Lewis and Clark: Exploration, Ambition the Road to Pacific

In 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led a small military expedition into a vast western country that the United States had only recently claimed and barely understood.Their mission combined exploration, diplomacy, science and national ambition. They were instructed to follow the Missouri River, cross the Rocky Mountains, reach the Pacific Ocean and establish relations with the Indigenous nations whose homelands lay along the route. What followed was one of the most demanding journeys in American history.Lewis and Clark traces the expedition from Thomas Jefferson's western vision and the formation of the Corps of Discovery through the Missouri River, Fort Mandan, the Great Falls, the Continental Divide, the Bitterroot Mountains and the Columbia River. It examines the contributions of Sacagawea, York, George Drouillard, Native guides, interpreters, hunters, boatmen and the many Indigenous communities whose knowledge and assistance repeatedly determined whether the expedition could continue.The book also moves beyond the familiar heroic legend. It considers the expedition's military purpose, its unequal diplomacy, the presence of slavery within the Corps and the consequences that American expansion brought to Native nations.Drawing upon expedition journals, documentary records and modern historical scholarship, Gordon J. MacKenzie presents an accessible and balanced account of extraordinary endurance, political ambition and cultural encounter.This is the first volume in The Westward Republic, a ten-book history of the exploration, migration, conflict and transformation that shaped the nineteenth-century American West.