The Paradox of Historical Fiction: Finding Truth in the Absence of Fact
by Loree Westron
History. What is ‘history’? Is it simply a ‘record of past events’ as my Collins
Concise Dictionary suggests? What about past events which aren’t
recorded? Are they still part of history? And whose record counts? Does
mine? Does yours? Which one is the most accurate, and more importantly,
whose account is right? As I embark on research for my novel, Legacy,
strands of which are historically based, I have begun to ask the questions
which all writers of postmodern historical fiction must invariably ask.
But back to that first question – what is history? In James Lee Burke’s crime
novel, Swan Peak, I came across a definition which seems as valid as any
other: ‘History,’ said one of the goons, ‘is the story that survives’ (Burke,
2008, p.358). It is the version of events that gets written down, that isn’t
destroyed, that is passed into the future, that is saved. As fiction writers, we
are all aware of the importance of perspective. We consider carefully from
whose point of view our stories are told. Is our narrator god-like and
objective, keeping strictly to the facts as they occur, or is our narrator biased
somehow, damaged even, uneducated, uninformed, unreliable? The narrator
we choose affects everything that follows, which events are given
prominence, which are skimmed over, which are unseen, and which are seen
but deliberately ignored. The narrator has immense power, steering the
reader in the direction he or she wants them to go, encouraging them to draw
the conclusions he or she wants them to make. We accept this in fiction. We
expect it even, and enjoy it as part of the form. But with history we expect
something more. We expect there to be more than a modicum of honesty. Is
this, however, expecting too much? With his concept of history as narrative,
Hayden White (1987) acknowledges the role of fiction in historiography by
recognising the individual biases of both those who create the records and of
the historians who interpret them. History, in its remembered or written form
is not simply a list of empirical facts, it is a story.
*
The idea for my project originated a number of years ago when I visited a
local history museum in my hometown of Lewiston, Idaho, and among the
exhibits on early white settlers and collections of Native American artefacts, I
found a photograph of a man said to be the son of the explorer William Clark
and a Nez Perce Indian woman. Having grown up along the route that Lewis
and Clark took through what is now the Idaho panhandle, the photograph and
its claims came as a surprise.
In 1804, the United States doubled in size when it acquired the Louisiana
Purchase, pushing its western border from the Mississippi River to the Rocky
Mountains. Eager to discover just what this vast land contained, Thomas
Jefferson commissioned Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to
lead an expedition across the continent. Along the way, they were to make
detailed observations of the flora and fauna, geographical features, and
Indian tribes encountered. Of the latter, their instructions were to cultivate
hospitable relations, with the aim of building a mutually beneficial trade route.
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On May 14, 1804, the 33 members of the Corps of Discovery began their
journey up the Missouri River ‘under a gentle breeze’ (Bakeless, 2002, pp.278).
When I was a child, Lewis and Clark were viewed in almost mythical terms as
the progenitors of the Western frontier spirit. They were brave, noble and,
considering the times, remarkably diplomatic when dealing with the threedozen Native tribes they encountered along the way. Few previous forays of
this type had been so well-conducted or well-received, with fewer still,
subsequently.
What we know about the Corps of Discovery comes primarily from the
journals, which both of the captains and four of the enlisted men kept during
the twenty-eight months of the expedition. With six men engaged in
recording the group’s daily activities, and nearly five thousand pages of diary
entries, one might expect a full and accurate account, but of the six, only Sgt.
John Ordway made a record for each and every day. Lewis’s own
contributions are, at times, surprisingly spare. After a few brief entries in midMay, at the beginning of the journey, he is all but silent until mid-September
when he makes entries on two consecutive days, the second of which ends
mid-sentence. His diaries don’t resume again until April 7, 1805, and even
after that there are additional lengthy periods where his entries are sporadic.
Whether these gaps are due to lost manuscripts or laxity is a matter of
debate. Other gaps, however, appear to have been contrived.
*
The journals contain detailed accounts of the party’s interactions with native
tribes, including descriptions of tribal customs, dress and physical
appearance, as well as hospitality received at villages all along the way.
Throughout, there are references to sexual contact between the enlisted men
and Native women. On two occasions, Clark describes the ‘curious custom’1
practiced by the men of the Brulé, Arikara and Mandan tribes of offering their
wives to other men. In some instances, the offers seem to be a simple
courtesy extended to visitors, or a way of building alliances. In others, it is a
means by which the husband can ‘catch some of the [other man’s] power’
and later, have it transferred, via the woman, to himself (Ambrose, 1996,
p.180).
Some of these encounters, however, appear to be purely financial, as when
Lewis wrote of the Shoshones: ‘The chastity of their women is not held in
high estimation, and the husband will for a trifle barter the companion of his
bead (sic) for a night or longer if he conceives the reward adequate.’ Taking
a pragmatic view, he goes on to say, ‘[T]o prevent this mutual exchange of
good officies (sic) altogether I know it impossible to effect, particularly on the
part of our young men whom some months abstanence (sic) have made very
polite to those tawney (sic) damsels’ (Moulton, 2005, p.226). Clark makes
similar observations about the Chinooks, on the Pacific coast, after an Indian
woman brought ‘6 young squaws’ to the men’s camp ‘for the purpose of
gratifying the passions of the men of our party’ (Bakeless, 2002, pp.281-2).
