Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness

This provocative work challenges traditional accounts of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's expedition across the continent and back again. Uncovering deeper meanings in the explorers' journals and lives, Exploring Lewis and Clark exposes their self-perceptions and deceptions, and how they interacted with those who traveled with them, the people they discovered along the way, the animals they hunted, and the land they walked across. The book discovers new heroes and brings old ones into historical focus. Thomas P. Slaughter interrogates the explorers' dreams, how they wrote and what they aimed to possess, their interactions with animals, Indians, and each other, their sense of themselves as leaders and men, and why they feared that they had failed their nation and President. Slaughter's Lewis and Clark are more confused, frightened, courageous, and flawed than in previous accounts. They are more human, their expedition more dramatic, and thus their story is more revealing about our own relationships to history and myth. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Review :
"This book unquestionably establishes Thomas Slaughter as one of the subtlest, most insightful historians writing today. Readers will emerge from this exploration with a new understanding of Lewis and Clark and their famous expedition." --Thomas Fleming, author of "Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Future of America" "Tom Slaughter's "Exploring Lewis and Clark" is a sometimes wickedly delightful re-examination of our legend of the Lewis and Clark expedition." --Kenneth A. Lockridge, author of "The Diary amd Life of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1674-1744 ""[The book] to read first. . . Slaughter marches into the voluminous pages of the journals of the expedition (and the legend that has grown around them) and performs a scintillating close reading, thinking deeply about the attitudes, wishes, and dreams of the men who wrote them. . . Slaughter at his best is wise and observant, even empathetic. . . other chapters, though, delve deep and ask questions that will forever change my reading of these men." -Bill Roorbach, "Newsday" " ""A rueful reading of the historical record that delights in considering some of the thorniest questions within it. . . Three million words of firsthand history cannot tell us, but Slaughter gives us some reasonable and altogether fascinating guesses. They could not be timelier. . . and deserve our close attention at the dawn of yet another American empire." -Gregory McNamee, "Washington Post Book World ""In a provocative new book. . . Thomas P. Slaughter argues that [the mythology of the explorer] was even pursued by Lewis and Clark, neither of whom was what he seemed." -Edward Rothstein, "New York Times ""Slaughter's fascinating new book. . . stands on the shoulders of the past century's scholarship. It also stands some of the scholarship on its head. Where Thomas Jefferson saw 'courage undaunted, ' Slaughter rediscovers the daunting challenges that inspired both anxiety and valor." -John Kukla, "Times-Picayune " "From the Hardcover edition."