JediKermit's Full Review: Stephen E. Ambrose Jr. - Undaunted Courage: Meriwe...
As some of you know, right now I’m teaching 8th Grade as a student teacher. US History and German, and I’m having a great time in both classes. In both classes, however, I find that I have areas where I don’t know as much as the textbook does, so I’m doing extra research so I can be a better teacher and not be caught off guard when the students ask me a question. We just finished a chapter that included Lewis & Clark, and in the interest of having a more interesting class, I read a book recommended by my site teacher; “Undaunted Courage,” by Stephen E. Ambrose. This is the 200th Anniversary of the Corps of Discovery—the expedition led by Lewis & Clark across the continent to the Pacific Ocean and back. I’ll get to the book in a moment, but first two anecdotes:
Anecdote 1: When I was just a pup (about 4 years old) my family went on a road trip that covered much of Lewis & Clark’s journey through the Northwest. My dad (a History Professor) told us stories about Lewis & Clark, and we immediately decided that my dad was Lewis, I was Clark, and my older sister was Sacagawea, complete with a papoose holding a doll on her back. My mom didn’t get to be anyone. Curse of motherhood. So you know, we’re a geeky family.
Anecdote 2: The first day I started teaching about Lewis & Clark, one of my 8th Graders said, “We’re going to learn about Lewis Lane and Clark Kent? They’re real people?” And my eyes bugging out at the unfortunate student was my only reply. Nice one, kid.
Of course, since I’ve been in the history field for a while, I’ve heard of Ambrose before. I have friends who recommended him to me as an eminently readable and balanced author. But ingrained as history is in my blood, I haven’t read much outside of textbooks, and it turns out I’m missing out on a lot of good stuff. Reading “Undaunted Courage” has made me an Ambrose convert for life. “Ambrosian?” Anyway.
This is one of those scholarly rarities—a well researched non-fiction history book that reads with the pace and developments of a novel. Ambrose, in focusing the narrative on Meriwether Lewis, gives us a powerful and complicated hero to follow throughout his life, and shows us the bad alongside the good.
Ambrose begins with background of Meriwether’s life as the wealthy son of a Virginia planter, and his military service before his ascendancy to become Thomas Jefferson’s secretary. By the way, “Meriwether” was his mother’s maiden name—an uncommon first name for a boy then and now, and the cause of much snickering among 8th Graders. Ambrose spends a good deal of time on the relationship between Jefferson and Lewis, and despite their 30-year difference in age, they had a fast friendship. Both shared common farming backgrounds, both considered themselves renaissance men, and both were bachelors living the high life in Washington DC. Lewis lived with Jefferson, and had an inside scoop on what was happening in the world, along with what must have been incredible conversations with the great thinkers of the age from the United States and Western Europe.
Because Jefferson knew Lewis so well, and because of his prior experience in the military and as a frontiersman, Lewis became the perfect choice to lead an expedition west in search of the fabled Northwest Passage—an all-water route to the Pacific Ocean. Ambrose spends over a hundred pages preparing for the expedition—fitting, since Lewis spent more than a year in preparation himself. I found this portion of the book to be as intriguing and stirring as the expedition—I thought I’d be bored with it and skip ahead to where they finally get moving, but it was fascinating to see how a man of 1803 would prepare for such a voyage. Ambrose details all of the fields of science that Lewis tried to get an education in—and succeeded quite well: botany, zoology, astronomy, meteorology, medicine…everything he would possibly need in the next three years of his life.
Ambrose necessarily writes extensively about the relationship between Lewis and William Clark; Clark had served in the military with Lewis, and Lewis wanted him as a co-Captain of their expedition. When word came back from the Secretary of War that there could only be one commander for the party, Lewis told Clark to “keep it on the down-low,” and they told their men that Clark had the rank of Captain (he was really a Second Lieutenant) and maintained this deception for the entire course of the mission. Lewis and Clark both refer to each other throughout their journals and letters as “my dear friend…” and it’s one of the few times in history that sharing leadership in this fashion has worked. Their names are inseparable, but Ambrose does a good job of detailing their differences, so each has a distinct personality for me now.
The Corps of Discovery included around 30 Army soldiers, and they picked up some indispensable help along the way in the form of Sacagawea—that legendary Shoshone guide who had been kidnapped when a child, married to a French fur trader Charbonneau (a fairly inept guy from all reports), and now at the ripe age of 16 was birthing her baby and then strapping him to her back and going everywhere the men were going. She saved their lives several times, and I wish we had more concrete information about her. Ambrose implies in a few places that she may have fallen in love with Captain Clark, but there’s no solid evidence to support this idea. Another indispensable addition to the Corps was Drouillard, a French-Indian hunter who knew more about the area and the customs than any of the white Americans on the expedition did. Clark’s slave, York, was along for the trip, and Lewis’ newly acquired dog, Seaman. This group piled into boats and headed up the Missouri, about to see things that none of them could have imagined.
The journey itself is amazing, and Ambrose rightly gives most of the space in the book to all of the discoveries that Lewis & Clark made in their trek. They were the first white men to see and document various Indian tribes, the first to see and describe teepees, the first to cross the Rocky Mountains. (Ambrose, and I, must both point out that Native Americans had done most of these things many many times before Lewis & Clark did…) They described new species of plants and animals in their journals, and did more to open up the West than can be readily described in my silly little review. I didn’t understand any of this until I read this book. I had a vague idea of who Lewis & Clark were, but it was based on the memories of a 4-year old and the little blurbs I read about the Sacagawea Dollar coin. Ambrose makes their adventures come to life on the printed page. He has the invaluable assistance of their own meticulous journals, letters, maps and other records—but he enlivens it in a way that history authors rarely do.
After their triumphant and unexpected return to civilization, Ambrose continues to follow Lewis’ life as Governor of the Louisiana Territory—a title granted him in appreciation by President Jefferson, but an office he wasn’t able to fulfill as well as he had his mission across the West. Within a few years of returning from the expedition, Lewis had taken his own life, possibly tormented by the demons of depression and alcoholism, which Ambrose posits ran in his family, and had been placed on hold during the journey, but came back full force when he was back in “civilization.” There are many mysteries about Lewis, but Ambrose fills in the gaps with his best guesses, always letting the readers know when it is a guess instead of a hard fact.
By the end of the book, I feel like I made that trip with Lewis and Clark—moreso than by having actually traveled in their paths when I was a pup. Their highs and lows—their discoveries and travails—are the makings of a great adventure story, and Ambrose tells it well. For this 200th Anniversary of the Corps of Discovery, I heartily recommend this book by Stephen Ambrose. It’s a great read, and you’ll find yourself simultaneously wishing you could be with them on the frontier…and thanking God that you’ll never have to do it.
From the bestselling author of D-Day comes the definitive book on the most momentous expedition in American history--and one of the greatest adventure...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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