Meriwether Lewis commanded the most important exploration mission in the early history of the United States. Clay S. Jenkinson takes a fresh look at Lewis, not to offer a paper cutout hero but to describe and explain a hyperserious young man of great complexity who found the wilderness of Upper Louisiana as exacting as it was exhilarating.Jenkinson sees Lewis as a troubled soul before he left St. Charles, Missouri, in May 1804. His experiences in lands "upon which the foot of civilized man had never trodden" further fractured his sense of himself. His hiring William Clark as his "partner in discovery" was, Jenkinson shows, the most intelligent decision he ever made. When Clark was nearby, Lewis's leadership was stable and productive. When Clark was absent and thus unable to provide a calming influence on his mercurial friend, Lewis tended to get into trouble. Jenkinson argues that if Clark had been with Lewis on the Natchez Trace, the governor of Upper Louisiana would not have killed himself. Jenkinson sees Lewis's 1809 suicide not as an inexplicable mystery, but the culmination of a series of pressures that extend back to the expedition and perhaps even earlier.The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness is a revision of an earlier book, greatly expanded with new scholarship and insights gained through Jenkinson's extensive participation in the Lewis and Clark Expedition Bicentennial. Jenkinson discusses Lewis's sense of humor, his oft-stated fear that the expedition he was leading might collapse, his self-conscious learnedness, and his inability to re-enter "polite society" after his return. The book attempts to reconstruct from Lewis's journal entries and letters his rich, troubled personality and his aspirations to heroism. When the American mythology surrounding him is removed and Lewis is allowed to reveal himself, he emerges as a fuller, more human, and endlessly fascinating explorer.

About the Author

Clay Jenkinson is a North Dakotan who grew up on the Lewis and Clark trail. Trained in English Renaissance literature and theology at the University of Minnesota and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes and Danforth scholar, Jenkinson is the author of eight books, the creator of documentary films about the Great Plains, and a weekly columnist for the Bismarck Tribune.

He is the principal consultant to the new Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, a distinguished lecturer at Bismarck State College, and the director of The Dakota Institute at the Lewis & Clark Fort Mandan Foundation. He lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, not far from where Lewis and Clark camped on October 21, 1804, and August 18, 1806.

His principal biographical interests are Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, John Wesley Powell, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Oppenheimer, and the British explorer and linguist Richard Francis Burton.

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