The American West has always been at least as much an idea as a place. While the United States was settled from East to West, Mark Twain started in the middle and moved, at different times, in both directions. But when his move East was new in 1867, he merely perched in New York City, writing about the East to a western newspaper, scanning the country for opportunities. It seemed doubtful, as he expressed his western prejudices about the East, that he expected to call such an alien place home; the tone of his writing suggests instead a powerful need to interpret the West to the East. After all, the United States had just come through the Civil War with a powerfully centralized government, newly robust industries, and a redoubled sense of manifest destiny to connect the entire continent into a single nation. To do so, the East, Twain felt, needed to come to know the rest.

Many on the Eastern seaboard looked for culture, looked for their identities, to Europe. As a westerner — and make no mistake about it, in 1867, anyone from beyond the Appalachians was a westerner — Twain set his agenda to offer an extended explanation of the West to the East. Twain told the East much about the physical and human geography of the West, but his main interest was cultural. Inasmuch as the woman's manners include knowledge of Europe, its traditions, and its etiquette, much of Twain's agenda is to suggest something of the manners of the American West, showing his greatest interest in the hierarchies and mores of the Mississippi.

The landscape and characters of frontier life play only a small part in his writings, one can always detect a tang of the region where he found his literary voice and identity in his distinctively colloquial style. Samuel Clemens (1835-1910) was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and grew up in nearby Hannibal, on the Mississippi River.

In Carson City, Clemens tried his luck with timber, then mining, then finally found a measure of success in 1862 as a feature writer for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. It was as this paper's reporter at the Nevada constitutional convention that Clemens began to sign his work Mark Twain. After two years, he went to San Francisco, where he wrote for a variety of newspapers and periodicals, among them The Californian, edited by Bret Harte. With The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, published in 1865 by The Saturday Press of New York, and reprinted by newspapers across the country, the style (natural & conversational) made its first appearance, a style readers would soon come to recognize as the voice of Mark Twain.

He settled briefly in Buffalo, New York, then permanently in Harford, Connecticut, where Clemens finally turned from journalism to produce the books and novels that are the basis of his fame. One of the first in this string was Roughing It (1872), an autobiographical account of his years in the West told in the humorous style of his travel writing, which pits a self-confident observer against a setting which he both comically misinterprets and ironically understands only too well. This element of self-conscious irony, rooted here in memory, would become the hallmark of Clemens' best work, especially evident in the novels set in his boyhood world beside the Mississippi River, Tom Sawyer (1876) (The first novel ever written on a typewriter.) and his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

On July 2, 1803, Secretary of War Henry Dearborn handed Capt. Meriwether Lewis the authorization to select up to twelve noncommissioned officers and privates. He could pick them from the garrisons at the posts at Massac and Kaskaskia, the former on the lower Ohio and the latter on the Mississippi, above the mouth of the Ohio. In separate orders, Dearborn told the commanding officers at the posts to furnish Lewis with every assistance in "selecting and engaging suitable men to accompany him on an expedition to the Westward." That was a license to raid, sure to be resented by captains about to lose their best men, but Dearborn made it stick. "If any [man] in your Company should be disposed to join Capt. Lewis," and if Captain Lewis wanted the volunteer, "you will detach them accordingly."

In addition, Captain Russell Bissell at Kaskaskia was ordered to provide Lewis with the best boat on the post and with a sergeant and "eight good Men who understand rowing a boat." They would carry baggage for Lewis, to his winter quarters on the Missouri, then descend before the ice closed in. Bissell refused Sergeant Patrick Gass's request to join the expedition, presumably on the grounds that he couldn't afford to lose his best noncommissioned officer. Lewis used the authority given him by Dearborn to enlist Gass anyway.

On September 22, 1806, the expedition set off for their last day's voyage. In less than an hour, it was swinging into the Mississippi River, past the old camp at Wood River, last seen twenty-eight months and eight thousand miles ago.

As the men paddled the last few miles to St. Louis, Lewis had cause to feel deep satisfaction, and could be forgiven a sense of hubris. He had completed the epic voyage. By itself that was enough to place him and his partner-friend in the pantheon of explorers.

Lewis had planned and organized and with Clark's help carried out a voyage of discovery that had been his dream for what seemed like all of his life. Indeed, it seemed he had been born for it, and had been training himself for it since childhood. His success was due to that training, and to his character, well suited to the challenge.

His leadership had been outstanding. He and Clark had taken thirty-odd unruly soldiers and molded them into the Corps of Discovery, an elite platoon of tough, hardy, resourceful, well-disciplined men. They had earned the men's absolute trust.

At most critical moments, Lewis and Clark had made the right decision - at the mouth of the Marias River in June 1805; in the dealings with the Shoshones in August 1805; in trusting in Old Toby to get them across the Lolo Trail in September 1805; in retreating from the Lolo in June 1806 and waiting for Nez Perce guides before trying again. Lewis's biggest mistake had been the decision to split the expedition into five parts and make the Marias exploration. Otherwise, in his most important role, that of military commander, he had done a superlative job.

Jefferson had charged him with numerous nonmilitary goals. He had carried them out faithfully. He was certain he had accomplished the number-one objective of the expedition, to find the most direct and convenient route across the continent. He had brought back a treasure of scientific information. His discoveries in the fields of zoology, botany, ethnology, and geography were beyond any value. He introduced new approaches to exploration and established a model for future expeditions by systematically recording abundant data on what he had seen, from weather to rocks to people.

On the more personal side, he had seen wonderful things. He had traveled through a hunter's paradise beyond anything any American had ever before known. He had crossed mountains that were greater than had ever before been seen by any American, save the handful who had visited the Alps. He had seen falls and cataracts and raging rivers, thunderstorms all but beyond belief, trees of a size never before conceived of, Indian tribes uncorrupted by contact with white men, canyons and cliffs and other scenes of visionary enchantment.

A brave new world.

And he had been first. Everyone who has ever paddled a canoe on the Missouri, or the Columbia, does so in the wake of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Everyone who crosses the Lolo Trail walks in their footsteps.

When the expedition set off downstream from the Mandan village in the Dakotas, Private John Colter turned back upstream, back to the wilderness, back to the mountains, on his way into the history books as America's first mountain man and the discoverer of what we now know as Yellowstone Park.

The American West (or The West), is an informal but well-recognized name for the region comprising the 23 of the most western states in the continental United States. They are, in order of their admittance into the Union, Lousiana (1812), Missouri (1821), Arkansas (1836), Texas (1845), Iowa (1846), California (1850), Minnesota (1858), Oregon (1859), Kansas (1861), Nebraska (1867), Nevada (1864), Colorado (1876), Montana (1889), North Dakota (1889), South Dakota (1889), Washington (1889), Idaho (1890), Wyoming (1896), Utah (1896), Oklahoma (1907), New Mexico (1912), Arizona (1912) and Alaska (1959).

Separating "East" from "West" is the Mississippi River. The region west of the river encompasses nearly all of the Louisiana Purchase, most of the land ceded by Britain in 1818, all of the land acquired when the Texas Republic joined the Union, all of the land ceded by Britain in 1846, all of the land ceded by Mexico in 1848, all of the Gadsden Purchase and the purchase of Alaska from Russia.

Before you get outa here. . .

Seduced by the West: Jefferson's America and the Lure of the Land Beyond the Mississippi In her provocative new book, Laurie Winn Carlson questions the larger aims of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806 and sees it as part of abroad range of schemes to wrest the American West from estblished European powers who claimed territory there.

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