Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's remarkable chronicle of their Voyage of Discovery across the pristine, uncharted wilderness of the American West occupies a unique place in American literature. To a young republic barely a dozen years old, the
Journals offered not only a pathbreaking work of natural history, but the equivalent of a national poem: a magnificent epic for an unfinished nation.
From 1804 to 1806 Captain Lewis and Captain Clark led their intrepid expeditionary crew on an 8,000-mile trek - from the mouth of the Missouri to the Pacific outlet of the Columbia River. Paddling in canoes and riding on Indian horses, the "Corps of Discovery" confronted breathtaking mountains, white-water rapids, charging buffalo. The Journals of Lewis and Clark records a natural world never before seen by white men: Edenic landscapes, mysterious native peoples, and the first descriptions of hundreds of plants and animals (coyotes, bighorns, prairie dogs, jackrabbits, kit foxes, and Ursus horribilis, the grizzly bear).
