Here are 100 books that William Clark and the Shaping of the West fans have personally recommended if you like
William Clark and the Shaping of the West.
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I'm a nature writer and poet who lives, writes, and tends his modest grapevines on a small farm in the highlands of northern Michigan. My study and my work delves into the mysterious connections between all living things. I've sailed the world's lakes and oceans and lived on the land from Alaska to California to the Caribbean. The natural world cannot just be described but must be experienced – all the writers on my list have taken this approach – as I've followed the lead of these great writers but in my own unique way. I would enjoy a day on a secluded river with each of them in search of the elusive brook trout.
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.
I was browsing a bookstore around 1996 when I spotted a book about Lewis and Clark. I took a look, saw a list of the members of the expedition, and realized I hardly knew anything about those individuals. I wondered who they were and what happened to them during and after their trek across the country. I started reading books and articles and making trips to conventions or archives in places like St. Louis and Philadelphia. It has been a great twenty-five years, and my passion for Lewis and Clark has never ebbed. I hope you enjoy the books discussed here as much as I have.
This thoughtful, compelling, 442-page essay by humanities scholar Clay S. Jenkinson is simply my favorite Lewis and Clark book. Clay begins with a quote from Hamlet, and in the next few pages mention everyone from Lewis—“an eccentric, high strung, and sometimes-troubled man” but also “a man of extraordinary intelligence and sensitivity” to John Donne, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong, to Lennon and McCartney. This is a highly personal, highly readable, free-ranging volume that offers new and fascinating insights into both Lewis and Clark and their westward trek. I highly recommend it.
Meriwether Lewis commanded the most important exploration mission in the early history of the United States. Clay S. Jenkinson takes a fresh look at Lewis, not to offer a paper cutout hero but to describe and explain a hyperserious young man of great complexity who found the wilderness of Upper Louisiana as exacting as it was exhilarating.
Jenkinson sees Lewis as a troubled soul before he left St. Charles, Missouri, in May 1804. His experiences in lands "upon which the foot of civilized man had never trodden" further fractured his sense of himself. His hiring William Clark as his "partner…
I was browsing a bookstore around 1996 when I spotted a book about Lewis and Clark. I took a look, saw a list of the members of the expedition, and realized I hardly knew anything about those individuals. I wondered who they were and what happened to them during and after their trek across the country. I started reading books and articles and making trips to conventions or archives in places like St. Louis and Philadelphia. It has been a great twenty-five years, and my passion for Lewis and Clark has never ebbed. I hope you enjoy the books discussed here as much as I have.
Gary E. Moulton is a history professor who spent twenty years editing the 13-volume journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, written by the captains and four of their men, describing in amazing detail the three years and one month they spent together. Moulton and his team not only transcribed all of these accounts—they offer informative footnotes that explain everything—from the Indians encountered to the plants and animals seen on the journey to the mountains and rivers traveled. So, it is no surprise that Moulton is the expert on the Expedition. Us Lewis and Clark afficionados own and love all 13 volumes, but this single volume is perfect for anyone interested in reading—and understanding—what the men themselves experienced.
Following orders from President Thomas Jefferson, Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out from their wintering camp in Illinois in 1804 to search for a river passage to the Pacific Ocean. In this riveting account, editor Gary E. Moulton blends the narrative highlights of the Lewis and Clark journals so that the voices of the enlisted men and of Native peoples are heard alongside the words of the captains. All their triumphs and terrors are here-the thrill of seeing the vast herds of bison on the plains; the tensions and admiration in the first meetings with Indian peoples; Lewis's…
I was browsing a bookstore around 1996 when I spotted a book about Lewis and Clark. I took a look, saw a list of the members of the expedition, and realized I hardly knew anything about those individuals. I wondered who they were and what happened to them during and after their trek across the country. I started reading books and articles and making trips to conventions or archives in places like St. Louis and Philadelphia. It has been a great twenty-five years, and my passion for Lewis and Clark has never ebbed. I hope you enjoy the books discussed here as much as I have.
While the early death of Meriwether Lewis is one of the tragic events related to the Expedition, no story is more poignant than that of York, William Clark’s slave, who was one of the twenty-eight men who made the complete journey from St. Louis to the Pacific coast and back. In many ways, this touching book tells the story of slavery itself, covering such topics as York’s fine service on the Expedition, his youth as a slave to the Clark family, his marriage, his falling out with Clark, his demotion from body servant to hired-out slave, his forced separation from his wife, his eventual freedom, and his understandable failure in the freight business—in a world where freed slaves were viewed with considerable suspicion. The sad heritage of slavery thus left its mark on the Expedition, just as it did the entire history of the United States.
The sole African American member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, William Clark's enigmatic body servant York has inspired numerous myths about his character and exploits. He was supposed to be a man of superb physique and stamina, and some believed that he clowned and womanized his way across the continent and made no significant contributions to the outcome of the Expedition. More often than not, reputable historians have assumed that these myths surrounding him were reliable portrayals of the first black man to reach the Pacific Ocean.
