The Course Of Empire: The Dramatic History of Exploration That Defined America―From Balboa to Lewis and Clark

Trilogy of the West #3

by Bernard DeVoto

Tracing North American Exploration from Balboa to Lewis and Clark, Devoto tells in a classic fashion how the drama of discovery defined the American nation. The Course of Empire is the third volume in historian Bernard Devoto’s monumental trilogy of the West. Entertaining and incisive, this is the dramatic story of three hundred years of exploration of North America leading up to 1805.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Westerns, American

688 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

About the author

Bernard Augustine DeVoto was an American historian and author who specialized in the history of the American West.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Bernard De Voto's The Course of Empire put me in mind of the computer game Empire Earth. Empire Earth is a real time strategy game that begins in the Stone Age and spans 500,000 years. You are given a certain number of settlers, with which to gather resources, build armies, and crush your enemies (your enemies being everyone who isn't your country, which makes it a tougher sell in schools than, say, Oregon Trail). The game allows you to be an overbearing, genocidal dictator within the confines of your mother's basement. In that way, it is a therapeutic outlet for your arch-villain ambitions. When I look back, I'm actually a little concerned at the thrill I got when I flung my fleets of atomic-bomb-laden B-52s at my neighbor's granaries and hospitals.

That was last week.

The reason I thought of Empire Earth, though, is that when the game begins, the whole world is black. The only thing you can see is the small number of settlers with which you begin play. In order to reveal the map, you have to send people out into that vast unknown.

In Empire Earth, the easiest thing you can do is build a dog, and then send that dog barking happily to its doom. By the time it is killed by a stone-throwing Neanderthal from the country of England, it will have shown you a good portion of the map. In real life, of course, you can't just build a dog and send it out to discover the world. For that, we have Spaniards.

The Course of Empire spans 278 years of North American exploration. It starts with the Spanish exploration of Mexico and the American southwest, including Cabeza de Vaca's extraordinary journey of survival, and ends with the Lewis & Clark Expedition in 1804.

Sometimes, often after watching an Insane Clown Posse video, I like to ponder the great difficulties of life. These are the things that got done that I can't imagine doing. Like inventing the enema. Or mapping North America. If I tried to draw you a map from my bedroom to my kitchen, there is a 30% chance you'd end up in Boca Raton. Yet, hundreds of years ago, there were men able to map this entire continent.

The overarching theme of The Course of Empire is how the reality of exploration measured up to the imagined lands. De Voto writes time and again about the "mists" that shrouded North America, and how men and nations poured their dreams and hopes into this blank slate. They imagined Northwest Passages and cities of gold; they conjured transcontinental rivers and tribes of Welsh Indians.

If this all sounds very romantic, and a bit Quixotic, that's how De Voto writes. This book was written in 1952, so if you're used to books that remind you every other page that the end result of these explorations was genocide and the decimation of the American Indian, you will probably find something missing. At the same time, De Voto was enlightened and nuanced enough to look critically at these explorers and their motivations.

Reading this book can be a bit of a slog. It's written in a very wordy, florid style, with a dearth of commas. If you aren't paying close attention, you will find yourself reading sentences that appear to have been siphoned through Babel Fish. De Voto's odd - I want to say archaic, but it's not that old - phrasing forces you to stay on your toes. On the upside, though, you get a historian who is also a literary force, who can inspire you with the beauty of his compositions.

Now, I'm the kind of guy who hates crowds. This is why I've never gone to Disneyland, I frequent dive bars, and I like to order pizzas (along with my confessed love for computer games, this review should get me a few dates!). Accordingly, I loved De Voto's evocation of a time when this country was wild and empty and the natural beauty took the breath from your lungs (somehow, I don't get quite the same feeling at Yellowstone and Yosemite, when I'm stuck behind an RV the size of a Central American country).

All this crossing of the plains had meant new landscapes, new experiences, new peoples, and they were all strange...Everywhere the sun mocked the eye with unearthly distortions. Seared eyes could find no trees for solace except the willows and the cottonwoods that marked watercourses and sometimes a small, hidden ravine choked with smaller stuff. Only the earth and the sun and the arch of the sky, buffalo grass everywhere and then taller grasses. Ahead of them the grass bent as the wind trod it; the line of horsemen bent it too as they crossed; it rose again from wind and hoof and closed behind them and no sign of their passing had been left...

