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Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (Paperback)
by Stephen Ambrose
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American history |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Ambrose has written prolifically about men who were larger than life: he illustrates Lewis's life, his relation to William Clark, and Thomas Jefferson, creating a picture painted in the readers' mind. |
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Author: Stephen Ambrose
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (June 2, 1997
Pub. in: June, 1997
ISBN: 0684826976
Pages: 528
Measurements: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00783
Other information: Reprint edition
ISBN-13: 978-0684826974
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- Awards & Credential -
The #1 New York Times Bestseller |
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- MSL Picks -
Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage tells the tale of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1803-1806. The journey, made when America's image was still being created, showed early 19th-century America at its best - deploying the scientific legacy of Enlightenment and the potential for a respectful exploration of the lands and peoples of the American interior.
Ambrose organized the story in chronological order, beginning with Lewis's childhood. He continues with the details on Lewis's teen and adult life, and continues on through the expedition and the events after the expedition's return. Lewis's childhood and adulthood prior to the expedition is details through the first six chapters. Chapter seven begins with the preparation for the expedition, detailing how the men who went on the expedition were chosen, the gathering of supplies, and the difficulties. The joint captainship of the expedition by Lewis and Clark magnifies how well they worked together. Chapters 8 through 12 detail the first year of the expedition. It begins with the travels of Lewis from Washington to Pittsburgh, where the expedition gathered and prepared to set off. The first leg of the journey down the Ohio River to the Missouri River to the winter camp of 1803 is told with emphasis on discoveries of new wildlife. Chapters 13 through 18 relate encounters with the Mandan and Sioux Indians. The winter of 1804 was spent at Fort Mandan with the Mandan Indians, who were very friendly. The expedition then continued up the Missouri River and encountered the Sioux. Unlike the Mandan Indians, the Sioux were hostile and demanded goods to let the expedition continue up the river. From the Missouri River the expedition continued to the Marias River, and then continued to the Great Falls of Missouri. Chapters 21 through 24 describe the long, hard trip over the Bitterroot Mountains, and the search for the Shoshone Indians. The Shoshone Indians were a friendly, humble group of people, who offered all they had to the strange white men. Chapters 25 and 26 detail the last leg of the journey to the Pacific Ocean and Fort Clatsop. Chapter 27 begins the trip home. Chapters 27 through 32 tell about the exciting adventures home.
Ambrose's writing cleverly blends fact, story, and excerpts from the journal of Meriwether Lewis so that it is detailed and interesting to read. The chronological account of the expedition works well for this book because it is important to read about the events in order to really understand what the expedition was, and where it traveled. The way the chapters are titled, date and event, work well because it prepares readers for what will happen in the chapter, and gives a sense of where it is headed.
Ambrose includes maps of the expedition's route and pictures of things that were discovered or important people, such as Indian chiefs. The pictures supplement the story to give an idea of what type of things were being seen on a daily basis during the expedition. However, pictures could have been more meaningful to the story if their connection to the story had been better explained. Much of the author's description of places, things, and events comes from excerpts of Lewis's journal. This is effective because it gives the book voice, and gives you the view from one of the first people to see the things that the new country had to offer.
Ambrose weaves a story that one does not want to put down.
- From quoting Janae
Target readers:
History students or lovers
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- Better with -
Better with
A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.)
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Stephen Ambrose
At the University of Wisconsin in the 1950s, Stephen Ambrose played football as a Badger for three years. He was a left guard on offense and a
middle linebacker on defense, and had he been just 10 pounds heavier, he would have taken a shot at the pros. Instead, his life took an entirely different course. Soon after completing both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin (which earned him a Ph.D. in history), Stephen Ambrose, a native of Illinois, had his first book published. A biography of Army General Henry W. Halleck, it was published by Louisiana State University Press in 1962 with a first printing of fewer than 1,000 copies. At least one copy must have been purchased, as he received a phone call from a fan, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower had read Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff, and was impressed. The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, and the two-term president of the United States offered Ambrose (then age twenty-eight) an opportunity to assist in the editing of his papers, and ultimately,
to write an authorized biography of the president. Needless to say he accepted the assignment. It was this event that would shape his career as a writer. Ambrose's first biography of President Eisenhower,The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, appeared in 1970, the same year he became a full professor at the University of New Orleans. He would go on to write three more biographies of Eisenhower, all of which met with widespread acclaim.
