Today, May 14, 2011, is the 207th anniversay of the day that the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Corps of Discovery, set out westward from St. Louis, Missouri, for the mouth of the Columbia River. At the time there were five places on earth that were truly unknown to Europeans: The two polar regions, the basins of the Amazon and Congo Rivers, and the Pacific Northwest from San Francisco Bay to Sitka, Alaska, and east to Saint Louis. Robert Gray had very carefully calculated the latitude and longitude of the mouth of the huge river he found, before naming it for his ship, the Columbia.
When they left Saint Louis they knew Gray's location for the mouth of the Columbia, but between those places there were hints, rumors, and suppositions. A few trappers, mostly French, had been through parts of it; Spanish soldiers had wandered about; but mostly there was speculation.
Some of the big speculation we are taught in high school: Was there a water passage to the Pacific? Was there a mountain range someplace? Jefferson thought that the Appalachins were the highest mountains in North America.
But there was one huge speculation that nobody talks about any more.
In the Book of Genesis there are a couple of creation myths, about Gawd making the earth, and the plants, and the animals, and hot women with big tits. And there was a verse in there about each having its place. Remember that; it's important. Christians also suffer from a unique handicap: Alone among religions, they think their Gawd is perfect. That creates a lot of problems. Like, if Gawd created all these animals, and a place for each of them, and It was perfect, then no animal could ever, ever go extinct. Laugh if you will, but on the day Lewis and Clark left Saint Louis, little Catholic kiddies were learning that in school. Folks had known for about a thousand years that nobody had seen a European lion, and in Ireland some folks had discovered the fossils of what we call "megafauna", that sudden mammalian flourishing that started a few million years after the dinosaurs vanished. No one would discover a dinosaur fossil for another 9 years, but the fossils of huge sloths and elk as tall as a three-story building were a bit disturbing to true believers.
The assorted prelates of the assorted churches had a ready explanation: Since Gawd was perfect and none of his critters would ever become extinct, they must be somewhere in that space between Saint Louis and the mouth of the Columbia.
So on the list of ten things President Jefferson wanted his secretary and roommate Lewis to do, one was look around for sloths the size of Chevy Suburbans and European lions. In two years Lewis saw a lot of things, but none of those.
There were a few religious loons who still insisted those animals must be somewhere, but the heavy thinkers knew when they had been licked. And so this is also the anniversary of the day religion lost the debate.