Meriwether Lewis stood at the Continental Divide of the Rocky Mountains, more than halfway on his epic quest across the North American continent. He concluded his August 18, 1805, journal entry with an oft-quoted passage of introspection and self-criticism.
“This day I completed my thirty-first year,” he began. He figured he was halfway through his life’s journey. “I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended.”
He shook the mood, writing that, since the past could not be recalled, “I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me…” and here he seems to have lost his train of thought. Whatever the cause, he forgot to name those “two primary objects of human existence,” and instead ended, “in future, to live for MANKIND, as I have heretofore lived FOR MYSELF.”