History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. 1.: To the Sources of the Missouri, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains and Down the River Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. Performed During the Years 1804-5-6.

This is the real thing: not a history of the expedition, but the expedition itself, rendered in the direct and often awestruck prose of men walking into maps that did not yet exist. Meriwether Lewis, armed with Thomas Jefferson's commission to find a water route to the Pacific and catalog every living thing that moved, led forty-five souls into a continent no American had ever crossed. What follows is the closest thing we have to witnessing the American West as it was: the first descriptions of pronghorn antelope and California condors, the first negotiations with the Shoshone and the Nez Perce, the moment they finally saw the Pacific and wondered if they would ever get home. This is frontier science in its rawest form, recorded by men who understood they were making history as they lived it.