A legend. A warrior. A hero. A classic American epic. Two centuries ago, with the support of the young Revolutionary government, George Rogers Clark led a small but fierce army west from Virginia to conquer all the territory between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. He battled the British, forged friendships with French and Spanish settlers, and made treaties with many Indian tribes who revered the lanky, red-haired white man and called him Long Knife. He fell in love with the woman of his dreams, the beautiful Spanish maiden Teresa de Leyba. And George Rogers Clark was, in the end, bitterly betrayed by the same government he had so nobly served. Rich in the heroic characters, meticulously researched detail, and grand scale that have become James Alexander Thom’s trademarks, Long Knife, his first historical epic, is simply unforgettable.

In this sweeping adventure story, Stephen E. Ambrose, the bestselling author of D-Day, presents the definitive account of one of the most momentous journeys in American history. Ambrose follows the Lewis and Clark Expedition from Thomas Jefferson's hope of finding a waterway to the Pacific, through the heart-stopping moments of the actual trip, to Lewis' lonely demise on the Natchez Trace. Along the way, Ambrose shows us the American West as Lewis saw it -- wild, awsome, and pristinely beautiful. Undaunted Courage is a stunningly told action tale that will delight readers for generations. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River to the Rockies, over the mountains, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, and back. Lewis was the perfect choice. He endured incredible hardships and saw incredible sights, including vast herds of buffalo and Indian tribes that had had no previous contact with white men. He and his partner, Captain William Clark, made the first map of the trans-Mississippi West, provided invaluable scientific data on the flora and fauna of the Louisiana Purchase territory, and established the American claim to Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Ambrose has pieced together previously unknown information about weather, terrain, and medical knowledge at the time to provide a colorful and realistic backdrop for the expedition. Lewis saw the North American continent before any other white man; Ambrose describes in detail native peoples, weather, landscape, science, everything the expedition encountered along the way, through Lewis's eyes. Lewis is supported by a rich variety of colorful characters, first of all Jefferson himself, whose interest in exploring and acquiring the American West went back thirty years. Next comes Clark, a rugged frontiersman whose love for Lewis matched Jefferson's. There are numerous Indian chiefs, and Sacagawea, the Indian girl who accompanied the expedition, along with the French-Indian hunter Drouillard, the great naturalists of Philadelphia, the French and Spanish fur traders of St. Louis, John Quincy Adams, and many more leading political, scientific, and military figures of the turn of the century. This is a book about a hero. This is a book about national unity. But it is also a tragedy. When Lewis returned to Washington in the fall of 1806, he was a national hero. But for Lewis, the expedition was a failure. Jefferson had hoped to find an all-water route to the Pacific with a short hop over the Rockies-Lewis discovered there was no such passage. Jefferson hoped the Louisiana Purchase would provide endless land to support farming-but Lewis discovered that the Great Plains were too dry. Jefferson hoped there was a river flowing from Canada into the Missouri-but Lewis reported there was no such river, and thus no U.S. claim to the Canadian prairie. Lewis discovered the Plains Indians were hostile and would block settlement and trade up the Missouri. Lewis took to drink, engaged in land speculation, piled up debts he could not pay, made jealous political enemies, and suffered severe depression. High adventure, high politics, suspense, drama, and diplomacy combine with high romance and personal tragedy to make this outstanding work of scholarship as readable as a novel.

Two centuries after their expedition awoke the nation both to the promise and to the disquiet of the vast territory out west, Lewis and Clark still stir the imagination, and their adventure remains one of the most celebrated and studied chapters in American history. This volume explores the legacy of Lewis and Clark's momentous journey and, on the occasion of its bicentennial, considers the impact of their westward expedition on American culture. Approaching their subject from many different perspectives—literature, history, women's studies, law, medicine, and environmental history, among others—the authors chart shifting attitudes about the explorers and their journals, together creating a compelling, finely detailed picture of the "interdisciplinary intrigue" that has always surrounded Lewis and Clark's accomplishment. This collection is most remarkable for its insights into ongoing debates over the relationships between settler culture and aboriginal peoples, law and land tenure, manifest destiny and westward expansion, as well as over the character of Sacagawea, the expedition's vision of nature, and the interpretation and preservation of the Lewis and Clark Trail.

Between 1803 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark co-captained the most famous expedition in American history. But while Lewis ended his life just three years later, Clark, as the highest-ranking federal official in the West, spent three decades overseeing its consequences: Indian removal and the destruction of Native America. In a rare combination of storytelling and scholarship, bestselling author Landon Y. Jones vividly depicts Clark's life and the dark and bloody ground of America's early West, capturing the qualities of character and courage that made Clark an unequaled leader in America's grander enterprise: the shaping of the West.

A beautifully rendered reference guide to the Great Plains portion of the famous expedition through the American West highlights the explorer's remarkable encounters with previously undocumented flora and fauna as they moved through the Plains region. Original. (Biology & Natural History)

Arriving as the country commemorates the expedition's bicentennial, Across the Continent is an examination of the explorers' world and the complicated ways in which it relates to our own. The essays collected here look at the global geopolitics that provided the context for the expedition. Finally, the discussion considers the various legacies of the expedition, in particular its impact on Native Americans, and the current struggle over who will control the narrative of the expansion of the American Empire. --from publisher description.