
By Gary E. Moulton
ISBN: 080328022X
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
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Since the time of Columbus, explorers dreamed of a water passage across the North American continent. President Thomas Jefferson shared this dream. He conceived the Corps of Discovery to travel up the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and westward along possible river routes to the Pacific Ocean. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led this expedition of 1804–6. Along the way they filled hundreds of notebook pages with observations of the geography, Indian tribes, and natural history of the trans-Mississippi West.
An accomplished carpenter and boat builder, Patrick Gass proved to be an invaluable and well-liked member of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Promoted to sergeant after the death of Charles Floyd, Gass was almost certainly responsible for supervising the building of Forts Mandan and Clatsop. His records of those forts and of the earth lodges of the Mandans and Hidatsas are particularly detailed and useful. Gass was the last survivor of the Corps of Discovery, living until 1870—long enough to see trains cross a continent that he had helped open. His engaging and detailed journal became the first published account of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Gass's journal joins the celebrated Nebraska edition of the complete journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition, which feature a wide range of new scholarship dealing with all aspects of the expedition from geography to Indian cultures and languages to plants and animals.
This book is the same as the hardback edition entitled, "Volume 10: Patrick Gass" (Volume 1 of the hardback edition is an atlas, which is not included in the paperback set).