Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West by Stephen E. Ambrose

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Stephen Ambrose's widely acclaimed Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West is the definitive account of the most momentous pioneering effort in our nation's history — the Lewis and Clark Expedition. A distinguished historian, Ambrose has pieced together previously unknown information to provide a colorful and realistic backdrop for this journey as seen through Lewis's eyes.

On an adventure spanning three years and traversing the North American continent, Lewis and his expedition confronted incredible hardships and extraordinary revelations. With the help of his partner, Captain William Clark, Lewis made the first map of the trans-Mississippi West, documented unusual species of fauna and flora, and established America's claim to Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. The paperback edition of Undaunted Courage features two new chapters on Lewis's work as an ethnologist, focusing on his documentation of the Shoshone, Clatsop, and Chinook Indians — tribes never before seen by white settlers.

Drawing from Lewis's private journal, Ambrose follows the explorer's footsteps —from hisyouth and close relationship with Thomas Jefferson through his ventures into vast, wild, and breathtaking lands to his ultimate depression, despair, and suicide. With Ambrose's meticulous research and luminous prose, Undaunted Courage provides a broad social overview of the young American republic and keen psychological insight into an exceptional individual.

From the Publisher

In this sweeping adventure story, Stephen E. Ambrose, the bestselling author od D-Day, presents the definitive account of one of the most momentous journeys in American history. Ambrose follows the Lewis and Clark Expedition from Thomas Jefferson's hope of finding a waterway to the Pacific, through the heart-stopping moments of the actual trip, to Lewis's lonely demise on the Natchez Trace. Along the way, Ambrose shows us the American West as Lewis saw it -- wild, awsome, and pristinely beautiful. Undaunted Courage is a stunningly told action tale that will delight readers for generations.

Publishers Weekly

Ambrose has written prolifically about men who were larger than life: Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Colonel Custer. Here he takes on half of the two-headed hero of American exploration: Meriwether Lewis. Ambrose, his wife and five children have followed the footsteps of the Lewis and Clark expedition for 20 summers, in the course of which the explorer has become a friend of the Ambrose family; the author's affection shines through this narrative. Meriwether Lewis, as secretary to Thomas Jefferson and living in the White House for two years, got his education by being apprenticed to a great man. Their friendship is at the center of this account. Jefferson hand-picked Lewis for the great cross-country trek, and Lewis in turn picked William Clark to accompany him. The two men shook hands in Clarksville, Ohio, on October 14, 1803, then launched their expedition. The journals of the expedition, most written by Clark, are one of the treasures of American history. Here we learn that the vital boat is behind schedule; the boat builder is always drunk, but he's the only one available. Lewis acts as surveyor, builder and temperance officer in his effort to get his boat into the river. Alcohol continues to cause him problems both with the men of his expedition and later, after his triumphant return, in his own life, which ended in suicide at the age of 35. Without adding a great deal to existing accounts, Ambrose uses his skill with detail and atmosphere to dust off an icon and put him back on the trail west. History Book Club main selection; BOMC split selection; QPB alternate

Library Journal

It has been 30 years since the last biography of Meriwether Lewis (Richard Dillon's "Meriwether Lewis: A Biography", 1965). Ambrose (Univ. of New Orleans), best known for his histories and biographies of the 1940-90 period, uses the journals and documents that have turned up since then, as well as the traditional sources, to craft a careful and detailed biography of Lewis that will stand as the standard account for some time to come. Ambrose not only recounts the expedition Lewis led with Clark but also explains how Lewis came to head it, how he prepared for this task, and how his life unfolded after he returned to Washington and reported to Jefferson. Specialists will appreciate this biography, but general readers will also be enthralled by Ambrose's well-written account. This book belongs in all libraries. Stephen H. Peters, Northern Michigan Univ. Lib., Marquette

School Library Journal

Though principally a biography of Meriwether Lewis, this narrative also provides fascinating portraits of Thomas Jefferson and William Clark, Sacagawea, and other members of the group of explorers who journeyed from the Ohio River to the Pacific Ocean in the years 1803-1806. While scholarly and well documented, this account is at the same time a great adventure story, and Ambrose generates a sense of excitement and anticipation that mirrors, at least to some degree, the feelings Lewis and Clark must have had as they began their journey. Lewis's intense curiosity about the world around him, his training as a naturalist, and his ability to record what he saw and experienced provide YAs with a fascinating picture of the American frontier in the 19th century. The subject's strengths and weaknesses as a leader are revealed as he and his loyal followers meet every kind of challenge in their search for a navigable water route from the Mississippi to the Pacific. Ambrose incorporates recent research and new material on the expedition into this history, and includes detailed maps and examples of Lewis's journal entries. An eminently readable resource. Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA

BookList

For decades, biographer Ambrose had nursed an ambition to chronicle the "Corps of Discovery," as Lewis and Clark styled their ventures. Hitherto detained by opuses on Ike, Nixon, and D-Day, Ambrose here loosens the reins to his admiration of the duo's fearlessness and skill in braving the unknown, an exploration of which had sunk into obscurity in the 1800s but has since ascended to iconic status in American history. Framed as a biography of Lewis, this work relies heavily on both Lewis' and Clark's famed journals, backed up by the author's personal travels along the Missouri River route from St. Louis to the Pacific. A stimulating tour guide, Ambrose paces the mundane so well with the unusual that readers will be entranced. Not content as a mere recorder of deeds, Ambrose often pauses to assess the military leadership of the explorers, how they negotiated with the Mandan, Sioux, or Nez Perce, and what they reported to Jefferson. Ambrose's epic, a combination of rhapsody and reality, feels like a final glimpse at a pristine Eden before the crowd of trappers and settlers altered it forever. The book clubs are also agog over this, so prepare for many requests.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0684811073
  
• ISBN-13: 9780684811079
• Format: Hardcover, 512pp
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
• Pub. Date: February 1996
• Edition Number: 1
• Sales Rank: 13,025

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Stephen E Ambrose: It comes from Thomas Jefferson, who, in a tribute to Lewis, began "of courage undaunted," and I just turned it around.

