The Journals of Lewis and Clark (Lewis & Clark Expedition)

The Journals of Lewis and Clark are “the primary report on the West, on america over the hill and past the sundown, on the province of the American future” (Bernard DeVoto).

In 1803, the good expanse of the Louisiana Buy was an empty canvas. Keenly conscious that the course of the nation’s future lay westward—and {that a} “Voyage of Discovery” can be obligatory to find out the character of the frontier—President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis to guide an expedition from the Missouri River to the northern Pacific coast and again. From 1804 to 1806, accompanied by co-captain William Clark, the Shoshone information Sacajawea, and thirty-two males, Lewis mapped rivers, traced the principal waterways to the ocean, and established the American declare to the territories of Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Collectively the captains saved this journal: a richly detailed report of the wildlife they sighted, the native tribes they encountered, and the awe-inspiring panorama they traversed, from their base camp close to present-day St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River, that has turn out to be an incomparable contribution to the literature of exploration and the writing of pure historical past.