Clay Jenkinson

This bold new study of the character of Meriwether Lewis attempts to make sense of one of the most fascinating and perplexing heroes of American history. Clay Jenkinson's Lewis is not a cheerful explorer in buckskins, but a complex, tightly-wound, ambitious and self-conscious man who led one of the great adventures in American history, but had severe re-entry problems and never wrote the book that would have served as the capstone of his explorations. Jenkinson's Lewis was happiest in Montana, alone on the shore with his notebook, his rifle, and his Newfoundland dog, exploring the pristine upper stretches of the Missouri River beyond the last outpost of Euro American civilization. Lewis was most alive between the expedition's departure, April 7, 1805, from Fort Mandan in today's North Dakota and his arrival, on August 12, 1805, at the source of the Missouri River in southwestern Montana. The Character of Meriwether Lewis examines Lewis's key relationships: with his friend and co-captain William Clark; with his patron Thomas Jefferson; with his self-expectations and his self-identification as America's Captain Cook; and with the English language. The Character of Meriwether Lewis is one of the first studies to attempt a completely fresh reading of the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition now that they have been comprehensively edited and published by the University of Nebraska Press. Jenkinson, who is a close reader of texts, attempts to reclaim Lewis from the layers of mythology that have nearly engulfed the actual achievement of Lewis and Clark. Jenkinson provides a rigorously fair and objective analysis of the last days of Lewis's life, and tries to make sense of Lewis's violent death, at the age of 35, almost certainly from suicide. One chapter of the book explores what happened on the night of October 10-11, 1809 on the Natchez Trace in today's Tennessee. Another attempts to understand why Lewis's life spiraled towards collapse in the three years following his return. The Character of Meriwether Lewis is a playful, imaginative, probing humanities study of one of the best-known and least-resolved stories in American history. It is not intended to settle the questions surrounding the remarkable and fragmented Lewis, but to invite a rigorous and spirited new conversation about who Lewis was, what he achieved, and why he could not, in the end, find satisfaction.

Explorer in the Wilderness : Essays on One of the Most Remarkable Men in American History

The Character of Meriwether Lewis

Our third president and founding father Thomas Jefferson is a role model for the Enlightenment movement. In addition, he sought avenues to live his words that "all men are ...endowed with the Rights for Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Author Clay S. Jenkinson puts Jefferson's formulas in plain English and shows us how to apply those formulas to our own every day lives.

Re-inventing the American Republic in the Twenty-first Century

Becoming Jefferson's People

Theodore Roosevelt ventured into the American West to seek authentic frontier experience and the strenuous life. The New York aristocrat traveled to western Dakota Territory in 1883 to kill his first buffalo. He got his buffalo, but he also fell in love with the badlands of what is now North Dakota. On impulse, Roosevelt invested a significant portion of his wealth in two badlands ranches, and he spent the better part of 1883–87 ranching, hunting, serving as deputy sheriff, writing books, and attempting to become an authentic American cowboy. In North Dakota the New York dude became the Theodore Roosevelt who led a cowboy brigade of cavalrymen up Kettle and San Juan Hills in 1898 and then led the American people into the twentieth century as the twenty-sixth president of the United States. This book contains 70 stories, many set in Dakota Territory, about Roosevelt's life as an adventurer, politician, and man of letters, lavishly illustrated with more than 100 photographs, some never previously published. Clay S. Jenkinson's introduction assesses what Roosevelt learned from his sojourn in the West, including his commitment to conservation of America's natural resources. With a foreword by best-selling biographer Douglas Brinkley, this book tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's life in his own words, carefully excerpted from his 1913 autobiography.

Theodore Roosevelt's Sojourn in the American West

A Free and Hardy Life

Timothy Murphy

X. J. Kennedy

Timothy Murphy lives on the Great Plains. He has been a grain and hog farmer and, like Wallace Stevens, an insurance salesman, but the twin joys of his life are poetry and hunting. Murphy's poetry explores faith, family, spirituality, death, farming, friendship, love, and sexuality, yet it is profoundly rooted in place -- the Red River watershed in North Dakota and western Minnesota. He tries to make sense of the wide sweep of the northern plains, to explore how place shapes poetry and how poetry shapes one’s experience of place.

New Poems

Mortal Stakes ; Faint Thunder

North Dakota is regarded as flyover country, but extraordinary narratives play out on this improbable Great Plains landscape. North Dakota is the home of one of the world's largest nuclear missile fields, one of the first mosques in America, a zany collection of roadside attractions, resurgent Native American communities, one of the nation's most productive oil fields, and the magnificent Little Missouri River badlands. Join Clay Jenkinson as he searches for spirit of place, cultural identity, sacred landscapes, and a future for rural America at the center of the continent, where Lewis and Clark wintered, Sitting Bull resisted the conquest, and Theodore Roosevelt became America's leading conservationist and the exemplar of the strenuous life. Part travelogue, part love song to the prairie, and above all, a vision for a cultural renaissance at the heart of the continent, The Language of Cottonwoods will make you laugh, cry, and think, and inspire you to visit North Dakota.

Essays on the Future of North Dakota

The Language of Cottonwoods

The Man of Light : Frequently Asked Questions about the Third President of the United States

Thomas Jefferson

Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs

An indispensable guide to our nation's epic adventure The years 2003-2006 mark the bicentennial of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark's famous transcontinental journey between the Missouri and the Columbia River systems. They never did find the fabled Northwest Passage, but over twenty-eight months, the Corps of Discovery traveled more than eight thousand miles through eleven future states, named scores of places and rivers, met with many Native American tribes, and wrote the first descriptions of heretofore unknown plants and animals. By the end of their trip, Lewis and Clark had navigated and named two thirds of the American continent. They may have had undaunted courage, but the sheer volume of information related to their expedition can be more than a little daunting to the armchair historian. Written by two highly regarded Lewis and Clark experts, this book contains over five hundred lively and fascinating entries on everything from the members of the expedition and the places they went to the weapons and tools, trade goods, and medicines they carried, along with the food and amusements that sustained them. Highly readable and informative, it's the perfect introduction for the Lewis and Clark novice, and the comprehensive guide no buff will want to be without. "This handy volume, timed for publication as the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition opens, has the virtue of teaching the student while helpfully reminding the scholar. " - Publishers Weekly

Clay Jenkinson

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