Review
"The journey of the Corps of Discovery, under the command of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, across the West to the Pacific Ocean and back in the years 1804-06 seems to me to have been our first really American adventure, one that also produced our only really American epic, The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, now at last available in a superbly edited, easily read edition... This important text has not been fully appreciated for what it is because of two centuries of incomplete and inadequate editing. All three editions previous to this excellent one from the University of Nebraska ... were flawed by significant omissions." Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books
Product Description
An accomplished carpenter and boat builder, Patrick Gass proved to be an invaluable and well-liked member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Promoted to sergeant after the death of Charles Floyd, Gass was almost certainly responsible for supervising the building of Forts Mandan and Clatsop. His records of those forts and of the earth lodges of the Mandans and Hidatsas are particularly detailed and useful. Gass was the last survivor of the Corps of Discovery, living until 1870 - long enough to see trains cross a continent that he had helped open. His engaging and detailed journal became the first published account of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Gass's journal joins the celebrated Nebraska edition of the complete journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which feature a wide range of new scholarship dealing with all aspects of the expedition from geography to Indian cultures and languages to plants and animals. Gary E. Moulton is Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of American History at the University of Nebraska. He is the recipient of the J. Franklin Jameson Award of the American Historical Association for the editing of the Lewis and Clark journals, and he won the Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Award from the University of Nebraska.
