Destiny of a Nation.

Byline: FRED CRAFTS The Register-Guard

WHEN transcontinental explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark arrived at the great falls on the Columbia River in October 1805, they made a startling discovery: fleas.

From out of nowhere, swarms of the hungry varmints ripped into the 33-member Corps of Discovery, making them miserable. Desperate, Clark called for bold action.

"Every man of the party was obliged to strip naked during the time of taking over the canoes that they might have an opportunity of brushing the fleas off their legs and bodies," he wrote in his now-famous diary.

The relief was only temporary.

Throughout the Corps' five-month stay along the Columbia River, fleas were a gnawing nuisance. Their nocturnal attacks at the winter quarters near Astoria were so ferocious that an itchy Clark scratched more than he slept.

Although Lewis and Clark had anticipated many of the hardships that might befall them during their historic, two-year trek across the continent, nothing had prepared them for the pesky insects. Fleas, as Portland historian Stephen Dow Beckham insists in his lavish new book, "Lewis & Clark: From the Rockies to the Pacific," were "one of Oregon Country's best-kept secrets."

Which is certainly not the case with Lewis and Clark themselves.

Two hundred years after their cross- country trek, the hardy adventurers have arrived on shelves, stage and screen amid great fanfare.

Lectures, workshops, seminars, Columbia River cruises, an IMAX movie and books galore are being readied to catch the Lewis and Clark bicentennial wave. Just wait until that hype hits high gear.

Oddly enough, the bigger Lewis and Clark get, the smaller they become: The three-score troupers who dutifully trudged along with them seem to have fallen by the wayside, and even Lewis and Clark themselves sometimes appear to have merged into one person (Lewisandclark).

To his credit, Beckham, who is the Pamplin professor of history at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, keeps them separate. And he details their monumental transcontinental trek in an even, straightforward voice that is inviting but never gushing.

The Lewis and Clark story is - or should be - immediately familiar. Former Army buddies, Lewis and Clark were sent, with a large military detachment (the Corps of Discovery), by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 to find out what the just-made Louisiana Purchase had added to the young nation.

Because nobody had yet gone across the new U.S. portion of the continent, Jefferson had only a vague notion about what was out there.

"Maps of the American West in 1803 identified only the margins of the Pacific Coast and the lower tributaries of streams running into the Mississippi," writes Beckham. "All else was blank space and imagination."

Rumor had it there was a giant river running from the heart of the nation to the Pacific Ocean. While searching for it, Lewis and Clark were instructed to also collect - to qualify as the first government- sponsored scientific probe - botanical and zoological specimens, weather data, ethnographic and linguistic material about the tribes encountered, geographical details and just about anything else they could think of.

Burdened with boats, food and equipment, the three dozen men and one woman (Sacagawea) ventured into a land where there were no convenience stores and no search-and-rescue teams.

Their adventures while struggling up snow-choked mountains and down streams that roared like water park thrill rides are rated by Beckham as among the greatest of all time, surpassing "the search for the source of the Nile or the explorations for the headwaters of the Congo," because it "helped chart the destiny of a nation, whereas trips to exotic places in other lands became the source of great adventure narratives."

Although the terse diaries of the Lewis and Clark expedition are a fascinating narrative, they are not, alas, a heart-pounding page-turner. That's especially true of the Oregon portion, where the travelers built Fort Clatsop (near Astoria) and filled long, dreary, rainy days with the dull routine of hunting for food and making moccasins.

But Beckham makes the most of it, chronicling the adventure with gusto and shaping it with insights.

"Lewis & Clark: From the Rockies to the Pacific," an official publication of the National Council of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial (2003-06), is an Oregon project. Beckham, photographer Robert Reynolds and the Graphic Arts Center Publishing house are all based in Portland, which makes them ideal compatriots to consider the western end of the trail.

Illustrating Beckham's solid text are breathtaking color landscapes by Reynolds, a hardy photographer who stood in the very places Lewis and Clark did, almost on the same day nearly 200 years later, to elegantly chronicle their journey.

