Lewis and Clark

[aitm]

Very nice two part on PBS if you haven't seen it. Read a book many a year ago very detailed but the series was very nice. Good to remember what they did at that time. Good stuff if you can get it.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Good stuff if you can get it? Do they sell it in nickel bags? :)

[SGOS]

I find the Lewis and Clark expedition to be one of the most interesting event's in American History, on  par with the Civil War.  The Missouri River is a powerful flow of water.  Hardly spectacular like the Colorado with it's nasty rapids.  But it moves fast enough that upstream progress without a steam boat would seem impossible.  And they did it with out a Rand McNally Road Atlas, and under severe conditions, not having any idea what to expect.  It wasn't just interesting because it was grueling.  The documentation is good enough that the journey can be relived and imagined with a fair degree of accuracy.  Campsites can still be revisited, some still in relatively pristine condition.  I don't get PBS, but I'll look for the DVDs.

[aitm]

I found it interesting that at the time it was very much a "national event", people would gather on the river banks as they started and wave them off, and then long before their return there was great concerns about if they had lived or died, many thought they had died and the great expedition had failed. Once they made it back to St. Louis, from there on to every city they came across, the townspeople had a great ball for them, big celebrations, quite the events. As one commentator remarked, it was very much our "going to the moon".

Pretty interesting.