This book is at its best when it can latch onto a character and follow him throughout a mini-narrative arc. That's why the early Spanish sections are enjoyable, because we are allowed to spend some time with a familiar person. The problem, though, is that for big chunks in the middle section, there isn't a character-based focus, and we are jumping from explorer to explorer very quickly. A lot of these were guys I'd never heard of. De Voto doesn't spend enough time on them to allow them to make an impression, so I quickly started to get confused. For instance, I've never read much about the British in the Northwest, and I needed more of a foundation in order to follow Alexander MacKenzie's attempts to find a route to the Pacific Ocean.

On the other hand, when De Voto has his focus, The Course of Empire rolls right along. This is especially true with the section on Lewis and Clark (which makes sense, since De Voto is something of an expert in this area). Right off, he nails the character of the two lead explorers, in nice thumbnail sketches:

Lewis had the faculty of command and exercised it by instinct. He was the better educated and was a citizen of the world and a diplomat. His mind was restless, inquiring, speculative, scientific. He was introspective, humorous though rather pompously so, mercurial, moody, and he expressed himself in elaborate prose. There was not much warmth in him, he was a solitary and a melancholiac, and he was saturated with romantic emotions. He belonged to a type very common in our westering, the complexly introverted personalities who turned to the solitude and beauties and challenges of nature to satisfy a need that human association could not assuage.

The Course of Empire takes as its subject an epic adventure that spans hundreds of years and one really diverse continent. Yet it really succeeds when it hones in on the human dramas; when it leaves behind the vastness of the land and stares into the souls of its human explorers. Otherwise, it tends to get baggy and unmanageable. There is a lot of talking about where certain men thought certain rivers were flowing, and even though there are plenty of maps, it's pretty much impossible to picture in your mind what is being described. Frankly, during those portions, my interest waned. But when De Voto brings it back to the human element, to those heroes and hucksters, visionaries and charlatans, and starts to hit the rhetorical high notes, I really enjoyed it.

There is a passage towards the end, at the conclusion of the Lewis & Clark expedition, when De Voto takes a roll call of the explorers. It's a soaring passage that really strives to capture the sweep of the enterprise, and I loved it:

Charles Floyd had been dead these two years and is buried on a bluff upriver; we passed his grave a few days back and found that Indians had opened it. John Colter is not here, having turned back to the Yellowstone. Charbonneau and Sacajawea and the little boy are also absent...So there are Meriweather Lewis...and William Clark...The hunter George Drewyer. Three sergeants...These in bold relief. There will be other figures in low relief, as many as the sculptor may care to use. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who first heard of the river whose olive-drab water slurs round the sterns of the anchored boats. Jolliet and Marquette who first saw it - "I have seen nothing more frightful." Many who traveled desirously toward the Western Sea: Cartier, Hudson, John Smith, Champlain, Brule, Nicolet, Duluth, La Salle, the defeated Verendrye (many defeated men, drowned or scalped or dead in bed so long ago no one remembers them), the thin-nosed Jonathan Carver, John Evans who left Wales to find Madoc's lost colony. There are as many as the sculptor may desire: they are ghosts, nothing of them lived on but their desire or dream. None saw the Western Sea, or the place where the Great River of the West reached the South Sea, or whither the Missouri led, or the mountains whose stones shone night and day...

Before there was America, there was an idea of America. De Voto tells us of the men who marched into the mists and failed to find what they were looking for and managed to find a whole lot else. There was no Western Sea, or shining mountains, or lost tribes. But there was America - towering mountains, endless rolling prairies, raging rivers, peaceful meadows, dense forests, plunging valleys, and placid lakes.

Now, sadly, the dream in the mist is of that time when that land was wild, untrammeled, uncut, and unexploited.

[Greg Strandberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably one of the best histories of Western exploration and expansion, an all-encompassing narrative that takes us from the mid-1400s up to 1806 and the end of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

The level of detail about explorers in America and the American West in the 1500s and 1600s was amazing. I had no idea about some of the places these people went to, and how much we knew.

That detail continues right up into the 1700s and 1800s, and even having read and researched dozens of books on fur trapping, there were a few names and dates that I was unaware of.

Bernard DeVoto won the Pulitzer Price for his second installment of the West's history (which may have been written first) and you can tell why in this volume. I highly recommend this book, which might take you some time to get through. It's well worth it.

[Erica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a history of seriously epic proportions. DeVoto covers 278 years of exploration over a massive continent in 550 pages--and makes it interesting.

