The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark

In 1902, Eva Emery Dye undertook something radical: she told the most famous expedition in American history through the eyes of the woman who made it possible. Sacajawea, the young Lemhi Shoshone woman purchased by French-Canadian trader Toussaint Charbonneau and pressed into service as an interpreter for Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's Corps of Discovery, had long been reduced to a footnote in westward expansion narratives. Dye restores her to the center of the story. The novel follows the expedition's grueling journey from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean, through unmapped wilderness, starvation, and encounters with dozens of Indigenous nations. But this is not simply an adventure narrative. It is Dye's reckoning with a young nation's hunger for territory, and her insistence that the story cannot be told without the people who already knew the land. For readers who seek perspectives buried in conventional histories, Dye's novel offers an early and passionate corrective.