The enterprise the title of this book refers to is the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804 to 1806 launched by Thomas Jefferson looking for a waterway passage to the northwest coast. Well, that didn’t work out, but they did make it to the West Coast, a miraculous feat, given the challenges of the terrain. Jefferson wanted reports of the plants and animals they encountered and Lewis was excellent at keeping those records, as well as specifics of their route. They made connections with many natives along the way, and sometimes owed their survival to some tribes, but were not able to convince them to be at peace with their neighbors.
More than twenty years ago I read Stephen Ambrose’s book Undaunted Courage, a mesmerizing account of this exploration. Of course few specifics remain with me, and I no longer have that book, sad to say. And all copies of it in the local library have been checked out, perhaps because Lewis and Clark, Jefferson, and Sacajawea all have a presence here in Charlottesville. The strength of this new history is the focus the author put on usually neglected members of the expedition and what each of them brought to the mix and what they experienced. This involves some speculation, but not, as far as I could tell, guesses without basis. To some extent this approach made me less focused on the arc of the events and made it a more complex story.
I want to remember in particular what the author wrote about Sacajawea and I offer this as an example of how he writes about others. She was a Shoshone, but she and others were captured by Hidatsa when she was twelve years old. By the time she was sixteen she had been purchased by a fur trader, Toussaint Charbonneau, who was hired as a translator by the expedition when they were at Fort Mandan in North Dakota. He turned out to be a terrible boatman but Sacajawea, who was pregnant when they joined the expedition, was invaluable. She hoped to return to Shoshone country and that tribe helped the expedition just at the time they needed to move from water-based exploration to land-based, as they made their way through the Rockies. The Shoshone sold them horses and helped them find a path west.
Lewis found Sacajawea to be helpful in his efforts to identify and describe plants that Jefferson was interested in. She told him her story and his notes describe her as being without emotion and a simple person content as long as she had food. When Lewis first encountered a few Shoshone, they were frightened and it was only when Lewis used what he had learned from Sacajawea that they stopped running away. He helped an elderly woman to her feet and gave her a mirror, and painted her cheeks with red paint as he had seen Sacajawea do. He asked to meet their leader, and they learned that Sacajawea’s brother Cameahwait had become the leader. When the siblings found each other, they were so emotional, they covered their heads with a blanket. Lewis misread her stoicism as lack of emotion.
Sacajawea might have left the expedition when she encountered her people, but for various reasons the author speculates on, she did not. Perhaps she wanted to see the Pacific Ocean, as that was an honor to her people, she was not starving as many of her people were, and many of her family members had died. William Clark was very fond of the child and he and others nicknamed him Pompy. After the expedition, she and Charbonneau moved with their son to Saint Louis and Clark adopted the child.
Along with Lewis and Clark, the author wrote with a focus on York, the enslaved man on the journey, Ordway, a sergeant who worked with both the two leaders and the men, Thomas Jefferson, and of special interest, some tribal leaders they encountered. It was an enlightening book and very readable.
Craig Fehrman, This Vast Enterprise, Avid Reader Press, 2026, 515 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.