Undaunted Courage: The Pioneering First Mission to Explore America’s Wild Frontier by Stephen E. AmbroseMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
One thing I really liked about this book was getting a sense of what America was like before white settlement: the natural (herds of bison roaming the Great Plains) and the anthropological. I somehow had a very binary idea that there was Native American civilization before vs after European contact, so it was interesting to see the ways the cultures interacted and coexisted over centuries. Some of the tribes Lewis and Clark came into contact with might never have seen white men, but their lives were still totally different because of things they did: the Spanish introduction of horses to the continent, trade routes involving British and French fur trappers, the spread of disease.
Reading it gave me some respect for cultural evolution-type stuff–like yep, Native American tribes really just figured out how to thrive in their environment in a way that’s pretty hard for a bunch of white guys figuring it out from first principles.
I picked this up because I wanted to read about people doing hard things, and it pretty much delivered. It sounds like the expedition was really hard and in most worlds wouldn’t have succeeded; they only made it through a combination of luck and actually being super prepared and making mostly quite good decisions. (I get weirdly anxious about packing for trips and have a lot of dreams about not having enough time to pack, forgetting to pack something, etc. so packing for a 2-year-long trip where you have to carry everything you pack but also you die if you run out of something is uh yikes.)
The weird thing about humans, though, is that they can be so good at doing hard things but they can also be so bad at doing easy things. Lewis commanded an expedition through unknown territory across America and did a really good job, but then when he got back he procrastinated horribly on publishing his journals, somehow totally failed to pick up any women despite being a national hero, became an alcoholic and opiate addict, and committed suicide.
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