Into the Archives: Craig Fehrman on This Vast Enterprise

A new look at an old expedition. A deeply researched history that reads like an adventure story, this is a fresh and in-depth account of Lewis and Clark's travels that new perspectives from forgotten figures, with recently discovered materials and 32 full-color photographs.  Read on for an exclusive essay from Craig about the research for This Vast Enterprise.  

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One of the big ideas in my book is that the success of Lewis and Clark depended on more than just Lewis and Clark. Their expedition relied on a huge number of people, and to tell those stories, I needed a huge number of sources. I’d like to share some images and anecdotes from my five years of research. 

I’d like to take you behind the scenes.

A woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis) that Lewis and Clark brought back with them. | Courtesy of the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Starting in 1804, Lewis and Clark traveled more than 8,000 miles from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back again. One thing that makes their trip so special—and I think of it as America’s best adventure story, our national Odyssey—is the amount of surviving documents. 

Every historian starts with the journals kept by the two captains and a few of their soldiers, which run to more than a million words. These journals describe big moments, like the tense, multi-day standoff between the Americans and the Lakota. But they also describe smaller ones, like Lewis’s account of a woodpecker. “The belly and breast,” he wrote, “is a curious mixture of white and blood red, which has much the appearance of having been artificially painted or stained.”

Here's where the research gets fun. Lewis and Clark also collected hundreds of scientific specimens, including the woodpecker pictured above. I can still remember the first time I looked at this image of a bird they’d brought home—you can instantly see how apt Lewis’s account was. The shade of red really is so vibrant it looks fake!

There’s a second lesson in the overlap between the journal and the specimen. It shows that the captains were doing their Enlightenment best to record everything as precisely as possible. Jefferson certainly trusted them. Lewis, the president wrote, was “so scrupulous that whatever he should report would be as certain as if seen by ourselves.”

An oil painting by George Catlin of the Missouri River in what is now South Dakota. | Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

I wanted to write a book about 1804, not 2026, and I worked hard to understand each person on their own terms. So much has changed in the last two centuries. Even the Missouri River has changed because of modern development and dams. I spent a lot of time reading academic research and interviewing experts, especially Native experts, so I could write from the perspective of people Lewis and Clark met—people like a Lakota leader named Black Buffalo. 

I sought out old paintings like this one by George Catlin, created only a few decades after Lewis and Clark. I read Catlin’s journals and then compared them to the maps Clark had drawn on their rocking boat. I pieced together that this painting was made on the same exact spot where the Americans and the Lakota had faced off in 1804. It felt so exciting to realize that Catlin’s painting was as close as we’ll ever get to seeing what Lewis and Clark saw during those stressful days.

Then I realized that it was as close as we’ll ever get to seeing what Black Buffalo saw, too. 

The sewing kit George Shannon carried on the expedition. | Courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society.

The expedition was about science and empire, but it was also about protecting your feet. This picture is of a sewing kit carried by one of the soldiers, a private named George Shannon. If you look closely by the red leather tab, you can still see the needle that Shannon used.

The American soldiers made hundreds of pairs of moccasins. Then they wore through them and made hundreds more. Eventually, they began making a new style of moccasin with double soles—Sacajawea probably showed them how to do that.

Of all the objects and maps I examined, I think about this sewing kit the most. I’m not sure why. I guess it makes me feel close to Shannon. It seems so relatable. (I need to protect my feet, too.) But it also seems so strange. (I can just go buy shoes at the store.) Historians always wrestle with this tension—with the way people from the past are like us but also not like us at all. 

And yet, in either case, history still comes down to human beings. That’s what I think, at least. I loved writing about this epic expedition. But I especially loved writing about the people who sacrificed so much for it, all of them.