Diary of discovery.

The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery

By Meriwether Lewis and William Clark; edited and with an introduction by

Gary E. Moulton University of Nebraska Press, 413 pages, $29.95

Modern men and women live in fear of spiders, darkness, terrorist attacks, disease, and other assorted ills. Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and their Corps of Discovery feared almost nothing. Consider this: Less than two months after they crossed the Mississippi and entered the American frontier, Lewis and Clark suffered two desertions from their party and found themselves helpless when a sergeant fell sick and died from a mysterious intestinal illness. On August 24, 1804 Lewis wrote that the expedition's clock (a key navigational aid) had stopped working. After all this, he and Clark decided to camp on a hill that local Indians believed to be haunted before they pressed on into uncharted terrain.

Their expedition's diaries, recently released in a new trade edition, offer insight into this utterly fearless mindset and the American character the explorers came to exemplify.

For all the attention Lewis and Clark draw today, their expedition had only a limited impact: The men's diaries sold only about 1,500 copies before the twentieth century. While their expedition did solidify America's claim on Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase, the explorers never found the all-water route across North America many had hoped might exist. The route they followed, indeed, had so little commercial value that it remains largely undeveloped today. (After St. Louis, the push-off point, Missoula, Montana is the largest town on their route.)

The intrepid explorers' story still offers plenty to admire. Lewis and Clark were both experienced outdoorsmen and inseparable comrades. Lewis emerges as the more bookish and intellectual of the two and Clark as the superior military leader. Together, they made a perfect team; not a single diary entry records a disagreement between the two.