The Journals of Lewis and Clark

by Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, Anthony Brandt

Release Date: 01 December, 2002

Edition: Paperback

Price:

More Info

This is the book to read!

Brandt's abridgment of these important historical documents will be the one that lasts for years to come. He makes these journals accessible to the everyday historian, who is interested in what the Corps of Discovery actually did, and saves us from having to struggle with quaint and erroneous spelling.

Interestingly, Lewis and Clark themselves never meant the journals to be published just as they wrote them. The editor Brandt has done us a great service by cleaning up the language, making the text flow seamlessly, and leaving out the boring parts.

There are those who will carp over his correction of the spelling (pedants who read Virgil in the original), but the rest of us are grateful. Brandt's talent as a writer shines through the work as he connects the journal sections with elegantly crafted passages.

Finally, the Story as Lewis & Clark would have told it

It's no secret that the only narrative available from Lewis and Clark themselves was one they wrote in raw form while on their journey. While this offers a certain "real time" value, it is a value best appreciated by researchers and not your average reader. I was intrigued enough by other books in this series to want to hear about Lewis & Clark's adventures in their own words, but not to read details of every single day of their journey which, by its very nature, can't help but be monotonous.
This book, on the other hand, gave me a true sense of what their journey was like, and what they were like without giving me the details of each morning's breakfast menu.
And that sense, by the way, was conveyed without any sense of abruptness or with any apparent gaps in the narrative. This book was a joy insomuch as it delivered the experience smoothly in their own words without the kind of puzzling pauses which accompany writings in broken English.
In much the same way that this exploration opened the west, this book opened my eyes to this exploration. It is absolutely worth the read.