American West history that reads like a novel

Discusses the Battle of the Little Big Horn, the federal and Indian antagonists, and of the battle's place in the context of the Plains Indian Wars.

In this sweeping adventure story, Stephen E. Ambrose, the bestselling author of D-Day, presents the definitive account of one of the most momentous journeys in American history. Ambrose follows the Lewis and Clark Expedition from Thomas Jefferson's hope of finding a waterway to the Pacific, through the heart-stopping moments of the actual trip, to Lewis' lonely demise on the Natchez Trace. Along the way, Ambrose shows us the American West as Lewis saw it -- wild, awsome, and pristinely beautiful. Undaunted Courage is a stunningly told action tale that will delight readers for generations. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a voyage up the Missouri River to the Rockies, over the mountains, down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, and back. Lewis was the perfect choice. He endured incredible hardships and saw incredible sights, including vast herds of buffalo and Indian tribes that had had no previous contact with white men. He and his partner, Captain William Clark, made the first map of the trans-Mississippi West, provided invaluable scientific data on the flora and fauna of the Louisiana Purchase territory, and established the American claim to Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Ambrose has pieced together previously unknown information about weather, terrain, and medical knowledge at the time to provide a colorful and realistic backdrop for the expedition. Lewis saw the North American continent before any other white man; Ambrose describes in detail native peoples, weather, landscape, science, everything the expedition encountered along the way, through Lewis's eyes. Lewis is supported by a rich variety of colorful characters, first of all Jefferson himself, whose interest in exploring and acquiring the American West went back thirty years. Next comes Clark, a rugged frontiersman whose love for Lewis matched Jefferson's. There are numerous Indian chiefs, and Sacagawea, the Indian girl who accompanied the expedition, along with the French-Indian hunter Drouillard, the great naturalists of Philadelphia, the French and Spanish fur traders of St. Louis, John Quincy Adams, and many more leading political, scientific, and military figures of the turn of the century. This is a book about a hero. This is a book about national unity. But it is also a tragedy. When Lewis returned to Washington in the fall of 1806, he was a national hero. But for Lewis, the expedition was a failure. Jefferson had hoped to find an all-water route to the Pacific with a short hop over the Rockies-Lewis discovered there was no such passage. Jefferson hoped the Louisiana Purchase would provide endless land to support farming-but Lewis discovered that the Great Plains were too dry. Jefferson hoped there was a river flowing from Canada into the Missouri-but Lewis reported there was no such river, and thus no U.S. claim to the Canadian prairie. Lewis discovered the Plains Indians were hostile and would block settlement and trade up the Missouri. Lewis took to drink, engaged in land speculation, piled up debts he could not pay, made jealous political enemies, and suffered severe depression. High adventure, high politics, suspense, drama, and diplomacy combine with high romance and personal tragedy to make this outstanding work of scholarship as readable as a novel.

Between 1846, when President James K. Polk declared war on Mexico, and 1865, when the South was defeated in the civil war, the United States invaded and conquered the West, creating a mighty nation that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. How this was accomplished is an epic tale of both shame and glory. Before the West could be settled American armies had to not only defeat the Mexican forces that held territory from Texas to California, but also subdue the dozens of Native American tribes that stood in the way. BLOOD AND THUNDER tells the story of how "Manifest Destiny" was forcibly carried out. No tribe resisted more fiercely than the nomadic Navajo who lorded over huge swaths of desert in what is now Arizona and New Mexico. Their great chieftain Narbona saw the ultimate futility of resisting "The New Men," as he called the Americans, but he was stupidly killed by an American trooper in an argument over a stolen horse, and the chance for peace was lost. The Navajo were then led by a ferocious warrior named Manuelito, who had witnessed Narbona's murder and swore vengeance. For twenty years the Americans battled the Navajo, finally defeating them in a brutal siege at Canyon de Chelly and forcing them on a migration known as "The Long Walk." No novelist could have invented the historic figures in these pages. Kit Carson, the legendary trapper, scout and soldier celebrated in early Western dime-novels (called (Blood and Thunders), stands at the center of Sides's tale. Carson had a deep respect and affinity for Native Americans (his first wife was Arapaho), yet he saw himself foremost as a patriot, and he ultimately played a critical role in defeating the Navajo nation.