Jefferson’s New Frontier
Book explores the explorers of America’s expanded territory.
Jefferson’s America might sound like a book about Thomas Jefferson’s grand vision for the young nation he helped found, but it actually focuses on the physical land the United States acquired during his presidency. And there’s indeed plenty of worthwhile ground to cover within this topic—far more than most of us learned in grade school.
Julie M. Fenster has written a compelling book in Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed a Nation. While most Americans have heard about Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s famous expedition, fewer of us have heard about the other expeditions President Jefferson authorized early in the 19th century. Fenster gives these adventurous souls the attention they deserve.
For example, the book introduces us to Zebulon Pike, which is a name we should know (and not just because it’s an amazing name, on par with Hercules Mulligan). Pike’s Peak, located among the Rocky Mountains, takes its name from this explorer with an “unflagging spirit,” and that summit was “the only thing on earth that ever made him give up,” according to Fenster.
Sacajawea, of course, also factors into the narrative. As Fenster notes, we don’t know a whole lot of concrete facts about her life. The book, however, fills us in on what historians do know.
Sacajawea was born around 1788, as part of the Agaidika (also known as Lemhi Shoshone) tribe in what is currently Idaho. She was captured at the age of 11 and forced into slavery.
Eventually, she was sold to a French-Canadian fur trader named Toussaint Charbonneau, who later married her as well as another young Shoshone woman he purchased as a slave. Sacajawea learned at least four languages, which prompted Lewis and Clark to recruit her and Charbonneau as interpreters. When they joined the Corps of Discovery, they had a two-month-old baby, whom Clark grew fond of and later adopted, with the mother’s support.
Fenster writes:
“Although the amount of information known for certain about Sacajawea could be written on a single piece of paper, the words left by others paint a consistent picture of a bright person and a kind one, amid a life of hard circumstances.”
There was more going on than just exploration, though. Britain, France, and Spain all had their eye on parts of the western and southern territories. The possibility of boundary disputes escalating into war remained throughout much of the Jefferson Administration, especially with Spain. Fenster describes it as a cold war.
She writes:
“Jefferson’s expeditions and much-publicized explorers had been the masks of his conquest, the tools of his diplomacy that allowed the stakes to rise without forcing a military response.”
Fenster likens it to the space race between the United States and Soviet Union in the 20th century.
Throughout the book, Fenster supplies highly readable prose, occasionally peppering in amusing lines. After the Louisiana Purchase became public, Jefferson anticipated backlash from his political opposition. But even the anti-Jefferson Washington Federalist initially praised the deal, leading Fenster to write:
“Jefferson’s opponents apparently needed extra time to think about what it was they hated about his Louisiana Purchase.”
Read the book and explore some new territory.