Finding The West: Explorations With Lewis And Clark

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, Rondaas book is centered on stories and storytellers. As he writes: aThis is a book about many storytellers. Their words are French-Canadian, Shoshone, New Hampshire English, Hidatsa, and Chinookan.a Ronda documents not only the stories that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark offered about their aroad across the continent, a 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 athe Westa 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 encounteranative or newcomerathe stories all soon revolved around a common theme: the coming of the winds of change.

Rondaas masterful interpretation of the young Republicas fascination with the West is written with grace, narrative sweep, and a conviction that history should, above all else, engage and inform us.

aThis is a really outstanding, important work.aaProfessor John L. Allen, University of Wyoming