“This Vast Enterprise is a page-turner and a fantastic achievement.... Do we really need another book about the Lewis and Clark expedition?... After reading This Vast Enterprise, my answer is an emphatic yes. The author has done a huge amount of research, shifting the focus away from the familiar pairing of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and widening the lens.... Each chapter unfolds from the viewpoint of a different individual and the result is a richly woven tapestry of voices.... Through the perspectives of 10 people, Fehrman reframes this well-known story, revealing it as more complex, and profoundly human.”
—Andrea Wulf, The New York Times Book Review (front-cover review)
“This is vivid, character-based history.... Fehrman weaves a tale that uses human stories to go beyond hard facts and calcified myths.... This Vast Enterprise moves Lewis, Clark, and their crew out of the realm of myth and into a world not just of blood and sweat but also negotiation: with the land, with Native peoples, and with each other. Fehrman’s approach to this well-trodden historical chapter is fresh and inclusive. It also makes for a ripping good read.”
—Boston Globe
“More than 220 years later, the Lewis and Clark expedition still intrigues.... In his immensely engaging book, This Vast Enterprise, Craig Fehrman strives to capture the motivations, values and ideas of the individuals who contributed to this multifaceted historical event.... Based on thorough research of published and unpublished sources, as well as Native American oral tradition, the book gives this well-known story a fresh breadth of implication.”
—Wall Street Journal
“An innovative new history of the expedition... History is usually written in the third person, even though it has to be lived in the first, and Fehrman takes advantage of the rich and deep documentation of the Lewis and Clark expedition to try to reconcile the discrepancy. ... Fehrman doesn’t attempt to speak in the voices of his subjects. He merely focuses on what each individual experienced and knew, while keeping in mind how much they didn’t experience and didn’t know—an analytic technique that historians have always been free to borrow from novelists but often lose sight of in the scramble to accumulate data.”
—New Yorker
Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A major revisionist history of the Lewis and Clark expedition: For the first time in a generation, This Vast Enterprise offers a fresh and more accurate account of one of the most important episodes in American history, humanizing forgotten figures and shattering long-held myths.
“This Vast Enterprise is a page-turner and a fantastic achievement.” —The New York Times • “Immensely engaging.” —The Wall Street Journal • “This is vivid, character-based history...It also makes for a ripping good read.” —The Boston Globe
“Do we really need another book about the Lewis and Clark expedition?...My answer is an emphatic yes. The author has done a huge amount of research, shifting the focus away from the familiar pairing of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark...Each chapter unfolds from the viewpoint of a different individual and the result is a richly woven tapestry of voices...Fehrman reframes this well-known story, revealing it as more complex, and profoundly human.” —Andrea Wulf, The New York Times Book Review (front-cover review)
In 1806, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark return from their journey—having led the Corps of Discovery across eight thousand miles of rapids, mountains, forests, and ravines—they bring an incredible tale starring themselves as courageous explorers, skilled survivalists, underrated scientists, and peaceful ambassadors. While there is truth in those descriptions, there is also distortion.
From one of the most exciting new historians to emerge in the past decade, This Vast Enterprise offers a novel take on the expedition: a gripping narrative that draws on lost documents, stunning analysis, and Native perspectives. Craig Fehrman spent five years visiting more than thirty archives, interviewing more than a hundred sources, and collecting oral history passed down over centuries. He came to see that the success of Lewis and Clark depended on much more than just Lewis and Clark. We all know Sacajawea, and some of us know York, the Black man Clark enslaved. But here we meet John Ordway, a working-class soldier who fought grizzlies and towed the captains’ hulking barge. We hear from Wolf Calf, a Blackfoot teenager who watched his friend die in a battle with Lewis and his men.
Each chapter moves to a different person’s point of view, describing their desires and contradictions. We see Thomas Jefferson operating in an age of bitter partisan unrest—his secret political maneuvers to fund the expedition, revealed here for the first time, are a case study in presidential power. We witness the strategy and strength of Black Buffalo, completely upending our understanding of Lakota-American diplomacy. York, in his chapters, finds ways to wield power and make choices in an era that didn’t allow him much of either. Clark is not a folksy Kentuckian but a student of the Enlightenment. (Fehrman discovered his college notebook; no previous biographer even realized that he went to college.) Lewis is someone willing to sacrifice everything for his country and his mentor, Jefferson.
