In May 1804 Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discovery embarked on a seven-thousand-mile journey with instructions from President Thomas Jefferson to ascend the Missouri River to its source and continue on to the Pacific. They had spent five months in the St. Louis area preparing for the expedition that began with a six-hundred-mile, ten-week crossing of the future state of Missouri. Prior to this, the explorers had already seen about two hundred miles of Missouri landscape as they traveled up the Mississippi River to St. Louis in the autumn of 1803.

The Atlas of Lewis and Clark in Missouri is a splendid re- creation of the natural landscape in the days when a vast western frontier was about to be explored. The Corps of Discovery's expedition began in territorial Missouri, and this book of computer-generated maps opens an extraordinary window onto the rivers, land, and settlement patterns of the period. This book is an intensive examination of the Missouri portion of the expedition through a series of twenty-seven maps developed by combining early-nineteenth-century U.S. General Land Office (GLO) survey documents with narratives of the trip derived from expedition journals. The maps are impeccable. The twenty-seven map plates--including twenty-three of the traveled route and four of the river corridor's historic vegetative land cover--depict the expedition's course and offer the first accurate rendering of travel distances and campsites. Some maps locate the campsites in relation to present-day landmarks. Journal descriptions accompany the map plates, which also include old geographic names; historical hydrography; contemporary towns, settlements, and forts; Indian campsites and villages; and territorial land grants from the French and Spanish governments. Geographers and historians will be fascinated by the maps' level of detail, especially the charting of the present course of the rivers alongside that of the early 1800s to show the landscape changes caused by the powerful waters of the Mississippi and Missouri. The result is a reconstruction of geo-referenced maps that give, for the first time, a detailed representation of the Corps of Discovery's course through Missouri, with geographic data as authentic and accurate as yesterday's available information and today's technology can produce. The maps allow readers to better understand changes in the land over time and why the landscape encountered by the expedition differs so radically from ours today.

For Before Lewis and Clark, A. P. Nasatir translated and annotated 239 documents relating to the history of the exploration of the Missouri River through 1804, when Lewis and Clark began their ascent of the waterway. The value of this collection is in the range of documents Nasatir included, some of which are unavailable elsewhere. The volume also includes seven maps; two facsimile illustrations; and an excerpt from the journal of Jean Baptiste Truteau, the Canadian-born explorer whose record of his 1794-95 travels proved valuable to Lewis and Clark. This edition marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of Nasatir’s landmark document collection. Five fold-out maps omitted from the most recent paperback edition have been restored for this one-volume edition.

Lewis and Clark's Expedition from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean was the first governmental exploration of the "Great West." The history of this undertaking is the personal narrative and official report of the first white men who crossed the continent between and British and Spanish possessions.

In May 1804 Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the Corps of Discovery embarked on a seven-thousand-mile journey with instructions from President Thomas Jefferson to ascend the Missouri River to its source and continue on to the Pacific. They had spent five months in the St. Louis area preparing for the expedition that began with a six-hundred-mile, ten-week crossing of the future state of Missouri. Prior to this, the explorers had already seen about two hundred miles of Missouri landscape as they traveled up the Mississippi River to St. Louis in the autumn of 1803.