Lively and curious, possessing a keen eye for detail and a knack for skin-dressing, Private Joseph Whitehouse produced an account that stands as the only surviving record by any army private in the Corps of Discovery expedition. In simple and well-paced sentences he painted full portraits of the unusual group of men he accompanied on one of the greatest adventures in American history. Whitehouse's journal is published here in full for the first time—including entries from a second copy of his journal that extend the narrative for five months beyond previous editions. Although Whitehouse's career after the expedition was checkered and he disappeared after 1817, his vivid eyewitness account will long be remembered.
Whitehouse's journal joins the celebrated Nebraska edition of the complete journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which feature a wide range of new scholarship dealing with all aspects of the expedition from geography to Indian cultures and languages to plants and animals.
Gary E. Moulton is Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of American History at the University of Nebraska. He is the recipient of the J. Franklin Jameson Award of the American Historical Association for the editing of the Lewis and Clark journals, and he won the Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Award from the University of Nebraska.
