After 9 weeks of reading, I finally finished Undaunted Courage, a novel about the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Actually, it's advertised more as a biography of Meriwether Lewis than an overview of the expedition. That being said, 80% of the book is about the expedition.
I enjoyed this book very much. Stephen Ambrose has a way of writing that just holds my interest. There's nothing spectacular about it, it's just interesting. I wanted to learn more about the expedition because you always hear about Lewis and Clark, but I knew next to nothing about what they did. I was under the impression that the U.S. didn't know where the West coast was, and wanted to find out how far the continent extended. In fact, the U.S. knew exactly where the continent ended. In 1792, an American sea captain discovered the mouth of the Columbia River and recorded its location. Speculation began about an "all-water route to the Pacific". If America could ship trade goods up the Missouri River from St. Louis to the Rocky Mts, and then go down the Columbia River to the Pacific, they'd have the quickest route to the Orient, and the U.S. stood to gain a lot of wealth. No all-water route existed, but neither did any information on what was between Missouri and the Pacific. It was a scientific expedition as much as it was for trade.
There are a couple of amazing things I learned about the expedition:
- Sacagawea was married to a Frenchman who had won her in a gambling match with some indians. Not only that, but the tribe she lived with in North Dakota wasn't her tribe. She had been kidnapped by them when she was a teenager. One of the reasons she wanted to go on the expedition was because they would be traveling west to her homeland, and were hoping to meet up with her native tribe, the Shoshones.
- Sacagawea had just recently given birth to her son, Jean Baptiste, when she set out on the expedition. She carried him on her back from North Dakota to the Pacific and back over a period of two years. Most of us complain about taking our little ones on a 3 hour car ride, or having to carry them in a carrier for more than an hour. She was tough.
- When negotiating for horses with the Shoshones, Sacagewea would translate Shoshone into Hidatsa, her husband (who spoke poor Hidatsa) would translate Hidatasa into French, then another man would translate the French into English for Lewis and Clark to hear. I would imagine a lot was lost in translation.
- The expedition relied VERY heavily on the indians they encountered to help them get through the trip. It is doubtless it would have failed without them. They stayed with and traded with Indians during their first winter in North Dakota, they traded with indians for horses to get over the Rockies, and they lived and traded with indians living on the Pacific during their second winter. They would have starved or gotten lost in the mountains without them.
- Contrary to popular revisionist history, not all the indians were noble and honorable. Some were, and were invaluable to the expedition. Some were not, and attempted multiple times to steal from the travelers. In one instance, Lewis and one of his men had to kill two indians who were attempting to steal their rifles and horses, two items that were desperately needed for survival.
- In some indian tribes, the indian women were very promiscuous with the whites (some at the insistence of their husbands) and venereal disease was rampant among the men of the expedition. Lewis and Clark claim to never have partaken of the services offered. 80% of the medical complaints and ailments listed involved VDs.
- Only one person died on the expedition, and that death was unavoidable. One of the sergeants developed an appendicitis and died after his appendix ruptured.
- The expedition literally travelled into territory were no white man had. They were the first to see the Rockies, the great plains, and grizzly bears. It was the ultimate adventure and they could never know what to expect.
- It took so long for the expedition to get back to St. Louis that President Jefferson didn't know whether they were alive or dead. A rumor had floated that they had been captured by the Spanish (the Spanish and English both claimed land west of the Missouri River), and were slaves in the silver mines.
- The Spanish learned of the expedition through their spies in the U.S. government, and sent out four different armed parties to arrest them. None were successful in locating them.
- Guns were some of the most prized commodities amongst the indians. The expedition had to be on guard at all times because they could be easily overwhelmed and slaughtered for their weapons.
- Meriwether Lewis was prone to severe depression (inherited from his family), and committed suicide 3 years after the expedition.
I could go on forever, but this was a great book. If you're a history buff, I highly recommend it. My next book is a biography of Abraham Lincoln. We'll see how that one pans out. I'm determined not to try and finish any book that loses my interest. I like to finish whatever I start, but I have so little time to read that I can't waste time on boring books.
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