The Guns Of The Lewis & Clark Expedition

[tenngun]

Shhh... It was Italian. I'm just guessing made by Pedersoli, so, it MUST have been historically imperfect from the start and cannot be mentioned.

:rotf:

 

[Dphar]

The verbiage,

"the ball had lodged in my breeches which I knew to be the ball of the short rifles such as that he had..." does not exist in my copy of

"The LEWIS and CLARK EXPEDITION
by Meriwether Lewis

I think the Biddle/Allen version has been excessively edited some things added some taken away. IIRC this is the one that has had "where she was made" added to a description of the short rifle being relocked at Ft. Clatsop. If this appears in your version then it contains added text not written by the original participants but added by the editor. I believe that the Thwaites version and the version linked below have no added text and these two versions agree on the description of the ball recovered by Lewis after he was shot. If the Journals do not contain the phrase I previously posted then they are NOT an true copy of the original Journals. The original story is all there in Biddle but the DETAILS have been "edited" in some cases to make the overall text unreliable for research at the level needed for this discussion.
http://lewisandclarkjournals.unl.edu/


Of course it is remotely possible that in some contact with Clark or Lewis that Biddle was TOLD it was a 1/2 ounce or 54 caliber ball. HOWEVER, unless there is a notation to this effect footnoted to the text then we cannot consider it as evidence. I would LOVE to see documentation that the ball was 54 cal (or that the "where she was made" comment was really in the original Journals). To my knowledge this does not exist.
We can only use information from people who were on site when any given event occurred. What some long after the fact editor added or took away to make himself think he was doing a good job is no more than gossip.

Dan