Reviewed by Ed Lengel

The Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806 has long occupied a central location in the American popular imagination. For almost the two centuries since its conclusion, interpretations about its dramatic personae—particularly, along with an assortment of secondary characters—have been almost entirely laudatory, with but a whiff of regret for native cultures, and natural beauty, now long extinct.

Historian Stephen Ambrose crystalized that vision in his inimitable way with his 1996 book, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns capturing the vision further in the 1997 television miniseries, Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, in which Ambrose of course took a starring role. Ambrose and Burns were an exceptionally talented in their respective mediums of the printed page and film, because they masterfully highlighted the essential narrative in storytelling form that enthralled millions of readers and viewers.

As it is now well known, however, Ambrose—the historian—was sloppy, as any careful cross-referencing from his text to his footnotes will elicit. Quite frequently, he indulged in flights of fancy not justified by his rather limited sources, and sacrificed good history, as he was wont to do in all his work, in the name of good storytelling.

Craig Fehrman, a journalist-historian, in This Vast Enterprise, attempted many things at once in his largely successful effort to supplant Undaunted Courage as the standard history of Lewis and Clark. First, he researched far more extensively than did Ambrose; uncovered sources related to President Jefferson’s complex and sometimes underhanded efforts to fund the expedition, and William Clark’s college notebook. Fehrman also devoted significant effort to unearthing a multiplicity of perspectives during the trek and its progress, including lesser-known members of the Corps of Discovery such as soldier John Ordway, the African American slave York, and especially Indians like a young Blackfoot named Wolf Calf.

All of this is well enough, and places Fehrman far beyond Ambrose in establishing a solid foundation in research and understanding. The trickier job was to maintain and indeed outdo the essential strength of Ambrose’s focused storytelling, while presenting the trip from far more complicated and often diverging perspectives. He attempted to do so by laying out his narrative through a series of alternating perspectives and testimonies, each of which he sought to develop fully and then merge into a unified whole that would still make for gripping reading.

Ironically, and unfortunately, this led Fehrman into committing mistakes like Ambrose’s: in short, by indulging in speculative historical storytelling. Ambrose, who relied almost wholly on the journals of Lewis and Clark, imagined thoughts, motivations, and even events that his source did not justify. In trying to expand his narrative to encompass diverse perspectives—something that Ambrose did not even endeavor do–Fehrman had to subsist on thin documentary gruel, for our knowledge of people like Ordway, York, and the many Native Americans who encountered or worked with the expedition, is but fragmentary. To flesh out their personas and activities, Fehrman almost inevitably had to indulge in hearsay stoked by deeply unreliable sources such as interviews with “experts”, family descendants, and oral histories—sources that understandably appeal to journalists like Fehrman, but which professional historians rightly view with distrust.

Fehrman, unlike Ambrose, is honest enough to admit his heavy reliance on chance to construct his vision of this profoundly important, but highly complex historical event. Fehrman evidently fails to recognize, however, that gaming all too quickly leads in easy steps to imagination and then to present-minded reinvention of the past. In Ambrose’s case, it induced him to create a simplistic and deeply patriotic and self-satisfying narrative appropriate to the era of the Greatest Generation-Band of Brothers that he did so much to create; for Fehrman, unreliable historic imaginations led him to construct a flattering appearance, into a partially simplistic–and, ironically condescending portrayal of social groups and ethnicities whose lives and roles in the early nineteenth century that remain imperfectly understood.

Clearly, Fehrman began his narrative with a desire to bestow initiative and personal agency to hitherto almost invisible figures like Ordway and York, but in his efforts to make them central characters, he engages in rosy imaginative visions that often ignore the cruel realities of their actual lives, in which they probably acted less than they were acted upon. Likewise, although Fehrman works hard to acknowledge the diversity and nobility of native cultures—unlike Ambrose– who tended to view Indians as an amorphous blob—he unfortunately slips all too easily into the trope of the noble savage, ignoring, for example, Indians’ often-Machiavellian, sometimes ruthless, and always extremely complex relations among tribes and with outsiders.

This Vast Enterprise must certainly become the new standard history of the Corps of Discovery, yet it remains palpably a product of popular perspectives on American history and culture in the 2020s—one that will, inevitably, demand a far more hard-headed reappraisal grounded less in conjecture than in the available sources.

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Ed Lengel is an author, a speaker, and a storyteller.