Stephen Ambrose

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The Epic Journey of Capt. Lewis: A Young Man's Life on an Incredible Expedition

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SOURCE: “The Epic Journey of Capt. Lewis: A Young Man's Life on an Incredible Expedition,” in Chicago Tribune Books, March 3, 1996, p. 1.

[In the following review, Theroux offers positive assessment of Undaunted Courage.]

On July 4, 1803, the nation's 27th birthday, the very same day Napoleon sold Louisiana to the United States, Capt. Meriwether Lewis was making final preparations for the greatest exploring expedition in the history of this country. President Thomas Jefferson had selected his personal secretary and fellow Virginian to travel up the Mississippi and Missouri, cross over the Rockies, go down the Columbia and reach the sky-blue Pacific. “The object of your mission is single,” stated the president, “the direct water communication from sea to sea formed by the bed of the Missouri & perhaps the Oregon.” Jefferson also wanted Lewis and his party to explore the new land, as well as extend commerce, collect specimens for science and establish an American claim on Idaho, Oregon and Washington.

It was to be a legendary 2 1/2-year trek, and although at the end Lewis’ partner, Capt. William Clark, would write, “Ocian in view! O! the joy,” it fell out that no Northwest Passage existed—there was no all-water route across country, or anything remotely resembling it. Ultimately, the complicated Lewis considered the expedition a failure, fell into depression and in 1809 took his life.

Using previously untapped materials and journals, Stephen E. Ambrose in Undaunted Courage superbly updates Richard Dillon's 1965 biography of Lewis and with as much passion as scholarship takes us again through the details of this epic journey. The 19 men went through hell. They were often exhausted. Although they commonly ate hominy and lard one day, salt pork and flour the next, and sometimes caught fish (or had beaver tail and buffalo tongue as delicacies), they were often badly starved, especially crossing the Rockies. Floggings were not infrequent for sleeping at sentry, insubordination and drunkenness. They often hazarded drowning as they crossed raging rivers, including the Salmon. Needle grass, noted Lewis, penetrated “our mockersons and leather legings and (gave) us great pain.” Ticks and gnats drove them mad. Mosquitoes and the malaria they spread were a plague. Storms, blizzards, lost boats, dysentery, VD all awaited them. They were scorched in the plains by the merciless sun and frostbitten in the mountains, with their keelboat locked rigidly into the ice during the winter of 1804–05.

Much was terra incognita. Indians were everywhere. It was mostly territory where no white man had ever entered. Sioux, Arikara, Crows, Assiniboines, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Otos and Omahas, Flatheads, Salish, Nez Perce, Osage and Clatsops surrounded them, tribes that were civil, peaceable, at times even distinguished. The men mostly feared the Blackfeet, with good reason, and in one confrontation Lewis shot one dead. Going over the Continental Divide, they met a Shoshone war party, which was quickly pacified by blue beads and mirrors, which they described, artfully, as “things like solid water.” It was thanks to a Shoshone interpreter/translator whom they met at Ft. Mandan that the explorers managed to overcome apprehensions when encountering that people.

Sacagawea, nicknamed “Janey,” was the only Indian, the only mother, the only woman and the only teenage person on the trip, a 15-year-old who was six months pregnant when they met her—one of the wives of a Toussaint Charbonneau, a French Canadian of middle age living among the Hidatsas as a trader. A slave, one of only two in the party—York, Clark's indentured black servant and lifelong companion, was the other—Sacagawea gave birth to her first child, Jean Baptiste, on Feb. 11, 1805. This was the source of some apprehension, as they didn't want to lose her, for, as Lewis noted, she was their “only dependence for a friendly negociation with the Snake Indians on whom we depend for horses to assist us in our portage from the Missouri to the Columbia River.”

With insight and compassionate understanding, Ambrose, a historian very much interested in following the footsteps of his subject, takes us into the world of Meriwether Lewis and, where possible, by way of journals and jottings and note-takings, into the workings of his mind.

Undaunted Courage is, as much as anything, the personal drama of Lewis, for whom Jefferson, 31 years older, was something of a father. Jefferson had opened the president's house (not called the White House then) to the young man as an ideal finishing school, probably taught him how to write and over the course of two years gave his energetic protege “a college undergraduate's introduction to the liberal arts, North American geography, botany, mineralogy, astronomy, and ethnology.”

Lewis was only 29 when he captained the expedition. Self-control, Ambrose tells us, was “not his strongest character trait.” He was a better zoologist than a botanist, more of a scientist than Clark, who was the better waterman and so more often manned the keelboat. Clark was also the better mapmaker. Neither was a trained naturalist. Lewis was a drinker and could be headstrong. (Lewis and Clark, however, got on famously and during the whole expedition supposedly had only one minor disagreement about an overloaded boat).

It is Ambrose's considered judgment that Lewis was a manic-depressive, which, as Jefferson well knew, was a family disorder—he had not only seen the melancholy of Lewis’ father, William, but also witnessed the same in Meriwether in 1801, when they had lived together and Meriwether was given to strange silences. During the expedition, whole months went by without diary entries, and, astonishingly, there isn't a single recorded word from Lewis about their arrival at the Pacific. “We don't have his description of what he saw and how he felt in this moment of triumph,” observes Ambrose, who attributes it to lassitude.

Indisposition or vice, that mood seemed to characterize the last, lost years of this brave American hero, when, sadly, inexplicably, his drinking began to increase as his self-esteem waned. He began taking medicine laced with opium or morphine. (Lewis had been shot and badly wounded during his travels.) Even his snuff-taking became inordinate.

He was luckless in love and couldn't cope, unlike the stronger and more predictable Clark. Lewis never married. Worst of all, especially to Jefferson, he never got around to organizing the valuable journals that the president impatiently wanted to see in print. On top of it all, his finances were in a sorry state. Soon he began telling lies and talking wildly and late one afternoon in Tennessee on his way to Washington, in a poorly built log-cabin inn that took in overnight customers, he shot himself.

With wonderful attention to detail, compiling previously unknown information about weather, terrain, science, food, flora and fauna, native peoples, even the devious political situation Jefferson was facing, Ambrose takes us into the interior of an adventure filled with high romance and personal tragedy, involving, all at once, the greatest of all American explorers, surely one of the greatest presidents and easily the greatest expedition ever undertaken in the history of this country. His vivid portrait of America as the background for this undertaking—forested and wild, vast and mountainous, rich and abundant—brings back the kind of dreams these men actually found, breathlessly stared upon, and awakens them again.

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