The Journals of Lewis and Clark

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's remarkable chronicle of their Voyage of Discovery across the pristine, uncharted wilderness of the American West occupies a unique place in American literature. To a young republic barely a dozen years old, the Journals offered not only a pathbreaking work of natural history, but the equivalent of a national poem: a magnificent epic for an unfinished nation.

From 1804 to 1806 Captain Lewis and Captain Clark led their intrepid expeditionary crew on …