The Wayslide Gang: Part Four (A Piece of the Rainstorm)

The elderly, living longer than ever before, symbolize this development, concentrating, if they have the means, in specific regions and supporting specific industries that cater to their needs. The protection of the local environment against change is the theme of political and social movements often characterized as NIMBY "not in my backyard" groups. Some new communities regulate the architectural details of the homes within them down to the color and shape of doors.

Other communities have become adept at protesting the encroachment of undesirable change. The tremendous diversity of America at the national level, it would seem, is being matched by an emphasis, often futile, on homogeneity at the local level. In part because they live and act in new ways, Americans are no longer sure how to represent reality to themselves, let alone to others.

For the first time in our history, the media have become nationalized, creating the possibility of a richer national community. But with the success of chain bookstores, national newspapers, and twenty-four-hour-a-day cable news has also come a "thinning" of the reality that is represented, as if Americans had more and more information and less and less understanding. The general pattern seems to be one characterized by an explosion of the outlets that make communication possible combined with an increasing inability to find much that is original and interesting to communicate.

One can now watch the same news program anywhere in the United States—indeed, anywhere in the world—and yet still not have the context and historical understanding to make sense of the events being reported. How Americans understand their relationships to each other has been changing as well. Although they like to think of themselves as neighborly, Americans increasingly resort to ways of resolving their disputes with each other that are more formal than a chat over a fence.

The increasing litigiousness of American society, the new role of insurance companies as makers of public policy, the formalization of trust, the increasing use of binding arbitration, the rise and now fall of an interventionist judiciary, the increasing privatization of government services all represent steps away from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft. Yet it would be foolish to lament these changes: Even as they wax nostalgic for a world they believe to be lost, Americans take steps to ensure their rights, realize their self-interests, and protect themselves against what they perceive to be the intrusive claims of community.

The net result is a change in the texture of everyday life, one bound to be felt at places as diverse as the physician's waiting room, the court room, the local prison, and the suburban shopping mall. No one, in a sense, seems to obey the rules any more. This is not meant to be part of a conservative lament that always accompanies social. It is as if the United States is caught between two moral codes, one of which no longer applies and the other of which has not yet been developed. Although they are not among the most important of American institutions, the social sciences have also been caught up in transformations that question their very existence.

There are prominent exceptions—I hope this book demonstrates that—but most work in social science seems increasingly unable to deal with changing economic, social, and political realities. The premise that the social sciences could be modeled on the value-free nature of the physical sciences has been undermined by an epistemological revolution in the "hard" sciences themselves. No longer is it possible to believe in the liberal optimism that led social scientists to accumulate inventories of findings about human behavior, in the belief that this would make for a better society.

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Yet unsure of how to respond to its own crisis of meaning, the social sciences either retreat into an ever-greater empiricism or develop models of rational choice or refinements of structuralism that explain everything except how real people act. The crisis of meaning in American society exists as well among those who make the study of meaning their business. We are, it seems, no longer the society we once were, but neither are we the society we had hoped to be. As we approach century's end, something new is emerging, helter-skelter, in our midst that bears little resemblance to any existing political, theological, or sociological model of how the world is supposed to work.

These emerging patterns may constitute the prelude to a new order that we will eventually come to view as normal or it may be a period of disorder that will usher in ever greater disorder; at this point, no one knows. But if we cannot know where these changes will take us, we can at least take pictures of American life in transition. Sociology, with its focus on real people living real lives, ought to make it possible to do so.

The assumption that links the chapters of this book is that a sociological approach to American society offers a way to get a grip on a process that is undergoing rapid change. But what kind of sociological approach should it be? When America was understood to be stable, the sociological study of America was also relatively straightforward. The s were not only self-proclaimed "golden years" for such cherished—if both short-. In textbooks dealing with American society at that time, chapters seem to write themselves: At the present time, by contrast, it would be nearly impossible to imagine any one sociologist or journalist capable of analyzing all the many ways in which American society has been transformed.

That is why I wanted to edit this book rather than write it myself. To capture the fluidity of American society in recent years, it seemed preferable to have many authors, diverse points of view, multiple methodologies, and tentative conclusions. There was a time when sociologists believed that if we did not know it all, we at least knew most of it.

It would hardly do to go to the opposite extreme, as some postmodernists do, and argue that we do not, and cannot, know anything—that there is no reality out there for social science to represent. It is enough to suggest that the realities of American life are far more complex than we once imagined and to be as humble in assuming that we have discovered the truth of those realities as we are aggressive in using our tools to discover what the truth, or truths, may be.

The transformations in American society described in this book, therefore, invoke what could be called a "third generation" of sociologists. The first generation of postwar sociologists, under the influence of Talcott Parsons, tended to stress the stability of American institutions and their contribution to the overall functioning of the society. Institutions were then seen as oppressive, their replacement by newer forms necessary as a first step toward greater liberation. They are, simply put, understood as interesting, as changing, as constantly running away from the analytic models we develop to understand them.

The third generation of sociologists can be called "the new institutionalists," after the movement in economics of the s and s that wanted to look behind abstractions at the realities of economic activity in the real world. Clearly because of the changes taking place in American.

In political science, Johan Olson and James March have called for an explicit return to the focus on institutions that characterized the study of public administration a generation ago. Not surprisingly, this concern with institutions has also affected sociology: Besides the contributors to this book, one can point to a broad group of sociological investigators looking, nontechnically, at the institutions of American society with a curious eye. What these scholars have in common is not age—though most, but not all, of the contributors to this book were born between and —but three other commitments.

First, neo-institutionalism shows respect for the nitty-gritty empirical realities of social life. All these sociologists are in touch with the lived reality of America. They are neither, to use C. Wright Mills's famous terms, abstract empiricists nor grand theorists. Ethnographic approaches, to be sure, predominate, because ethnography—with its emphasis on understanding how people themselves understand the world around them—is the unique contribution that sociology and anthropology can give to the world. But there is an important place for other forms of empirical investigation as well.

Much of the new institutional scholarship, for example, is inspired by historical methods, which provide a way to get a grounding in the lived realities of institutions and how they change. Others are not averse to statistics;. Second, each of these writers shows open-mindedness toward political issues. While each of them has taken strong positions on issues involving class, race, and gender, there is a lack of dogmatism of any form in their work, an appreciation of the unexpected.

Again, to be sure, this pluralism has its bias: But each author was charged to let the data speak. Not all of them found what their political perspectives suggested they ought to find. We sought a combination of commitment and openness rather than dogmatic certainty, apolitical cynicism, and artfully contrived compromises between conflicting positions. Finally, all of these contributors were selected because they could write. Some write with genuine literary skill and others with marked social science training, but all of them are committed to writing as clearly as possible.

We hope to harken back to the days when a career in social science did not necessarily mean that one wrote as many obscure articles in technical journals as possible, but also involved an obligation to comment for general readers on important trends in society. I asked the contributors to think of David Riesman as they wrote, to try and keep alive the spirit—if not always the politics—of C.

Understanding that sociology is not a discipline that stands outside American society looking in, we recognize ourselves to be part of the transformations for which we are trying to account. We hope this sense of involvement gives our chapters less certainty but, because it is tentative, greater authenticity. There is no going back—all the authors assembled here would agree. The transformations in American practices and institutions being analyzed in this volume have, as all transformations do, both positive and negative sides, but it seems a fair generalization that our experience with the nuclear family is typical: The same could be said for the schools, for the doctor-patient relationship, the community, and all the rest.

