Finding the West: Explorations with Lewis and Clark

Histories of the American Frontier Series

by James P. Ronda

One of the foremost historians of Lewis and Clark, Ronda grounds Finding the West in the insights and reflections he has gleaned from some twenty years of research and writing about this pivotal era. But above all else, Ronda's book is centered on stories and storytellers. As he "This is a book about many storytellers. Their words are French-Canadian, Shoshone, New Hampshire English, Hidatsa, and Chinookan." Ronda documents not only the stories that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark offered about their "road across the continent," but also the large and important stories by and about the native peoples whose trails they followed and whose lands they described in their journals and reports and on their maps. The beginning of the nineteenth century represents a time when America passed into a headlong rush for empire and when "the West" loomed large as a dream for some and a nightmare for others, an era that irrevocably shaped the new American nation in the two hundred years that followed. Whoever the storyteller in the aftermath of that encounter--native or newcomer--the stories all soon revolved around a common the coming of the winds of change. Ronda's masterful interpretation of the young Republic's fascination with the West is written with grace, narrative sweep, and a conviction that history should, above all else, engage and inform us.
"This is a really outstanding, important work."--Professor John L. Allen, University of Wyoming

Genres: American History, History

160 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2001

Reviews

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having moved to the terminating point of the Lewis and Clark expedition I was looking for a quick read discussing the reasons for the expedition and its effects on those peoples affected by the journey. The original storytellers recounting the trip had different points of view and the author interestingly
explains those differences. The author presents the positive results and the failures of Jefferson's big gamble. I came away with a better understanding of the importance of the expedition without having to plod through the day to day happenings found in the diaries left behind. That may come at a later time. It was an interesting read. Glad I found it.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was initially intrigued by Ronda's promise to help "see" the Lewis and Clark trek from a number of different perspectives of how "The West" was and continues to be visualized by competing groups. "Competing" in both a real and figurative sense, since in 1804-6 the Pacific northwest was by no means assured to the American republic. There was commercial contention from Canadian and Russian fur traders and Spanish interests in the southwest, as well as established stakes by native Americans across the entire landscape.

While I enjoyed reading this collection of essays, at the end I was left feeling like I was still looking for the fulfillment of this revelatory promise. Perhaps my expectations were just pumped-up by the way Ronda talked about the many different "stories" told and implied by the Corps of Discovery's penetrating exploration westward. I somehow didn't find in his book new perspectives that were truly new and informative.

And one of his assertions at the end of his final essay caught my attention as a sort of summary to Ronda's undercurrent treatment of the Lewis and Clark expedition and its mission as defined by Jefferson. In commenting on Lewis and Clark's active remapping and renaming of important geographic features such as rivers, in order to comprehensively identify the Western lands, Ronda writes that "what they did not appreciate was naming as an act of erasure, appropriation and possession" (p. 127). A ridiculous statement. As every explorer has known since the beginning of formal statehood, when you come to a place that you wish to claim as your own you stick a flag in the ground and give it a name and with that all prior history of that landscape disappears.