After publishing the series of books on Eisenhower, the subject of his next series of biographies was suggested to Ambrose by his editor, Alice E. Mayhew. Ambrose did not have the same relationship with Richard Nixon as he did with Eisenhower, but he was challenged by the writing project Ms. Mayhew put before him. In 1987, Nixon, The Education of a Politician was published. Although he admits to never liking President Nixon, after writing two more books on this president, he grew to admire and respect him. In fact, Ambrose didn't even meet President Nixon until after the series was in print. This series of books, too, were celebrated with critical acclaim.
Ambrose's desire to write on Lewis and Clark began in the mid 1970s. In the summer of 1976, to celebrate the bicentennial of the United States, Stephen Ambrose, his wife and their five children, traveled the Lemhi Pass in the Rocky Mountains, where Meriwether Lewis was the first nonnative American to cross the Continental Divide in August 1805. On this trip, Stephen and his wife took turns reading to their children from the diaries of Lewis and Clark. Being so moved by this uniquely American experience, his family has repeated it every summer since - visiting Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Kansas, or the Dakotas, and following some piece of the trail. The family has canoed more than 165 miles down the Missouri, backpacked and horse backed along the Lolo Trail, and turned in at night at various Lewis and Clark campsites. After the publication of D-Day: June 6, 1944, Ambrose began to focus all of his attention of what would become Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West.
Stephen Ambrose, now a retired professor from the University of New Orleans, lives in the Old South community of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, in his home, Merry Weather. He also maintains a home in Helena, Montana, along the trail of Lewis and Clark.
Other works by Stephen Ambrose:
Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff
Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of
Two American Warriors
The Supreme Commander: The War Years of
General Dwight D. Eisenhower
Eisenhower: The President
Nixon: Ruin and Recovery
Band of Brothers
D-Day: June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of WorId War II
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Undaunted Courage is the story of a heroic and legendary man, and the saga of a great nation creating itself. In 1803, President Thomas Jefferson chose Captain Meriwether Lewis to lead the first government- backed exploration of the vast and unknown western territory of what would become part of the United States. Lewis was the perfect choice.
Undaunted Courage is first and foremost a significant, scholarly work, yet it reads like an adventure novel filled with high drama, suspense, and personal tragedy. It brings to life the times and circumstances of Meriwether Lewis and his unprecedented expedition, and renews our wonder of the vastness of America and the heroics of its forefathers.
- From quoting the publisher
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Chapter 1
Youth 1774-1792
From the west-facing window of the room in which Meriwether Lewis was born on August 18, 1774, one could look out at Rockfish Gap, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, an opening to the West that invited exploration. The Virginia Piedmont of 1774 was not the frontier - that had extended beyond the Allegheny chain of mountains, and a cultured plantation life was nearly a generation old - but it wasn't far removed. Traces of the old buffalo trail that led up Rockfish River to the Gap still remained. Deer were exceedingly plentiful, black bear common. An exterminating war was being waged against wolves. Beaver were on every stream. Flocks of turkeys thronged the woods. In the fall and spring, ducks and geese darkened the rivers.
Lewis was born in a place where the West invited exploration but the East could provide education and knowledge, where the hunting was magnificent but plantation society provided refinement and enlightenment, where he could learn wilderness skills while sharpening his wits about such matters as surveying, politics, natural history, and geography.
The West was very much on Virginians' minds in 1774, even though the big news that year was the Boston Tea Party, the introduction of resolutions in the House of Burgesses in support of Massachusetts, the dissolution of the Burgesses by the Royal Governor Lord Dunmore, and a subsequent meeting at Raleigh Tavern of the dissolved Burgesses, whose Committee of Correspondence sent out letters calling for a general congress of the American colonies. In September, the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, and revolution was under way.
Lord Dunmore was a villain in the eyes of the revolutionaries. He was eventually forced to flee Virginia and take up residence on a British warship. But in January 1774, he had done Virginia a big favor by organizing an offensive into the Ohio country by Virginia militia. The Virginians goaded Shawnee, Ottawa, and other tribes into what became Lord Dunmore's War, which ended with the Indians defeated. They ceded hunting rights in Kentucky to the Virginians and agreed to unhindered access to and navigation on the Ohio River. Within six months, the Transylvania Company sent out Daniel Boone to blaze a trail through the Cumberland Gap to the bluegrass country of Kentucky.