In all cases, the transition to newly emerging pat-. Although no one can know what shape emerging America will ultimately take, it is likely to be different, and for those who find in difference rewards as well as problems—as do most of us writing here—that change alone will be one to welcome. It was not part of the charge to these authors to outline their own political hopes and policy suggestions although some of them did so. Their collected observations, however, paint a picture of America that may be helpful to those who think more explicitly about public policy.

What we offer is, in the jargon of Washington, D. There are real people out there in America. They are neither the secular-humanist, pornography-loving decadents imagined by the right-wing fundamentalist nor the deeply reactionary, racist, and ignorant know-nothings that the left invokes to explain the right. They are trying to live as best they can, and any public policy ought to begin with that.

Worthy of Publishing - The Wayslide Gang Book One: Rainstorm

When I first began to practice social science, there was a clear link between what social scientists wrote and what policymakers thought. It was not always a beneficial relationship; the war in Vietnam was intellectually inspired by social scientists, let alone some of the more dubious ideas about poverty and how to fight it.

Still, what took place then is preferable, in my opinion, to what takes place now, which is that policy decisions are based on tomorrow's public opinion poll, demands made by this or that interest group, or assessments of how to "win" by playing on emotions and fears—as if the best efforts of social scientists trying to understand the world were of no consequence whatsoever for the country and its future. My hope is that a chastened social science and a chastened policy elite may someday meet again and learn from each other.

I cannot speak for the policy elites. But social scientists have learned a good deal over the past few decades: There is less arrogance and more willingness to listen in what many of them do. If policymakers are going to respond adequately to the transformations America has been experiencing, they ought first to consult, not quick and shallow public opinion polls nor the well-financed views of those with an immediate stake in whatever policy is being debated, but instead those whose lives constitute and are constituted by the policies they make.

It is a long way from the "bottom up" to the "top down"—longer than from the "top down" to the "bottom up"—but like many longer journeys, the rewards at the end of the trip are more lasting. The extended family is in our lives again. This should make all the people happy who were complaining back in the sixties and seventies that the reason family life was so hard, especially on mothers, was that the nuclear family had replaced the extended family.

Your basic extended family today includes your ex-husband or -wife, your ex's new mate, your new mate, possibly your new mate's ex, and any new mate that your new mate's ex has acquired. It consists entirely of people who are not related by blood, many of whom can't stand each other. This return of the extended family reminds me of the favorite saying of my friend's extremely pessimistic mother: Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

In the summer of I attended a wedding ceremony in a small pentecostal church in the Silicon Valley. The service celebrated the same "traditional" family patterns and values that two years earlier had inspired a "profamily" movement to assist Ronald Reagan's landslide reelection to the presidency of the United States. At the same time, however, the pastor's rhetoric displayed substantial sympathy with feminist criticisms of patriarchal marriage.

Moreover, complex patterns of divorce, remarriage, and stepkinship linked the members of the wedding party and their guests—patterns that resembled the New Age extended family satirized by Delia Ephron far more than the "traditional" family that arouses the nostalgic fantasies so widespread among religious and other social critics of contemporary family practices.

This chapter summarizes and excerpts from my ethnographic book Brave New Families: In the final decades before the twenty-first century, passionate contests over changing family life in the United States have polarized vast numbers of citizens. Outside the Supreme Court of the United States, righteous, placard-carrying Right-to-Lifers square off against feminists and civil libertarians demonstrating their anguish over the steady dismantling of women's reproductive freedom.

On the same day in July , New York's highest court expanded the legal definition of "family" in order to extend rent control protection to gay couples and a coalition of conservative clergymen in San Francisco blocked implementation of their city's new "domestic partners" ordinance.

Declaring that the attempt by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to grant legal status to unmarried heterosexual and homosexual couples "arbitrarily redefined the time-honored and hallowed nature of the family," the clergymen's petition was signed by sufficient citizens to force the ordinance into a referendum battle. One year later, a similar referendum won a narrow victory. Betraying a good deal of conceptual and historical confusion, most popular, as well as many scholarly, assessments of family change anxiously and misguidedly debate whether or not "the family" will survive the twentieth century at all.

The "modern family" of sociological theory and historical convention designates a family form no longer prevalent in the United States—an intact nuclear household unit composed of a male breadwinner, his full-time homemaker wife, and their dependent children—precisely the form of family life that many mistake for an ancient, essential, and now endangered institution. The past three decades of postindustrial social transformations in the United States have rung the historic curtain on the "modern family". In three-fifths of American households contained male breadwinners and full-time female homemakers, whether children were present or not.

Instead, Americans today have crafted a multiplicity of family and household arrangements that we inhabit uneasily and reconstitute frequently in response to changing personal and occupational circumstances. We are living, I believe, through a tumultuous and contested period of family history, a period following that of the modern family order but preceding what, we cannot foretell.

Precisely because it is not possible to characterize with a coherent descriptive term the competing sets of family cultures that coexist at present, I identify this family regime as postmodern. I do this, despite my reservations about employing such a controversial and elusive cultural concept, to signal the contested, ambivalent, and undecided character of contemporary gender and kinship arrangements. Like postmodern culture, contemporary family arrangements in the United States are diverse, fluid, and unresolved.

Two centuries ago leading white middle-class families in the newly united American states spearheaded a family revolution that gradually replaced the diversity and fluidity of the premodern domestic order with a more uniform and hegemonic modern family system. The former could enter the public sphere as breadwinners and citizens because their wives were confined to the newly privatized family realm. Ruled by an increasingly absent patriarchal landlord, the modern middle-class family, a woman's domain, soon was sentimentalized as "traditional.

It took most of the subsequent two centuries for substantial numbers of white working-class men to achieve the rudimentary economic passbook to "modern" family life—a male breadwinner family wage. Once again, middle-class white families appeared to be in the vanguard. This time women like myself were claiming the benefits and burdens of modernity, a status we could achieve only at the expense of the "modern family" itself.

Reviving a long-dormant feminist movement, frustrated middle-class homemakers and their more militant daughters subjected modern domesticity to a sustained critique, at times with little sensitivity to the effects that our anti-modern-family ideology might have on women for whom full-time domesticity had rarely been feasible. Thus, feminist family reform came to be regarded widely as a white middle-class agenda, and white working-class families were thought to be its most resistant adversaries. I shared these presumptions before I conducted fieldwork among families in Santa Clara County, California.

My work in the "Silicon Valley" radically altered my understanding of the class basis of the postmodern family revolution. Once a bucolic agribusiness orchard region, during the s and s this county became the global headquarters of the electronics industry, the world's vanguard postindustrial region.

While economic restructuring commanded global attention, most outside observers overlooked concurrent gender and family changes that. During the late s, before the conservative shift in the national political climate made "feminism" seem a derogatory term, local public officials proudly described San Jose, the county seat, as a feminist capital. The city elected a feminist mayor and hosted the statewide convention of the National Organization for Women NOW in Santa Clara County soon became one of the few counties in the nation to elect a female majority to its board of supervisors.

And in , high levels of feminist activism made San Jose the site of the nation's first successful strike for a comparable worth standard of pay for city employees. During its postindustrial makeover, the Silicon Valley also became a vanguard region for family change, a region whose family and household data represented an exaggeration of national trends. For example, although the national divorce rate doubled after , in Santa Clara County it nearly tripled; "nonfamily households" and single-parent households grew faster than in the nation, and abortion rates were one and one-half the national figures.

This endangered species is the family. And sometimes it seems as if every institution in this valley—political, corporate, and social—is hellbent on driving it into extinction. The coincidence of epochal changes in occupational, gender, and family patterns make the Silicon Valley a propitious site for exploring ways in which "ordinary" working people have been remaking their families in the wake of postindustrial and feminist challenges.