Stephen E Ambrose: The alcohol problem is heavily documented. The bouts of depression are conjecture on my part. Although Jefferson spoke to Lewis's tendency toward melancholia.

Stephen E Ambrose: Trust in each other's abilities and character. They had no secrets from each other. They were terribly ambitious but would never have dreamed of cheating the other of credit that he was due. They never lied to one another.

Stephen E Ambrose: I think what Lewis and Clark showed was the opposite of the myth of the lone cowboy or rugged individualist. They demonstrated that it takes a team to challenge the wilderness.

Stephen E Ambrose: No. They were men of the Enlightenment. Facts were facts. And they greeted Lewis as a hero. Lewis himself apparently felt he had let the boss down.

Stephen E Ambrose: Jefferson is the only man in the country who never gave up on him. He consistently said he expected them to make it when everyone else had given up.

Stephen E Ambrose: No. She got nothing. Her husband got $500 for the use of his teepee, which she had built, and for his services as an interpreter, and she was the one who was doing the interpreting.

Stephen E Ambrose: I don't know the answer to that question. I wish I did. This is the all-time case of writer's block. He had the material in front of him and it was priceless, but he never prepared one line for the printer.

Stephen E Ambrose: I think it's because of Lewis's suicide. It's just very hard to make a national hero out of a man who committed suicide. Then there was a hundred-year delay in the publishing of the journals, so for all that time, nobody knew about Lewis's scientific work.

Stephen E Ambrose: They were various laxatives of legendary proportions and the combination was just awesome. It certainly cleaned a person out.

Stephen E Ambrose: The best hikes are on the parts of the trail that have been the least disturbed. The best of these are: Lemhi Pass on the Idaho/Montana border; along the Lolo trail in Idaho; and a particular favorite is over what is called Lewis & Clark Pass in Montana, just off Highway 200, up Alice Creek. Drive to the trailhead and you have a two-mile hike to get over the pass, and in the process you are walking in the travois path that the Nez Perce crossed for hundreds of years. Canoeing anywhere on the upper Missouri River is a treat.

Stephen E Ambrose: It was Lewis who offered a co-command. It was his idea. He didn't have to do it. It was based on what he knew about Clark, and felt for him. I also think that Lewis may have feared that Clark would not come along as his subordinate since these guys were Virginians and very rank-conscious. But that's a guess on my part. What I know is that it was Lewis's decision to offer co-command and it was Lewis who first used the words "The Lewis and Clark Expedition."

Stephen E Ambrose: One man died. Sgt. Floyd died of an appendicitis rupture. He was the first American soldier to die west of the Mississippi River.

Stephen E Ambrose: There was a lot of romanticism about the Indians at the beginning of the 19th century, based on Jean Jacques Rousseau's ideas about the Noble Savage. As to attitudes about African Americans, Jefferson and his contemporaries had to regard them as inferior or else they would have had no justification for holding them as slaves.

Stephen E Ambrose: Yes, Hans Von Luck is very much alive, living in Hamburg, Germany.

Stephen E Ambrose: They are chapters on Lewis as an ethnographer. One of them is his description of the Shoshone Indians -- their economy, dress, weapons, politics, morals. The other is on the Clatsops, covering the same subjects. I took them out of the hardcover edition because my editor said they interrupted the flow of the narrative. When the book made the bestseller list, I told my editor those chapters had to go back into the paperback.

Stephen E Ambrose: Jefferson was a great friend of Lewis's father and a contemporary and neighbor. Lewis's father was an officer in the Revolutionary War and died in the war when Lewis was 6. Jefferson had no sons. Something close to a father-son relationship developed between Jefferson and Lewis.

Stephen E Ambrose: No, I've retired. There is not a single best Lewis & Clark exhibit. But there are many outstanding museums,including: The Arch in St. Louis, The Charles Russel Museum and the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Great Falls, MT; Fort Clatsop, near Astoria, Oregon; and all of the state historical societies along the route.

Stephen E Ambrose: Well, some of these Indians had seen white men before. The principle reason why the Indians never tried to overwhelm the expedition was that they were so much better armed then the Indians were. Without doubt, many of the tribes could have overwhelmed the expedition, but without doubt they would have suffered very heavy casualties. So none of them ever tried.

Stephen E Ambrose: It wasn't that charges were brought, it was that notes that he had signed were not honored and this is a complex story, but basically what happened was there was a new administration and as far as President Madison was concerned, the Lewis & Clark Expedition: that was yesterday. So Madison refused to honor chits that Lewis had written at Jefferson's authorization.

Stephen E Ambrose: Over 200 new species of plants and animals, including the coyote, the prairie dog, the western meadowlark, the sitka spruce, and so many other plants and animals that represent the essence of the western United States. He introduced us to these plants and animals.

Stephen E Ambrose: CITIZEN SOLDIERS is a sequel to my book D-DAY. It covers the war in Northwest Europe from dawn on June 7, 1944, to the end of the war on May 7, 1945, primarily from the point of view of the junior officers and enlisted men. It will be published in October and will be in stores in November.

Stephen E Ambrose: Actually I first wanted to do Clark. But a friend and a noted scholar James Ronda was already writing a Clark biography. So, I yielded and decided to do Lewis. It's a funny thing, in a lot of ways, Clark is still to me the more appealing of the two, but Lewis was the better subject because of the two years he lived with Jefferson in the White House, which just added a depth to Lewis that Clark did not have.

