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Undaunted Courage
Undaunted Courage
Stephen Ambrose is one of those writers who make you wonder how they get so much done. He is the author of 18 books, all of them biographies or historical works requiring research so extensive that it seems it must represent the toil of at least four lifetimes.
Yet he has found time in the last 20 years to go larking about all over the West, camping and hiking and canoeing in the summers with his wife and five children. Which perhaps only shows that anything can be raw material to the receptive mind, for it was on those trips that he developed a great fascination with the Lewis and Clark expedition that explored the West when the country was but a pup.
That fascination has now resulted in Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, a richly detailed, exciting account of an event that has achieved mythic status. Like the expedition itself, the book is a bit slow getting started, being rather overconcerned with matters like family mottoes and "begats," but after 40 pages or so it takes off on one of the wildest adventures in our nation's history.
I say "mythic status," but one wonders, in an atmosphere of scorn for or at best apathy toward our past, how much that is still true among Americans, many of whom might have trouble dating the expedition within 50 years. If they read Ambrose's book they'll be in no doubt, for it is indeed a tale of "undaunted courage."
The expedition came about primarily through the efforts of one man, President Thomas Jefferson. Among his chief goals were to find an all-water route to the Pacific and to keep the West from breaking away under Aaron Burr or any of a number of schemers. And, of course, being Jefferson, there was the pure intellectual joy of discovery.
For the men who made the trip, however, it was something other than pure intellectual joy. From November 1803 to September 1806, it was almost three years of brutish hard labor over territory most of which no American had ever seen before. Scantily equipped from the start, often ill fed and ill clad, the men--mostly American soldiers--did it for pay of about $5 per month and a land grant of 320 acres.
But they were well led. The author fairly bursts with admiration for Meriwether Lewis, the young Army captain Jefferson took under his wing and into his President's House (as the White House was then known) to be his secretary. Their father-son association became a deep friendship, and Jefferson chose Lewis to head the expedition.
Lewis in turn chose a colleague, William Clark, to join him in command. Though Clark's official Army rank was lieutenant, theirs was a true co-captaincy, a rare example of a divided military command that worked. Simply put, they were the best of friends.
Ambrose has done several other biographies, including multivolume studies of Presidents Nixon and Eisenhower, but this work is more than a biography of Lewis. It is a history that captures the flavor of life in the struggling nation, particularly on the frontier.
We tend, for example, to invest those early builders of the republic with a purity of motive and purpose, whereas, Ambrose shows, their ranks were as filled with greedy, grasping office-seekers as today. If you build the trough, the hogs will come. Most startling is to read how partisanly political the military appointments were.
Also in the course of his story Ambrose destroys the notion, prominent in some quarters, that Indians were innocent children of nature living in an Eden of harmony and light. They were dirty, thieving, and warlike, and abominable to their women--in other words, not totally unlike the mass of mankind.
The most common medical problem on the journey, incidentally, was syphilis. The soldiers contracted it from the Indian women, who were offered to the soldiers by their husbands or fathers, and sometimes mothers.
In the end, not many of the goals were achieved. There was no all-water route, for one thing. For another, nearly all of Lewis and Clark's findings and achievements went uncredited to them because of Lewis's failure to publish his journals, which Ambrose calls a treasure of American literature. And three years after their return, Lewis died by his own hand.
Nevertheless, at its conclusion the expedition seemed a grand undertaking. Nearly 200 years later, thanks to Ambrose, it still does.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Grafton, Wisconsin. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.