The Silicon Valley is by no means a typical or "representative" U. In contrast to the vanguard image of the Silicon Valley, most of the popular and scholarly literature about white working-class people portrays them as the most traditional group—indeed, as the last bastion of the modern family. Relatively privileged members of the white working class, especially, are widely regarded as the bulwark of the Reagan revolution and the constituency least sympathetic to feminism and family reforms. Those whose hold on the accoutrements of the American dream is so recent and tenuous, it is thought, have the strongest incentives to defend it.

For nearly three years, therefore, between the summer of and the spring of , I conducted a commuter fieldwork study of two. My research among them convinced me that white middle-class families are less the innovators than the propagandists and principal beneficiaries of contemporary family change. To illustrate the innovative and courageous character of family reconstitution among pink- and blue-collar people, I present radically condensed stories from my book-length ethnographic treatment of their lives.

Two challenges to my class and gender prejudices provoked my turn to ethnographic research and my selection of the two kin groups who became its focus. Pamela was the forty-seven-year-old bride at the Christian wedding ceremony I attended two years later. There she exchanged Christian vows with her second husband, Albert Gama, a construction worker to whom she was already legally wed and with whom she had previously cohabited. Pamela's first marriage in to Don Franklin, the father of her three children lasted fifteen years, spanning the headiest days of Silicon Valley development and the period of Don's successful rise from telephone repairman to electronics packaging engineer.

In contrast, Dotty Lewison, my central contact in the second kin network I came to study, secured that status by challenging my class prejudices. The physical appearance and appurtenances of the worn and modest Lewison abode, Dotty's polyester attire and bawdy speech, her husband's heavily tattooed body, and the demographic and occupational details of her family's history that Dotty supplied satisfied all of my stereotypic notions of an authentic "working-class" family.

But the history of feminist activism Dotty recounted proudly, as she unpacked a newly purchased Bible, demonstrated the serious limitations of my tacit understandings. When I met Dotty in October of , she was the veteran of an intact and reformed marriage of thirty years duration to her disabled husband Lou, formerly an electronics maintenance mechanic and supervisor, and also, I would later learn, formerly a wife and child abuser.

Pamela, Dotty, and several of their friends whom I came to know during my study, were members of Betty Friedan's "feminine mystique". Unlike the more affluent members of Friedan's intended audience, Pam and Dotty were "beneficiaries" of the late, ephemeral achievement of a male family wage and home ownership won by privileged sectors of the working class. This was a pyrrhic victory, as it turned out, that had allowed this population a brief period of access to the modern family system just as it was decomposing.

Pam and Dotty, like most white women of their generation, were young when they married in the s and early s. They entered their first marriages with conventional "Parsonsian" gender expectations about family and work "roles. Assuming primary responsibility for rearing the children they had begun to bear immediately after marriage, Pam and Dotty supported their husbands' successful efforts to progress from working-class to middle- and upper-middle-class careers in the electronics industry.

Their experiences with the modern family, however, were always more tenuous and less pure than were those of women to whom, and for whom, Betty Friedan spoke. Insecurities and inadequacies of their husbands' earnings made itinerant labor force participation by Dotty and Pam necessary and resented by their husbands before feminism made female employment a badge of pride. Dotty alternated frequent childbearing with multiple forays into the labor force in a wide array of low-paying jobs.

In fact, Dotty assembled semiconductors before her husband Lou entered the electronics industry, but she did not perceive or desire significant opportunities for her own occupational mobility at that point. Pamela's husband began his career ascent earlier than Dotty's, but Pamela still found his earnings insufficient and his spending habits too profligate to balance the household budget.

To make ends meet in their beyond-their-means middleclass life-style without undermining her husband's pride, Pam shared child care and a clandestine housecleaning occupation with her African-American neighbor and friend, Lorraine. Thus Pam and Dotty managed not to suffer the full effects of the "problem without a name" until feminism had begun to name it, and in terms both women found compelling.

In the early s, while their workaholic husbands were increasingly absent from their families, Pam and Dotty joined friends taking reentry courses in local community colleges. There they encountered feminism, and their lives and their modern families were never to be the same. Feminism provided an analysis and rhetoric for their discontent, and it helped each woman develop the self-esteem she needed to exit or reform her unhappy modern marriage.

Both women left their husbands, became welfare mothers, and experimented with the single life. Dotty, with lesser educational credentials and employment options, took her husband back, but on her own terms, after his disabling heart attack and after a lover left her. Disabled Lou ceased his physical abuse and performed most of the housework, while Dotty had control over her time, some of which she devoted to feminist activism in antibattering work.

By the time I met Pamela and Dotty a decade later, at a time when my own feminist-inspired joint household of the prior eight years was failing, national and local feminist ardor had cooled. Pam was then a recent convert to born-again Christianity, receiving Christian marriage counseling to buttress and enhance her second marriage to construction worker Al. Certainly this represented a retreat from feminist family ideology, but, as Pamela gradually taught me, and as Susan Gerard and I have elaborated elsewhere, it was a far less dramatic retreat than I at first imagined.

She judged it "not so bad a deal" to cede Al nominal family headship in exchange for substantive improvements in his conjugal behavior. Indeed, few contemporary feminists would find fault with the Christian marital principles that Al identified to me as his goals: Try to use God as a guideline.

The goals are more openness, a closer relationship, be more loving both verbally and physically, have more concern for the other person's feelings. Instead she collaborated with her first husband's live-in Jewish lover, Shirley Moskowitz, to build a remarkably harmonious and inclusive divorce-extended kin network whose constituent households swapped resources, labor, and lodgers in response to shifting family circumstances and needs.

Dotty Lewison was also no longer a political activist when we met in Instead she was supplementing Lou's disability pension with part-time paid work in a small insurance office and pursuing spiritual exploration more overtly postmodern in form than Pam's in a metaphysical Christian church. During the course of my fieldwork, however, an overwhelming series of tragedies claimed the lives of Dotty's husband and two of the Lewisons' five adult children.

Dotty successfully contested her negligent son-in-law for custody of her four motherless grandchildren. Struggling to support them, she formed a matrilocal joint household with her only occupationally successful child, Kristina, an electronics drafter-designer and a single mother of one child. While Dotty and Pamela both had moved "part way back" from feminist fervor, at the. Between them, Pamela and Dotty had eight children—five daughters and three sons—children of modern families disrupted by postindustrial developments and feminist challenges.

All were in their twenties when I met them in and , members of the quintessential postfeminist generation. Although all five daughters distanced themselves from feminist identity and ideology, all too had semiconsciously incorporated feminist principles into their gender and kin expectations and practices. They took for granted, and at times eschewed, the gains in women's work opportunities, sexual autonomy, and male participation in childrearing and domestic work for which feminists of their mothers' generation had struggled.

Ignorant or disdainful of the political efforts feminists expended to secure such gains, they were instead preoccupied, coping with the expanded opportunities and burdens women now encounter. They came of age at a time when a successful woman was expected to combine marriage to a communicative, egalitarian man with motherhood and an engaging, rewarding career.

All but one of these daughters of successful white working-class fathers absorbed these postfeminist expectations, the firstborns most fully. Yet none has found such a pattern attainable. Only Pam's younger daughter, Katie, the original source of the evangelical conversions in her own marriage and her mother's, explicitly rejected such a vision. At fourteen, Katie joined the Christian revival, where, I believe, she found an effective refuge from the disruptions of parental divorce and adolescent drug culture that threatened her more rebellious siblings. Ironically, however, Katie's total involvement in a pentecostal ministry led her to practice the most alternative family arrangement of all.

