The Journals of Lewis and Clark

by Meriwether Lewis

Overview

This edition retains the original idiosyncratic spelling and punctuation. " "These Journals are from May 14, 1804, the day the expedition left the Mississippi River, to September 26, 1806, a day or two after they arrived back in St. Louis. It includes all possible Journal entries of Lewis and Clark. Most of the "courses and distances" and "celestial observations" have been omitted. The notes and most of the corrections of past editors have been removed." According to Wikipedia: "The Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803–1806), headed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, was the first American overland expedition to the Pacific coast and back."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781455340095
Publisher:	Seltzer Books
Publication date:	12/12/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Frank Bergon is a novelist and professor at Vassar College

Editorial Reviews

The epic Lewis and Clark Expedition comes to life on a human scale in this engrossing abridgment of the explorers' journals. The travelers spent more than two years traveling up the Missouri, across the Rockies to the Pacific and back, and these accounts leave no doubt that it was a very hard slog. Page after page details the drudgery of paddling and hauling the boats upstream, the maddening mosquitoes and the enervating damp of the Pacific Northwest; virtually every entry includes an anxious tally of the game killed that day to feed the party. But the sober, soldierly tone of the journals often gives way to lyrical descriptions of the terrain and wildlife of the magnificent landscapes through which the expedition passed (hair-raising encounters with grizzlies are a persistent refrain). Particularly intriguing are the portraits of the Indian peoples the explorers encountered, with whom they maintained mostly friendly relations. Although burdened by the prejudices of the age, Lewis and Clark recognized the complexity of the attitudes and motivations of the Indians, who wavered between wariness of white men and eagerness to trade with them and enlist their support in the convoluted inter-tribal politics of the West. The editor's assiduous untangling of the explorers' notoriously bad spelling, punctuation and grammar, helpful notes and maps and fluent synopses of the duller stretches of the narrative make the journals accessible to a general readership. In the words of Smithsonian Institution curator emeritus Herman J. Viola, who contributes an afterword, these journals are "an American classic in the truest sense." (Dec.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A new edition using the Thwaites text of 1904-1905. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews