One of the foremost historians of Lewis and Clark, Ronda grounds Finding the West in the insights and reflections he has gleaned from some twenty years of research and writing about this pivotal era.
Allen, University of Wyoming.
This is a really outstanding, important work.--Professor John L.
Ronda\'s masterful interpretation of the young Republic\'s fascination with the West is written with grace, narrative sweep, and a conviction that history should, above all else, engage and inform us.
Whoever the storyteller in the aftermath of that encounter--native or newcomer--the stories all soon revolved around a common theme: the coming of the winds of change.
The beginning of the nineteenth century represents a time when America passed into a headlong rush for empire and when the West loomed large as a dream for some and a nightmare for others, an era that irrevocably shaped the new American nation in the two hundred years that followed.
Ronda documents not only the stories that Meriwether Lewis and William Clark offered about their road across the continent, but also the large and important stories by and about the native peoples whose trails they followed and whose lands they described in their journals and reports and on their maps.
Their words are French-Canadian, Shoshone, New Hampshire English, Hidatsa, and Chinookan.
As he writes: This is a book about many storytellers.
But above all else, Ronda\'s book is centered on stories and storytellers.
One of the foremost historians of Lewis and Clark, Ronda grounds Finding the West in the insights and reflections he has gleaned from some twenty years of research and writing about this pivotal era
