This Vast Enterprise

My new book, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark, comes out on April 21. I spent five years on it, finding many 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 . . . Grounded in outstanding scholarship . . . Fehrman has done a great service to American history in this must-read.” — Booklist (starred review)
  • “A valuable fresh look at a storied moment in American history . . . Fehrman’s approach gives added depth to his chronicle of the breathtaking natural wonders encountered and extraordinary hardships overcome on the Corps’ transcontinental trek.” — 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”
  • “Here, at long last, is the Lewis and Clark expedition presented in living technicolor. Employing an ever-shifting point of view that slyly and intriguingly builds upon itself, we see the great historic project as an epic of mutual discovery, in which the explorers and those whose lands are being explored are given equal consideration and dramatic weight. In this way, Fehrman leads us to confront the deeper truth that ‘discovery’ is never a one-way process—its fruits and its legacies, its gifts and its curses, flow in multiple directions.” — Hampton Sides

The header to my 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 independent bookstore.

One thing I found in my research is that this view, captured by Catlin 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.