| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest. Ed. by Patrick G. Williams, S. Charles Bolton, and Jeannie M. Whayne. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005. xviii, 228 pp. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-55728-784-8.)
After the Louisiana Purchase, President Thomas Jefferson sent four expeditions into the West. In 1804 George Hunter and William Dunbar ascended the Red and Ouachita rivers into Arkansas. In 1806 Thomas Freeman and Peter Custis made a second foray up the Red River while Zebulon Pike followed the Arkansas River into southern Colorado. Spanish officials rightly regarded those three expeditions as more immediately consequential than the Corps of Discovery's trek through the northern mountains.	1
In various ways, A Whole Country in Commotion redresses the celebratory distortion that works on Lewis and Clark brought to American historiography in the twentieth century. At the end of the nineteenth century, Henry Adams devoted 186 pages of his History of the United States during the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1889–1891) to the Louisiana Purchase and only a page and a half to the Corps of Discovery. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, James P. Ronda candidly reported the many ways the Lewis and Clark expedition was "a failure" (Finding the West, 2001, pp. 117–27). Bracketed by these clear-headed assessments, the twentieth century nevertheless witnessed the elevation of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark into the pantheon of American heroes—a process that began with the 1904 World's Fair and continues in today's popular media.	. . .

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