The companion volume to Ken Burns''s PBS documentary film, with
more than 150 illustrations, most in full color.
In the spring of 1804, at the behest of President oThomas
Jefferson, a party of explorers called the Corps of oDiscovery
crossed the Mississippi River and started up the Missouri, heading
west into the newly acquired Louisiana Territory.
The expedition, led by two remarkable and utterly different
commanders--the brilliant but troubled Meriwether Lewis and his
trustworthy, gregarious friend William Clark--was to be the United
States'' first exploration into unknown spaces. The unlikely crew
came from every corner of the young nation: soldiers from New
Hampshire and Pennsylvania and Kentucky, French Canadian boatmen,
several sons of white fathers and Indian mothers, a slave named
York, and eventually a Shoshone Indian woman, Sacagawea, who
brought along her infant son.
Together they would cross the continent, searching for the fabled
Northwest Passage that had been the great dream of explorers since
the time of Columbus. Along the way they would face incredible
hardship, disappointment, and danger; record in their journals
hundreds of animals and plants previously unknown to science;
encounter a dizzying diversity of Indian cultures; and, most of
all, share in one of America''s most enduring adventures. Their
story may have passed into national mythology, but never before has
their experience been rendered as vividly, in words and pictures,
as in this marvelous homage by Dayton Duncan.
Plentiful excerpts from the journals kept by the two captains and
four enlisted men convey the raw emotions, turbulent spirits, and
constant surprises of the explorers, who each day confronted the
unknown with fresh eyes. An elegant preface by Ken Burns, as well
as contributions from Stephen E. Ambrose, William Least Heat-Moon,
and Erica Funkhouser, enlarge upon important threads in Duncan''s
narrative, demonstrating the continued potency of events that took
place almost two centuries ago. And a wealth of paintings,
photographs, journal sketches, maps, and film images from the PBS
documentary lends this historic, nation-redefining milestone a
vibrancy and immediacy to which no American will be immune.
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