Stephen E Ambrose: No, I did no interviews. It was a very different kind of research. My basic source was the journals of Lewis, Clark, Sgt. Ordway, the other sergeants, three of the enlisted men, and the Jefferson correspondence. But it's funny, I always dream about my subjects, and I feel that I know the men of the Lewis and Clark Expedition as well as I know the men of D-Day, although I never met any of the men of the Corps of Discovery and have met hundreds and hundreds of D-Day veterans. But it is all storytelling and in the journals, Lewis and Clark and their men tell their stories and I'm not there to interview them. I would like to be. There are questions I would surely have for them. But it is a privilege and so helpful to have their journals, which are damn near as good as an interview -- in some ways better. In an interview it's me who decides what's important to talk about, but I can't interject myself into the journals. So what I get as a source is what they thought was important, and it could be that they were right.

Stephen E Ambrose: To do it. To cross the continent. To be the first to do so. To bring back so much information that had immediate practical consequences. But even more, there is this about the Lewis and Clark Expedition: This is our Iliad and our Odyssey. This is our national epic. The journals of Lewis and Clark are our national poem.

Stephen E Ambrose: Get out on the trail. It is accessible. It starts in Pittsburgh and ends in Astoria. There are sights all along the way. Do a bit of it, do a long stretch, do it all. But bring the journals of Lewis and Clark along with you and make camp at their campsites and sit around the campfire and read aloud from the journals of Lewis and Clark about what they did at that place 197 years ago. I guarantee you, it is just magical.

Reading Group Guide

0. In Undaunted Courage, Ambrose gives us anunbiased account of Meriwether Lewis. He presents Lewis as both a hero and a flawed man. How does Ambrose reconcile these two sides of Lewis's character?

1. Discuss the ways in which Undaunted Courage shares a reading experience with that of a novel. Yet how is reading history unlike reading fiction?

2. Compare and contrast the social conventions of Lewis's time with those of our own—in particular the social standing and treatment of women, blacks, and Indians. How much did the harsh physical environment that people endured affect the attitudes of the time in the arena of racial and sexual equality?

3. What small but significant role did women play in the story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition?

4. Discuss the way in which Ambrose clearly depicts the difficulty and confusion that faced both the Americans and the Indians when their paths began to cross. They were different peoples with different ways, and their inability to fully comprehend the other was mutual. Does Ambrose give us a sense of the inevitability of American expansion at the expense of the Indians, or does he suggest and/or imply that there might have been another way?

5. Ambrose brings to life the diversity of Indians in America in the early 1800s. Now, however, there is little trace of the many tribes that Ambrose described. We often consider what the Indians themselves lost, but what does the world lose when a whole culture of people becomes extinct? Do you think the Indians gained anything from theirassimilation?

6. At the end of the book, Lewis commits suicide. What does Lewis's suicide leave the living—both in his own time and ours? Discuss the apparent irony of a man who has endured the hardships, terrors, and rigors of a cross-country expedition, returning a hero, only to commit suicide later?

7. There were many firsts in Undaunted Courage. Lewis was the first white man to explore territory west of the Rockies. York was the first black man these Indians had ever seen. It was the firstscientific discovery of many of the floral and faunaspecimens Lewis came across during the expedition. What are some other firsts this book reveals?

8. Discuss the importance of Lewis's expedition. Speculate as to why the story of Lewis and Clark has previously been treated rather superficially? Has Undaunted Courage altered your perspective on American history? Why was Ambrose so tempted to go back and reexamine Meriwether Lewis?

9. Beyond its historical significance, Undaunted Courage is a story of a great and excitingadventure. Discuss the various hardships that theexpedition endured, as well as the truly wondrous and spectacular sights they encountered. Speculate as to what would be encountered now if one were to follow the same voyage as Lewis and Clark.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

Dee Brown

History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson

Henry Adams

The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Bernard DeVoto, ed.

Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition

'Donald Jackson, ed.

Lewis & Clark: Partners in Discovery

John Bakeless

Lewis and Clark Among the Indians

James P. Ronda

Northwest Passage: The Great Columbia River

William Dietrich

The Rediscovery of North America

Barry Lopez

Sacajawea of the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Ella Clark and Margot Edmonds

Wilderness at Dawn

Ted Morgan

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Youth 1774-1792

From the west-facing window of the room in which Meriwether Lewis was born on August 18, 1774, one could look out at Rockfish Gap, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, an opening to the West that invited exploration. The Virginia Piedmont of 1774 was not the frontier -- that had extended beyond the Allegheny chain of mountains, and a cultured plantation life was nearly a generation old -- but it wasn't far removed. Traces of the old buffalo trail that led up Rockfish River to the Gap still remained. Deer were exceedingly plentiful, black bear common. An exterminating war was being waged against wolves. Beaver were on every stream. Flocks of turkeys thronged the woods. In the fall and spring, ducks and geese darkened the rivers.

Lewis was born in a place where the West invited exploration but the East could provide education and knowledge, where the hunting was magnificent but plantation society provided refinement and enlightenment, where he could learn wilderness skills while sharpening his wits about such matters as surveying, politics, natural history, and geography.

The West was very much on Virginians' minds in 1774, even though the big news that year was the Boston Tea Party, the introduction of resolutions in the House of Burgesses in support of Massachusetts, the dissolution of the Burgesses by the Royal Governor Lord Dunmore, and a subsequent meeting at Raleigh Tavern of the dissolved Burgesses, whose Committee of Correspondence sent out letters calling for a general congress of the American colonies. In September, the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, and revolution was under way.

LordDunmore was a villain in the eyes of the revolutionaries. He was eventually forced to flee Virginia and take up residence on a British warship. But in January 1774, he had done Virginia a big favor by organizing an offensive into the Ohio country by Virginia militia. The Virginians goaded Shawnee, Ottawa, and other tribes into what became Lord Dunmore's War, which ended with the Indians defeated. They ceded hunting rights in Kentucky to the Virginians and agreed to unhindered access to and navigation on the Ohio River. Within six months, the Transylvania Company sent out Daniel Boone to blaze a trail through the Cumberland Gap to the bluegrass country of Kentucky.

