The Character of Meriwether Lewis Explorer in the Wilderness : Essays on One of the Most Remarkable Men in American History

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.