations were no more capable of exploring, conquering, settling, and exploiting the western two-thirds of North America than they had been in the preceding three centuries." But Jefferson’s Americans, as Stephen Ambrose informs us, had two great advantages over their European rivals. First, Americans had already started their westward movement towards Mississippi "and some of them had even crossed it to settle, most of them illegally, in Upper Louisiana. Americans, in short, were beginning to take physical possession of lands to which the Europeans had only claims or hopes. The second great advantage was that the United States had Thomas Jefferson for its leader.”

As Ambrose asserts, “In an age of imperialism, Jefferson was the greatest empire builder of all. His mind encompassed the continent. From the beginning of the revolution, he thought of the United States as a nation stretching from sea to sea (from Atlantic to Pacific).. More than any other man, he made that happen.”