Meanwhile, the British government, in the Quebec Act of 1774, moved to stem the flow of Virginians across the mountains, by extending the boundary of Canada south to the Ohio River. This cut off Virginia's western claims, threatened to spoil the hopes and schemes of innumerable land speculators, including George Washington, and established a highly centralized crown-controlled government with special privileges for the Catholic Church, provoking fear that French Canadians, rather than Protestant Virginians, would rule in the Ohio Valley. This was one of the so-called Intolerable Acts that spurred the revolution.
Meriwether Lewis was born on the eve of revolution into a world of conflict between Americans and the British government for control of the trans-Appalachian West in a colony whose western ambitions were limitless, a colony that was leading the surge of Americans over the mountains, and in a county that was a nursery of explorers.
His family had been a part of the western movement from the beginning. Thomas Jefferson described Lewis's forebears as "one of the distinguished families" of Virginia, and among the earliest. The first Lewis to come to America had been Robert, a Welshman and an officer in the British army. The family coat of arms was "Omne Solum Forti Patria Est," or "All Earth Is to a Brave Man His Country." (An alternate translation is "Everything the Brave Man Does Is for His Country.") Robert arrived in 1635 with a grant from the king for 33,333 1/3 acres of Virginia land. He had numerous progeny, including Colonel Robert Lewis, who was wonderfully successful on the Virginia frontier of the eighteenth century, in Albemarle County. On his death, Colonel Lewis was wealthy enough to leave all nine of his children with substantial plantations. His fifth son, William, inherited 1,896 acres, and slaves, and a house, Locust Hill, a rather rustic log home, but very comfortable and filled with things of value, including much table silver. It was just seven miles west of Charlottesville, within sight of Monticello.
One of the Lewis men, an uncle of Meriwether Lewis's father, was a member of the king's council; another, Fielding Lewis, married a sister of George Washington. Still another relative, Thomas Lewis, accompanied Jefferson's father, Peter, on an expedition in 1746 into the Northern Neck, between the Potomac and the Rappahannock. Thomas was the first Lewis to keep a journal of exploration. He had a gift for vivid descriptions, of horses "tumbling over Rocks and precipices," of cold, rain, and near-starvation. He wrote of exultation over killing "one old Bair & three Cubs." He described a mountain area where they were so "often in the outmoust Danger this tirable place was Calld Purgatory." One river was so treacherous they named it Styx, "from the Dismal appearance of the place Being Sufficen to Strick terror in any human Creature."
In 1769, William Lewis, then thirty-one years old, married his cousin, twenty-two-year-old Lucy Meriwether. The Meriwether family was also Welsh and also land-rich -- by 1730, the family held a tract near Charlottesville of 17,952 acres. The coat of arms was "Vi et Consilio," or "Force and Counsel." George R. Gilmer, later a governor of Georgia, wrote of the family, "None ever looked at or talked with a Meriwether but he heard something which made him look or listen again." Jefferson said of Colonel Nicholas Meriwether, Lucy's father, "He was the most sensible man I ever knew." He had served as commander of a Virginia regiment in Braddock's disastrous campaign of 1755.
The Lewis and Meriwether families had long been close-knit and interrelated. Indeed, there were eleven marriages joining Lewises and Meriwethers between 1725 and 1774. Nicholas Meriwether II, 1667-1744, was the great-grandfather of Lucy Meriwether and the grandfather of William Lewis. The marriage of Lucy and William combined two bloodlines of unusual strength -- and some weaknesses. According to Jefferson, the family was "subject to hypocondriac affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family."
Despite William Lewis's tendency toward hypochondria -- or what Jefferson at other times called melancholy and would later be called depression - Jefferson described his neighbor and friend as a man of "good sense, integrity, bravery, enterprize & remarkable bodily powers."
A year after their marriage, William and Lucy Lewis had their first child, a daughter they named Jane. Meriwether Lewis was born in 1774. Three years later, a second son, Reuben, was born.
