![]() The upper ends of the streams appear and vanish incessantly, which causes such a seeming trembling in the air, that you would think the upper part of the heavens to be as it were in convulsions. Out of these arches proceed streams of light generally perpendicular to the horizon, but sometimes a little inclined to it, and very much resembling the tail of comets. terminated with one or more lucid arches, and sometimes by a long bright streak of light, lying parallel to the horizon. Beginning with “Aurora borealis is an extraordinary meteor, shewing itself in the night-time, in the northern parts of the heavens,” Owen’s went on to describe the northern lights’ appearance as:Īn apparent, though not real cloud. Donald Jackson, “Some Books Carried by Lewis and Clark,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, Vo. It wasn’t the latest, and it was British, but it was the best available. Jefferson ordered for Meriwether Lewis a two-volume reference work commonly called Owen’s Dictionary. Yet, scientists of the early 21st century still cannot completely explain what causes the northern lights. What did Meriwether Lewis and William Clark understand about the aurora borealis–literally, “Dawn of the North”? Even though the captains were well past mythological explanations, scientific theories of their time may sound a bit fanciful today. (In the southern hemisphere, the phenomenon is called southern lights or, scientifically, aurora australis-from the Latin for southern. The phenomenon’s modern name, aurora borealis, combines the name of Aurora, the Roman goddess of dawn, with a word meaning north derived from the name of Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind. The northern lights were portents of trouble or signs of celestial joy in different cultures. At Fort Mandan, the captains were at 47° north latitude. Appearing above the magnetic poles, near the North Pole and South Pole, the lights have been seen as far away as 40° north or south latitude. Since humans first had looked into the night sky, people in high northern and southern latitudes had tried to explain these dazzling curtains, spears, and arches of light. ![]() They had first seen them at Camp Dubois, on the 1 April 1804. In mid-August 1806, coincidentally again at the Mandan villages, they saw them. They saw them the next night too, “very brilliant in perpendiculer collums frequently changing position,” Clark wrote. After glittering for some time its colours would be overcast, and almost obscured, but again it would burst out with renewed beauty the uniform colour was pale light, but its shapes were various and fantastic: at times the sky was lined with light coloured streaks rising perpendicularly from the horizon, and gradually expanding into a body of light in which we could trace the floating columns sometimes advancing, sometimes retreating and shaping into infinite forms, the space in which they moved. Late at night we were awaked by the sergeant on guard to see the beautiful phenomenon called the northern light: along the northern sky was a large space occupied by a light of a pale but brilliant white colour: which rising from the horizon, extended itself to nearly twenty degrees above it. ![]() (2 vols., 1814 reprint, with an introduction by John Bakeless, New York: Heritage Press, 1962), I:78. In his 1814 edition of the Lewis and Clark journals, Nicholas Biddle expanded upon the journalists’ brief, breathless description of the night-sky phenomenon they observed from Fort Mandan on the night of 5 November 1804: Nicholas Biddle, History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark.
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