The landscape encountered by the Corps of Discovery during their
multi-year, cross- country trek to the Pacific was dramatically
different from the one that greeted visitors attending Portland's Lewis
and Clark Centennial Exposition in 1905 or the one that exists in the
Pacific Northwest today. On the occasion of the bicentennial of the
Lewis and Clark expedition and the centennial of the Lewis and Clark
Centennial Exposition, the time is ripe for reconciling those earlier
events with present-day activities.
In Two Centuries of Lewis and Clark, William L. Lang and Carl Abbott
have collaborated to address those issues. Lang scrutinizes the
motivations for the Lewis and Clark expedition and the environmental
ramifications of its discoveries on the people and the landscape of the
Columbia River Basin. Abbott examines the ways in which the Lewis and
Clark Exposition advanced President Jefferson's goal of developing the
economic potential of the Pacific Northwest, particularly through the
exploitation of the region's abundant natural resources.