About Lewis and Clark’s Log

Lewis and Clark’s Log retells the journey of the Corps of Discovery, which crossed the West from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back between 1804 and 1806, from the journals its members kept along the way.

The book follows them in 31 chapters. As you turn the pages, the Corps travels across a map of North America in 1804, with the West that no American had mapped drawn the way Americans imagined it in 1803. Objects from the journey are collected into your codex as you read.

Sources

The book retells the journals kept on the expedition, above all those of the two captains, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and the journals of Sergeant Charles Floyd and Private Joseph Whitehouse. Quotations keep the writers’ own spelling and follow Reuben Gold Thwaites’s edition, Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804–1806 (1904–05), the first to print the journals exactly as they were written. Jefferson’s instructions to Lewis are quoted from the same edition. The record of Sacagawea’s death in December 1812 comes from the journal of John Luttig, a fur-trade clerk, published in 1920.

The margins bring in what the journals leave out: the nations the Corps met, York’s enslavement, and the stories told about Sacagawea since.

The map

The map shows North America in 1804. The expedition’s track follows the National Park Service’s centerline of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, with Lewis’s and Clark’s separate routes of 1806. Coastlines, rivers and lakes are from Natural Earth, and the borders of 1800 are adapted from historical-basemaps by A. Ourednik (GPL-3.0). The West that no American had yet mapped is clouded, and drawn the way the maps of 1802 and 1803 showed it: a single ridge of mountains, with a short carry between the Missouri and a river running to the Pacific. The real land appears as the Corps travels. Distances in the ledger are measured along the route and scaled to the expedition’s own total of about 8,000 miles.

How it was made

Lewis and Clark’s Log was made with the help of AI. The retelling was written with an AI model working from the journals, and every quotation was checked, spelling and all, against the published journals. The 35 pictures in the codex were made with AI image generation, in the style of engravings of about 1810. See them all →

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Lewis and Clark’s Log is the second volume of Voyage Logs: history’s great voyages, retold from the journals of the people who sailed them.