Undaunted Courage: The Pioneering First Mission to Explore America's Wild Frontier

Meriwether Lewis is the central figure in Undaunted Courage, serving as the principal leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Lewis was a product of the frontier planter class, raised among political elites and well-versed in wilderness survival. He dealt with depression all his life. Before the expedition, he served as Jefferson’s private secretary and an army captain, experiences that positioned him uniquely for the task of commanding a scientific and diplomatic mission across the uncharted Louisiana Territory. His ambition, curiosity, and loyalty made him the ideal figure for Jefferson’s vision of “enlightened” expansionism.

Lewis was a polymath who sought to catalog the new land’s geography, flora, fauna, and native cultures while also fulfilling a diplomatic and military mission. His meticulous journal entries, though sporadic, reflect the Enlightenment spirit of inquiry, but his growing mental illness and eventual suicide underscore the immense personal cost of such responsibility. His treatment of Indigenous peoples, especially on the expedition’s return trip, was marked by profound racism and gratuitous violence, and his expedition paved the way for the genocidal colonization of the American West in the coming century. In this way, Lewis embodies the contradictions of early American empire-building: convinced of its noble intentions but bringing devastation in its wake.