Abstract
The United States has recently finished celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and during that celebration scholars and citizens alike-me included-commemorated what Stephen Ambrose called “our epic voyage.”1 It was certainly epic; the Lewis and Clark Expedition was one of the great voyages of discovery ever undertaken by Europeans or Euro-Americans. Over twenty-eight months it covered some 7,000 miles. During that time, just one man died-probably due to a ruptured appendix-members of the expedition fired their guns in anger just one time, and the information they brought back filled in huge swathes of what had been an empty map of the North American heartland. More importantly, in the years since Lewis and Clark’s return, the story of their journey has become our epic and has assumed a unique place in our national identity; few Americans know anything of similar expeditions led by Zebulon Pike, Stephen H. Long, or John C. Frémont, but virtually every American is familiar with Lewis and Clark.
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Notes
Bernard DeVoto, ed., The Journals of Lewis and Clark with a foreward by Stephen E. Ambrose (Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 1997), p. vii.
Alexander Mackenzie, Voyages from Montreal on the River St. Lawrence through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen Pacific Oceans in the Years 1789 and 1793. (London: T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies Strand, 1801), p. 412.
James P. Ronda, Finding the West: Explorations with Lewis and Clark (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), pp. 9–10
Raymond J. DeMaillie, vol. ed., “Plains,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 13, ed. William G. Sturtevant (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978)
Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 21–25.
James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark among the Indians (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 30–31.
Richard Somerset Mackie, Trading Beyond the Mountains: The British Fur Trade on the Pacific, 1793–1843 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997).
Richard M. Clokey, William H. Ashley: Enterprise and Politics in the Trans-Mississippi West (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980).
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© 2009 George R. Goethals and J. Thomas Wren
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Thorp, D.B. (2009). Leadership and Discovery: Lessons from the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In: Goethals, G.R., Wren, J.T. (eds) Leadership and Discovery. Jepson Studies in Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101630_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101630_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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