Katie, with her husband and young children, has lived "in community" in various joint households occasionally interracial households whose accordion structures and shared childrearing, ministry labors, and expenses have enabled her to achieve an exceptional degree of sociospatial integration of her family, work, and spiritual life. At the outset of my fieldwork, none of Pam's or Dotty's daughters inhabited a modern family.

However, over the next few years, discouraging experiences with the work available to them led three to retreat from the world of paid work and to attempt a modified version of the modern family strategy their mothers had practiced earlier. All demanded, and two received, substantially greater male involvement in child care and domestic work than had their mothers or mine in the prefeminist past. Only one, however, had reasonable prospects of succeeding in her "modern" gender strategy, and these she secured through unacknowledged benefits feminism helped her to enjoy.

Dotty's second daughter, Polly,. Legalized abortion and liberalized sexual norms for women allowed Polly to experiment sexually and defer marriage and childbearing until she was able to negotiate a marriage whose domestic labor arrangements represented a distinct improvement over that of the prefeminist modern family. I have less to say, and less confidence in what I do have to say, about postmodern family strategies among the men in Pam's and Dotty's kin groups.

America at Century's End

Despite my concerted efforts to study gender relationally by defining my study in gender-inclusive terms, the men in the families I studied remained comparatively marginal to my research. In part, this is an unavoidable outcome for any one individual who attempts to study gender in a gendered world. Being a woman inhibited my access to, and likely my empathy with, as full a range of the men's family experiences as that which I enjoyed among their female kin.

Still, the relative marginality of men in my research is not due simply to methodological deficiencies. It also accurately reflects their more marginal participation in contemporary family life. Most of the men in Pam's and Dotty's networks narrated gender and kinship stories that were relatively inarticulate and undeveloped, I believe, because they had less experience, investment, and interest in the work of sustaining kin ties. While economic pressures have always encouraged expansionary kin work among working-class women, these have often weakened men's family ties.

Men's muted family voices in my study whisper of a masculinity crisis among blue-collar men. As working-class men's access to breadwinner status recedes, so too does confidence in their masculinity. Pam's and Dotty's male kin appeared uncertain as to whether a man who provides sole support to his family is a hero or a chump. Two of these men avoided domestic commitments entirely, while several embraced them wholeheartedly. Two vacillated between romantic engagements and the unencumbered single life.

Too many of the men I met expressed their masculinity in antisocial, self-destructive, and violent forms. Women strive, meanwhile, as they always have, to buttress and reform their male kin. Responding to the extraordinary diffusion of feminist ideology as well as to sheer overwork, working-class women, like middle-class women, have struggled to transfer some of their domestic burdens to men.

My fieldwork leads me to believe that they have achieved more success in the daily trenches than much of the research on the "politics of housework" yet indicates—more success, I suspect, than have most. Almost all of the men I observed or heard about routinely performed domestic tasks that my own blue-collar father and his friends never deigned to contemplate.

Some did so with reluctance and resentment, but most did so willingly. Although the division of household labor remains profoundly inequitable, I am convinced that a major gender norm has shifted here. From the Stunt plane to the Eagle, and the Space Shuttle replica to a Hammerhead, this book is fueled by science and fun. Patti Kelley Criswell , illustrated by: Ali Douglass - American Girl Publishing, 56 pages. This kit contains helpful directions for starting a book club and includes question cards, bookmarks and activity cards.

Suggestions for being a good listener and participant are also included to encourage children to talk about what they are reading. Find The Book Club Kit at your local library. Patty Kelley Criswell , illustrated by: Stacy Peterson - American Girl Publishing, 80 pages. In this book, girls learn the importance of friends and making a friendship work. These real-life stories, activities and quizzes can be read alone or with a friend. Making Them and Keeping Them at your local library. Gregory Tang , illustrated by: Harry Briggs - Scholastic, 32 pages.

Does the thought of memorizing your multiplication facts drive you crazy? Are you tired of those pesky speed drills in math class? If you want a fun way to learn how to multiply, you must read this clever picture book. Tang uses simple rhymes and puzzles to help students understand the concept of multiplication. Find The Best of Times: Math Strategies That Multiply at your local library. Find Crazy Cars at your local library. This book outlines over a dozen famous frauds from the s to the present, including P.

Fakes and Hoaxes Through the Years at your local library. Laura Schlitz , illustrated by: Robert Byrd - Candlewick Press, 85 pages. Even reluctant readers will enjoy the clear, direct text, short length, and dramatic content. We can even hope that this brilliant book, with its awards and attendant success, may lead to a renaissance of books for kids that make history come alive. In 19 monologues and two dialogs in verse and prose, the lives of a cast of characters from a medieval village — nobles and peasants, but all children — are illuminated. Through them, along with margin notes and periodic background sections, a portrait of life in the Middle Ages is created.

Voices from a Medieval Village at your local library. Shelley Tanaka , illustrated by: Ken Marschall - Hyperion Books for Children, 48 pages. You may want to discuss the concept of class differences with your kids. Find On Board the Titanic: Visuals abound and the book concludes with some significant ways for kids to make a difference. This guide will educate and empower young readers, leaving them with the knowledge they need to understand this problem and a sense of hope to inspire them into action. A practical guide to conserving resources and protecting the environment, each brief chapter of 50 Simple Things provides information and tips designed to inspire ideas and action.

The book also explains how everyday items — like a light switch or a toilet — are connected to the rest of the world. Fun ideas for the whole family to discuss and implement! Like eco-Nancy Drews, the characters of the Gaia Girls series will appeal to girls ready to take on modern-day environmental challenges. Illustrated throughout, this chapter book is for more mature fourth-grade readers, as it does not pull any punches when taking on subjects like factory farming.

Highly recommended for its compelling story and sensitivity to current issues. Enter the Earth at your local library. Janeczko , illustrated by: Jenna LaReau - Candlewick Press, pages. This book has everything a budding spy or cryptographer wants to know about creating codes, ciphers, and the methods of concealment. An answer key provides a great opportunity to practice new skills from pictographs to Igpay Atinlay. This is an ear-to-ear-grinningly delightful school story.

Parents need to know that there is nothing to be concerned about here and lots to cheer. Families can talk about silence and civil disobedience. Why does the silence seem so powerful? What do you think of the standoff between Dave and the principal? Find No Talking at your local library. Fourteen-year-old orphan Widge works for a mean and unscrupulous master who goes by the name of Falconer. Ordered to steal the script for Hamlet, Widge is taken to London and forced to attend a performance of the play. Instead of concentrating on stealing the script, he becomes engrossed in the show.

Reluctantly, Widge admits his failure to Falconer and is told to return until his mission is accomplished. Nothing goes as planned and a very surprised Widge finds himself an accepted member of the backstage crew. Once a lonely outcast, he has friends and a place to call home for the first time in his life. Will he have the moral integrity to disobey his master or will he betray his new family? Set in Elizabethan London, The Shakespeare Stealer introduces us to Shakespearean stagecraft, life on the streets of London and to the truth behind the youthful appearance of Queen Elizabeth I!

Find The Shakespeare Stealer at your local library. Part of the Eyewitness Books series, Natural Disasters covers a wide variety of natural disasters, from earthquakes to epidemics. Written in plain language and illustrated with spectacular photos and diagrams, it contains a wealth of valuable information, including a historical timeline of major disasters, a glossary, and a list of Web and real-world resources natural history and science museums for additional research.

Find Natural Disasters at your local library. Quentin Blake - Viking Juvenile, pages. With his hallmark wit and humor, Dahl tells the tale of Matilda, a child prodigy who defends her sweet teacher against the terrible school principal, Mrs. Children will love learning about Matilda and her extraordinary powers. Find Matilda at your local library. Wendy Orr , illustrated by: Kerry Millard - Yearling Books, pages. Take a spunky heroine competently surviving on her own on a deserted island the ultimate kid fantasy.

