In This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis and Clark, Craig Fehrman brings a new and nuanced understanding to the long-revered Lewis and Clark Expedition. There are innumerable accounts of the Corps of Discovery, and it remains one of America’s favorite stories—one of pioneering and bravery, collaboration and innovation. Yet Fehrman manages to breathe new life into this well-worn tale through his masterful retelling.
Fehrman starts with the expedition’s inception and the complicated politics that plagued organized endeavors since the country’s founding. Then, Fehrman deftly moves Captains Lewis and Clark out of the spotlight and brings in perspectives we’ve not heard before—like those of Lakota leader Black Buffalo, working-class sergeant John Ordway and a Blackfoot teenager named Wolf Calf—and he expands our understanding of the critical characters we’ve come to know in lore and legend, specifically Sacajawea and York, the Black man Clark enslaved.
As Fehrman writes in the prologue, “Together, these chapters reveal that the expedition was a drama driven not by two leading men but by a fascinating and unruly ensemble. . . . They were all complicated humans, with complicated worlds of their own.” Which is to say: Lewis and Clark weren’t the only ones struggling, sacrificing and giving their all. The expedition wasn’t just theirs, not by a long shot.
This is obvious with Fehrmen’s broadened scope. The goal of the Expedition was to map a passage to the Pacific, and it was also to map land acquisition. The party aimed to broker peace with Native nations, yet that “peace” came only with the acceptance of their new “father,” Thomas Jefferson. The most striking dissonance occurs in the chapter devoted to Wolf Calf, which Fehrman constructs from a transcribed interview that directly conflicts Lewis’ record of events. As Fehrman writes, “All histories—all forms of human communication—arrive with agendas and blind spots. That’s where interpretation comes in.”
Like Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, This Vast Enterprise delivers a brilliant new interpretation of a story that deserves to be known in its entirety.