Re: The Godfather (CRACK) - RELOADED Hack Tool Download
Niki Wienberg
A few years ago I was helping my friend Stephen Ambrose lead a group of people along some of the most scenic stretches of the Lewis and Clark Trail. On a warm summer evening, after a pleasant day of paddling canoes on the Missouri River, we camped amid the eerie and majestic White Cliffs of north-central Montana, close to the exact spot where, or 31 May 1805, Meriwether Lewis wrote one of his most lyrical journal passages about the wondrous landscape he and his men were encountering with such fresh eyes. "As we passed on," Lewis concluded, "it seemed as if those seens of visionary inchantment would never have an end."
Did any members of the Lewis and Clark expedition snore? If so, which ones? Was it a gentle sawing sound that encouraged the others to sleep, like the croaking of frogs on a riverbank? Or was it a series of erratically erupting snorts and rasps, perhaps even a grand anvil chorus of a dozen or more men that reverberated out of the tents, echoed over the hills, and alarmed the wild beasts of the Plains? Did their non-snoring campmates ponder (as that other great American adventurer Huckleberry Finn would have) the age-old conundrum, the "curiosest thing in the world": why is the snorer, the person closest to the sound, the only one left undisturbed by his snoring? Did they kick or shove or toss sticks at the offender? Or did they simply lie there, wide awake and murderously sleep deprived, silently calculating how hard it would be to slip a few doses of Rush's Thunderbolts (that super-powered laxative) into someone's breakfast?
We don't know the answers to these questions because the primary source of information, the expedition's journals, doesn't provide them. But it's a safe bet that every single member of the Corps of Discovery could have answered them, and probably in elaborate detail.
The men considered some specific disruptions of their slumber important enough to mention in their journals. The night before the expedition entered the White Cliffs, for instance, a buffalo bull stampeded into the sleeping camp, rampaged around the four fires, bent a rifle and one of the blunderbusses with its pounding hooves, and, according to Sgt. John Ordway, came "within a flew Inches of Several mens heads" before Lewis's dog, Seaman, chased it away. "It was Supposed," Ordway added, that "if he had trod on a man it would have killed him dead."' This puts the issue of being awakened by snoring in a different perspective. Or consider the night of 26 July 1806, on the Corps's return trip, when a vicious wolf sank its fangs into the hand of Sgt. Nathaniel Pryor the kind of disturbance that might rouse anyone from even the deepest of dreams.
Most other recorded bouts with insomnia, though far less dramatic, are nonetheless helpful in providing a fuller picture of the expedition's experience. At a site west of the Yellowstone River the beaver were so numerous that the slapping of their tails on the water kept some men from nodding off; near the mouth of the Columbia the huge and noisy flocks of geese and brants had done the same thing. Along the Missouri mosquitoes caused at least two sleepless nights (and probably innumerable others unrecorded); fleas were the problem at Fort Clatsop. Among the Nez Percs in Idaho, after the nearly starved men had unadvisedly gorged themselves on salmon and camas root, Clark dutifully noted in his journal that the feast "filled us so full of wind, that we were scercely able to Breathe all night" (and then, thankfully, he left additional details of the evening to the imagination).
Obviously the issues of sleep and snoring are not the most critical points of consideration in the epic journey of Lewis and Clark and their fellow explorers. But they do lead to larger, more important ones.
Journals from six men have survived: those of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Sergeants John Ordway, Patrick Gass, and Charles Floyd, and Private Joseph Whitehouse. Taken together their commentaries leave no day of the expedition unrecorded, and for most days provide multiple perspectives from which to triangulate events. In addition, Sergeant Pryor and Private Robert Frazer are presumed to have kept journals as well, as yet unrecovered. What has been lost from not hearing their voices? How much more would we learn from the personal accounts of others on the expedition, such as York, Clark's black slave; or Sacagawea, the young Shoshone woman, and Charbonneau, her French Canadian husband; or the other enlisted men? It's impossible to tell.
