McCOWN'S LONGSPUR 1565 



the party. AVhat with haste, the fear of Indian attack, the distraction 

 of bear, deer, elk, and "barking squireels" continually under their 

 gunsights, it is perhaps hardly surprising that when he encountered a 

 new bird in the short grass, Lewis did not collect it and later was less 

 precise in his report than was his custom. He listed (Thwaites, Lewis 

 and Clark Journals, II: 119-120) several sparrows and 



Also a small bird which in action resembles the lark, it is about the size of a 

 large sparrow of a dark brown colour with some white feathers in the tail; this 

 bird or that which I take to be the male rises into the air about 60 feet and sup- 

 porting itself in the air with a brisk motion of the wings sings very sweetly, has 

 several shrill soft notes reather of the plaintive order which it frequently repeats 

 and varies, after remaining stationary about a minute in his aireal station he 

 descends obliquely occasionally pausing and accomnyng his descension with a 

 note something like twit twit twit; on the ground he is silent. Thirty or forty of 

 these birds will be stationed in the air at a time in view. These larks as I shall 

 call them add much to the gayety and cheerfullness of the scene. All those birds 

 are not seting and laying their eggs in the plains; their little nests are to be seen 

 in great abundance as we pass, there are meriads of small grasshoppers in these 

 plains which no doubt furnish the principal aliment of this numerous progeny of 

 the feathered creation. 



While Lewis' notation describes McCown's generally (though it 

 lacks the precise detail necessary for positive identification), Elliott 

 Coues in his annotation of the Biddle edition of the Lewis and Clark 

 "Journals" in 1893 unhesitatingly identified the bird: "This is the 

 black-breasted lark-bunting or longspur, Centrophanes (Rhynchopanes) 

 maccoumi, which abounds in Montana in the breeding seasons." 

 Reuben G. Thwaites, the editor of the "Original Journals of 

 Lewis and Clark (1904-05)," accepts his conclusion. Between 

 1806, when Thomas Jefferson announced the news of the progress of 

 the Expedition in a message to the Congress, and 1851, when George 

 N. Lawrence published the discovery of the longspur, only the 

 Biddle version of the "Journals" (published in 1814) appeared in 

 print. The Biddle edition, however, is a paraphrase, a popular 

 account of the most important events of the expedition. It omits 

 the scientific data, including the zoological material, among which is 

 the account of McCown's longspur. While the avian specimens 

 collected on the Expedition were becoming well known, the scientific 

 data remained in darkest obscurity. 



For almost a hundred years Lewis' description of "a small bird" 

 with a treasury of other ornithological information lay hidden in the 

 unpublished portions of the "Journals" in the library vaults of the 

 American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. In 1892 Elliott 

 Coues, his new Biddle edition largely completed, learned of the 

 original papers, secured them, and from their largely untapped 

 resources enriched his volume with pages of annotations. One of the 

 notes pertains to the identification of Lewis' "small bird." But the 



