History, non-fiction.

How much do you really know about the Corps of Discovery, familiarly known as the Lewis & Clark Expedition?  Most of us Americans would probably say "not a lot," and our friends of other nationalities might say "nothing."  For most of us Americans, it has probably been years, even decades, since we last studied about this expedition, and even then, our textbooks did not devote 472 pages to it.

In brief, it was an almost three-years expedition by Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, along with their troop of twenty-five picked men, to explore the vast Louisiana Territory, which America had recently bought from France.  This territory comprised 825,000 square miles, which doubled the size of the United States, and stretched from the Mississippi river to the continental divide, virtually all of it unexplored by Americans.  From November 1803 to September 1806 Lewis and Clark traveled with their group from Missouri all the way to the Pacific Ocean, where they stayed during the winter of 1805-1806 in a small log fort they built on the Oregon coast, and then returned to Missouri in 1806 to discover that they had long been given up for dead by the American citizens living in the east.  (Actually, only one man of their group died, from what was probably appendicitis.  That in itself was a miracle.)

Such a journey, exploring the vast new lands by canoe, on foot, and on horseback, documented all the way as to the geography, plants & animals, and native Americans, and all the challenges, hardships, and dangers, makes for fascinating reading, an adventure story crammed full of historical detail, all the more outstanding because it's all true.  The journals of Lewis and Clark, begun on the first day of their journey and comprising the entire almost-three years, are one of America's literary treasures.  And they are amply quoted from, in this book.

The first hundred pages of this book, before the expedition sets out on their epic journey across North America to the Pacific Ocean, are devoted to a description of Lewis's life in Virginia and Georgia as a boy and youth and a description of the social and political conditions at the time.  This provides a broad background of America at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, when America was not yet thirty years old as a nation.

What a treat it has been for me to read the account, much of it in their own words, of this momentous venture into the unknown.