On a few occasions Lewis displays a histrionic yearning for glory or alternately provides brief glimpses into the darker recesses of his soul. Clark sometimes whines about his health or exhibits a fatherly concern for the welfare of his men. Ordway's descriptions of the most dangerous moments come the closest to expressing outright fear, just as his entries about Christmas and his longing to return home seem the most heartfelt. In general, though, the information the journals provide exists within a fairly narrow range: miles traveled, the day's weather, locations of campsites, new species and new landscapes encountered, Indian tribes met and the prospects for trade, brief accountings of the day's highlights, and soon. All the things, in other words, that Mr. Jefferson so anxiously awaited. He wasn't interested in reading a novel of western adventure, he wanted facts. The Corps of Discovery obeyed by returning with a prodigious number of them.
Nevertheless, from the unelaborated facts alone a dramatic narrative emerges, one that is chock full of more heart-pounding near misses than most novels of the day would have dared attempt: a crumbling riverbank nearly overwhelms the keelboat; Lewis nearly falls to his death from a cliff; a confrontation with the Teton Sioux nearly turns deadly for both sides; men nearly freeze to death on the northern Plains; buffaloes nearly trample them and grizzly bears nearly catch them; a pirogue containing the most valuable cargo nearly capsizes; the expedition nearly takes a disastrous turn up the wrong river; a violent hailstorm nearly kills some of the men, while a flash flood nearly sweeps Clark to his death; Sacagawea nearly dies from sickness; her people, the Shoshones (with their all-important horses), nearly abandon Lewis; while crossing the Bitterroot Range, nearly lost, everyone nearly starves; the Nez Percs nearly decide to kill rather than befriend the weak and starving strangers; Columbia River cascades and then ocean swells nearly swamp the small flotilla of dugout canoes; Blackfeet warriors nearly leave Lewis and a few companions horseless and gunless in hostile territory;, Lewis is shot and nearly killed in a hunting accident. (And, unbeknownst to the expedition, Spanish war parties dispatched for their destruction nearly intercept them.)
Just as facts overshadow feelings and personalities in the journals, the repetitive drumbeat of dramatic moments eventually drowns out the details of the more mundane day-to-day routines and the quiet heroics of getting up each morning for yet another exhausting day of moving only a few miles more across a seemingly endless continent. What is captured in the bargain is undoubtedly the most important information, as well as the most stirring moments. But what is lost is a fuller sense of the participants in this historic event, and perhaps some greater insights the participants in this historic event, and perhaps some greater insights into how they succeeded so spectacularly. It's like reading an intricately plotted, action-packed, and highly informative novel that is sadly populated by rather featureless characters, or embarking on an epic adventure without really getting to know everyone else along on the trip.
Exacerbating the problem with all this lost potential is the way in which the captains overshadow everyone else. From the very start the historic enterprise tended to be viewed from the top down. President Jefferson, for instance, always considered it the "Lewis Expedition," reflecting his notion that Lewis was the only one to whom he had delegated authority and who therefore was solely responsible for the journey's outcome. Lewis knew better. He was the first to add Clark to the expedition's name, and always insisted that his trusted friend shared in the fame (just as he had shared in the decision making throughout the hard journey). So successful were these two remarkable leaders at melding their talents that they now seem historically joined at the hip, two quite different men who cast an even larger shadow because they stand together. They are unquestionably the "stars" of the story and the ones we most easily recognize, not only because they were the leaders but also because they are the story's principal narrators. Despite the existence of other journals, we turn to the captains' version of events first.
As the expedition began its ascent up the Missouri, it appears Willard spent at least some days on shore riding horseback with George Drouillard, the expedition's chief scout and best hunter, which suggests that the captains recognized in him some level of competence with a gun and horses. Someone raised along the Connecticut would have been familiar with rivers, but the mighty Missouri's size, power, and soon-to- be-legendary treachery must have amazed Willard. Perhaps he was thankful to be assigned to hunting duty rather than fighting the Big Muddy with the others. Did he and Drouillard exchange stories from their very different backgrounds? Was there an implicit competition between them over who supplied the most fresh meat to the hungry men? Did the primeval hardwood forests of Missouri, with their majestic stands of hickory and oak, hearken him back to the gentle hills of New Hampshire, blanketed with trees as they might have been when Willard's ancestors first arrived in New England? We can speculate but we cannot know. The journals only report for certain that he and Drouillard were responsible for the horses in late May, that on at least one occasion he and other hunters killed three fat elk bulls, and that, in the organization of the party, he was assigned to the squad of Sergeant Ordway, a fellow New Hampshire native. It takes a careful reading of the early journals to be even aware of Willard's presence.
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