Meanwhile, the British government, in the Quebec Act of 1774, moved to stem the flow of Virginians across the mountains, by extending the boundary of Canada south to the Ohio River. This cut off Virginia's western claims, threatened to spoil the hopes and schemes of innumerable land speculators, including George Washington, and established a highly centralized crown-controlled government with special privileges for the Catholic Church, provoking fear that French Canadians, rather than Protestant Virginians, would rule in the Ohio Valley. This was one of the so-called Intolerable Acts that spurred the revolution.

Meriwether Lewis was born on the eve of revolution into a world of conflict between Americans and the British government for control of the trans-Appalachian West in a colony whose western ambitions were limitless, a colony that was leading the surge of Americans over the mountains, and in a county that was a nursery of explorers.

His family had been a part of the western movement from the beginning. Thomas Jefferson described Lewis's forebears as "one of the distinguished families" of Virginia, and among the earliest. The first Lewis to come to America had been Robert, a Welshman and an officer in the British army. The family coat of arms was "Omne Solum Forti Patria Est," or "All Earth Is to a Brave Man His Country." (An alternate translation is "Everything the Brave Man Does Is for His Country.") Robert arrived in 1635 with a grant from the king for 33,333 1/3 acres of Virginia land. He had numerous progeny, including Colonel Robert Lewis, who was wonderfully successful on the Virginia frontier of the eighteenth century, in Albemarle County. On his death, Colonel Lewis was wealthy enough to leave all nine of his children with substantial plantations. His fifth son, William, inherited 1,896 acres, and slaves, and a house, Locust Hill, a rather rustic log home, but very comfortable and filled with things of value, including much table silver. It was just seven miles west of Charlottesville, within sight of Monticello.

One of the Lewis men, an uncle of Meriwether Lewis's father, was a member of the king's council; another, Fielding Lewis, married a sister of George Washington. Still another relative, Thomas Lewis, accompanied Jefferson's father, Peter, on an expedition in 1746 into the Northern Neck, between the Potomac and the Rappahannock. Thomas was the first Lewis to keep a journal of exploration. He had a gift for vivid descriptions, of horses "tumbling over Rocks and precipices," of cold, rain, and near-starvation. He wrote of exultation over killing "one old Bair & three Cubs." He described a mountain area where they were so "often in the outmoust Danger this tirable place was Calld Purgatory." One river was so treacherous they named it Styx, "from the Dismal appearance of the place Being Sufficen to Strick terror in any human Creature."

In 1769, William Lewis, then thirty-one years old, married his cousin, twenty-two-year-old Lucy Meriwether. The Meriwether family was also Welsh and also land-rich -- by 1730, the family held a tract near Charlottesville of 17,952 acres. The coat of arms was "Vi et Consilio," or "Force and Counsel." George R. Gilmer, later a governor of Georgia, wrote of the family, "None ever looked at or talked with a Meriwether but he heard something which made him look or listen again." Jefferson said of Colonel Nicholas Meriwether, Lucy's father, "He was the most sensible man I ever knew." He had served as commander of a Virginia regiment in Braddock's disastrous campaign of 1755.

The Lewis and Meriwether families had long been close-knit and interrelated. Indeed, there were eleven marriages joining Lewises and Meriwethers between 1725 and 1774. Nicholas Meriwether II, 1667-1744, was the great-grandfather of Lucy Meriwether and the grandfather of William Lewis. The marriage of Lucy and William combined two bloodlines of unusual strength -- and some weaknesses. According to Jefferson, the family was "subject to hypocondriac affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family."

Despite William Lewis's tendency toward hypochondria -- or what Jefferson at other times called melancholy and would later be called depression -- Jefferson described his neighbor and friend as a man of "good sense, integrity, bravery, enterprize & remarkable bodily powers."

A year after their marriage, William and Lucy Lewis had their first child, a daughter they named Jane. Meriwether Lewis was born in 1774. Three years later, a second son, Reuben, was born.

In 1775, war broke out. Jefferson noted that, when it came, William Lewis was "happily situated at home with a wife and young family, & a fortune placed him at ease." Nevertheless, "he left all to aid in the liberation of his country from foreign usurpations." Like General Washington, he served without pay; going Washington one better, he bore his own expenses, as his patriotic contribution to his country.

Meriwether Lewis scarcely knew his father, for Lieutenant Lewis was away making war for most of the first five years of his son's life. He served as commander of one of the first regiments raised in Virginia, enlisting in July 1775. By September, he was a first lieutenant in the Albemarle County militia. When the unit integrated with the Continental Line, he became a lieutenant in the regulars.

In November 1779, Lieutenant Lewis spent a short leave with his family at Cloverfields, a Meriwether family plantation where his wife, Lucy, had grown up. He said his goodbyes, swung onto his horse, and rode to the Secretary's Ford of the Rivanna River, swollen in flood. Attempting to cross, his horse was swept away and drowned. Lewis managed to swim ashore and hiked back to Cloverfields, drenched. Pneumonia set in, and in two days he was dead.

People in the late eighteenth century were helpless in matters of health. They lived in constant dread of sudden death from disease, plague, epidemic, pneumonia, or accident. Their letters always begin and usually end with assurances of the good health of the letter writer and a query about the health of the recipient. Painful as the death of an honored and admired father was to a son, it was a commonplace experience. What effect it may have had on Meriwether cannot be known. In any case, he was quickly swept up into his extended family.

Nicholas Lewis, William Lewis's older brother, became Meriwether's guardian. He was a heroic figure himself. He had commanded a regiment of militia in an expedition in 1776 against the Cherokee Indians, who had been stirred up and supported by the British. Jefferson paid tribute to his bravery and said that Nicholas Lewis "was endeared to all who knew him by his inflexible probity, courteous disposition, benevolent heart, & engaging modesty & manners. He was the umpire of all the private differences of his county, selected always by both parties."

Less than six months after his father's death, another man came into Meriwether's life. On May 13, 1780, his mother married Captain John Marks. Virginia widows in those days commonly remarried as soon as possible, and family tradition has it that in marrying Captain Marks she was following the advice of her first husband, given as he lay dying.