In the end, the captains are men who needed help—from Sacajawea, from the Corps, and from each other. Mile after mile, the expedition pushes on through hailstorms and flash floods, frostbite and infections, rattlesnakes and rabid wolves, with the Spanish cavalry in fierce pursuit. Fehrman balances the story’s adventure with the humanity of its protagonists. The result is a thrilling reminder that even the most familiar moments in history can still surprise us.
Reviews
“An incredible feat, Craig Fehrman’s This Vast Enterprise is a wildly entertaining history of Lewis and Clark—the product of more than half a decade of rigorous and immensely impressive research—that never loses sight of the adventure at its center. Fehrman brings this legendary expedition thrillingly to life by turning our attention beyond Lewis and Clark themselves, revealing the oft-overlooked people and perspectives that made the journey possible. Expansive, compelling, and alive on every page, this is a perfect summer read for America’s 250th anniversary.” —Isaac Fitzgerald, The TODAY Show, “Summer Beach Reads: The Buzziest Books of the Season”
“Riveting... Grounded in outstanding scholarship... By writing from various points of view, Fehrman broadens the long-held narrative of the expedition, enriching what we know of its successes and failures.... Fehrman has done a great service to American history in this must-read.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“For a fresh take on the first American road trip: The Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark, Indiana-based journalist Craig Fehrman’s immersive panorama, drawing on oral histories and long-buried sources, rescues this potted narrative from the usual classroom tales of two men and a canoe, for a revelatory portrait about mutual surprise, allowing equal time to both the discovers and the owners of the land being discovered.”
—Chicago Tribune
“A valuable fresh look at a storied moment in American history... The book’s wide-angle perspective is appropriate, since Lewis and Clark favored a more democratic decision-making style than was usual on a military expedition, and the inclusion of multiple Native points of view makes it clear how complex and fraught the team’s mission was. Fehrman’s approach gives added depth to his chronicle of the breathtaking natural wonders encountered and extraordinary hardships overcome on the Corps’ transcontinental trek.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A piercing revisionist account of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s 1804 expedition... Readers will learn much from this revelatory unveiling of the raw humanity behind the hagiography.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“I followed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition to the Pacific in Craig Fehrman’s This Vast Enterprise.... I now feel as if I know how the Lewis and Clark team felt.... Lewis, Clark and several of the 30 men with them kept detailed journals, and Fehrman has drunk deeply from them as well as from recollections of the Native American leaders they encountered along the way. I felt like I was sharing the vistas, smells, discomforts, injuries, terrors (grizzly bears!) and occasional joys of an expedition now over 200 years back.... [Fehrman] scored a touchdown.”
—John McWhorter, New York Times Opinion
“This Vast Enterprise [is] an ambitious, appropriately timed book.... The Lewis and Clark story sits at the intersection of American idealism and original sin—the pioneering spirit that defines American exceptionalism, and the displacement and slavery that shadowed it. Fehrman doesn't choose a side. He offers an optimistic view of America through a self-critical lens.... This Vast Enterprise has much to say about the well-known heroes. More importantly, it advances the story, helping us understand what drives Americans from all walks of life to venture into the unknown.”
—Indianapolis Star
“Craig Fehrman has done what he set out to do: shed new light on a fabled story, and tell it in a way that puts all of us back in a vanished but resonant world. His rendering of the Lewis and Clark saga is original, compelling, and memorable.”
—Jon Meacham, author of And There Was Light
“There are innumerable accounts of the Corps of Discovery, and it remains one of America’s favorite stories... Yet Fehrman manages to breathe new life into this well-worn tale through his masterful retelling. Fehrman deftly moves Captains Lewis and Clark out of the spotlight and brings in perspectives we’ve not heard before—like those of Lakota leader Black Buffalo, working-class sergeant John Ordway and a Blackfoot teenager named Wolf Calf—and he expands our understanding of the critical characters we’ve come to know in lore and legend.... Like Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, This Vast Enterprise delivers a brilliant new interpretation of a story that deserves to be known in its entirety.”
—BookPage (starred review)
“This book is so, so good, one of my favorites of the last decade.”
—Patrick Wyman, Tides of History
“Craig Fehrman has done an incredible job of bringing this story of exploration and manifest destiny to life. He presents a kaleidoscope of figures whose lives intersected with the duo on their trek across the country, from enslaved men working alongside them to the Indigenous people whose territories they encroached on. It’s history that feels colorful—and like a more accurate portrait of what truly unfolded.”
—Traci Thomas, Marie Claire