Add in animal friends who seem to understand, the vaguest of villains hovering in the background and easily overcome, a smattering of scientific information effortlessly absorbed and a very satisfying conclusion. Then write it in breezy style, making the various pieces of the story fit together in a nicely coincidental, jigsaw-puzzle way.

All together it makes for one delightful story. Check out the sweetly imaginative, family-friendly film starring Jodie Foster. Natalie Babbitt - Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 40 pages. The Tucks will never die, which turns out to be less of a blessing than one might think. A gentle but powerful reflection on mortality, and on what constitutes a meaningful life.

Check out the adaptation, in which the character Winnie is 15 instead of Find Tuck Everlasting at your local library. This was her first sighting of Dustfinger, one of many colorful characters that her father brought to life from the pages of the book Inkheart. In fact, Meggie does not know this yet, but this is how her own mother disappeared nine years before. Now, the evil Capricorn wants another character brought to life, and is determined to have Mo read aloud. This fascinating multi-layered story is an enjoyable but dark read for anyone who loves a good story within a story.

Find Inkheart at your local library. It turns out that his disappearance is connected with his scientific work, and Meg, her brilliant little brother, and her friend Calvin set out to find him — a search that takes them on an exciting but dangerous galactic adventure. Check out the adaptation, which dramatizes the struggle between good and evil, or the new release coming spring Find A Wrinkle in Time at your local library.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery - Harcourt Brace, 96 pages. A pilot crashes in the Sahara Desert. A thousand miles from any habitation, while attempting to fix his plane, he meets a strangely dressed little boy who seems to have come from nowhere, and who demands that he draw a sheep. Gradually the Little Prince reveals his story. He comes from a small asteroid, where he lives alone until a rose grows there. But the rose is demanding, and he is confused by his feelings about her. Eventually he decides to leave and journey to other planets in search of knowledge.

After meeting many confusing adults, he eventually lands on Earth, where he befriends a snake and a fox. The fox helps him to understand the rose, and the snake offers to help him return to his planet — but at a price. Many adults look back on this book with a catch in the throat and have a special place for it in their hearts. There quite literally has never been anything like it, though others have certainly tried.

Find The Little Prince at your local library. Hugo is an orphan who tends the clocks in a Paris train station. He lives a lonely existence in the shadows of the station, stealing food and dodging the Station Inspector. One day he encounters a flinty old man who has even more secrets than he does. This powerful story is beautifully illustrated to create the pace and visual effects of a movie. Find The Invention of Hugo Cabret at your local library.

Laura Ingalls Wilder , illustrated by: New readers and those familiar with Laura Ingalls and her family will love following along as Laura takes them through a year in the life of the little family of pioneers. She lives in a little house in the big woods where she and her siblings work hard at their many chores, mind their ma and pa, go to school all in one room and have lots of frontier adventures.

Check out the TV series, which loosely follows the storylines of all of the Little House books. Find Little House in the Big Woods at your local library. Richard and Florence Atwater , illustrated by: In fact, many teachers today use it as part of their language arts curriculum. Poppers Penguins is a good fit for most first- and second-grade readers, and can also be read aloud to kindergartners. Want to watch the movie? The adaptation is only loosely based on the original story but has plenty of slapstick gags to keep the elementary school crowd entertained.

Find When You Reach Me at your local library. Please enter a valid email address. Thank you for signing up! Please try again later. Sorry for the inconvenience. Favorite books for 4th graders Our panel of children's book experts recommends these great books for your fourth grader. GreatSchools Staff Print book list. Kids who like adventure stories. Kids with siblings, older and younger. Kids who like classic stories.

Kids who like fantasy stories. Kids who like myths and folktales. Kids who like numbers. Kids who like historical fiction. Kids who like humor stories. Kids who like mysteries. Kids who like realism. Kids who like nonfiction and animals. Kids who like arts and crafts. Kids who like making friends. Kids who like history. Kids who like science and nature.

Kids who like mystery. Kids who like science and nature and striking visuals. It is worthy of note that some of the men who later turned out to be the most valuable men of the party, were among those who had to be punished while at Camp Woods, as the following orders will show:. The Commanding officer feels himself mortified and disappointed at the disorderly conduct of Reubin Fields in refusing to mount guard when in the due roteen of duty he was regularly warned; nor is he less surprised at the want of discretion in those who urged his opposition to the faithful discharge of his duty, particularly John Shields, whose sense of propryety he had every reason to believe would have induced him rather to have promoted good order, than to have excited disorder and faction among the party, particularly in the absence of Capt.

The Commanding officer is also sorry to find any man, who has been engaged by himself and Capt. Clark for the expedition on which they have entered, so destitute of understanding, as not to be able to draw the distinction between being placed under the command of another officer, whose will in such case would be their law, and that of obeying the orders of Capt. Clark and himself communicated to them through Sergt.

Ordway , who, as one of the party, has during their necessary absence been charged with the execution of their orders; acting from those orders expressly, and not from his own caprice, and who, is in all respects accountable to us for the faithful observance of the same. A moments reflection must convince every man of our party, that were we to neglect the more important and necessary arrangements in relation to the voyage we are now entering on, for the purpose merely of remaining at camp in order to communicate our orders in person to the individuals of the party on mere points of policy, they would have too much reason to complain; nay, even to fear the ultimate success of the enterprise in which we are all embarked.

The abuse of some of the party in respect with privilege heretofore granted them of going into the country, is not less displeasing; to such therefore as have made hunting or other business a pretext to cover their design of visiting a neighboring Whiskey shop, he cannot for the present extend this privilege; and does therefore most positively direct that Colter , Bolye , Wiser and Robinson do not receive permission to leave camp under any pretext whatever for ten days , after this order is read on the parade, unless otherwise directed hereafter by Capt.

The Commanding officers highly approve of the conduct of Sergt. The Carpenters, Blacksmiths, and in short the whole party except Floyd , who has been specially directed to perform other duties are to obey implicity the orders of Sergt. Ordway , who has received our instructions and is held accountable to us for their due execution. This order obviously produced the desired effect, for we find all the men mentioned to be members of the party when it started out, and John Shields , Reuben Field s, John Colter and Peter Weiser became members of the permanent party that went on to the Pacific.

Captain Clark , as he was always recognized by the party, though when his commission arrived was only as a second lieutenant in the Artillery, spent most of the time at Camp Woods. He pondered the provisions needed for the expedition, the loading of the three boats, and gave considerable attention to those men who would be selected as permanent members who were to cross the continent, and to those which would comprise the extra force needed to get the equipment and provisions beyond the Indians who dominated the lower Missouri. Try as he would, the total number always came out to be around fifty men.

In one of his notes he lists "Our party: Plus 1 Corporal and 6 soldiers in a canoe with provisions for the party as far as these provisions last. This is a point to remember when later the journalists all state the total number of the party consisted of only fortyfive men. George Drouillard had been engaged to act as interpreter for the party. He was dispatched to Tennessee to recruit men, and he returned on December 16, , with eight men.

One was a blacksmith and another was a "Housejoiner. Louis "that he did not know how they will answer our experiment, but I am a little disappointed in finding them not possessed of more of the requisite qualifications. There is not a hunter among them. Drouillard nor myself have made no particular bargain with them. Captain Lewis spent most of the time in St.