Lucy Meriwether Lewis Marks was a remarkable woman. She bore five children, two by John Marks (John Hastings, born 1785, and Mary Garland, born 1788). She had a strong constitution; she buried two husbands and lived to be almost eighty-six years old. Jefferson called her a "tender" mother. She was slim, fragile in appearance, with light brown hair and hazel-blue eyes, "a refined face and a masterful eye." A family history described her: "Her position as a head of a large family connection combined with the spartan ideas in those stirring times of discipline, developed in her a good deal of the autocrat. Yet she...had much sweetness of character, was a devoted Christian and full of sympathy for all sickness and trouble."

Known far and wide for her medicinal remedies, she grew a special crop of herbs which she dispensed to her children, her slaves, and her neighbors. She also knew the medicinal properties of wild plants. She took care to teach her son all that she had learned about herbal remedies.

Stem and spartan though she may have been, her son loved her dearly. Although he was scarcely ever with her from age fourteen on, he was a faithful and considerate correspondent.

On March 31, 1805, he wrote her from "Fort Mandan, 1609 miles above the entrance of the Missouri," to relate to her some of his various adventures in ascending the river so far and to inform her that he was about to set off into the unknown. "I feel the most perfect confidence that we shall reach the Pacific Ocean this summer." It was going to be easy, he wrote, because everyone in the party was in good health and "excellent sperits, are attached to the enterprise and anxious to proceed."

Still, mothers will worry, so he added: "You may expect me in Albemarle [County, Virginia] about the last of next September twelve months. I request that you will give yourself no uneasiness with rispect to my fate, for I assure you that I feel myself perfectly as safe as I should do in Albemarle; and the only difference between 3 or 4 thousands miles and 130, is that I can not have the pleasure of seeing you as often as I did while [I lived] at Washington."

The woman who inspired such concern and love was also capable of leading an expedition of her own into the wilderness, of running a plantation, of supervising at hog-killing time. When some drunken British officers burst into Locust Hill one evening, she grabbed her rifle down from its peg and drove them off. Another time, a hunting party from Locust Hill and neighboring plantations got separated from the dogs. The hounds brought a buck to bay on the lawn at Locust Hill. Lucy grabbed her rifle, rushed out, and shot it. When the crestfallen hunters returned, empty-handed, the buck's hindquarters were already roasting over the fire.

She had a county-wide reputation for her culinary talents. Jefferson was especially fond of her cured Virginia hams. His overseer recorded, "every year I used to get a few for his special use." She had a small library, which she treasured. She valued it so much that she was careful to leave directions in her will for its equal division among her surviving children.

"Her person was perfect," said one of her male acquaintances, "and her activity beyond her sex." Even as an old lady, "Grandma Marks" was seen riding about Albemarle on horseback to attend the sick. According to a contemporary, in her mid-seventies she retained "refined features, a fragile figure, and a masterful eye."

Georgia Governor George Gilmer described her: "She was sincere, truthful, industrious, and kind without limit." He added that "Meriwether Lewis inherited the energy, courage, activity, and good understanding of his admirable mother."

As a child, Meriwether absorbed a strong anti-British sentiment. This came naturally to any son of a patriot growing up during the war; it was reinforced by seeing a British raiding party led by Colonel Banastre Tarleton sweep through Albemarle in 1781. Jefferson recorded: "He destroyed all my growing crops of corn and tobacco, he burned all my barns containing the same articles of last year, having first taken what he wanted; he used, as was to be expected, all my stocks of cattle, sheep and hogs for the sustenance of his army, and carried off all the horses capable of service; of those too young for service he cut the throats, and he burned all the fences on the plantation, so as to leave it an absolute waste. He carried off also about 30 slaves."

Tarleton also ordered all the county court records burned. This wanton act was roundly and rightly condemned by Reverend Edgar Woods in his 1932 history of Albemarle County: "It is hard to conceive any conduct in an army more outrageous, more opposed to the true spirit of civilization, and withal more useless in a military point of view, than the destruction of public archives."

When Meriwether was eight or nine years old, his stepfather, Captain Marks, migrated with a number of Virginians to a colony being developed by General John Matthews on the Broad River in northeastern Georgia. Few details of this trek into the wilderness survive, but it is easy enough to imagine a wide-eyed boy on the march with horses, cattle, oxen, pigs, dogs, wagons, slaves, other children, adults -- making camp every night -- hunting for deer, turkey, and possum; fishing in the streams running across the route of march; watching and perhaps helping with the cooking; packing up each morning and striking out again; crossing through the Carolinas along the eastern edge of the mountains; getting a sense of the vastness of the country, and growing comfortable with life in the wilderness.

Meriwether lived in Georgia for three, perhaps four years. It was frontier country, and he learned frontier skills. He gloried in the experience. Jefferson later wrote that he "was remarkable even in infancy for enterprize, boldness & discretion. When only 8 years of age, he habitually went out in the dead of night alone with his dogs, into the forest to hunt the raccoon & opossum.... In this exercise no season or circumstance could obstruct his purpose, plunging thro' the winter's snows and frozen streams in pursuit of his object."

At about this time, according to family legend, eight- or nine-year-old Meriwether was crossing a field with some friends, returning from a hunt. A vicious bull rushed him. His companions watched breathless as he calmly raised his gun and shot the bull dead.

Another favorite family story about Meriwether at a young age concerned an Indian scare. When one of the cabins was attacked, the transplanted Virginians gathered at another for defense. Then they decided they were too few to defend it from a determined attack and fled for concealment to the forest. As dusk came on, one hungry, not very bright refugee started a fire to cook a meal. The fire attracted the Indians. A shot rang out. The women shouted alarms, men rushed for their rifles, something close to panic set in. In the general confusion and uproar, only ten-year-old Meriwether had sufficient presence of mind to throw a bucket of water over the fire to douse it, to prevent the Indians from seeing the whites silhouetted against the light of the fire. A family friend commented, "He acquired in youth hardy habits and a firm constitution. He possessed in the highest degree self-possession in danger."

