LEWIS AND CLARK: SEPTEMBER 20, 1806
				    
        "That afternoon, the men saw cows on the bank, a sight that brought out 
        spontaneous shouts of joy. 

	       - from Undaunted Courage by Stephen E. Ambrose 
  
For over 2 years   
they'd lived in a swirling   
world of elk and buffalo,   
pronghorn antelope, grizzlies big   
as cliffsides, over 2 years   
on a planet   
whose maps they were drawing,   
whose plants   
they folded with English   
words for the first time   
ever; you don't today   
think you'll walk over the Rockies in a day,   
but they didn't see why not,   
and they're the ones   
who told us   
you can't   
and told us a name   
for every river,   
creek, and trickle fattening the Missouri   
from its mouth to its tail,   
told us salmon and vultures and prickly pears and prairie dogs,   
who walked in space   
so long   
the world assumed them dead   
by Lakota or Blackfeet   
or Canadian winter or disease   
or bears or dragons or mutiny or madness or starvation or   
any of the names Death has   
where maps end   
and sky starts.   
They dug,   
they hunted, they   
begged, they labored   
for meat or grains, fish or roots,   
and all but one man somehow   
were still afloat,   
upriver from Saint Louis,   
surfing the Missouri madly   
after such wild years,   
such tall tales and isolation   
and they shouted, oh they shouted,   
and look around you too   
and you'll realize why,   
they shouted for the cows   
because a cow, a cow   
means home.