Lewis at the Divide

On 12 August 1805 Meriwether Lewis, walking ahead of the boats with three men, followed the Missouri to a trickle he could stand across and climbed the ridge above it. He expected to look down on a river running west to the Pacific. What he saw instead from Lemhi Pass, on the present border of Montana and Idaho, was range after range of snow-topped mountains with no end in sight. The water route across the continent that Jefferson had sent him to find did not exist. The expedition would need horses, and soon.

Caspar David Friedrich painted Wanderer above the Sea of Fog around 1818, and it hangs in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. A man in a dark coat stands on a crag with his back to us, looking out over cloud that fills the valleys, with peaks rising through it. Friedrich's idea was to put the viewer inside the figure: you cannot see his face, so you take his place and his view.

Here the figure wears a fringed buckskin hunting shirt and a cocked hat, a powder horn at his belt, the long rifle grounded in his right hand and his left hand on his hip. He stands on a dark outcrop with a single conifer at the left, and below him the cloud lies flat and white to the horizon, ridges breaking through it in blue-gray lines. Along the skyline the snow peaks catch a pale early light and the sky above shades from apricot to gray. Nothing in the picture is moving except the fog.

Friedrich's wanderer is looking at a landscape. This one is looking at a problem, and somewhere below him the last of the water runs east.