Bartonia No. 62: 95-102, 2004 The Second Two Hundred Years Are Better: The Endearing, Enduring Plants of Lewis and Clark EARLE E. SPAMER 1 • 3 AND RICHARD M. MCCOURT 2 • 4 lArchives, Ewell Sale Stewart Libary, 2Department of Botany The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1900 Benjamin hanklin Pm'kway, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19103 3Current address: 1 Locust Court, Maple Shade, New Jersey 08052 4Current address: 7801 Cresheim Road, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19118 THIS is a story about a Prussian pilferer, his proclivities for gathering North American plants, and his putatively inebriant state that ushered along his work on the first comprehensive flora for North America. Not a one of the specimens in question was actually collected by him, but some of them accumulated 14,000 miles of travel by horseback, canoe, and sailing ship before rejoining their long-forgotten companions nearly a century later. They had been guests in the White House and captives in London. Others lay quietly in a Philadelphia attic for three-quarters of a century, completely forgotten. Some plants were eaten by bugs, others were eaten by humans. Researchers in the twentieth century would even go so far as to incinerate parts of some of them. And now everyone wants to see them. THE AMERICAN ZEPHYR Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are among the lesser known botanical collectors, even though as explorers they have been objects of infatuation ever since they tramped to the Pacific Ocean and back in the earliest part of the nineteenth century. Scholars and students alike have studied the expedition, its labors, and its booty. Later, the explorers' travails became the focus of cinematographers and editors. But the plants they collected are hardly ever seen against the dazzle of travel and discovery. The 222 specimen sheets of the Lewis and Clark Herbarium, now in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, are likewise eclipsed by the larger, longer story told by the Academy's entire herbarium-a million more dried, pressed plant specimens from around the globe and a century farther yet into the past. Even though the Lewis and Clark Herbarium represents just two one-hun- dredths of a percent of the plant specimens curated at the Academy, they nonetheless stand out as the most publicly recognized symbol of the unique historical treasures in the entire herbarium. It is easy to gloat when you have such a treasure. Yet some historians glibly point out that in one way Lewis and Clark were dismal failures. They had not achieved the principal objective of the expedition conceived by President Thomas Jefferson and secretively funded by Congress. The ever elusive quest for a mostly water-borne passage between the Atlantic Manuscript submitted 28 May 2004 95