spelling was the one thing
those two fellows couldn't do.

"They used to make field notes, rough, just as you boys do. Clark had an
elk-skin cover to his book--and that little book disappeared for over
one hundred years. It was found in the possession of some distant
relatives, descendants, by name of Voorhis, only just about ten years
ago.

"At night, by the camp fire, the two officers would write out their
field notes, for they had to report very fully to President Jefferson.
Sometimes one wrote, sometimes the other, and often one would copy the
other's notes. Only the originals could make all that plain. And, alas!
not all the original work is known to exist.

"No one seems to have valued the written record of that wonderful trip.
When the young men got to St. Louis on their return, they did try to
make a connected book of it all, but no one valued that book, and they
couldn't get a publisher--think of that! But at last they did get an
editor, Mr. Nicholas Biddle, he was, of Philadelphia.

"That poor man waded through over one million words of copy in the
'notes' he got hold of at last! But by then President Jefferson was
getting anxious about it. By then, too, poor Lewis was dead, and Clark
was busy at St. Louis as Indian agent. And Will Clark never was a
writer. So, slip by slip, the material faded and scattered.

"Biddle saved the most of it, boiling it down quite a lot. Then he gave
it over to Paul Allen, a newspaper man, also of Philadelphia, who did
more things to it, getting it ready for the press. This book did not get
published until February, 1814, five years after Lewis died and eight
years after they got back. By that time a lot of people had had a hack
at it. A lot more have had a hack since then; but Biddle is the man who
really saved the day, and Allen helped him very much.

"Of late, inside of the last twenty or thirty years, many editions of
that great _Journal_ have been issued. The best is the one that holds
closest to Clark's spelling. That's the best. And I'll tell you it took
genius, sometimes, to tell what he meant, for that redhead spelled by
ear.

"Look here--and here. 'Catholic' he spells 'Carthlick'; 'Loups'--the
Indians--he calls 'Loos.' He spells 'gnat' 'knat,' or spells 'mosquito'
'musquitr,' and calls the 'tow rope' the 'toe rope'--as indeed Lewis did
also. He spells 'squaw' as 'squar' always; and 'Sioux' he wrote down as
'Cuouex'--which makes one guess a bit--and the 'Osages' a