BY HANNES THUM
Two hundred and twelve years ago this month, the Corps of Discovery expedition set out from what was then the westernmost frontier of the settled United States. Their intentions may have included the desire for adventure in the sense that they would be some of the first Euro-Americans to see the West, but, as you have learned in any American history class, there were also practical matters at hand: the United States at the time had a strong desire to make inroads in a region that, in the eyes of some, was more or less up for grabs.
So, much of the West came to be named by this group of men that traversed it, out and back again, in their two-and-a-half-year journey. Places were named after these men; rivers and valleys named after politicians back home that the Corps was trying to honor; and a rather impressive number of plants and animals were “discovered” by the expedition (lest we forget that they were all known by other humans long before 1804).
In biology, generally, whoever first finds a creature gets to name that creature. Captain Meriwether Lewis was honored with the naming of the Lewis’s woodpecker, which the group first saw in Montana. Lieutenant William Clark’s name was given to the Clark’s nutcracker.
There is some dispute about if these men were actually the first Euro-Americans to see some of these species, but the descriptions and names of a huge number of local plants and animals have been nonetheless attributed to the expedition. Just a few of our iconic regional species that the Corps described include the cutthroat trout (with its Latin name, Oncorhynchus clarkii, honoring William Clark), the pronghorn, the grizzly bear (with which their first encounters led to fascinating and terrifying entries in the men’s journals), the black-tailed prairie dog in Montana (which intrigued the men so much that they sent a live specimen back East to the White House), the Ponderosa pine, and the greater sage grouse.
Eventually, naming would lead to claiming, as the United States officially took ownership over this land and the creatures living upon it. The men on the expedition were explorers but were also, by necessity and by their orders, biologists. They were just barely scratching the surface of a land that would become, to you and me, home. And the names of many species we care about are rooted in the work of these men and their trip across the wild landscape of the West.