Stephen Ambrose

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The Search for American Heroes

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SOURCE: “The Search for American Heroes,” in Yale Review, Vol. 85, No. 4, October, 1997, pp. 146-50.

[In the following review, Lamar offers favorable evaluation of Undaunted Courage, praising Ambrose's narrative skill and successful effort to humanize Meriwether Lewis.]

Stephen E. Ambrose, the author of The New York Times bestseller D-Day and the biographer of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, has always been in search of American heroes. In Undaunted Courage he goes back in time to write about one of the country's first official explorer-heroes, Meriwether Lewis of the famous Lewis and Clark Overland Expedition of 1804–6. Unlike other accounts of Lewis and Clark, however, Ambrose with good reason not only rescues Meriwether Lewis from two centuries of obscurity but presents him as a fascinating, complex, strong, contradictory individual. He also portrays Thomas Jefferson as a more shrewd, highly political, and tough figure than we usually encounter in American texts. For Ambrose, Jefferson was a practical politician standing midway between the opposite categories of dreamer and schemer.

It could almost be said that Ambrose has rescued Lewis from a conspiracy of silence imposed by several generations of historians. Henry Adams more or less dismissed both Lewis and Clark as frontier types who could not have been any good as scientific explorers since they were not formally trained or educated.

Because Lewis died early and Clark lived a long time as a key Indian superintendent in Saint Louis and produced a remarkably accurate and detailed map of their western trip, Clark became the dominant figure in the usual Lewis and Clark accounts. But as Ambrose points out repeatedly, Lewis was the single planner, the quartermaster, and the senior officer who headed the expedition. Even so, Clark, the brave frontiersman who had drawn a superb map, became the hero everyone wanted to write about.

Other historians, almost studiously avoiding what Lewis and Clark had achieved, fastened on the story of the Shoshone woman Sacagawea and called her not only a guide but the savior of the expedition when she persuaded her Shoshone people to furnish the explorers with horses that allowed them to travel through the Rockies on their way to the Pacific. Indian tribes and historians alike have fought verbal battles as to whether Sacagawea was a Shoshone or from another tribe and whether she lived to a great age or died of a “putrid fever” in 1809. Besides getting horses from her brother Cameahwait, as the journals acknowledge, the presence of a woman in the Lewis and Clark party “reconciles all Indians that we are not a war party.” It should be said that Lewis and Clark appreciated her but that she was not their savior.

More recently, the psychological historians have had a go at Lewis and Clark by asking such questions as did Lewis have a crush on Clark and/or did Clark have an affair with Sacagawea? Both tantalizing speculations die from lack of evidence. Now medical historians have gotten into the act by arguing that Lewis was depressed and later committed suicide because he had contracted syphilis from the Indians and died when the disease began to affect his brain.

Fortunately for the reader, Ambrose keeps these questions in perspective. But even more fortunate is that all the known papers and correspondences relating to the Lewis and Clark Expedition have been edited by Professor Gary Moulton of the University of Nebraska in an exhaustive ten-volume edition. With Moulton's edition, Stephen Ambrose had most of his materials right at hand. The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition put to rest all questions about Lewis's competence as a scientific observer and demonstrate conclusively what an incredible treasure trove of information the two men gathered. Aided by the work of such other scholars as Donald Jackson, James Ronda, and Paul Russell Cutright, Ambrose has synthesized Lewis and Clark's findings brilliantly.

Even so, the real secret of the powerful impact of Undaunted Courage on hundreds of thousands of readers is Stephen Ambrose's contagious enthusiasm for reliving the Lewis and Clark trail over the Rockies, the Lolo Pass Trail, by hiking and riding it on horseback each fall with his wife, children, and grandchildren. There is even an Ambrose grandson named Meriwether.

The question still remains what has Ambrose told us about Lewis himself that could be called new. Besides being the first full biography of Lewis, this is the first book to describe his childhood and life in the context of a Virginia plantation society and economy. Ambrose argues persuasively that Lewis got his sense of authority and command because he and his family were plantation aristocracy and slaveowners.

