The Corps of Discovery: They *Don't* Teach This in School

This review could easily devolve into the old Boomer trope: "Why don't they teach this at school?" Well, frankly, there's just too much. Too much to learn, too much to read. Too much to absorb.

In Idaho, we get this history obviously as part of "Idaho History," which was required of fourth and eleventh graders when I was of school age.

I'll admit here I don't remember much of what I learned, partly because it's so long ago and partly because I've read a lot of such history, writ small and writ large, since then, and it's all become muddled in my brain.

It's clear even with Stephen E. Ambrose in his book "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West" (finally we get to the subject of this review). It's an excellent book, full of detail, told in a splendid voice often in the written words (and creative spelling) of Meriwether Lewis. Highly recommended; I have yet to read an Ambrose book that's a stinker.

I did learn a lot of stuff I didn't know about the Corps of Discovery; mainly that it was splendidly led by insightful, hardy, and lucky people who treated some people with too much deference and others who deserved better treatment with some disdain and cruelty, particularly the Nez Perce of Idaho.

Also: Did not know that after the voyage was over Lewis was slow as tar in getting any organization going in their collected journals while he fought petty battles with other members of the corps that wanted to publish or did publish their own writings and ended up killing himself in Kentucky as a result of what may have been a lifelong battle with depression and other mental illness or a combination of that with addictions to morphine, opium, and alcohol. Or it might have been syphilus. That's not the kind of things they tell fourth graders.

Anyway, highly recommended reading. I'll be passing the book on to my wife. And I enjoyed the little bits of trivia I encountered in the book.