Tall, blond, blue-eyed Meriwether Lewis and tall, red-haired Billy Clark were as brave, bright and resourceful as any pair of frontiersman President Jefferson could have chosen. They were sent in 1803 to lead an expedition across the mysterious, newly acquired western lands, from the fur-trading village of St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River. On part of this perilous journey they had the assistance of the attractive, courageous Shoshone Indian girl, Sacagawea.
It took every bit of stamina and brains these two young army officers possessed to fight their way up the turbulent Missouri, over the unmapped mountains and down the rapid Columbia to the Pacific. But their expedition proved for the first time that thousands of unknown miles of our continent could be explored and traversed.
Every mile of the way presented a new challenge. For instance, within a single day and night Lewis, wandering alone on the prairie, killed a buffalo, then, with unloaded gun, ran for his life and plunged into the Missouri to escape and enraged bear. Soon thereafter he met an unidentified animal "of the tiger kind", probably a mountain lion. On the following morning he awoke to find a huge rattlesnake coiled on the bough above him. Not every twenty-four hours produced so much action. But every day of the journey was exciting.
Lewis wrote careful reports, doctored the injured and ailing, and made scientific observations. William Clark, younger brother of the Revolutionary War hero, General Rogers Clark, drew maps of the entire expedition.
Both leaders kept journals; and both did what they could to protect their "Corps of Discovery" from treacherous Indians, prairie fires, floods, heat and thirst, subzero cold and famine. Their adventures constitute an American Classic. And John Bakeless gives us a vivid, authentic picture of what it was like to explore the West when it was really wild.
—from the dust jacket
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