First published in 1985, Robert B. Betts' unique account of this long-obscured…
I’m a retired English prof with a lifelong interest in history. My father fostered my fascination with Civil War battlefields, and growing up in Florida, I studied the Seminole wars in school and later at FSU. While teaching at the University of Idaho (nearly 50 years), I pursued my interest in the Indian wars of the mid-19th century and developed a curiosity about tribes in the inland Northwest, notably the Coeur d’Alene, Spokane, and Nez Perce. My critical biography of Blackfeet novelist James Welch occasioned reading and research on the Plains tribes. I recommend his nonfiction book,Killing Custer: The Battle of Little Bighorn and the Fate the Plains Indians.
Aside from the Colorado landmark, Pike’s Peak, most of us know little of Zebulon Pike. A relative passed along the tee-shirt, but that’s as close as I got before reading Jared Orsi’s account of Lieutenant Pike’s 1805-07 fascinating expeditions to the headwaters of the Mississippi and to the Rockies. Pike strives to establish friendly relations among the Ojibway and Dakotah and later among the Osage and Pawnee while introducing the tribes to their new landlords, the U.S. government under President Jefferson. In attempting to ascend the peak, Pike and his men suffer near starvation and death in bitter cold and waist-deep snow, only to be rescued and arrested by the forces of New Spain. Orsi approaches the expeditions from an environmental perspective.
Today Zebulon Pike's name is immortalized at Pikes Peak, the second most visited mountain in the world after Japan's Mount Fuji. It overlooks the town of Colorado Springs, where historian Jared Orsi teaches. Orsi was inspired to take up this biography not just by geography but also because there has been no modern interpretation of the life of this key explorer in American history. His life sheds considerable life on the early national period and on the American frontier.
Born during the Revolution Zebulon, Pike came of age with the nation. Trained as a soldier and stationed at various frontier…
Mark Derr is an independent scholar and author of three books on dogs, a biography of Davy Crockett, and a social and environmental history of Florida, as well as a co-author with photographer Cameron Davidson of Over Florida. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Scientific American, Audubon, Smithsonian, Natural History, The New York Times, and other publications. His poems have appeared in Kansas Quarterly, Partisan Review, and other journals. He has had a lifelong relationship with dogs. Having known and mourned a number of outstanding dogs, he has told friends, "They are always with me in my thoughts, and I miss them very much." He and his wife currently share their domicile with a Jack Russell Terrier and a Miami Beach street cat.
Arguably, people and dogs—initially in the guise of wolves—have been wandering the world together since they first met on the trail of the big game they were both hunting. Dogs were generally more amicable, low-maintenance traveling companions, serving as camp guards, hunters, bed warmers, social secretaries, and occasional sneak thieves.
A prototype for traveling dog in American letters is Seaman, a young Newfoundland Meriwether Lewis obtained to accompany the corps of discovery on its westward explorations. Seaman and his exploits dot the pages of The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1814), a great resource and compelling read for anyone hoping to understand the history of the American West.
An in-depth look at Lewis and Clark's historic expedition through the explorers' journals-America's "first report on the West" (Bernard DeVoto). In 1803, the great expanse of the Louisiana Purchase was an empty canvas. Keenly aware that the course of the nation's destiny lay westward-and that a "Voyage of Discovery" would be necessary to determine the nature of the frontier-President Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis to lead an expedition from the Missouri River to the northern Pacific coast and back. From 1804 to 1806, accompanied by co-captain William Clark, the Shoshone guide Sacajawea, and thirty-two men, Lewis mapped rivers, traced the…
You have to appreciate the intrepid nature of those who ventured out to sea in the days before satellite-enabled navigation, modern weather forecasting, and Coast Guard rescue swimmers. The books I’ve listed span a time of great global exploration occurring simultaneously with the engines of novel economic development. Most of that development was based on the exploitation of human and natural resources. A thread of curiosity through all of these picks is how those individuals most directly involved in its physical pursuit and transport were rarely the same who benefitted from it. But instead lived lives of constant hardship and danger – profiting, if at all, only in the adventure itself.
This is another early American expedition lost to modern memory. In 1810, one of America’srichest men, John Jacob Astor, sent out two expeditions to exploit the riches of the western coastof North America. Unclaimed at the time.
One was to progress overland the other by sea. Bothended in personal and economic disaster. Yet, showcasing moments of heroism and cowardice,selflessness, and greed – but ultimately awakening America to this untapped potential of thisrich, rugged, and unforgiving territory.
Stark writes like a novelist weaving rich, character studiesInto the narrative that helped invest me in the people and their mostly, unfortunate fates.
