1823 account of a major government sponsored expedition to the Western lands, by steamboat down the Ohio, then up the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, intending to reach Yellowstone. The team's botanist and geologist Edwin James compiled the account from the journals of its commander Maj. Long, Thomas Say and other members of the party. The expedition produced the first scientific data on the flora and fauna of the general area of the Santa Fe Trail.

With original primary source documents, this anthology brings readers into the vast unknown 19th-century American West—through the eyes of the explorers who saw it for the first time. This volume brings together book excerpts, maps, and illustrations from 12 explorers from the 19th century, highlighting their lives and contributions. Arranged chronologically, the 10 chapters focus on individual explorers, with biographies and background information about and document excerpts from each person. The chapters offer analyses of each document's relevance to the historical period, geographic knowledge, and cultural perspective. This guide shares the important contributions from explorers like Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, Jedediah Smith, James P. Beckwourth, John C. Fremont, Susan Magoffin, and John Wesley Powell. It also nurtures readers' historical literacy by modeling historians' methods of analyzing primary sources. Readers will see new and familiar events from different perspectives, including that of a woman traveling along the Santa Fe Trail, one of the most famous African American mountain men, and a Civil War veteran, among many others.

Through a retelling of Lewis's life, from his resourceful youth to the brilliance of his leadership and accomplishments as a man, Patricia Tyson Stroud shows that Jefferson's unsubstantiated claim of his protégé's suicide is the long-held bitter root at the heart of the Meriwether Lewis story.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Sixty Miles from Contentment is a revitalization of a pulsating American scene in the nineteenth-century. Drawing on the work of travel writers from America's own East Coast and from fourteen other countries, it offers a witty and irreverent look at the wild Midwest in its heyday.