In 1775, war broke out. Jefferson noted that, when it came, William Lewis was "happily situated at home with a wife and young family, & a fortune placed him at ease." Nevertheless, "he left all to aid in the liberation of his country from foreign usurpations." Like General Washington, he served without pay; going Washington one better, he bore his own expenses, as his patriotic contribution to his country.
Meriwether Lewis scarcely knew his father, for Lieutenant Lewis was away making war for most of the first five years of his son's life. He served as commander of one of the first regiments raised in Virginia, enlisting in July 1775. By September, he was a first lieutenant in the Albemarle County militia. When the unit integrated with the Continental Line, he became a lieutenant in the regulars.
In November 1779, Lieutenant Lewis spent a short leave with his family at Cloverfields, a Meriwether family plantation where his wife, Lucy, had grown up. He said his goodbyes, swung onto his horse, and rode to the Secretary's Ford of the Rivanna River, swollen in flood. Attempting to cross, his horse was swept away and drowned. Lewis managed to swim ashore and hiked back to Cloverfields, drenched. Pneumonia set in, and in two days he was dead.
People in the late eighteenth century were helpless in matters of health. They lived in constant dread of sudden death from disease, plague, epidemic, pneumonia, or accident. Their letters always begin and usually end with assurances of the good health of the letter writer and a query about the health of the recipient. Painful as the death of an honored and admired father was to a son, it was a commonplace experience. What effect it may have had on Meriwether cannot be known. In any case, he was quickly swept up into his extended family.
Nicholas Lewis, William Lewis's older brother, became Meriwether's guardian. He was a heroic figure himself. He had commanded a regiment of militia in an expedition in 1776 against the Cherokee Indians, who had been stirred up and supported by the British. Jefferson paid tribute to his bravery and said that Nicholas Lewis "was endeared to all who knew him by his inflexible probity, courteous disposition, benevolent heart, & engaging modesty & manners. He was the umpire of all the private differences of his county, selected always by both parties."
Less than six months after his father's death, another man came into Meriwether's life. On May 13, 1780, his mother married Captain John Marks. Virginia widows in those days commonly remarried as soon as possible, and family tradition has it that in marrying Captain Marks she was following the advice of her first husband, given as he lay dying.
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| View all 10 comments |
Michael (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-28 00:00>
Whether you are a history buff, a history student, or just like reading about the American west, this is a must read. Stepen E. Ambrose has written a well documented piece. You find yourself in the boat with Lewis and Clark as they traverse the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers. You feel the excitement that Meriwether Lewis brought to the mission. After you read this you'll need to see the museum under the Arch in St. Louis, MO. |
Kerry O. Burns (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-28 00:00>
An incredible writer at his finest. The historical detail is fascinating and the adventure is incredible. You feel as if you are making this journey with Lewis & Clark. This was my first Ambrose book that I read. He has become one of my favorite writers because he never cheats the reader. He knows his story, his characters and his history and weaves a tale that is fascinating. |
Steve Dietrich (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-28 00:00>
Ambrose brings the magic of the Lewis & Clark expedition alive with this magnificent book.
A great author can struggle with a pedestrian story and a great story be tarnished by an unskilled author. However, Undaunted Courage is the re-telling of a classic story from the heart of America by a great author who also loves and lives the material. There are so many mini-stories woven into the book that it helps to stimulate entertaining discussions of this historic accomplishment.
The book also brought to me a far greater appreciation of Jefferson's great impact on art and science in the young republic. While we think of thte expedition in terms of its impact on our political history, it was equally important in gaining an understanding of the biological and geographical wonders of the uncharted wilderness.
It is a wonderful gift to young people to help them understand the foundation of our westward growth. Reads with the excitement of a novel and the enlightenment of good history.
It is hard not to repeat the many good things said about this book other than to mention that if I were to be allowed only 5 books to take for a year of isolation this would be one.
It's easy, but rewarding reading.
Highly recommended and a book that's filled a lot of Christmas stockings and birthday packages in our family. |
Brian (MSL quote), USA
<2007-05-28 00:00>
This provided a great insight into the minds and the people behind a major event that made this country great. These people, just like the Founding Fathers, had the 'right stuff'. |
View all 10 comments |
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