I read this as part of a project this semester to explore some narrative histories, which were done very well in the 1950s when this was published (as opposed to thesis-driven history, which has dominated academia since the 1960s and which I feel has had more than its fair share of time in the limelight and ought to be done away with [Heresy!]). In the first chapter, DeVoto enchanted me with a mixture of dramatic passages, truly deft turns of phrase, vividly drawn characters, and a subtle sense of humor, and for the first time in a long time I found myself excited by the prospect of writing history. Here was a history book with a literary structure, poetically titled chapters, themes, and other narrative devices! I haven't read many "popular" history books, so DeVoto was something of a novelty to me after two years of reading academic histories, which one approaches with a scalpel for swift scientific dissection rather than with a spoon for savoring.

So that explains my excitement. The beginning chapters on the Spanish, and the end chapters on the Lewis and Clark Expedition were especially enjoyable. But the book is quite dense--I will admit to being bogged down in the middle when the French were on center stage, but I suspect this was partly a function of my being in a hurry and my inability to satisfactorily pronounce French names in my head. Also, while DeVoto has a real talent for drawing characters, he sometimes draws a little too decisively and runs the risk of caricature, especially in his portrayal of various Native American tribes. But all in all, I enjoyed my experience of DeVoto.

[Anson Cassel Mills · Rating 4 out of 5]

To my mind, Course of Empire is the best book written by Bernard Devoto (1897-1955). With it, he won a National Book Award to add to his Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes. DeVoto’s integration of American exploration with the political quarrels of Europe is exceptionally good, and his understanding of western geography is overwhelming even to the well traveled.

Most important, this is the work of a novelist manqué who should have been a historian all along. The book is everywhere readable and sometimes sings. A couple of examples:

“The best hope of peace lay in the fact that for half a century Spain had been falling like Lucifer son of the morning and was now prostrate. Its possessions spread across Europe without logic of geography or nationality. If they could be satisfactorily distributed among the powers peace might follow like the well-being of a man who has dined well.” (164)

“In 1744 [Arthur Dobbs] published An Account of the Countries Adjoining to Hudson’s Bay, a vigorous, absorbing book which assembled everything that was known, rumored, guessed, logically deduced, and imagined about the Northwest. It is a visionary’s argument and perhaps the most shining eighteenth-century example of what the imagination can do when it has a blank map to work on and is handicapped by no empirical knowledge whatever.” (244)

Finally, in Course of Empire, Native Americans are treated knowledgeably and thoroughly yet without the stifling political correctness of the early 21st century. DeVoto writes of “savages” who do savage things; and he is right. Of course, DeVoto had the advantage of writing at a time when Europeans could no longer get a pass for being white but before Native Americans got one for not being so. DeVoto could not have chosen his era, but he certainly made fine use of it.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A narrative history of the exploration of North America from Cortez to Lewis and Clark. DeVoto writes about many explorers you and I have never heard of. The Spanish wanted gold. Later the French and British established an extensive fur trade along their routes to find a Northwest Passage. Published in 1952, this is still a grand narrative. These adventures have been described many times in the intervening 67 years, but I was persuaded that I'd find DeVoto's writing and his telling of the epic journeys compelling. I was also warned his prose often tried to be too splendid. I found neither to be quite the case, though I did come to think that DeVoto's big and engaging chronicle of 1952 probably outweighs his history as seen from the higher ground of 2019.

[Cat · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a magisterial history of the exploration of the west by an icon of western histiography. DeVoto takes in the whole sweep of New World history, from the conquistadors up to Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark are the clear apogee of the narrative, and the hundred or so pages on their expedition function as a hundred page mini book within a book.

I learned alot about the exploration of the west in this book, especially in the sections devoted to spanish (inept) and french (daring but lacking ambition) exploration. All forces eventually will yield to the english and later the americans.

Jefferson emerges as a far sighted hero of manifest destiny. This book gives great little known detail on the interaction between westerners and native americans without being biased or unduly sentimental to the existing native cultures.

I thought on the whole he was even handed about alot of controversial issues and his awesome prose and thorough research make this an enduring classic of american history and the "course of empire"

[Liam · Rating 4 out of 5]

"'We ever held it certain that going toward the sunset we would find what we desired.' In four centuries, no one ever said it more fully." (quoting Cabeza de Vaca, 19)

"Are there geographical units here to which political units must correspond? It was asked so quietly that down to today many have never realized that it was asked at all." (228)

"The American teleology is geographical." (404)

"[O]n the far shore were not only the Canto merchants who brought the sea otter but Prester John and the Grand Khan who ruled kingdoms of marvel. There had been but there would be no longer; for it this camp [Lewis and Clark's] was a beginning it was also a final end. They had filled out the map and when the map is made there is no room or use for dreams." (553)

[Lauren Hiebner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bernard Devoto is a great storyteller, it’s like sitting around a campfire listening to stories about explores of North America. This story begins in the 1500s with the Spanish explorers and it continues with French explores and the fur trade. Next is Great Britain and their explores and the interaction of cultures on the frontier. He finishes with the great Lewis and Clark trip that was taken in 1806. Devoto explains economic and political impact of these explores, he then delves into the life and culture of the explores and the impact that they had. The only fault that I see in the book is being in the written in the 50s, the stereotyped image of the Indian tribes that he describes. However it is a great read.

