The journals of Lewis and Clark Book

An alternate cover edition exists here. 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 & that a national "Voyage of Discovery" must be mounted to determine the nature & 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 & 32 men, made the first trek across the Louisiana Purchase, mapping the rivers as he went, tracing the principal waterways to the sea & establishing the American claim to the territories of Idaho, Washington & Oregon. together the captains kept a journal, a richly detailed record of the flora & fauna they sighted, the Indian tribes they encountered & 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 & the writing of natural history. The Journals of Lewis & Clark, writes Bernard DeVoto, was "the first report on the West, on the United States over the hill & beyond the sunset, on the province of the American future. There has never been another so excellent or so influential...It satisfied desire & created desire: the desire of the westering nation."