Ambrose also demonstrates that Lewis was obsessed with getting an education. He left his widowed mother and a brother in Georgia to return to Virginia to be tutored. He fought for what little formal education he got and urged his brother Reuben and a stepbrother to attend school. It quickly becomes clear why Jefferson liked Lewis so much: he was the perfect willing pupil whom Jefferson deliberately trained for the western expedition he had been planning for twenty years.

Ambrose gives us yet other valuable clues to Lewis's character by tracing his early years in the army on the frontiers of the Old Northwest. Army life was rough, crude, and punctuated by violence and hard drinking. What Ambrose has done, however, has been to explain why Lewis was so attracted to the wilderness. He finds that Lewis was always curious about trees, wild plants, birds, and animals. He was almost a John Muir, but with a shotgun. In effect, Jefferson could hardly have found another army officer who had such an overwhelming curiosity about nature.

When Jefferson finally decided to send Lewis west, he packed him off to Philadelphia for crash courses in astronomy, medicine, and scientific descriptions of plants with Dr. Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Smith Barton, and others. Early historians have made fun of this superficial training, but Ambrose argues that Lewis was such an avid pupil that what he learned was substantial.

Moreover, Lewis was in charge of getting boats built to go down the Ohio, buying supplies and guns, and purchasing medicines. In short, this was Lewis's expedition. Clark came on at the last minute and had no role in the planning. Yet Lewis and Clark, both army men and frontiersmen, admired and respected each other. Lewis made Clark co-commander and called him captain even though that rank was formally denied Clark throughout the expedition.

Lewis and Clark's epic journey to the Pacific and back is a familiar story to many but is so well told by Ambrose that it seems a fresh, new saga. After they returned to Saint Louis in September 1806, the country learned of their two-year successful journey and declared them heroes.

We come now to what is the first weakness or troubling part of Ambrose's biography of Lewis. Lewis came home a national hero. He was wined and dined everywhere from Saint Louis to Philadelphia. He had one big task ahead of him: to write up and publish his and Clark's extensive journals. But after writing Jefferson a wonderful summarizing letter from Saint Louis he wrote no more. He never asked for scientific help or chose an editor or a publisher. Ambrose tries to excuse Lewis by saying he was disappointed that he could not report to Jefferson that the West was a future agrarian empire and so felt that he had failed Jefferson. By this time Lewis was drinking heavily and may have been taking drugs. An inebriated Lewis, though handsome and charming, appears to have scared off the women he found attractive and wished to marry.

The next episode we might blame partly on Jefferson himself. He named Lewis governor of Louisiana Territory, but Lewis proved to be no politician and soon came to grief dealing with sophisticated French merchants and aggressive American frontier politicians. Jefferson should have kept him in the East to edit the journals. But Lewis was at fault, too, because he was anxious to get rich in the fur trade and gave friends special deals. Ambrose freely acknowledges this venal side of Lewis's character.

Lewis's periods of drinking and depression became more pronounced as he got deeper into trouble as governor. When he decided to return to Washington via the Natchez Trace, he demanded whiskey and a gun at a frontier home in Tennessee and shot himself not once but several times. Neither Clark nor Jefferson were surprised, and Jefferson himself wrote a kind of a obituary that brilliantly analyzed Lewis and the problem of depression in the Lewis family. It is there that Jefferson described his erstwhile secretary as possessing “undaunted courage”—hence the book's title.

What Ambrose has done is to make Lewis a real person, a hero who was at once a frontiersman and a near poet. Lewis's description of the Great Falls of the Missouri is a beautiful example of his occasional eloquent prose. His excitement over the discovery of a new plant or bird echoes John James Audubon. His being at home in the wilderness and appreciating nature for itself reminds one of Daniel Boone.

Lewis, then, should be listed as a westering nature lover, not quite in the category of Muir, Audubon, Thomas Nuttall, or Henry David Thoreau, but a near relative. Similarly, he was fascinated by the West as the mysterious unknown, as were Jefferson, Jedidiah Smith, John Colter, and John C. Frémont. Ambrose's accomplishment has been not only to rehabilitate Lewis as a person and frontier hero but to point to a new way of seeing other intelligent frontiersmen whom historians have previously made into unthinking macho types. In this context one awaits with anticipation a forthcoming biography of William Clark by historian James Ronda. Meanwhile, Undaunted Courage may well remain the most effectively narrated American adventure story to appear in this decade.

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