[Lorena · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most fascinating books about American History that I have ever read, and filled a huge gap in my knowledge and understanding of the years preceding 1830. I will read it again at least once, as there is so much to absorb and reflect upon. This book is enriching other books I am reading too. Highly recommend!

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Laborious reading, more like poetry than prose.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the keystone book of DeVoto's trilogy of American growth and expansion. I've read the two follow-ups, "Across the Wide Missouri" and "The Year of Decision," and own this one, as the best of the three. Yes, "Across the Wide Missouri" won the Pulitzer, but it built on the recognition this book had achieved.

This book also has more information about early non English/British/American exploration than in your high school textbook. More of what's in the other two volumes is accessible elsewhere. That's the main reason I kept this.

But, it's dated, and it was a bit dated by the time Wallace Stegner wrote the note that became the introduction for the 1980 reprint I have. We've got more information today, or rediscovered more information, on some of those old explorers. We've also puzzled together more information on American Indian movements before whenever various groups first contacted whites, and in the first generations after.

Speaking of?

The biggest failing is something that's close to cultural essentialism. It's not quite that, in its normal sense, and so, it's far short of racism. But, observations such as "All Crows X" or "All Sioux Y" are a sub-ethnic version of cultural essentialism.

A lesser failing? The maps, in this edition, aren't conducive to following exploration trails well. The Lewis and Clark routes, notably, get lost in how mountains and rivers are drawn.

[Wayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Book 7 of 2023: Course of Empire by Bernard DeVoto (1952, Mariner Books (1998), 647 p.)

This is the third (as published) of DeVoto's trilogy of Western history, but covers the initial part of the history chronologically. The time frame is from Balboa's reaching the Pacific from Europe in 1513 to the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804-1806.

It is essentially the narrative of the northern, southern, westward, and eastern expansion by European (Spain, France, British) empires and the continent's latecomer the United States.

While the prehistoey of the Indigenous peoples is difficult to sort out in a narrative history (it would mostly be an anthroplogical and archaeological treatise), DeVoto deals with the impact (both good and bad) from European contact. One of the most significant impacts was trade for European manufactured goods that eased the everyday life of tribal members (often detrimental to their cultures) and the introduction of the horse that created the Plains culture.

The narrative is really one of geography and a slow unveiling of it across the centuries. One of my frequent complaints on histories is a lack of maps. DeVoto has over 30(!) maps as part of his story. I also lived that fact that the year(s) covered in the text were printed on the top header of each page.

HIghly recommended.

[James Empson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found the earlier part of the book fascinating, but the details re Lewis and Clark's expedition are probably more readable in Stephen Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage". That said, DeVoto's sense of imperial strategy -as seen in a time before rail and air transit and focused almost exclusively on the fur trade - is more than illuminating in the context of the development of an American empire. (Still unsure as to DeVoto's tendency to wax lyrical from time to time)

[David Kessler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bernard D. has done it again and written a fine book with lots of research time behind it.
The details of how the empire was created; how did the U.S. form itself? The book provides all the details of the western expansion of this youthful nation. And who helped this country grow along the way? What economies helped it get its footing? Enjoyed the author's writing of America's expansion from 1500(captains and ships) to the 1800s and the movement of farms west of the Mississippi.

[Craig McGraw · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely detailed history of the exploration of North America from early Spanish to Lewis & Clark. Fascinating stories of men transversing the wilds of the western US and the ramifications on world politics at the time. Also the never ending myth of the Northwest Passage which was always over the next ridge or around the next bend of the river

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Scholarly, well written. Explains how Britain and subsequently the US bested the French and took control of their colonial properties including the Louisiana Purchase, thus opening the west for further exploration.
I would have loved to be alive then and seen the country in its wild state.

[Raquel A.]

I liked this book a lot because it taught me about people discovering new lands and what hardships they went through to discover new land.

