Roger Wendlick, a middle-aged construction foreman, worked six days a week to underwrite his addiction. 

He refinanced his North Portland home three times and skirted personal bankruptcy for 18 years.

He knew early on there was no "patch" to cure his eclectic habit: collecting rare books about the Lewis and Clark expedition.

He got hooked in 1984 when he spent $695 on a 1904 edition of the journals of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. With that, the foreman who dug sewer and electric lines set out to build the world's finest private collection of rare books about the 1803-1806 expedition.

Wendlick became as dogged in his quest as Lewis and Clark were in finding the River of the West. Just as the Corps of Discovery ultimately mapped much of America's future, chasing Lewis and Clark books charted Wendlick's life.

Where Lewis confronted grizzly bears, Wendlick leveraged one credit card against another. Where Sacajawea, the Shoshone teen-ager who accompanied the explorers, saved the journals from a swamped canoe, Wendlick begged his boss for overtime to avoid financial capsizing.

As Lewis and Clark pointed a 55-foot keelboat into the Missouri River's chaotic spring currents, Wendlick charmed his way into the arcane, brutally expensive world of rare books.

A network of booksellers soon embraced the affable 54-year-old who spent his days running a 90,000-pound backhoe.

"Roger's background surprised people, and it delighted them," said Charles Seluzicki, a Portland bookseller. "We deal with stuffed shirts on occasion, and Roger is like a guy."

By the time Wendlick sold his collection to Lewis & Clark College last fall, most agreed he had achieved his goal. He amassed more than 1,000 books, maps, newspapers and other documents. His collection, teamed with another given to the college by the late E.G. Chuinard, pushes the Portland college into the top ranks for Lewis and Clark research.

"The acquisition will make Lewis & Clark College one of the premier libraries about the expedition," said Gary Moulton, a University of Nebraska professor and editor of the journals.

All this because Wendlick always bought the book he could not afford.

"This was my passion. I grew to love it," he said. "This shows how the American dream still lives for everybody. I wasn't born wealthy. ... It was an honor and a privilege to have owned these books. They are a national treasure."

Wendlick was born in Portland, graduated from Jefferson High School and attended Portland State College for a year before dropping out. He moved to White Salmon, Washington where he worked as a logger during the day; nights, he played folk guitar in local bars.

Before returning to Portland in his late 20s, Wendlick worked in construction in Seattle and backpacked across Europe.

When he came home, he went into the construction trade for the money. But his active mind quickly led him to collecting. His obsession began with a souvenir plate from the Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905. He inherited the blue plate from his grandmother, who attended the fair.

"I wanted to have a hobby," said Wendlick, who never married. "I thought there might be more stuff to collect from the fair."

Within four years, he'd gathered 1,200 items from the exposition that remade Portland. He bought 55 plates, countless cigar boxes, glasses and other knickknacks. When he grew bored, he kept a place setting of a dozen plates and sold the rest. He turned his attention to books.

Wendlick's hand trembled when he wrote the check for his first purchase, the 1904 edition of the journals. He carried the eight-volume set to the Old Oregon Book Shop in downtown Portland and showed it to Preston McMann, dean of Oregon rare-book dealers.

When Wendlick asked if there were any more editions, McMann laughed. When the neophyte announced he would get them all in five years, McMann doubled over. The men later became friends. McMann, who died in 1997, grew to admire Wendlick's tenacity.

"He is an absolutely fanatical collector," said Dick Perier, who sold Wendlick his first Lewis and Clark books. "He wanted it and he wanted it all, and he got it. That was the amazing thing. He put it together in 18 years on a working man's salary."

Wendlick's collection does not include original manuscripts of the journals; they are held by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. It does contain original editions of the journals, which have been published several times; copies of books and maps the explorers brought with them; and newspaper accounts, including a brief mention in an 1803 edition of the Connecticut Courant about Lewis' departure from Kentucky.

Wendlick's purchase of an 1814 Philadelphia edition -- the first publication of the journals -- marked his entry into elite books. The book was a narrative summary of the journals by Nicholas Biddle, a Philadelphia financier and diplomat. The job was supposed to have been Lewis', but his mysterious death in 1809 delayed publication of the journals.

Only 1,417 copies of the 1814 edition were published. The book, which has become an American icon, is one of the most expensive books ever published in America. William Reese of New Haven, Connecticut, a leading Western Americana bookseller, says people who don't collect any other books covet the 1814 edition. Reese says he expects an upcoming New York auction of an 1814 edition in its original boards -- one of about 30 copies in its original binding -- may bring $200,000.

In February 1992, Wendlick found a book that greatly elevated his collection. He walked up to Reese's booth at the Los Angeles Antiquarian Book Fair and asked whether Reese had any books on Lewis and Clark.

Reese gestured to the 1814 edition, bound in chestnut leather. Wendlick held his breath as he unfolded a wonderfully preserved map. The map, which had been plotted by Clark, sets the price for this rare book. Many of the original copies did not have the map; others were torn out over the years.

How much? Wendlick asked.

Twelve thousand, five hundred for the two-volume set.

Wendlick gulped. "I can't afford them," he said.

He walked around the book fair in a daze. He had to have those books. But how could he afford them? How could he afford any of this?

He had a scotch at the bar and went back to Reese.

Do you allow payments? he asked.

Could you afford $1,000 a month?

Maybe in late May once the construction season gets going, Wendlick said. I really can't afford it now.

Then the bookseller wrapped up the books and handed them to Wendlick.

"Pay me when you can," he said.

 A stunned Wendlick walked out of the fair.

"We often deal with people who feel a need to conceal their enthusiasm for books because they feel we will raise the price on them," Reese said. Wendlick never hid his passion.

"I'd rather sell the book to Roger and get paid in the course of a year than sell to somebody who didn't care as much about the book."

Wendlick paid Reese in a year. He estimates his 1814 edition is now worth about $75,000.

Lewis & Clark College officials and Wendlick declined to say how much the college paid for his collection.

It was part gift and part purchase," said Michael Mooney, college president. "We did it in a way to provide adequately for Roger's future."

These days, Wendlick says he is collecting knowledge. He volunteers in the Heritage Room, where the collection is stored, at the college's Aubrey R. Watzek Library. It's a long way from his days aboard a bulldozer.

"It had to be here for future generations for study and for scholarly endeavor," Wendlick said.

As the expedition's bicentennial approaches, the college hopes the collection will help unravel the legacy of the Corps of Discovery.

"The Wendlick collection has the promise to place the expedition in a larger intellectual context," said Stephen Dow Beckham, a professor of history at the college.

Mooney and Beckham say the college's chief interest is in the expedition's impact. Lewis and Clark embodied America's entry into the Age of Enlightenment.

The explorers pursued a viable commercial route to the Pacific, but they also documented the natural history of the West and were emissaries to Native American tribes and bands.

"In many respects, the expedition was the beginning of the arts and sciences in the West," Mooney said. "They were open to every aspect of discovery of the natural and social universe they encountered. That was their mandate, and that is what they did."

Beckham teaches a variety of courses at the college. The captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark turn up in most of them: an environmental history of wilderness; a history of tribes; a history of the Pacific Northwest.

Next fall, he will lead a 15-book colloquium on the explorers called "End of the Unknown."

"Each generation of Americans has made its own discovery of Lewis and Clark," he said. 

You can reach Brian Meehan by e-mail at brianmeehan@news.oregonian.com

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