The Lewis and Clark Expedition - Analysis or more Questions?

            I finished reading the Lewis and Clark Expedition Assignment, then went to class for our "Flora and Fauna and Natural Wonders" presentation. After our private discussion concerning what I should concentrate on while writing this essay, I had a pretty good idea that it would be a typical 2-4 hour essay, as well as what I was going to write. It did not come to pass.
             Being a finance/economics major and a practical and realistic person, my idea was to concentrate on either Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's great leadership abilities and partnership skills, which they definitely had, or maybe to do the analysis of one or other practical results of the expedition. I had finished a little bit more than 1 page devoted to the first theme, when something got into my head and I decided to read the extra course document by Thomas P. Slaughter, "Rediscovering Lewis and Clark". After reading the first sentence: "The Lewis and Clark expedition did not matter two centuries ago. The explorers were not the first to make the transcontinental journey, as they well knew, having been preceded in both travels and publication by the ." my thinking underwent a turning point. The difference in statements between that writing and the introduction from the book by Gunther Barth were too great. In his book "The Lewis and Clark Expedition", Gunther Barth makes the comment:" the expedition produced the first decisive encounter with the people and natural resources of a part of the continent unknown to the young nation". Meanwhile Slaughter continued on: "They followed Cook, Vancouver, and dozens of trading ships that made landfall on the West Coast and had ongoing contacts with Indians in the Northwest, just as French and Anglo-Canadian fur traders had already engaged Indians east of the Rockies". It was then I understood that it would be impossible for me to write a typical essay. Born-in scepticism definitely cannot digest beautiful phrases as "continent unknown to the young nation" or "The brainchild [expedition] of President Thomas Jefferson, it was a high point in his lifelong preoccupation with the American West".