The Lewis and Clark Expedition 1803-1806, 2 volumes (Easton Press Collector's Edition)

LEWIS, Meriwether & William CLARK (ed. Nicholas Biddle; intro. John Bakeless). The Journals of the Expedition Under the Command of Capts. Lewis and Clark to the Source of the Missouri, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains and Down the River Columbia to the Pacific Ocean, Performed During the Years 1804–5–6 by Order of the Government of the United States. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 1993. 2 vols.

Large Octavo. Full deep green leather. Covers with gilt image of the United States. Spines with raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page markers. 545 pp. per volume. Illustrated with portraits, maps, and natural history drawings throughout. Two-volume Collector's Edition. Part of the Easton Press Library of Military History.

In the summer of 1803 President Thomas Jefferson concluded the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of the United States at a stroke and acquiring for the nation an enormous territory about which almost nothing was known. Jefferson had already been planning an expedition. He now had his reason, and he gave the commission to his private secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, who invited his friend Lieutenant William Clark to share the command. The Corps of Discovery, thirty-three strong, set out from Camp Dubois near St. Louis in May 1804 and returned there in September 1806. In the intervening two years and four months they had travelled eight thousand miles, crossed the Continental Divide, reached the Pacific Ocean, described hundreds of plant and animal species previously unknown to science, made contact with dozens of Native nations, and produced the most consequential geographical survey in American history.

The journals Lewis and Clark kept throughout the journey are among the foundational documents of American literature and natural history. Contained are richly detailed records of the landscape, flora, fauna, weather, and peoples encountered from the Missouri River to the mouth of the Columbia, written in a plain, direct style that carries the immediacy of daily observation. The natural history sections alone — descriptions of the grizzly bear, the pronghorn, the prairie dog, the western meadowlark, and dozens of other species — constitute a primary scientific document of the first order. The accounts of the expedition's human encounters, including the crucial assistance rendered by Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman who joined the Corps at Fort Mandan in present-day North Dakota, are irreplaceable records of a world on the threshold of permanent transformation.

Nicholas Biddle (1786–1844), the Philadelphia lawyer and financier who edited the journals for their first publication in 1814, produced a remarkably readable narrative from the raw material of the captains' notes. The introduction to this Easton Press edition was written by John Bakeless (1894–1978), the American biographer and historian whose work on the American frontier remains a standard reference.

Very good to near fine. Some loss to gilt at upper corner of cover of Volume II. Some mild foxing along gilt edges of both volumes. Contents of both volumes fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000477