First Across the Continent: The Story of the Exploring Expedition of Lewis and Clark in 1804-5-6

In 1804, President Thomas Jefferson sent two men into almost two million square miles of complete unknowns. The Louisiana Purchase had doubled the nation, but no one in Washington knew what lay west of the Mississippi. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led a expedition of thirty-three soldiers and frontiersmen into a continent no white American had ever crossed. They would spend two and a half years trekking through wilderness, surviving starvation and sickness, befriending and clashing with dozens of Native American tribes, and documenting a natural world that would stagger scientists back east. Noah Brooks wrote this account in the late nineteenth century, when veterans of the expedition were still alive to interview. His narrative crackles with the raw excitement of discovery: building canoes from cottonwood trees, wintering in present-day North Dakota, watching the Rocky Mountains rise on the horizon like a impossible dream. This is the story of the Corps of Discovery, the men who first carried the American flag across the continent, and the world they found waiting for them.