Louis, procuring maps and every bit of information he could gather regarding the land and natives resident up river. Additional medicines and provisions for the voyage were obtained. He was advised that the best men for propelling the boats were those French-Canadian water-men who lived at Kaskaskia and Cahokia. These were villages on the Illinois side of the Mississippi near St. Louis where these boatmen resided when not off on some trading adventure up the Missouri or Mississippi rivers. Chouteau's help, the most capable and reliable men were engaged to man the boats as far as the Mandan Nation.

Lewis wrote Clark that "Mr. Chouteau has procured seven engages to go as far as the Mandans but they will not agree to go further, and I found it impossible to reduce them to any other engagement than that usually made with these people. Some of these engages may have been former employees of the North West Company of Canada. Likewise, Francois Rivet, Paul Primeau , Peter Roi and others could have originated from that source, for the same, or variants of the name, appear in the rosters of the North West Company for the years just prior to the formation of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

See for example, above citation, pages — John Francis McDermott [11] reprints an apt description of the engage:. These men carried out the necessary work of the trade; cordelling, poling or rowing up the Missouri to operational headquarters, seeking out and trading with the Indian villages; trapping the beaver and other fur-bearers; hunting meat animals; maintaining the equipment, conveying the messages through the unknown country; cooking; keeping camp; tending horses; and performing a score of other regular and extra duties.

Some of them were sons and grandsons of the men who had come up the Mississippi River from New Orleans with Laclede and Auguste Chouteau, and of this group some were native St. The number of men now deemed necessary was a considerable advance over that understood by Congress. In view of this situation, there could possibly have been an understanding with President Jefferson that the "official" figure would be acceptable if the total number did not exceed forty-five, including the two captains.

This could be one of the reasons that no complete roster was compiled by the captains at the outset of the expedition. At any rate, all those who kept journals — Lewis, Clark , Gass , Ordway , Floyd , and Whitehouse — dutifully record that the total number was about forty-five men.

They do not all agree on the number, but none exceeds forty-five. So for over a hundred and fifty years this number has been accepted. As the names of the entire roster had never been published, no one seemed to question it. Of course, the names of the thirty men who had gone on to the Pacific were known and recorded in the journals, but what of those twenty or so who had helped the party up to the Mandan villages, had wintered there, and had returned to St.

Louis in the early summer of ? They brought back the maps and reports that had been made thus far, as well as many crates of new animal, mineral and botanical specimens. They saw to it that all this material was dispatched to Jefferson in Washington, and several of them conducted those Indians who had been prevailed upon to visit the Great White Father, and had acted as interpreters between them and President Jefferson. All this was part and plan of the expedition from its original conception. To many students of the expedition, these men were important to the success of the enterprise.

It has since been felt that more should be known of the entire party— just who they were — and as much biographical information should be collected as is possible. As the journals were studied, it also became evident that more men returned from the expedition than the forty-five that were stated to have gone at its start. In the December , issue of the Oregon Historical Quarterly , [12] I submitted a roster and made the suggestion that the number should be forty-seven including the captains.

I presented a list of forty-five, plus additional names that merited consideration. At that time I felt it presumptuous for a mere student to fly into the face of the scholars and historians who had edited the journals. Since , much new material has been published which substantiates, and even elaborates on that thinking. Osgood, were published by the Yale University Press. Each adds bits of additional information regarding the personnel. It now appears that Captain Clark was right when he noted a party of about fifty men.

But even if we accept this new figure, we are still far from an easy solution as to the names of the men, for the captains, especially Clark , had a charming disregard for the accuracy of spelling. When it came to proper names, almost any combination of letters seemed to suffice. Take the name of Corporal Richard Warfington for example. We find it rendered Warfington, Worthington , Worbington , Worthyton and even more exotic variations.

George Drouillard was nearly always Drewyer. But those are the easy ones. In another case we have Carr n, Carr , Cane or Cann , all apparently meant to represent one person. I need not here show what happened to the spelling of the French names. That will be found in the roster. As though this were not problem enough, we also have those who, following the success of the expedition, attempted to climb on the band-wagon and publicly claim that they had been members of the party.

There are many examples, of which it is sufficient to cite only one:. Benjamin Jones was a noted hunter, trapper and surveyor of early times in Missouri. His father was an Englishman who settled in Virginia at an early date. He had two sons, Lewis and Benjamin. The latter ran away from home when he was sixteen years of age, and came to St.

Louis, where he joined the Indians and engaged in trapping, until Lewis and Clark started on their expedition, when he joined their party in the capacity of a scout. Before the expedition reached the Pacific Ocean, he and one or two others were sent back to St. They fell into an Indian ambuscade, lost their horses, and had to perform the journey on foot, which occupied six months but they arrived safely and delivered the dispatches.

Now the first part of this notice could be true, for this Benjamin Jones was on the Missouri in —, and was a hunter with the government service on the Santa Fe trail in But we find no other documented mention of where Jones was ever a member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The student can only sift these momentarily exciting bits of data, and present those which seem to contain honest paydirt. My roster which follows, has been compiled from the researchers who were on the scene some sixty-five years ago, such as Reuben G. Wheeler, [15] James K.

Hosmer [16] and others. They all gave an account of the men, as far as they knew at the time. In addition we have the works of Bradbury, [17] Brackenridge, [18] Henry, [19] and others who lived in, and wrote of the days when some of these men were still living. Army records and considerable genealogical research have also added details for a more complete picture. I have used them all as sources in compiling my roster. Probably not all historians and researchers will ever agree on exactly which men actually started out with Lewis and Clark. A few of the French engages seem to have disappeared from the records, so further data on them is completely lacking.

Just when a solution seems to be reached, a new name will crop up. On page of that work we find in a tentative list of engages, a very legible " E. Cann " written in someone's hand. It is interesting to note in the same reproduction of the original document that two of the engages' names are joined together in one: These are surely William Labiche and Etienne Malboeuf.

On page Cann is written out in what appears to my perhaps prejudiced eye as " Carn ," though on page Dr. Osgood deciphers the word as "Cane. To my knowledge none of the journals, nor the vast literature of the fur trade which followed the expedition, even suggests this name. On the other hand, one of the spellings in the original journals under date of August 13, , is Carr n. In the Field Notes , page 48, there is the word Carseux written over an entry. This is not singular, for on the entry for July 5, , we find the name of Howard — one of the members — written over it.

John Bradbury [21] states that Alexander Carson was near the head of the Missouri in — In Alexander Carson was engaged by William Clark — as were also a few other former members of the expedition, to try to return the Mandan chief, Shahaka, back to his home on the upper Missouri. In a letter in the collection of the Oregon Historical Society we learn: This Boney had been in Carson's employ for several years, trapping, and had always been treated with the utmost kindness and regard, by Carson, he had great confidence in the Indian.

Whatever led to the crime, is more than anyone knows. Carson had been stopping at my house two or three weeks, this Boney, his wife, and son with him. When he thought he was able to travel, left my house accompanied by Boney, Boney's wife and son. The first night after leaving my house he camped at Ellick's Butte, the whole tribe camped there. Boney arose in the night, stole out of Carson's tent his Carson's rifle, which he held in reserve and holding up the curtain of the tent so that the light of the fire might shine on Carson, compelled his son a lad of twelve or fourteen years to shoot him in the head with a shot-gun, blowing his brains all over the tent.

The body was thrown in a small stream, and the plunder distributed out amongst the tribe. I may mention here an Indian by the name of Click-kowin who was said to be a half Killamook, and was with the Killamooks a portion of his time, was accessory to the murder, and shared in the plunder.

Boney, and his son, died soon after the murder was committed, and Click-kowin was shot after the murder, by Waaninkapah, the Chief of the Nefalitin tribe. Those Indians have never atoned for the crime, they were compelled to give up a portion of the plunder which was delivered over to William Cannin, a cousin of Carsons.

