The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery

Abstract

The Lewis and Clark Journals: An American Epic of Discovery, Edited by Gary E. Moulton. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Pp. Ixviii, 413. Illustrations, maps. Cloth, $29.95JAfter spending the last twenty years as the editor of the magisterial thirteenvolume The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1983-2003), no one is better qualified to distill the voluminous record of America's exploratory epic down to a single volume than Gary E. Moulton. As the result of his efforts over the last two decades, Moulton probably knows more about the Lewis and Clark Expedition than any other American scholar. There may be some more conversant in specific facets of the expedition's journey, but in terms of the general story of the Corps of Discovery, Moulton's expertise puts him in a class by himself. It is therefore gratifying that he has provided the reading public with a condensation of the journals in one volume-a much more manageable compilation of the daily recordings of the captains and other journalists such as sergeants Floyd, Gass, Ordway, and Pryor, and private Whitehouse than the more than one million words contained in the multi-volume set that takes up the better part of an entire shelf in a large bookcase. Moulton has used his authoritative experience as a documentary editor to produce what will be, for the majority of Americans, the most accessible and readable version of the trek to the Pacific and back as recorded by the participants.There have been previous single-volume condensations of the Lewis and Clark journals, most notably Bernard Augustine DeVoto's classic 1953 edition. But these earlier versions were seriously limited by the nature of the source material available to their editors. This source material consisted primarily of a narrative history, the History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, extracted and rewritten by Philadelphian Nicholas Biddle from the field notes of the captains and other journal writers, first published in 1814 and poorly re-edited in 1893, and the first publication of the original field journals, edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites to coincide with the Lewis and Clark Centennial in 1903. The Thwaites edition, for the first time, provided Americans with an opportunity to read the words written around hundreds of campfires, complete with Clark's often inventive spelling and Lewis's frequently lyrical prose.Since the publication of previous compilations, a significant compendium of Lewis and Clark material has been added to the literature of the expedition: previously undiscovered journal materials and missing records; a masterful collection of correspondence and non-journal documentary material on the expedition edited by Donald Jackson as Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents (1962); and a significant number of scholarly books on the natural history, geography and cartography, ethnohistory, and other facets of the Expedition. Unlike previous editors of one-volume Lewis and Clark journals, Moulton had access not only to these fruits of two new generations of Lewis and Clark scholarship, but to his own twenty-year involvement with the original journal materials. …