My new book, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark, comes out on April 21. I spent five years on it, finding new documents and a new way to tell this classic story.
My publisher remains Avid Reader Press, a terrific imprint of Simon & Schuster, and their website has all sorts of purchase options.
Here are some early reactions to This Vast Enterprise:
- “Riveting . . . Fehrman has done a great service to American history in this must-read.” — Booklist (starred review)
- “Masterful . . . Like Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger and Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, This Vast Enterprise delivers a brilliant new interpretation of a story that deserves to be known in its entirety.” — BookPage (starred review)
- “A valuable fresh look at a storied moment in American history.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
- “Fehrman’s rigorous account sheds light on previously overlooked historical figures and political machinations during the Lewis and Clark expedition, drawn from an impressive mountain of research.” — New York Times, “Nonfiction Books We’re Excited About This Spring”
The header to this website is a painting by George Catlin of Fort Pierre, available for free at the Smithsonian. Thanks in part to that institution, which remains a national treasure, This Vast Enterprise features more than seventy full-color images and more than twenty new maps. I hope you get a chance to look at a physical copy, perhaps at your local bookstore. Or come say hello this spring during my book tour!
One thing I found in my research is that Catlin’s view, captured only a couple decades after the expedition, is almost certainly the same view the captains had when they met the Lakota in the fall of 1804. This is as close as we’ll ever come to seeing what Lewis and Clark saw — and what Black Buffalo and the Partisan saw, too.
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Craig Fehrman 