Curious and inquisitive as well as coolheaded and courageous, he delighted his mother by asking questions about her herbs and about wild plants that she used as nostrums. He wanted to know the names and characteristics of the trees, bushes, shrubs, and grasses; of the animals, the fish, the birds, and the insects. He wanted to know the why as well as the way of things. He learned to read and write, and something of the natural world, from one of the adults in the Georgia community. An anecdote survived: when told that, despite what he saw, the sun did not revolve around the earth, Meriwether jumped as high into the air as he could, then asked his teacher, "If the earth turns, why did I come down in the same place?"

He wanted more knowledge. He could not get it in Georgia. And he was a youngster of considerable substance and responsibility, for under Virginia's laws of primogeniture he had inherited his father's estate. This included a plantation of nearly 2,000 acres, 520 pounds in cash, 24 slaves, and 147 gallons of whiskey. Though it was being managed by Nicholas Meriwether, it would soon be Meriwether's to run. His mother agreed that he should return to Virginia, at about age thirteen, to obtain a formal education and prepare himself for his management responsibilities.

There were no public schools in eighteenth-century Virginia. Planters' sons got their education by boarding with teachers, almost always preachers or parsons, who would instruct them in Latin, mathematics, natural science, and English grammar. Jefferson biographer Dumas Malone notes that "the sons of the greater landowners had all the advantages and disadvantages that go with private instruction. The quality of this instruction was often high, but it naturally varied with the tutors who were available." These men were all overworked, their "schools" too crowded. Finding a place was difficult. Even with his guardian, Nicholas Lewis, and his father's friend Thomas Jefferson to help him, it took Meriwether some months, perhaps as long as a year, to become a formal student.

His first extant letter, dated May 12, 1787, he addressed to his "Moste loving Mother." Apparently he had not yet found a place. He began by complaining that he had no letter from his mother, then confessed: "What Language can express the Anxiety I feel to be with you when I sit down to write but as it is now a thing impossible I shall quit the Subject, and say nothing more about it." He was glad to report that all the Lewises and Meriwethers in Albemarle were in good health. He passed on a rumor, that "Cousin Thomas Meriwether is marryed," and asked if she knew anything about it. He concluded, "I live in Hopes of recieving a letter from you by which as the only Means I may be informed of your Helth and Welfair. I enjoy my Health at present which I hope is your situation. I am your ever loving Sone."

Meriwether's next surviving letter to his mother, undated, written from Cloverfields, related family news and the complications he was encountering in trying to get into school. His brother-in-law, Edmund Anderson, who had married his older sister, Jane, in 1785, when she was fifteen, was preparing to go into business in Richmond and "would have been there before this, had not the small-pox broke out in that City which rages with great violence and until this Disorder can be extirpated, they will continue where they are" -- i.e., in Hanover. "Sister [Jane] and Children are well; the children have grown very much, but I see no appearance of another."

Parson Matthew Maury, son of one of Thomas Jefferson's teachers, was the man Meriwether wanted to study with, but so far he had not been able to get started. "I hope Reubin [his younger brother, still in Georgia] is at school tho I am not yet ingaged in that persuit myself," he wrote. "Robert Lewis and myself applyed to Mr. Maury soon after my return [to Albemarle] who informed us that he could not take us by any means till next Spring and as what we would wish to learn would interfer so much with his Latin business that he had rather not take us at all."

Meriwether had therefore applied to Reverend James Waddell, but success was uncertain. "If we do not go to Mr. Waddle we shall certainly go to one Mr. Williamson a young Scochman who teaches in about ten Miles of this Place and who was earnestly recommended both by Mr. Maury and Waddle. In this situation I have now been waiting for this three Weaks past."

In the fall of 1787, Reuben came to Cloverfields for a visit. As he was leaving, he asked Meriwether to come to Georgia the following fall. On March 7, 1788, Meriwether wrote Reuben to say he could not make the visit, "by Reason of my being at School. I set in with Parson Maury, soon afer you left me, with whom I continued till Christmas, and then I fully expected to have stayed six Months longer at least, if not another Year; but couzen William D. Meriwether then said he did not think it worth while, as I had got well acquainted with the English Grammer, and mite learn the Georgraphy at Home. Upon this, I concluded to stay at Uncle Peachy Gilmers, and go to school to a Master in the Neighbourhood in Order to get acquainted with Figurs, where I am now stationed."

He hated not being able to visit Georgia: "I should like very much to have some of your Sport, fishing, and hunting," he told Reuben. But he was determined to improve himself and said he must "be doing Something that will no Doubt be more to my advantag hereafter" -- that is, getting an education.

In June 1788, Meriwether's guardian paid seven pounds for room, board, and tuition. In January 1789, he paid thirteen pounds and in July another two pounds. That summer Meriwether was able to go to Georgia for a visit.

In the fall, he studied under Dr. Charles Everitt. His schoolmate and cousin Peachy Gilmer, five years younger than Meriwether, hated Dr. Everitt. According to Gilmer, he was "afflicted with very bad health, of an atrabilious and melancholy temperament: peevish, capricious, and every way disagreeable...He invented cruel punishments for the scholars....His method of teaching was as bad as anything could be. He was impatient of interruption. We seldom applied for assistance, said our lessons badly, made no proficiency, and acquired negligent and bad habits."

Young Gilmer described Meriwether as "always remarkable for persevereance, which in the early period of his life seemed nothing more than obstinacy in pursuing the trifles that employ that age; a martial temper; great steadiness of purpose, self-possession, and undaunted courage. His person was stiff and without grace, bow-legged, awkward, formal, and almost without flexibility. His face was comely and by many considered handsome."

