This Vast Enterprise

Craig Fehrman's This Vast Enterprise reframes the Lewis and Clark expedition not as the story of two heroic captains but as a collective drama shaped by contests over land. Using rotating chapters centered on different individuals, Fehrman traces the expedition from its political origins through its perilous journey and its troubled aftermath.

The book opens in September 1803 on Cedar Island, a trading post on the Missouri River, where French fur traders were confronted by the Lakota, a powerful Native nation that dominated the region. Two rival Lakota leaders, Black Buffalo and the Partisan, vied for control: Black Buffalo favored strategic patience, while the Partisan preferred volatility and theatrics. This scene establishes the world the Corps of Discovery, the U.S. expedition party led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, was about to enter.

Fehrman then introduces Lewis, born in 1774 near Monticello in Virginia. Lewis found structure in the army after a rootless childhood and became President Thomas Jefferson's private secretary in 1801. The two discussed the possibility of a water route connecting the Missouri and Columbia Rivers. Jefferson, who had pursued western expansion for decades, secured secret congressional funding in early 1803. His motives went beyond science: He embraced preemption rights, the principle that a nation claiming territory through discovery held the exclusive right to purchase it from Native occupants. The Louisiana Purchase arrived as a surprise in July 1803, granting the United States preemption rights over vast territory west of the Mississippi. Spain, furious, deployed spies and cavalry to intercept the expedition.

Lewis departed Pittsburgh on August 31, 1803, descended the Ohio River, and reached Louisville, where Clark, his invited co-leader, had assembled volunteers. Clark brought York, an enslaved man born around 1770 on the Clark family's plantation, separating him from his wife and parents. The party wintered at Camp River Dubois near the mouth of the Missouri. There, Sergeant John Ordway, a New Hampshire native and the youngest of 12 children, drilled civilian recruits. The captains favored consensus over the brutal flogging typical of the era, but discipline nearly collapsed when recruits threatened violence. Ordway stood down rather than escalate, preventing a confrontation that could have ended the expedition.

The Corps departed on May 14, 1804, with about 30 men in a barge and two pirogues, or small cargo boats. Clark managed logistics and mapped the route while the party battled the Missouri's powerful current. At Council Bluff on August 3, Lewis delivered a speech presenting Jefferson as a benevolent leader, while Clark gathered intelligence about land claims for Jefferson's preemption agenda. A council with the Yankton, a Dakota subgroup, went well in late August, but the captains mistook the Yankton for the feared Sicangu, or Brulé Lakota, leaving themselves unprepared for the real encounter ahead.

That encounter came in late September at the mouth of the Bad River. Black Buffalo, born around 1755, had risen to lead the largest Sicangu band through kinship and balanced diplomacy. When the Partisan grabbed Clark and insulted him, Clark drew his sword and Lewis aimed the cannon. Black Buffalo intervened, seizing the cable from his rival's men and inviting the captains to visit the Sicangu camp. Over three days, he welcomed the Corps with feasts and dancing while arguing for a long-term American alliance. When the Partisan's men again seized the anchor cable, Black Buffalo negotiated their release.

York's role expanded during the expedition's ascent of the Missouri. He hunted buffalo, carried a gun, and nursed sick colleagues. At the Arikara towns, a Native community on the Missouri, York became a sensation: The Arikara had never seen a Black person and considered him spiritually powerful. When Clark criticized him, York decided not to defer. At Fort Mandan, the Corps' second winter camp near villages of the Mandan and Hidatsa peoples, Sacajawea entered the narrative. Born around 1788, the Shoshone teenager had been captured by Hidatsa raiders around 1800 and later acquired by Toussaint Charbonneau, a trader who enslaved and abused her. The captains hired Charbonneau because his Shoshone wives could help acquire horses for crossing the Rockies.

The Corps began its second year on April 7, 1805. Lewis documented hundreds of new species while the party survived grizzly bears, navigated a crucial fork in the Missouri, and endured a grueling 20-mile portage around the Great Falls. At Three Forks, Sacajawea told Ordway this was where she had been captured, the first time she shared her story with anyone in the Corps. Lewis's scout party crossed the Continental Divide and found the Shoshone in mid-August. Sacajawea discovered that the Shoshone leader Cameahwait was her brother and broke down sobbing. She learned nearly her entire family was dead but chose to continue, hoping the expedition would bring trade to the Shoshone. The Corps acquired horses and endured a brutal 24-day crossing of the Rockies.

Emerging from the mountains in late September 1805, the Corps met the Nez Perce, a Native nation that fed the sick explorers and taught them to build dugout canoes. York and the strongest swimmers piloted canoes through dangerous rapids on the Clearwater, Snake, and Columbia Rivers, reaching the Pacific in November. Lewis and Clark asked everyone, including York and Sacajawea, to vote on where to build winter quarters. The vote for the south side of the Columbia was overwhelming, influenced by Coboway, the most powerful Clatsop leader, who had steered the Corps toward his territory. Over the winter, Coboway traded with the captains and secretly prevented an attack on the fort. Meanwhile, Piahito, a multilingual Arikara leader, traveled to Washington as part of a Native delegation, showed Jefferson a map asserting Arikara sovereignty, and died there on April 7, 1806.

The return trip proved equally perilous. The Corps split into groups, and Lewis explored the Marias River, defying Jefferson's orders. Near the Two Medicine River, Lewis and three men encountered Wolf Calf, a Piikani teenager from the Blackfoot confederacy, returning from a horse raid. After camping together, the encounter turned violent at dawn: According to Wolf Calf's later account, it began as a standard horse raid, but Reuben Field, one of Lewis's men, stabbed the raid's leader to death. Lewis chased two Piikani alone and shot one before nearly being killed. He fled east, reunited with Ordway's unit, and was accidentally shot by expedition member Pierre Cruzatte while hunting. At the Mandan villages, Sacajawea, her son Pahmpi, and Charbonneau left the expedition. The Corps reached St. Louis on September 23, 1806, and Lewis wrote Jefferson a strategic letter emphasizing commercial potential while omitting his failures.

The Epilogue traces the central figures' fates. Clark became Superintendent of Indian Affairs; Black Buffalo's influence produced a Lakota-American alliance lasting more than a decade. Lewis became governor but struggled with politics and debt; he died by suicide on October 11, 1809. Ordway bought plantations destroyed by the 1811 New Madrid earthquakes and died in poverty. Sacajawea likely died in 1812, though some traditions place her death decades later. York asked Clark for his freedom, but Clark refused, beat him, and jailed him; York was eventually freed around 1820 and died of cholera. Around 1825, Clark wrote a list titled "Men on Lewis and Clark's Trip," recording each member's fate. He did not include York.