[John Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The "Great Game" contested by Great Britain, Russia, and to a lesser extent other powers for control of Central Asia is a familiar part of history. This book presents the thesis that North America between 1492 and roughly 1815 was the site of a similar "great game" involving Spain, France, Great Britain, and, at the end, the United States. The major elements were the same: foreign powers occupying the periphery of the continent and seeking to control trade with the interior; indigenous tribes in the interior seeking (where possible) to block and monopolize the same trade for their own benefit; tribes situated in areas that gave them relatively steady access to European trade goods and weapons using that advantage to prey upon and sometimes exterminate their neighbors; and the maneuvering of all parties being shaped by the same set of geographic conditions - long distances, no roads, high mountains and wide deserts to make travel even more difficult, and only a limited number rivers that could substitute for highways. The two editions of the "Great Game" also were similar in that the most highly sought-after prize was a viable land route to the markets of the East - India in the case of the nineteenth-century Asian contest, and China in the case of the earlier North American struggle - which ultimately was found not to exist.

This book places American history in a much broader and more comprehensive framework than usually is the case. Events such as the founding of the original thirteen colonies on the Atlantic seaboard barely are mentioned. Even Daniel Boone, who usually is understood to have played a prominent role in the history of early westward expansion, merits barely a mention. Indeed, his trailblazing expeditions seem positively plebian compared to the earlier explorations of French and British voyageurs, who went much farther, into much more hostile country, and did it with the less advanced weapons and tools of an earlier era.

The Course of Empire is history on a broad scale, and it does an excellent job of weaving together events taking place in widely separated places in America, and even Europe. History usually focuses on particular places at particular times. For example, histories of the era of the conquistadors usually focus on events in Latin America and the American Southwest to the exclusion of other areas. The Course of America brings together the entire story, and reminds the reader that French voyageurs began their explorations only a few years after the Spaniards, and made their own trips deep into the interior of the continent while Spanish conquistadors such as Coronado still were making their own explorations.

The Course of Empire initially was published in 1952, and it remains a tour de force of American history. Anyone interested in American history will find it well worth reading.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This history of the development of the United States covers the period from early exploration to the Louisiana Purchase, with heavy emphasis on relations with Native American tribes. In a sense, it is "Guns, Germs and Steel" told from an American perspective. DeVoto, a noted historian, does a good job of describing relationships among the tribes of North America and the impact of trade for guns and iron tools that would change the balance of power among American Indians. It describes the arrival of the horse culture to Plains Indians and the impact on inter-tribal conflicts. It describes as well the decimation of certain tribes by smallpox.

But DeVoto's style in the book has a strong dramatic aspect to it, so at times you wonder if he's writing a novel instead of history. For example, in describing the first Americans west of the Appalachian mountains DeVoto writes,"The Kentuckians were the first half-horse, half-alligator Americans, nature's premature attempt to create Texans." Imaginative but even after finishing the book I have no idea what that passage means.

The final section of the book covers the Lewis & Clark expedition in detail. It is excellent.

A better DeVoto work is his history of the Mexican-American War, "The Year of Decision: 1846".

As a side note: DeVoto's wife, Avis, was the editor of Julia Child's first book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and a long-time correspondent with Child. A collection of her correspondence is published under the title "As Always, Julia".

[Carl Strange · Rating 3 out of 5]

DeVoto is good, but here he loses his narrative power like Napoleon in Russia. Two and a half centuries is just too wide a path to travel for any one story, and the individual stories seem disjointed, as though they belonged in a narrower book. Had he concentrated on the navigation and settlement of the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, the details of hugely erroneous course planning and of human endurance would have come to flower. Instead he moves here from bud to bud.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Across The Wide Missouri, this can be a grind of a read. But these two, along with The Year of Decision 1846, will likely remain the definitive history of American exploration for a very long time.

[Caleb Schultz]

A glorious and intellectual account of the History and westward expansion of North America. A lofty read. I consider it a short course on American History. It highlights most of the important items in our history as we expanded west.

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ignorantly, I read this, the third volume of DeVoto's historical trilogy about the westward expansion of the USA, without having read the previous volumes, The Year of Decision 1846 (1942) and Across the Wide Missouri (1947).

[Mike · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally finished this behemoth of a book. While some parts were engaging, for the most part it was a drag to get through. There are so many names and places that I felt lost. Would have been nice to have a big map sitting next to me for most of the text.

[Jonathan Parfrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

best book i've read on the founding of the american empire

[Wesley Redfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding account of the pivotal year of 1846.