Meriwether loved to "ramble," as Jefferson put it. Into the mountains, or to visit Jane and other relatives, or down to Georgia, a trip he made at least once on his own. Later in his life he met his mother's half-joking complaints about his roving propensities with the laughing response that he had inherited this disposition from her.

Albemarle County records show that Meriwether's guardian was meticulous. His accounts include the purchase of "1 pr Knee Buckls," "10 Vest buttons," "2 hanks Silk," "1 Pin Kniff." There are numerous entries for "poct Money." One arresting entry is for "I quart Whiskey for Negroe Wench." Another covers "1 Quart Rum & 1 lb Sugar."

Meriwether transferred in 1790 to Reverend James Waddell, who was a great contrast to the ill-tempered Everitt. Meriwether called Waddell "a very polite scholar." He wrote his mother in August, "I expect to continue [here] for eighteen months or two years. Every civility is here paid to me and leaves me without any reason to regret the loss of a home of nearer connection. As soon as I complete my education, you shall certainly see me."

In October 1791, he wrote his mother to report that he had received a letter from Uncle Thomas Gilmer (Peachy's father) "which gives moste agreeable information of your welfare and my brothers assiduity and attention at School." He said he had just returned from a visit with his sister, Jane, who had shown him a letter their mother had written that summer. From it he learned that Captain Marks had died, leaving his mother once again a widow, with Reuben plus the two younger children to care for. Mrs. Marks wanted Meriwether to come to Georgia to organize a move back to Virginia for her and her dependents.

"I will with a great deal of cheerfullness do it," Meriwether wrote his mother, "but it will be out of my power soon[er] than eighteen Months or two years." He promised her she would always have a home at Locust Hill and "you may relie on my fidelity to render your situation as comfortable as it is in my power."

In April 1792, Meriwether wrote his mother that he had learned from her letters to Jane that she was anxious to return to Virginia that spring. "This together with my sisters impatience to see you has induced me to quit school and prepare for setting out immediately." He had employed an artisan at Monticello to make a carriage for the trip; it would be ready by May 1. Meriwether needed to purchase horses and collect some money. "If I can not collect a sufficiency from the lands that are now due I shall dispose of my tobacco for cash in order to be detained as little time as possible. I shall set out about the 15th of May."

He did as promised, and by fall he had gone to Georgia, organized the move of his mother and her children and the slaves, animals, and equipment, and brought the whole back to Virginia, where he set up at Locust Hill and began his life as a planter and head of household.

Thus ended Meriwether Lewis's scholarly career. What had he learned? Not enough Latin to use the language in his extensive later writings, nor any other foreign language. Not enough orthography ever to be comfortable or proficient with the spelling of English words -- but, then, he lived in an age of freedom of spelling, a time when even so well read and learned a man as Jefferson had trouble maintaining consistency in his spelling. He did develop a strong, sprightly, and flowing writing style.

What he read can only be inferred from references in his writings, which indicate he read a little ancient history, some Milton and Shakespeare, and a smattering of recent British history. He was an avid reader of journals of exploration, especially those about the adventures of Captain James Cook.

He got his figures down pretty well, along with a solid base in botany and natural history. He picked up all he could about geography. He had achieved the educational level of the well-rounded Virginian, who was somewhat familiar with the classics, reasonably current with philosophy. Only in the field of plantation affairs was he expected to be a specialist, and to that end Lewis now set out.

He may have done so with some regret, for he valued education highly. All his life he kept after Reuben and his half-brother, John Marks, and half-sister, Mary Marks, to make every effort and meet every expense to further their educations. The last paragraph of his March 31, 1805, letter to his mother, written from Fort Mandan, far up the Missouri River, reads: "I must request of you before I conclude this letter, to send John Markes to the College at Williamsburgh, as soon as it shall be thought that his education has been sufficiently advanced to fit him for that ceminary; for you may rest assured that as you reguard his future prosperity you had better make any sacrefice of his property than suffer his education to be neglected or remain incomple[te]."

Perhaps as an eighteen-year-old he wished to continue his education, to attend the "ceminary" at William and Mary, but it could not be. He was responsible for his mother, his brother, John and Mary Marks, the slaves at Locust Hill, his inheritance. Instead of book learning at William and Mary, he was destined to learn from the school of the plantation. At age eighteen, he was the head of a small community of about two dozen slaves and nearly two thousand acres of land. His lessons from now on would be in management, in soils, crops, distillery, carpentry, blacksmithing, shoemaking, weaving, coopering, timbering, in killing, dressing, and skinning cattle and sheep, preserving vegetables and meats, repairing plows, harrows, saws, and rifles, caring for horses and dogs, treating the sick, and the myriad of other tasks that went into running a plantation.

At eighteen years, he was on his own. He had traveled extensively across the southern part of the United States. He had shown himself to be a self-reliant, self-contained, self-confident teen-ager, and was a young man who took great pride in his "persevereance and steadiness of purpose," as Peachy Gilmer had put it. His health was excellent, his physical powers were outstanding, he was sensitive and caring about his mother and his family. He was started.

Copyright © 1996 by Ambrose-Tubbs, Inc.

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter 1

Youth 1774-1792

From the west-facing window of the room in which Meriwether Lewis was born on August 18, 1774, one could look out at Rockfish Gap, in the Blue Ridge Mountains, an opening to the West that invited exploration. The Virginia Piedmont of 1774 was not the frontier -- that had extended beyond the Allegheny chain of mountains, and a cultured plantation life was nearly a generation old -- but it wasn't far removed. Traces of the old buffalo trail that led up Rockfish River to the Gap still remained. Deer were exceedingly plentiful, black bear common. An exterminating war was being waged against wolves. Beaver were on every stream. Flocks of turkeys thronged the woods. In the fall and spring, ducks and geese darkened the rivers.

Lewis was born in a place where the West invited exploration but the East could provide education and knowledge, where the hunting was magnificent but plantation society provided refinement and enlightenment, where he could learn wilderness skills while sharpening his wits about such matters as surveying, politics, natural history, and geography.