In the tradition of The Lost City of Z and Skeletons in the Zahara, Astoria is the thrilling, true-adventure tale of the 1810 Astor Expedition, an epic, now forgotten, three-year journey to forge an American empire on the Pacific Coast. Peter Stark offers a harrowing saga in which a band of explorers battled nature, starvation, and madness to establish the first American settlement in the Pacific Northwest and opened up what would become the Oregon trail, permanently altering the nation's landscape and its global standing.
Six years after Lewis and Clark's began their journey to the Pacific Northwest, two of…
I used to be the caretaker for the last home of Edgar Allan Poe, and during my four-year tenure, I tried to read everything Poe ever wrote, as well as literature inspired by his work. The key word there is “tried.” It’s an impossible task. Poe’s influence is vast and evergreen. The traditional ghost story was not his specialty, but nevertheless, I associate him with spirits and phantoms since one of his primary obsessions was the potential oblivion of the afterlife. I share these obsessions, and I doubt I would have taken the job if I wasn’t already drawn to stories that imagine what lies beyond the veil.
I love books that engage in a literary conversation with writers from a previous era, and Mat Johnson’s novel does just that—it’s both a homage and a critique of Edgar Allan Poe’s sole novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, itself a hodgepodge of gothic elements and maritime adventure. It’s also horrifyingly racist with its depictions of black-skinned islanders.
Johnson inverts and reframes these uncomfortable racial dynamics to glorious effect. It is both a raucous satire and full-throttle adventure story, as Johnson’s hero, Chris Jaynes, leads an all-black crew to the South Pole—into the center of whiteness—to discover what may be on the last bastion of the African Diaspora. From there, it only gets weirder and funnier.
“THE SHARPEST AND MOST UNUSUAL STORY I READ LAST YEAR . . . [Mat] Johnson’s satirical vision roves as freely as Kurt Vonnegut’s and is colored with the same sort of passionate humanitarianism.”—Maud Newton, New York Times Magazine
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Vanity Fair • Houston Chronicle • The Seattle Times • Salon • National Post • The A.V. Club
Recently canned professor of American literature Chris Jaynes has just made a startling discovery: the manuscript of a crude slave narrative that confirms the reality of Edgar Allan Poe’s strange…
As a historian of feminism, I have been trying for decades to understand how gender, race, class, and nationality are knotted together in ways that are not always obvious or trackable in our personal experience. The books I recommend here have served as brilliant lanterns for me—not simply pointing out the flawed history of western feminism but instead explaining the complicated effects of whiteness and imperialism in the development of today’s feminist identities, ideologies, and consciousness. For me, these histories offer intersectional keys decoding the map of the world we’ve been dropped into and offering a path leading to a more justly feminist future….I hope they do for you too!
This slim but explosively dramatic book makes everything you were ever told about the history of polar exploration seem like nothing more than random trivia. Lisa Bloom takes those stories you think you know and offers up the hidden realities of them in ways that explain the race, gender, and sexual politics of not just polar exploration but the idea of “modernity” itself as a crutch for justifying the “penetration” of people and spaces existing at the “ends of the earth.”
In this work, the author focuses on the conquest of the North Pole as she reveals how popular print and visual media, including photography and video, defined and shaped American national ideologies from the early 20th century to the present. She goes on to analyze gendered and racial constructions and idioms of American identity by examining the powerful and continuing cultural investment in the legacy of the so-called discovery of the North Pole in 1909, and the ongoing celebration of white explorers, such as Robert Peary, as "heroes". Her analysis of the polar expedition opens up contemporary questions in cultural…
I am an author specializing in nature, travel, and adventure writing. I’ve been fortunate to travel to many of the places featured in my books – including Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. I even to travelled to Morocco to study the art of storytelling with the last of the great storytellers. I’ve always been intrigued by stories that tell a personal journey about overcoming obstacles, especially if the story takes the reader to exotic places. So no wonder I jumped at the opportunity to co-author a book with a game ranger and conservationist in Africa that combines historical perspectives, larger-than-life characters, and dangerous experiences with wildlife.
An art teacher recommended this book to me when I wanted to learn more about sketchbook journaling. What better way to learn than to page through the field notes and illustrations from the diaries and journals of 70 famous world travelers and adventurers! For each of these daring men and women, there is a brief introduction followed by a visual treasure trove of sketches, original diary pages, and watercolor paintings. This book will remind you of what exploration and encountering wildlife and other cultures were like before cameras and cell phones.
The sketchbook has been the one constant in explorers' kits for centuries of adventure. Often private, they are records of immediate experiences and discoveries, and in their pages we can see what the explorers themselves encountered. This remarkable book showcases 70 such sketchbooks, kept by intrepid men and women as they journeyed perilous and unknown environments—frozen wastelands, high mountains, barren deserts, and dense rainforests—with their senses wide open. Figures such as Charles Darwin and Sir Edmund Hillary are joined here by lesser-known explorers such as Adela Breton, who braved the jungles of Mexico to make a record of Mayan monuments.…
