The Journals

Cover Type: Softcover
Book Condition: Good
Jacket Condition: None Issued
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Publisher Place: Usa
Publisher Year:
Edition: Reprint

Description: 504 pages. Book is in general good condition. There is some light reading wear present, but still a presentable copy.

Publishers Description: An alternate cover edition exists here.In 1803, when the United States purchased Louisiana from France, the great expanse of this new American territory was a blank--not only on the map but in our knowledge. President Thomas Jefferson keenly understood that the course of the nations destiny lay westward & that a national "Voyage of Discovery" must be mounted to determine the nature & accessibility of the frontier. He commissioned his young secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to lead an intelligence-gathering expedition from the Missouri River to the northern Pacific coast and back. From 1804 to 1806, Lewis, accompanied by co-captain William Clark, the Shoshone guide Sacajawea & 32 men, made the first trek across the Louisiana Purchase, mapping the rivers as he went, tracing the principal waterways to the sea & establishing the American claim to the territories of Idaho, Washington & Oregon. together the captains kept a journal, a richly detailed record of the flora & fauna they sighted, the Indian tribes they encountered & the awe-inspiring landscape they traversed, from their base camp near present-day St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River. In keeping this record they made an incomparable contribution to the literature of exploration & the writing of natural history. The Journals of Lewis & Clark, writes Bernard DeVoto, was "the first report on the West, on the United States over the hill & beyond the sunset, on the province of the American future. There has never been another so excellent or so influential...It satisfied desire & created desire: the desire of the westering nation."

ISBN: 039508380x