Adding a startling you-are-there dimension are recently discovered, ancient, glass-plate black-and-white images of now-gone Indian life and river features.

The book picks up the explorers at the Three Forks of the Missouri River in Montana, goes with them through the deep snows of the Bitterroot Mountains and follows them down the Snake and Columbia rivers to the Pacific Ocean, where they were lashed by fierce storms while waiting to retrace their steps in the spring. Finally, it takes them home.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition is perhaps the world's most investigated adventure. Key to unraveling it has been important analysis by Stephen Ambrose, James Ronda, Bernard DeVoto, Donald Jackson, Gary Moulton and Paul Russell Cutright, among many others, some of them by authors desperate for an angle. Three books have been written just about Lewis' dog, Seaman.

"No single event of the sort of the Lewis and Clark Expedition has resulted in so many words and images," Beckham reveals. "There were probably two million words written by the various Corps members alone."

What Lewis and Clark learned sent shock waves around the globe.

"Lewis and Clark put the world into a new order," Beckham states. "In their expedition into the unknown Pacific Northwest, they gave form and substance to the complex geography of a vast continent."

They also revealed the complex network of indigenous people and detailed many previously unknown inhabitants. Beckham shines in assessing the explorers' impact on American Indians in the Northwest.

"Never before had the Shoshone, the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Cayuse, Yakama, Tenino, Wasco and Wishham (tribes) had encounters with Euro-Americans," Beckham points out. "They had a few elements of their technology - their trade beads, kettles, some Spanish bandoleers and so on - but they had not had the kind of encounter they got from this expedition and its magic: its air-powered gun, its Newfoundland dog, its compass, its sextant, the tricks of the trade."

The contact did not bode well for the land's original inhabitants, many of whom were soon afterward wiped out by smallpox and other diseases, and are now known primarily through Lewis and Clark's diaries. Pained by the tragedy, Beckham labels the expedition as "the great driving force of undoing centuries-old native life ways."

In examining the Corps' Northwest trek, Beckham stays close to the traditional narrative. Having taught courses on the expedition for 33 years (he has been cited as Oregon's Professor of the Year and won the American Historical Association's Distinguished Teaching Award), he knows it inside out.

Beckham has written profusely on the subject. Besides this book, he crafted the initial master plan for the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, Mont., and wrote 17 interpretive panels for the Oregon Department of Transportation.

At present, Beckham is writing the narratives for new exhibits at the Fort Canby Interpretive Center. At the same time, he is finishing essays for a major work due out in January: "The Literature of the Lewis and Clark Expedition: A Bicentennial Bibliography," covering 200 years of publications on the expedition.

Although Beckham's writing seldom wanders from the well-trod trail, his voice is firmest when placing events in a world order. The explorers, he affirms, "grasped the awesome potentials of the American West" and captured its potential in their prose.

"They described a land of astounding beauty, great distances and rich resources. They found beaver, otter and ermine. They described Indian fisheries that fed large native populations. They encountered fertile soils, vast forests and large areas of gentle climate," Beckham observes.

"In its quest, the Corps of Discovery opened the Pacific Northwest to a curious world."

In so doing, Beckham declares that Lewis and Clark charted "a new course for America. In a very real sense, their descent of the Columbia, the exploration of its estuary, the construction and occupancy of the fort and the assessment of native people and the land, fixed national interest on the distant shores of the Pacific.

"From this point on, there was no turning back: The United States had embarked on a path of building a transcontinental empire."

Reporter Fred Crafts can be reached by phone at 338-2575 and by e-mail at [e-mail].

CAPTION(S):

American Indian garments were often adorned with trinkets - such as thimbles, beads and bells - gained from trading with explorers. From left to right: Beargrass was used in adornments worn by the American Indians that Lewis and Clark encountered; the Corps of Discovery was exposed to the elements at places such as Indian Beach near Fort Clatsop; and elk in the area became a staple of the explorers' diet.