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Your quotation from Jim Steward of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla (Op-Ed, Aug. 17), stating that “We stand today in the ocean probably where Lewis and Clark did when they jumped across the Mississippi,” provides a superb example of how even brainy Americans don’t know our history.
The Lewis and Clark expedition “jumped” across the Missouri River, not the Mississippi. The expedition was even organized in St. Louis, which today, as in 1804, is already west of the Mississippi. On May 14, 1804, the explorers started up the Missouri and eventually crossed the Continental Divide and headed for the Pacific.
