Undaunted Courage

I love books, both fictional and non-fictional, that help me relive history. Stephen E. Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage did just that.

I got to know the men behind the famous names of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark! I crossed the mountains and rode on the keelboat with them to explore new lands. I saw the buffalo and bears with them. I encountered the Native Americans with them.

I did not know before reading this book how many different Native American groups there were in America! It was so interesting to learn about their different beliefs and ways of living.

I also… show more.

A classic American story following Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery from Virginia to the Pacific Coast and back again in the very early 1800s.

This book needs to be read not only by those interested in history but by all who would understand the origins of our nation. The complex personalities of Lewis, Clark, and Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned the journey come through in living color. 

This is an incredibly insightful book about the travails and successes of the Lewis and Clark expedition pioneering the opening of the Pacific Northwest. Ambrose does a masterful job analyzing the tremendous challenges Meriwether Lewis and William Clark encountered during their mission and what it took to persevere. This book is a great study on successful small-unit leadership, and Ambrose could not have used a better example of what right looks like than this study of what Lewis and Clark did to successfully accomplish their mission.

Most obviously, this is a riveting account of the Lewis and Clark Expedition to explore the American West all the way to the Pacific, and I would recommend the book just for that. But to my own surprise, it also becomes a disquieting psychological study of Lewis, the alpha to Clark’s beta. Their triumph turns Lewis into a national celebrity. But somehow this fame ruins the young man. Unlike Clark, he can’t maintain fulfilling relationships or find a new purpose in life. He drinks himself into oblivion, until he kills himself in his despair, in one of the messiest suicides… show more.

Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage is the only non-fiction book on my list, but it is as readable as a novel, and it is foundational for anyone interested in the history of the American West. In 2014, HBO announced plans to produce a six-part mini-series with Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt, and Edward Norton as executive producers. I was really looking forward to that; however, filming was halted in 2016.  

Undaunted Courage is a biography of President Thomas Jefferson’s personal secretary, Meriwether Lewis. In 1803, Jefferson asks Lewis to lead an expedition up the Missouri River to the Rockies, through the mountains, down… show more.

This book, by historian Stephen Ambrose—a key advisor for Ken Burns’ 1997 documentary on Lewis and Clark—is the most popular book about the expedition ever published and the perfect companion to Moulton’s abridged volume of the Lewis and Clark journals (number 3 above). Undaunted Courage is both a biography of Lewis—who died by suicide three years after the Expedition—and a history of the expedition. If you don’t know much about Lewis and Clark, don’t worry—this book is the perfect place for the general reader to start. Ambrose, who died in 2002, called his writing and research a labor of love,… show more.

Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discovery set off into the wilderness with an astonishing mission: To explore and map the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase and to traverse the continent to the Pacific Ocean. Ambrose weaves this story from the journals Lewis, Clark, and others in the Corps left behind, documenting the boldness of the endeavor (hunts and navigation and encounters with grizzlies), the human interactions (with Native Americans and within the Corps itself), and the quiet beauty of the American West, its flora and fauna, and its dynamic waterways.