Westron, 2
Both Lewis and Clark, as the headmen of their own little tribe, were frequently
offered women, though there is no firm written evidence to suggest that either
accepted. On most of these occasions, the two captains record that though
their men happily participated in these exchanges, they, themselves, declined
the offers outright. After declining one such offer, Clark was presented with a
second young woman the following day and wrote in his journal that ‘[they]
wish[ed] me to take her & not Dispise them.’ In response, he adds somewhat
obliquely, ‘I wavered the subject’ (Moulton, 2005, p.61). Clark is noted for his
idiosyncratic spelling and grammar but this journal entry seems specifically
designed for its lack of clarity. Was he saying that he ‘waved the woman
away’? Or could this be an admission that he hesitated, that he thought
seriously about the offer? And what then? For a fiction writer, the ambiguity
in Clark’s statement is a gift.
Reduced to eating horses, ‘portable soup’ and candles during their
treacherous crossing of the Bitterroot Mountains in the northern Rockies, the
Corps of Discovery descended, famished, into Nez Perce country in late
September of 1805. As his men recovered their strength and worked with the
Indians to build five dugout canoes, Clark continued to lay foundations for
peaceful trade. After replenishing their food stores with dried fish, camas
roots and dogs, the party left their horses in the care of the Nez Perce, and
continued down river towards the sea.
Seven months later, having reached the Pacific and spent the winter on the
coast, the expedition returned to Idaho where they stayed a month with the
Nez Perce, as they waited for the snow to melt in the mountains before
continuing east. Tribal historian, Otis Halfmoon (2001) discusses how the
Indians had befriended the expedition the year before because they desired
the weapons and ‘material wealth’ which the white men carried, but during
their extended stay in 1806, mutual respect and friendships developed.
It is at this point in the journals that all mention of sexual interaction stops.
Clark biographer, Landon Jones (2004, pp.138-9) finds this highly suspicious,
especially as relations between the men of the expedition and the Nez Perce
were so amiable. He speculates that these were ‘some of their happiest
weeks of the journey’ for Clark and his men and is doubtful that ‘this most
agreeable of captains remained celibate.’ Jones suggests that the captains’
resolve may have weakened because of their anxiety about recrossing the
Bitterroots. Their first crossing of the ancient Lolo hunting trail had been
fraught with drama as horses and supplies were lost into ravines, and the
men nearly starved for lack of game. The party were ‘desperate to acquire
more horses’ for the crossing and exchanged ‘everything they could,
including buttons cut from their uniforms’ (ibid). So why now this mysterious
silence on intimate matters? While it may have been acceptable for men of
the lower ranks to have sexual relations with Native women, perhaps the two
captains, anticipating future political careers, refrained from giving full
accounts of their activities to fend off questions about their moral conduct.
Again, it is what has been left out of the diaries that is so intriguing.
Westron, 3
Halfmoon (2001) attempts to fill in some of the gaps by relating Nez Perce
cultural practices which oral history claims produced a child by William Clark:
The old time method of making allies...was through
intermarriage, and children. And some of the women slept
with Lewis and Clark, and York...We know two children that
were left with the Nez Perce people that were created in
1806. We had a son of Clark, and we also had a son from
York... (part 8)
Nez Perce oral history claims that the sister of chief Red Grizzly Bear2 bore a
son by William Clark (Moulton, 2002, p.241). The child, referred to by the
name of Tzi-Kal-Tza or Halahtookit3, meaning Daytime Smoke, was said to
have had ‘reddish hair and eyes like the sky’.
In the photograph which sparked this project, taken around 1866, a man past
his middle years cradles a Winchester rifle and looks directly into the camera.
He wears knee-length buckskin moccasins, a plain shirt and a Pendleton
blanket. His long hair is parted in the centre and hangs loosely about his
shoulders. His skin is dark, almost black, and there is nothing to indicate that
he is less than full-blood. Oral history says that this man called himself
‘Clark’, that he was captured at the end of the Nez Perce Indian war of 1877,
and that he died of malaria fifteen hundred miles away from home. There are
many gaps in the story of Clark’s Nez Perce son, many questions for which
historians will never find answers.
What is undisputed, however, is that sixty years after befriending the men of
the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Nez Perce had ceded nine-tenths of their
tribal lands to the United States government, and by October 1877, the last of
the free Nez Perce were confined to the reservation at Lapwai or held in a
prisoner of war camp in Indian Territory.
History is the story that survives long enough to be made tangible through the
process of being written down. Linda Hutcheon (1988, p.120) asserts that it
is the role of the postmodern historical novel to question exactly whose story
it is that has survived and to continually challenge received versions of past
events. When facts have been deliberately omitted, as appears to be the
case with the Corps of Discovery journals, it is as though there has been an
attempt to alter the future’s perception of the past. History, then, is in the
position of ‘confronting its own historiocity’ (Ermarth, 1992, pp.43-4),
acknowledging that there is not one truth, but many (Hutcheon, p.109).
Writers of historical fiction have the ability to fill in the gaps, creating the old
world anew in a way that historians cannot. Might such fiction, where it is
based on fact, sensitively and thoroughly researched, from a broad and
analytical perspective, ultimately be considered true?
###
Westron, 4
Endnotes
Bakeless (2002) pp. 87 and 117
Buckley (2008, p.14) says that Red Grizzly Bear was approximately fifty years of age in
1806 and claims that the child was born not to his sister, but to his daughter.
3 Halahtookit is the Nez Perce name used by most historians. In correspondence with the
author, Dr. Alan Marshall suggests that Tzi-Kal-Tza may be a Salish (Flathead) name.
2
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