Synopses & Reviews
"[It is] our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us...," exhorted the
New York Morning News on December 27, 1845. Much of the continent lay open for the taking. Manifest Destiny was the cry, and the human tide was flooding west.
Thomas Jefferson had seen it, the vision of a great nation stretching from sea to shining sea. He had sent Lewis and Clark on their epic journey to the Pacific to find out what lay out there, beyond the wide Missouri. Now, in the 1840s, thousands of settlers, eyes bright with hope, urged their teams onward the setting sun, toward Oregon, toward Texas, toward the West. These farmers, miners, cowboys, and townspeople have been immortalized in our time in book, song, movie and myth.
But what of the others, what of those who went first, who climbed the mountains, traced the rivers, followed the canyons, blazed the trail for those who followed to settle the vast lands? Who remembers the guides, soldiers, geologists, surveyors, naturalists, and engineers who went west not as conquerors but as cartographers, surveyors, catalogers of resources? Or the artists and photographers who captured the unspoiled West for their own time and forever? They were the largely unsung heroes of the westward movement, who went out without fanfare to bring back rocks and routes, photographs and fossils, plants and animals, accounts of Indian life and Indian attack stories of hardship and hunger and hazards and escpaes from a thousand deaths, all endured for the sake of curiosity.
Some of their names may still stir a memory: Zebulon Pike, Joseph Walker, Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, John C. Frémont, John Wesley Powell. But they are only a few of the hundreds who came from lonely lives as trappers, from the Army and government departments, from universities and museums to set off on expeditions under the banner of knowledge. Exploring the West is their story.