Boney's son confessed the crime and went with us and showed where all the plunder had been cached, as far as he knew of. I quote this letter in full, except for some irrelevant matter at the opening, because Alexander Carson , along with Joseph Collins , Charles Hebert , Charles Caugee and " Rokey ," have no official record of any wages paid for service.

Heretofore, historians have questioned that they were members of the expedition. As I have shown above, Lewis was authorized to hire, rather than enlist, extra men, which he apparently did and paid some of them off at Fort Mandan in the spring of Note the entry under date of August 22, , where we read:. This man had spent all his wages and requested to return with us. We agreed to give him passage down [to St. This would seem to be proof that a few of the men were not enlisted, but were hired for the trip up the Missouri only, and were paid wages out of funds in hand.

The others were paid by Captain Amos Stoddard , Capt. Lewis 's agent in St. For this reason they do not appear on the muster rolls and were not entitled to extra pay and land warrants as the enlisted men later were. This may also be a reason why the journalists list only forty-five men, for they might not have considered the hired, extra men as technically a part of the expedition. In the revised Private Joseph Whitehouse Journal , as yet unpublished, there is found a partial list of the members who set out and adds "8 Canadians who were only to proceed with us to the Mandans.

Alexander Carson could have been one of these extra men, for with the evidence I have shown, and the entry in the journals for August 18, , [24] where it is stated: Thwaites appears to have had some evidence, for on page he notes after the word Carr n " Carson— editor. The above evidence, while not conclusive, is the best we have at present. However, I believe it is strong enough that Alexander Carson should be considered as one of the party until such time as we have positive contrary evidence. In connection with these "alleged members," it may be of interest to report a sidelight that is of record.

As shown, the previously mentioned Alexander Carson , in his last years, was living in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. A companion of his trapping days, William Canning, was living on a farm nearby. William Canning was a bona fide mountain man, and had been with Wilson P. Hunt's Astorian party of At Champoeg, Willamette Valley, was an old man by the name of Cannon [there goes that spelling again — author] who had been one of the party with Lewis and Clark , and from his own account, the only remaining one in the country.

Now Canning should have been aware that Francois Rivet, who was a member of the party as far as the Mandans , was living on a farm nearby. We can forgive him that he may not have known that Patrick Gass was living in West Virginia at the time. But he may just be bragging about himself. Mountain men had a bad habit of doing that. Wilkes of course did not mention the fact that Alexander Carson had, in , made a will in favor of Canning, and that after Carson had been murdered in , Canning had claimed from the Hudson's Bay Company, the balance of accounts that were due Carson.

There is ample documentary evidence to show that Carson and Canning were two different men. It is tempting to speculate that Captain Clark could have been referring to Canning when he rendered the name as Cann and Cane. But it is difficult to imagine that the clearly legible E. Cann could be taken to mean an initial for William. We have already seen that Ellick is one of the spellings, along with Alec.

In any event, neither Canning, Cannin, nor Cannon is ever mentioned in conection with Lewis and Clark until Wilkes quotes him in I have given all this Carson material as a typical example of the research done to arrive at the most complete and correct roster possible. In an attempt to gather further information, I appended additional data to my roster, and it was published in the DAR Magazine for November, I am happy to acknowledge that quite a bit of new information has been acquired, and is collected here for the first time. In no case have I used "family tradition," but only include data that is fully documented.

I am particularly pleased that some of the members who heretofore have had the notation after their names — "Nothing more known of him" — have been rescued from oblivion. By the time the winter of had passed into the spring of , Captain Clark had decided on which of the men would be taken along on the expedition. Many of them had been transferred from their former military units as of January 1, , onto the muster rolls of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Later, some of the French water-men had been enlisted, but others were hired as extra hands. The provisions and Indian trade goods were divided so that some of each were placed in separate boxes in order that all would not be lost in case of accident.

The air gun was mounted on the keel-boat and the arms checked and put in order. The powder was contained in cannisters of lead which could later be melted and molded into bullets when the cannisters were empty. A hundred other details had to be thought out and arranged, for once the expedition set out, no other supplies could be obtained in the frontier country into which they were going. At long last, spring arrived, and the Missouri was showing signs of becoming navigable. Captain Lewis was in St.

Louis winding up the many last minute details, including a conference with a delegation of Osage Indians. George Drouillard was with him most of the time. Charles, a french Village 7 Leags. Lewis could finish the business in which he was obliged to attend to at St. Louis and join me by Land from that place 24 miles; by this movement I calculated that if any alterations in the loading of the Vestles or other Changes necessary, that they might be made at St. So at 4 o'clock on the afternoon of May 14, , the shake-down cruise began.

They easily could have made St. Charles in one day, but Captain Clark took all of two, for there was no hurry, and much had to be learned about the men, the boats, and the loading. They soon found out that the keel-boat was too heavily loaded in the stern. On the nights of the 14th and 15th, they camped along the river, for this presented an opportunity to test the arrangement of the men into messes, or groups, where each prepared its own meals.

This pre-arrangement was continued until May 26th of the voyage when a few changes were made. On the 16th of May, the party arrived at St. Charles, where, during the following four days, the cargoes were reloaded. On the 19th, Drouillard came over from St. Captain Clark had warned the members:. That they should act with true respect for their own dignity, and not make it necessary for him to leave the comforts of the town for a more retired situation [31].

Nevertheless, William Werner , Hugh Hall and John Collins went absent-without-leave, and furthermore, Collins behaved in an unbecoming manner at the ball, and after his return to the keel-boat, had uttered disrespectful statements in regard to the orders of Captain Clark. Clark had been over to Portage des Sioux to talk and trade with the Indians at that place, and the three men had taken advantage of his absence. This sort of behavior had to be stopped, so Captain Clark appointed a court-martial, headed by Sgt.

The court sentenced each of the culprits to receive twenty-five lashes on their bare-backs, but because of the former good conduct of Werner and Hall, they recommended mercy from Captain Clark. The punishment was remitted for them, but John Collins received his punishment at sunset that evening. On Sunday, May 20th, the men were given leave to enjoy themselves and to hear a sermon at the Catholic Church on Main Street. That afternoon at six-thirty, Captain Lewis arrived from St. Louis with a group of friends to help send the expedition off. He was accompanied by Capt.

Amos Stoddard who was to act as his agent while he was away , Lt. Clarence Mulford , Lt. Stephen Worrall and the Messrs. Captain Lewis made some additional purchases such as sugar, and castor-oil was obtained from Doctors Jeremiah and Seth Millington. These were two American doctors who had arrived in St.

Charles in January and were now raising medicinal plants on their farms located above the town. The gentlemen of the village gave a banquet and a ball for the party. It was the last taste of civilization before their departure. The next day, May 21, , the orders were given for departure, and despite the rain, a farewell parade was given.

The band played all the way down the mile long main street fronting the Missouri River, and there was singing and fiddle playing. Charles under a salute and three cheers from the dignitaries and citizens. In honor of their warm hospitality, three cheers were returned and three guns were fired from the boats as a salute. Under the joint command of Captains Lewis and Clark , the expedition officially started up the Missouri. Since that fateful day some one hundred and sixty years ago when the expedition faded off into the dim distance, the following facts have been gathered about the men who comprised it, and who set off on this historic voyage of exploration.

