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Lewis & Clark Expedition
Mariner Books
May 1997
On Sale: April 30, 1997
Featuring: Meriwether Lewis
576 pages
ISBN: 0395859964
EAN: 9780395859964
Paperback
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Non-Fiction Memoir | Historical
In 1803, when the United States purchased Louisiana from
France, the great expanse of this new American territory was
a blank -- not only on the map but in our knowledge. President Thomas Jefferson keenly understood that the course
of the nation's destiny lay westward and that a national
"Voyage of Discovery" must be mounted to determine the
nature and accessibility of the frontier. He commissioned
his young secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to lead an
intelligence-gathering expedition from the Missouri River to
the northern Pacific coast and back. From 1804 to 1806, Lewis, accompanied by co-captain William
Clark, the Shoshone guide Sacajawea, and thirty-two men,
made the first trek across the Louisiana Purchase, mapping
the rivers as he went, tracing the principal waterways to
the sea, and establishing the American claim to the
territories of Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Together the
captains kept a journal, a richly detailed record of the
flora and fauna they sighted, the Indian tribes they
encountered, and the awe-inspiring landscape they traversed,
from their base camp near present-day St. Louis to the mouth
of the Columbia River. In keeping this record they made an
incomparable contribution to the literature of exploration
and the writing of natural history. The Journals of Lewis and Clark, writes Bernard DeVoto, was
"the first report on the West, on the United States over the
hill and beyond the sunset, on the province of the American
future. There has never been another so excellent or so
influential...It satisfied desire and created desire: the
desire of the westering nation."
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