Stephen Ambrose has been following Lewis and Clark for 20 years, not just in the library but on the trail itself.
He spent July 4, 1976 - the country's 200th birthday - at Lemhi Pass, where the legendary explorers crossed the Continental Divide in 1805. He's camped there almost every summer since. His granddaughter's middle name is Sacajawea, after the Shoshone woman who accompanied the expedition.It's hard to imagine a historian more wrapped up in his subject than Ambrose is in Lewis and Clark, and it shows in his exhilarating "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West."
Jefferson conceived the expedition primarily in hopes that the explorers would discover a water trading route to the Pacific. There was a sense of urgency: Britain, France and Spain coveted the West.
Jefferson's interest in its flora and fauna was matched by his ambition for a country that spanned the continent. In other words, the Corps of Discovery was on a quest for information and empire.
Beyond the Mississippi lay terra incognita. The volcanoes, mammoths and giant sloths Jefferson imagined didn't materialize, but Ambrose's pages are filled with Lewis and Clark "firsts."
They were the first white Americans to see the Rockies, coyotes and a Sioux scalp dance. They discovered 178 new plants, 127 new animals. When they reached the Pacific, they voted on where to camp. Sacajawea and Clark's slave, York, participated.
"This was the first vote ever held in the Pacific Northwest," Ambrose writes. "It was the first time in American history that a black slave had voted, the first time a woman had voted."
They saw the endless buffalo herds and sky-darkening flights of birds, the vast, wild spaces which would give European settlers a second chance to get it right. A bittersweet mood pervades the book: No one will ever again see what they saw.
It wasn't a picnic. They were tormented by mosquitoes, fleas, prickly pears, malnutrition, dysentery and apple-sized hail. Except for Clark, they learned to enjoy the taste of dog. A grim humor lightens terse reports of deprivation.
"Capt Lewis & my Self eate a Supper of roots boiled, which filled us So full of wind, that we were Scercely able to Breathe all night . . . ," wrote Clark. But on rare occasions, a gill of whiskey (four ounces) was rationed. Out came the fiddle. They danced, sang and made merry beneath the stars.
Ambrose tells the story straight, without romanticizing his subjects or subjecting them to a revisionist inquisition.
Jefferson's catholic brilliance and lofty ideals jar with his possession of slaves. He outrageously violated one of the universal truths he believed in. But his Enlightenment mind-set conceived the idea that "all men are created equal," from which the best of America's unique history has flowed.
Meriwether Lewis comes across as an intrepid leader with a "passion for rambling," a gifted observer, a skilled amateur physician as well as an impetuous, hard-drinking dandy, given to depression.
There are magic moments in "Undaunted Courage" when Lewis - who was Thomas Jefferson's secretary for two years - walks in the gardens of Monticello absorbing lessons in botany, astronomy and other subjects from his dazzling mentor before embarking on the saga.
Encounters with Indians provide the most vivid passages. We see white man and Indian as human beings without the interference of any politically correct umpire to distinguish good guys from bad.
Both sides were capable of generosity and treachery. The white man at his worst spoke with condescension to the Indian "children" about their Great Father in Washington, backing up expressions of goodwill with veiled threats and Kentucky rifles.
Some Indians gave the hungry trespassers food; others stole their tools. Lewis cursed them as thieves, then appropriated one of their canoes. The Indians were rarely pleased with trinkets - they wanted gunpowder and guns. And at the bargaining table they were anything but children. Horse traders par excellence, they took full advantage of the captive market, selling the white men their "soar back" nags.
Contrary to some romantic portraits of their idyllic existence, the tribes lived in fear of one another and were locked into warfare as a way of life. When Lewis urged them to make peace with other tribes, they were baffled. How could they choose a chief if he hadn't proved himself in war? For some reason, however, the Indians didn't take advantage of their numerical superiority to overcome the expedition and seize its horde of weapons.
Indian men offered their wives to the white men, not just out of generosity but according to the belief that sexual relations would transfer white power to the Indians. In a few golden moments, the Indians and whites laid aside their differences, competed in horse races and joined in feasts and dances.
Ambrose addresses the poisonous influence of slavery on America at the time. After the return, Clark refused to free his faithful servant York - who'd made his fires and hunted for his meat on the trip. Clark even beat York for "insolence."
A quote from Jefferson reveals his appreciation of the evil of slavery and the retribution coming.
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
Meriwether Lewis came to a sad, familiar American end. Returning to public adulation, he made plans to cash in on his celebrity. But civilized life soon consumed him. He drank too much, fell into debt.
Looking Westward in evening, before he took his own life, he must have heard the bellowing buffalo bulls, the howling wolves, the savage songs, and longed for a hard bed on the ground and the redemptive discomforts of the wilderness.
Ambrose conveys a vivid sense of the times, the frontier mingling of rustics with cosmopolitans, the dangers and limitless promise of this country in its youth. He recounts his own days on Lewis and Clark's trail with family and students - the snowstorms, the soaking rains, the moments of ecstatic celebration. He calls his book "a labor of love" and for once that worn phrase sounds like the truth.