Reviews for This vast enterprise : a new history of Lewis & Clark
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
The famous transcontinental expedition “depended on more than Lewis and Clark.” Not that journalist/historian Fehrman neglects to provide vivid portraits of the Corps of Discovery’s co-captains. He depicts Lewis, secretary and confidant to President Thomas Jefferson, as brilliant but volatile, a superb natural historian prone to fits of anxiety and outbursts of rage at his men. Clark comes across as a shrewd judge of character and situation; the portrait of his complex and evolving relationship with his enslaved “body servant” York, who wins some measure of dignity and respect during the arduous two-year journey, is one of the book’s highlights. York is one of the several subordinate expedition members given chapters foregrounding their experiences; others include capable, virtually unflappable Sergeant John Ordway and Sacajawea, the pregnant Shoshone teenager who proved a far more useful guide and translator than her “husband,” a dissolute trader who bought her from the Hidatsa tribe that had captured and enslaved her. Fehrman also provides the perspectives of various Native American leaders, including Black Buffalo of the Lakota and Piahito of the Arikara, who both sought to establish friendly relations with the Corps despite their tribes’ misgivings. Native suspicions were well founded: One of the key concepts driving Jefferson’s commission of the expedition, Fehrman demonstrates in a sharp analytical passage, was what he called “our right of preemption,” a tangled concept that claimed to respect Natives’ “right of occupancy” but was designed to open the door for “purchases” of Indigenous land. The book’s wide-angle perspective is appropriate, since Lewis and Clark favored a more democratic decision-making style than was usual on a military expedition, and the inclusion of multiple Native points of view makes it clear how complex and fraught the team’s mission was. Fehrman’s approach gives added depth to his chronicle of the breathtaking natural wonders encountered and extraordinary hardships overcome on the Corps’ transcontinental trek. A valuable fresh look at a storied moment in American history. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Publishers Weekly
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Historian Fehrman (Author in Chief) offers a piercing revisionist account of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s 1804 expedition. Dispatched to discover the “most direct” water route across the continent, Lewis and Clark returned, two years later, without such a discovery. “But they did have an incredible tale,” Fehrman writes, “featuring themselves as courageous explorers.” Their story is full of both truth and “distortion,” according to Fehrman, who “attempts a more accurate account” of the odyssey—which he asserts is better characterized as “a federally funded military operation” chiefly motivated by “the American appetite for land.” The most painful gulf between myth and reality Fehrman exposes is that of the story of Sacajawea, the 16-year-old Shoshone girl who was six months pregnant with the child of her violent master, a French Canadian explorer, at the journey’s start. Other complications of the expedition’s legacy include Clark’s refusal, after the journey’s end, to free York, an enslaved Black man who proved to be the expedition’s most daring member; Lewis’s descent into substance abuse; and Clark’s appointment as superintendent of Indian Affairs, in which position he acquired millions of acres of Native land on behalf of the government, including, in a stark betrayal, large amounts of Lakota land despite the fact that Lakota political patronage had saved the expedition from certain destruction. Readers will learn much from this revelatory unveiling of the raw humanity behind the hagiography. (Apr.)
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
In this riveting and revitalized new history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, acclaimed historian Fehrman (Author in Chief, 2020) draws from not only the written documents of Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark to tell the story but also centers chapters around Corps of Discovery member John Ordway, Shoshone translator Sacajawea, multiple Native Americans who encountered the expedition, and, most significantly York, an enslaved Black man owned by Clark who was critical to the expedition’s success. By writing from various points of view, Fehrman broadens the long-held narrative of the expedition, enriching what we know of its successes and failures. Grounded in outstanding scholarship documented in significant bibliographic essays on his sourcing and two outstanding appendices in which he discusses how specific research was conducted, Fehrman provides a model for revisiting long-studied aspects of our nation’s past. York proves to be the moral center here, while the dichotomy between Clark’s thoughtful decisions with the rest of the corps versus his refusal to acknowledge the horrors of slavery that directly tormented a man who embodied all the honor the corps sought to achieve is nothing less than startling. Fehrman has done a great service to American history in this must-read.
