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

Throughout Undaunted Courage, Ambrose frames the Lewis and Clark expedition as a series of fraught cultural encounters that expose both the possibilities and failures of communication between Indigenous people and the representatives of Jefferson’s young republic. Jefferson’s instructions to Lewis emphasized diplomacy and mutual benefit: Indigenous groups were to be treated as “children” of the American “great father,” encouraged to trade peacefully and adopt white agricultural practices. These seemingly benevolent instructions encode the paternalism and cultural superiority that underlie the imperial project of which this expedition is an early emissary.

Early encounters with tribes such as the Oto and the Yankton Sioux reveal the tone-deafness of American diplomacy. Lewis’s speeches, translated imperfectly, describe Jefferson as their “great father” who “loved his red children” and wished for peace. However, as Ambrose notes, the gifts Lewis distributed, including medals and cheap trinkets, were “unimpressive” and even insulting to tribes accustomed to British traders who offered gunpowder and rifles. When an Oto chief returned to Lewis “naked, to emphasize his poverty,” it underscored the gulf between the tribes’ expectations and those of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The Americans believed they were performing diplomacy; the tribes saw an unequal exchange of power.

The encounter with the Sioux escalates this tension into near-violence. Lewis and Clark’s insistence on their own authority—refusing to offer the Sioux sufficient gifts or respect their territorial dominance—led to a volatile standoff that only Chief Black Buffalo’s intervention defused. Ambrose remarks that Lewis and Clark “expected the Sioux to respect their traditions while refusing to do the same for them,” illustrating the failure of Enlightenment universalism to understand Indigenous sovereignty. Later, with the Shoshone, Lewis fares better—thanks largely to Sacagawea’s presence and her reunion with her brother Cameahwait—but even this success depends on coincidence and luck, not cultural insight.

As the expedition progresses, misunderstandings take on new forms. By the time they reach the Chinook and Clatsop, who have long dealt with European traders, Lewis grows frustrated by their “sharp trading practices” and “lack of generosity,” failing to recognize that they are merely acting within the norms of a developed commercial economy. His disillusionment with these tribes mirrors his growing moral fatigue, as he comes to see Indigenous people not as equal partners in a cultural and economic exchange but as obstacles to be “civilized or cowed”

Ambrose uses these cross-cultural interactions to show that the failures of diplomacy stem not from language or temperament alone but from an entrenched hierarchy of perception.