Westward expeditions fueled by intrigue in “Jefferson’s America’

Crown Publishing Group

422 pages, $30

With 20/20 hindsight, major turning points in U.S. history like the Louisiana Purchase look almost inevitable. The sharpest, most insightful history books convey how events that seem predestined to present-day readers at the time represented great risks for the course of the country.

“Jefferson’s America,” Julie M. Fenster’s intriguing, occasionally dry historical account, captures the uncertainty of America’s fate in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, specifically involving America’s acquisition and exploration of the Louisiana territory. Back then, the territory west of the Mississippi River was largely unknown to the newly minted Americans, but served as a massive bargaining chip in international politics.

Author of such previous histories as “The Case of Abraham Lincoln” and the Pulitzer-Prize nominee “Race of the Century,” Fenster begins with a complex account of how U.S. leaders, particularly Thomas Jefferson, negotiated for the territory. The third president’s initial motivation was to secure trading access to the Mississippi River and New Orleans. The idea of doubling the size of the new nation came later and required Jefferson to sell Americans on the idea that the Purchase was worth it.

“Jefferson’s America” has the subtitle “The President, the Purchase and the Explorers who Transformed a Nation,” but “the president” gets relatively less attention. Jefferson sets the events in motion, but out of necessity spends much of the book on the periphery of the action. He comes across like a chess grandmaster plotting multiple moves ahead, but he also has humanizing moments as a dilettante farmer back at his home in Monticello.

Much of book unexpectedly unfolds like a Cold War narrative, especially in the strained relations between the Americans, eager to settle west of the Mississippi, and the Spanish, clinging to their diminishing hold over North America during the age of Napoleon. Fenster points out that the lack of consensus over the size of the Louisiana Territory only aggravated the situation.

Towns beyond U.S. borders, like Natchez, come across as remote outposts of international intrigue, like World War II-era Casablanca in the old Humphrey Bogart movie. Describing plantation owner and future explorer William Dunbar’s time there, Fenster points out how he “had served as a magistrate in the Spanish government; founded the local aristocracy with British expatriates; and traded constantly with Americans wherever he found them.” And that doesn’t even include the indigenous people.

Fenster conveys how surveyors, who literally gave shape to nations, could enjoy a rock star-type reputation among scientists of the era. The heart of the book lies in their multiple expeditions, and though they face comparable challenges and enjoy similar triumphs, Fenster presents each with a subtly different tone, as if they represent subgenres in an anthology of exploration tales.

The most famous expedition, of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to find an overland route to the Pacific Ocean, reads like a classic inspirational tale of discovery. Lewis and Clark have greater discipline, fewer disasters and more diplomatic successes with the tribes they encounter. (Famed guide Sacagawea gets brief attention.) The reader appreciates their wonder at Western landscapes and alien flora and fauna, learning first-hand how the grizzly bear lives up to its fierce reputation.

In contrast, the attempt of William Dunbar and Philadelphia chemist George Hunter to reach a mythic hot springs (that would become an Arkansas landmark) unfolds like a comedy of errors. Mismatched in experience and temperament, manned by an insolent crew, Dunbar and Hunter encounter one mishap after another. Hunter designed their ship in the style of a Chinese junk, and Fenster keeps the reader guessing if the unconventional shape will be a boon or a boondoggle.

Zebulon Pike’s two missions – to find the source of the Mississippi River and to explore the Southwest – have the tenor of harrowing survival tales. Pike’s personal drive, impatience and near-masochistic capacity for hardship nearly wreck his body and lead his men to the brink of starvation. A metaphor for his seemingly fruitless efforts comes when he fails to reach a peak of the Rocky Mountains that seems to keep receding from his approach. It would eventually be named “Pike’s Peak” in his honor.

Finally, Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis’ trip up the Red River turns into a white-knuckle military adventure story, as their 45-man team is hunted by Spanish forces of more than 1,000 troops. Arguably the book’s least-familiar expedition proves to be its most gripping, with readers wondering if the mismatched groups will meet on a collision course. And while Fenster doesn’t play favorites with her explorers, she seems to have a soft spot for Freeman’s moral uprightness and quiet professionalism.

Fenster takes a roughly chronological, almost month-by-month approach to recounting the book’s disparate events, which can both help and hinder the narrative. It’s useful to know where the pieces are on the game board at a given time. But the frequent cross-cutting can impede the flow of individual stories. The teams make so little progress through the book at a time that it’s easy to confuse which groups are getting hung up on which natural barriers.

Fenster’s language proves largely prosaic, but occasionally her writing takes wing. When she talks about how Jefferson needed to go beyond arguing an abstract case for U.S. expansion, she writes, “The president could no longer merely talk about the value of the American presence in newly acquired Western lands – he needed to prove it. He had to bring forward in place of his words the color of the rock, the words of the chiefs, the direction of the water and the fact that the American mind had met its frontier.”

The multiple expeditions in “Jefferson’s America” not only succeed at mapping the expanding nation, they serve as some of the 18th century’s first and biggest public relations coups.