The Paper and the River: Lewis and Clark, the Mandan Villages, and the Making of the American West
By Daniel Whitcomb Avery
Length5h 28m
About this audiobook
Thomas Jefferson drafted the message himself on a January evening in 1803, at a tilted writing desk of his own design: a confidential request to Congress for a modest sum to send a small party of soldiers up the Missouri River. He called the project commercial and scientific. He did not mention that he had wanted the Pacific coast for twenty years, or that no nation living beyond the river would be asked a single question about any of it.
Within months Napoleon had sold the United States all of Louisiana, and in May 1804 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark started upriver. For the next two years and four months their lives rested, again and again, on the people whose country they were crossing. The Teton Sioux confronted them at the Bad River. The Mandan and Hidatsa carried them through a winter at the Knife River villages. Sacagawea's Lemhi Shoshone sold them the horses that took them into the mountains, and after a starving crossing of the Bitterroots the Nez Perce took them in. At the mouth of the Columbia, the Clatsop traded with them through a long, wet winter.
After the trip home across the mountains come the routes the captains passed up, Clark's great map, and what had become of the nations along the river fifty years on. The captains called it discovery. The people who fed them, guided them and sold them horses had known the way all along.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length5 hrs 28 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 18, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Paper and the River
2Chapter 2: The Osage Road
3Chapter 3: A Council at the Teton Sioux
4Chapter 4: The Knife River Winter
5Chapter 5: Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau
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6Chapter 6: The Marias Decision
7Chapter 7: The Shoshone and the Horses
8Chapter 8: The Bitterroot Crossing
9Chapter 9: The River of the West
10Chapter 10: The Return Across the Mountains
11Chapter 11: The Paths Not Taken
12Chapter 12: The Great Map
13Chapter 13: Fifty Years After
14Chapter 14: The River Still Runs
15About the Author
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