| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.1

Book Review

The Forgotten Expedition, 1804–1805: The Louisiana Purchase Journals of Dunbar and Hunter. By Trey Berry, Pam Beasley, and Jeanne Clements. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. xxxvi + 248 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $29.95.
Of the voyages of discovery that Thomas Jefferson sanctioned to explore the territory purchased from France in 1803, George Hunter and William Dunbar's journey up the Ouachita River to the hot springs in what is now south-central Arkansas was clearly the least eventful. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark crossed the continental divide, making it to the Pacific Ocean and becoming national heroes. Peter Custis and Thomas Freeman got through the Great Raft in the Red River only to be turned around by hostile Spanish troops. Zebulon Pike's party was arrested near Santa Fe and briefly imprisoned in Mexico. So there is good reason that Hunter and Dunbar's effort has been forgotten. But the uneventfulness of their expedition allowed Hunter and Dunbar more time to contemplate the order that the United States would try to impose on the newly acquired land, making this collection of the explorers' daily journals essential reading for those interested in the Louisiana Purchase, westward expansion, and the young republic's conception of itself.	1
Hunter, a chemist who, according to Jefferson, had "no equal in the U.S.," and Dunbar, an experienced surveyor who many considered to have the best scientific mind in the lower Mississippi Valley, had originally intended to ascend the Arkansas, do a little portaging, and descend the Red. The pair, like Jefferson, wrongly assumed that the two rivers originated in the same area. But trouble with the Osages along the Arkansas forced postponement. Waiting for the trouble to clear, Hunter and Dunbar decided to ascend the Ouachita—a tributary of the Red River—to the hot springs—both as a trial run and in search of minerals to be exploited.	2
Unlike their counterparts, Hunter and Dunbar traversed an area that they expected to soon fill with American settlers, and this shaped the way they viewed the land and its inhabitants. The pair had nothing but contempt for the resident Spanish and French and the ways that they used the land. Dunbar complained that they had adopted the "Indian mode of life"—residing in crude structures and relying more on hunting than agriculture (p. 49). Both explorers constantly speculated on the ways that Americans would use the land. Dunbar felt that an American settler along the lower Ouachita would have to briefly depend on the bounty of the forests but that "in a year or two he arrives at a state of independence, he purchases horses, cows & other domestic animals, perhaps a slave who shares with him the labours and the production of his fields." This opportunity afforded by the frontier is what differentiated Americans from the "oppressed and degraded Peasants of Europe" (p. 15). Hunter was even more enthusiastic about the area's potential, acquiring two thousand acres near Fort Miró (present-day Monroe, Louisiana).	3
The mountainous area around the hot springs disappointed the two explorers as they discovered "nothing of importance" (p. 127). The springs contained only hot water, the coal proved to be of poor quality, and the iron ore similarly inferior. Dunbar did think, however, that the area contained "tolerable wheat land" and that a winemaker would "find his labor's amply compensated" (pp. 91, 110). Upon their return, the pair sent reports of the expedition to Jefferson but decided to forgo the planned exploration of the Arkansas and the Red—Hunter pleaded financial hardship; Dunbar felt he was too old for such an undertaking. Instead, Dunbar helped their replacements—Custis and Freeman—prepare for their expedition.	4
The volume's introduction is more summary than analysis, and readers should approach it and the footnotes with caution as errors abound. For example, the editors state that Fort Miró was "first established by the French around 1784," but France had given up its claim to Louisiana twenty years earlier, and it was the Spanish who built the fort (p. xxv). The editors also assert that both "LaSalle and Joutel visited Bayou Bartholomew [a river running from Arkansas into Louisiana]" in 1687, but René Robert LaSalle had been murdered in Texas before Henri Joutel's trek across what is now Arkansas began (p. 50). Nonetheless, the editors have done a valuable service by assembling the journals of Hunter and Dunbar in a single volume.	5
Michael Pierce is associate editor of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly and assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

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