Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West

Stephen E. Ambrose

Early in Thomas Jefferson's administration the area west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies - that area drained by the Mississippi and Missouri rivers - was in the hands of Spain. In 1801 Jefferson learned of a secret treaty transfering the Louisiana Territory from Spain to France. Alarmed at the possibility of Napoleon gaining a foothold in the Americas, Jefferson began to develop a plan for acquiring control of the region.

Figuring that Napoleon did not have the forces to both continue his military advances in Europe and defend the vast prairies of Louisiana, Jefferson took a bold step. He approached Napoleon with the idea of purchasing the territory for $2 million. It was inevitable, Jefferson said, that American settlers would spread into the land, requiring Napoleon to defend it or lose it by default. Jefferson's offer to purchase this worthless holding would give Napoleon cash to fund his war effort at home and release him from deploying troops to another front.

Napoleon saw this as a clear victory - an opportunity too good to pass up. Cash for land that he could not defend and didn't care to own. He took the $2 million, not ever knowing that Jefferson had been authorized to spend up to $10 million.

In the meantime, Jefferson had been preparing to explore the continent with the knowledge that, with or without Napoleon's cooperation, America would move west. He appointed Meriwether Lewis - a Virginia farmer, woodsman, and neighbor of Jefferson's at Monticello - to head the expedition. During the planning for the trip, Jefferson closed the deal with Napoleon.

Lewis was an expert outdoorsman and marksman, and a natural leader. After months of preparation (and thousands of dollars ran up against a virtual blank check issued by the president) the expedition set off to explore the headwaters of the Missouri and report back.

While other missions into hitherto unexplored regions of the frontier failed, the Lewis and Clark Expedition was completely successful. Only one man died, and that of disease - not the ever-present and sometimes hostile Indians. Lewis not only explored the reaches of the Missouri, but contiued over the Rocky Moutains to reach the Pacific Ocean.

Lewis's life came to a tragic end upon returning to civilization. Burdened with the task of converting the thousands of pages of journal entries to a form suitable for printing, with the responsibilities of his appointment as governor of Louisiana, and facing mounting personal debt, Lewis fell into a deep depression which eventually led to his taking his own life. His journals were never published until one hundred years later, at which time they were revealed to be rich with details of newly discovered plant and animal species and other geographical and ethnological details of the region that would have astounded an early 19th century reader.

Ambrose's narrative is compelling and blends the right mix of direct quotations from the journals, his own paraphrase and elaborations, and references to contemporary sites along the trail. His is a fitting tribute to Lewis, whom history has treated with some disdain - or at least apathy.

Of courage undaunted, possessing a firmness & perseverance of purpose which nothing but impossibilities could divert from it's direction, careful as a father of those committed to his charge, yet steady in the maintenance of order & discipline, intimate with the Indian character, customs & principles, habituated to the hunting life, guarded by exact observation of the vegetables & animals of his own country, against losing time in the description of objects already possessed, honest, disinterested, liberal, of sound understanding and a fidelity to truth so scrupulous that whatever he should report would be as certain as if seen by ourselves, with all these qualifications as if selected and implanted by nature in one body, for this express purpose, I could have no hesitation in confiding the enterprize to him.