Son of William and Lucy Meriwether Lewis. Well educated, blond— sunny hair; bowlegged, particular, precise, serious, reserved and inclined to melancholia and hypochondria. He served in the 1st Infantry, U. Army and in Gen. In he was appointed Pres. Jefferson 's private secretary. After the expedition, he was appointed the Governor of Louisiana Territory. Clerks in Washington protested some of his drafts — some of which were connected with the expedition — which caused him emotional strain. He decided to go to Washington to explain the drafts, and while enroute on the Natchez Trace, he died, either by murder or suicide, on October 11, A monument stands at his burial place on the Trace near Nashville, Tennessee.

Born, August 1, , near Charlottesville, Virginia, of Scottish ancestry. Son of John and Ann Rogers Clark. Six feet tall, red-haired, a popular leader of men. He was promised a captaincy by Lewis, and received the same pay and recognition as a captain, though when the commission was received, it was for a second lieutenant. When the expedition returned to St. Louis he promptly returned the commission on October 10, After the expedition he was appointed Indian Agent, and after Lewis' death, the Governor of Missouri. She died June 27, leaving four sons and a daughter.

He married second, Mrs. Harriet Kennerly, widow of Dr. One son survived this marriage. William Clark died in St. Louis on September 1, , and is buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery near St. Clark 's negro servant who was willed to him by Clark 's father on July 24, Since their childhood, a life-long companion of Clark. York was the son of "Old York " and "Rose," slaves who had been with the Clark family all their lives. York was kinky-haired, jet-black, large sized, and of herculean strength. A wag, wit and delight of the party and Indians, who considered him Great Medicine.

After the expedition he was freed by Clark , and he returned to Louisville, Kentucky, where he married. He was furnished a dray and six horses by Clark who was concerned for his welfare for as long as he lived. He engaged in the draying business between Nashville, Tennessee, and Richmond, Kentucky. He took to drink and entertained with stories about his adventures with the expedition, which became taller with each telling. He died of cholera in Tennessee. He was one of the first to enlist in the party, which he did on August 1, , in Kentucky, and is therefore listed as one of the "Nine young men from Kentucky.

Captain Clark called him "A man of much merit. He died on August 20, , of what has since been diagnosed as a ruptured appendix — the only man to die on the expedition. He was posthumously awarded a land grant, which was deeded to his brother, Davis, and two sisters, Elisabeth and Mary Lee Floyd. Dark complexion, grey eyes, dark hair, short, burley, barrel-chested. He had enlisted in the loth U. Infantry in at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, after having served in a Ranger Company in He was a fine carpenter, boat builder, woodsman and great wit.

After Charles Floyd 's death, he was elected sergeant. After the expedition, he served in the War of under Capt. Kingsly of Nashville, Tennessee. In , he ascended the Ohio to Pittsburgh, then on to Fort Erie. He was in the battle of Lundy's Lane; then to Sackett's Harbor. He lost his left eye at Fort Independence in June , and was discharged and pensioned in the same month for total disability.

He married at the age of sixty, in , to Maria Hamilton, aged twenty. They were the parents of six children: He died April 2, , aged almost ninety-nine years — the sole survivor of the expedition. He was the first to publish a journal of the expedition in , seven years before the official Lewis and Clark journals were finally printed in Born about at Dumbarton, New Hampshire.

His parents and a brother, Stephen, lived near Hebron, New Hampshire, in the spring of He was recruited from Capt. Bissell's 1st Infantry Company at Kaskaskia and went on Lewis and Clark 's payroll as of January 1, , though he was in charge of Camp du Bois much of the time before this date. He was educated and kept a journal which, after being lost for over a hundred years, was published in He was held in high esteem by his commanders. He kept the orderly books and held other important duties while on the expedition. After the expedition returned in 'Sob, he witnessed the sale on September 29, , of John Collins and Joseph Whitehouse 's land warrants.

He went to Washington with Captain Lewis and a party of Indians to show to the President, then he returned to New Hampshire for a time. He became an owner of extensive lands and attained some prosperity — having two plantations of peach and apple orchards. He married in Missouri, and he and his wife, Gracy, died in Missouri about They left no survivors. Born in , probably in Amherst County, Virginia. He was a son of John and Nancy Floyd Pryor. She was a sister of Robert Floyd , and Robert was the father of Charles Floyd — also a member of the expedition.

Therefore, Pryor and Floyd were cousins. He moved with his parents in to Kentucky, and was recruited by Captain Clark on October 20, He is usually listed as one of the "Nine young men from Kentucky. His leaders stated, "He was a man of character and ability. His journal is said to have been lost while enroute to France for publication. After the expedition returned, he was one of the party who in attempted to return the Mandan Chief, Shahaka, to his homeland, but was prevented from doing so by the Arikara Indians.

Pryor remained in the army and was a second lieutenant until He then entered the Indian trade on the upper Mississippi. In he was attacked at Fort Madison where he nearly lost his life. Two of his men were slain, but he escaped by crossing the ice of the Mississippi.

He re-entered the army in , and in he became a captain. He served in the Battle of New Orleans. Later, he was discharged and he then set up a trading post on the Arkansas River. He married an Osage girl, and they had several children who were all given Indian names.

They lived among the Osage s until his death on June 1, He is buried at Pryor , Mayes County, Oklahoma, where a monument has been erected to his honor. He is not the same Nathaniel Pryor of Pattie's Narrative. The family relationship, if any, is not clear, for there were several other Nathaniel Pryor s at this time. George was in the U.

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Army at Fort Massac when he was transferred to Captain Lewis on November 11, , after some resistance on the part of his commander who did not want to lose him. He was tall, straight, and had black hair and dark eyes. He was adept in the Indian sign language. He was always with one captain or the other in most emergencies and situations of danger where skill, nerve, endurance and cool judgement were needed.

After the expedition he lived for a few years at Cape Girardeau, Missouri. He made a return trip to the Rocky Mountains and gave William Clark considerable topographical details of the mountain country which Clark incorporated into his map of the Northwest. He was killed by the Blackfeet Indians in , not far from the area in which he had the scrape with these Indians while he was with Captain Lewis when they made the exploration to the upper Maria's River.



He was with the Manuel Lisa party when he met his death. Robert Bratton and his wife, Mrs. I give these clues to William's ancestry because there is yet some confusion as to just which of the brothers was William's father. It is reported William's family migrated to Kentucky about , and on October 20, , William enlisted under William Clark for the expedition.

Hence he is usually listed as one of the "Nine young men from Kentucky. This "E" was adopted during his Indiana years to distinguish him from another William Bratton , probably his cousin, who also lived near Waynetown, Indiana, and with whom he has often been confused. Bratton was over six feet tall, square of build, very straight and erect, rather reserved, economical, of fine intelligence and the strictest morals. At an early age he was apprenticed to a blacksmith, possibly his father, or uncle, James, and later became an excellent gunsmith and blacksmith on the expedition.

In these capacities, and as a hunter, he was a useful man. After the expedition had reached the mouth of the Columbia River in November , Bratton and four companions were assigned to salt making at the seashore. They produced enough salt for the expedition's winter requirements as well as enough to last them for the return trip to the states. While working at this exposed task, Bratton became seriously ill of lumbago.

He became so weak that he could hardly walk, although the captains did everything in their power to help him. At long last, on May 24, , an Indian steam bath was constructed as a forlorn hope of saving his life. This proved effective, and soon Bratton was able to resume his duties. Bratton 's conscientious service was attested to by the discharge he received at the end of the expedition.

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After the expedition, Bratton returned to Kentucky. He lived there for a time, but returned to Missouri where he lived near John Ordway for a few years. He enlisted from Kentucky for the War of , and was one of those surrendered at Frenchtown now Monroe, Michigan on January 22, He sold his warrant for land to a Mr. Samuel Barclay in