The West was very much on Virginians' minds in 1774, even though the big news that year was the Boston Tea Party, the introduction of resolutions in the House of Burgesses in support of Massachusetts, the dissolution of the Burgesses by the Royal Governor Lord Dunmore, and a subsequent meeting at Raleigh Tavern of the dissolved Burgesses, whose Committee of Correspondence sent out letters calling for a general congress of the American colonies. In September, the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, and revolution was under way.

Lord Dunmorewas a villain in the eyes of the revolutionaries. He was eventually forced to flee Virginia and take up residence on a British warship. But in January 1774, he had done Virginia a big favor by organizing an offensive into the Ohio country by Virginia militia. The Virginians goaded Shawnee, Ottawa, and other tribes into what became Lord Dunmore's War, which ended with the Indians defeated. They ceded hunting rights in Kentucky to the Virginians and agreed to unhindered access to and navigation on the Ohio River. Within six months, the Transylvania Company sent out Daniel Boone to blaze a trail through the Cumberland Gap to the bluegrass country of Kentucky.

Meanwhile, the British government, in the Quebec Act of 1774, moved to stem the flow of Virginians across the mountains, by extending the boundary of Canada south to the Ohio River. This cut off Virginia's western claims, threatened to spoil the hopes and schemes of innumerable land speculators, including George Washington, and established a highly centralized crown-controlled government with special privileges for the Catholic Church, provoking fear that French Canadians, rather than Protestant Virginians, would rule in the Ohio Valley. This was one of the so-called Intolerable Acts that spurred the revolution.

Meriwether Lewis was born on the eve of revolution into a world of conflict between Americans and the British government for control of the trans-Appalachian West in a colony whose western ambitions were limitless, a colony that was leading the surge of Americans over the mountains, and in a county that was a nursery of explorers.

His family had been a part of the western movement from the beginning. Thomas Jefferson described Lewis's forebears as "one of the distinguished families" of Virginia, and among the earliest. The first Lewis to come to America had been Robert, a Welshman and an officer in the British army. The family coat of arms was "Omne Solum Forti Patria Est," or "All Earth Is to a Brave Man His Country." (An alternate translation is "Everything the Brave Man Does Is for His Country.") Robert arrived in 1635 with a grant from the king for 33,333 1/3 acres of Virginia land. He had numerous progeny, including Colonel Robert Lewis, who was wonderfully successful on the Virginia frontier of the eighteenth century, in Albemarle County. On his death, Colonel Lewis was wealthy enough to leave all nine of his children with substantial plantations. His fifth son, William, inherited 1,896 acres, and slaves, and a house, Locust Hill, a rather rustic log home, but very comfortable and filled with things of value, including much table silver. It was just seven miles west of Charlottesville, within sight of Monticello.

One of the Lewis men, an uncle of Meriwether Lewis's father, was a member of the king's council; another, Fielding Lewis, married a sister of George Washington. Still another relative, Thomas Lewis, accompanied Jefferson's father, Peter, on an expedition in 1746 into the Northern Neck, between the Potomac and the Rappahannock. Thomas was the first Lewis to keep a journal of exploration. He had a gift for vivid descriptions, of horses "tumbling over Rocks and precipices," of cold, rain, and near-starvation. He wrote of exultation over killing "one old Bair & three Cubs." He described a mountain area where they were so "often in the outmoust Danger this tirable place was Calld Purgatory." One river was so treacherous they named it Styx, "from the Dismal appearance of the place Being Sufficen to Strick terror in any human Creature."

In 1769, William Lewis, then thirty-one years old, married his cousin, twenty-two-year-old Lucy Meriwether. The Meriwether family was also Welsh and also land-rich -- by 1730, the family held a tract near Charlottesville of 17,952 acres. The coat of arms was "Vi et Consilio," or "Force and Counsel." George R. Gilmer, later a governor of Georgia, wrote of the family, "None ever looked at or talked with a Meriwether but he heard something which made him look or listen again." Jefferson said of Colonel Nicholas Meriwether, Lucy's father, "He was the most sensible man I ever knew." He had served as commander of a Virginia regiment in Braddock's disastrous campaign of 1755.

The Lewis and Meriwether families had long been close-knit and interrelated. Indeed, there were eleven marriages joining Lewises and Meriwethers between 1725 and 1774. Nicholas Meriwether II, 1667-1744, was the great-grandfather of Lucy Meriwether and the grandfather of William Lewis. The marriage of Lucy and William combined two bloodlines of unusual strength -- and some weaknesses. According to Jefferson, the family was "subject to hypocondriac affections. It was a constitutional disposition in all the nearer branches of the family."

Despite William Lewis's tendency toward hypochondria -- or what Jefferson at other times called melancholy and would later be called depression -- Jefferson described his neighbor and friend as a man of "good sense, integrity, bravery, enterprize & remarkable bodily powers."

A year after their marriage, William and Lucy Lewis had their first child, a daughter they named Jane. Meriwether Lewis was born in 1774. Three years later, a second son, Reuben, was born.

In 1775, war broke out. Jefferson noted that, when it came, William Lewis was "happily situated at home with a wife and young family, & a fortune placed him at ease." Nevertheless, "he left all to aid in the liberation of his country from foreign usurpations." Like General Washington, he served without pay; going Washington one better, he bore his own expenses, as his patriotic contribution to his country.

Meriwether Lewis scarcely knew his father, for Lieutenant Lewis was away making war for most of the first five years of his son's life. He served as commander of one of the first regiments raised in Virginia, enlisting in July 1775. By September, he was a first lieutenant in the Albemarle County militia. When the unit integrated with the Continental Line, he became a lieutenant in the regulars.

In November 1779, Lieutenant Lewis spent a short leave with his family at Cloverfields, a Meriwether family plantation where his wife, Lucy, had grown