Exploration and Empire: The Explorer and the Scientist in the Winning of the American West.

Abstract

From early mountain men searching for routes through Rockies to West Point soldier-engineers conducting topographical expeditions, exploration of American West mirrored development of a fledgling nation. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Exploration and Empire, William H. Goetzmann analyzes special role explorer played in shaping vast region once called the Great American Desert. According to Goetzmann, exploration of West was not a haphazard series of discoveries, but a planned - even programmed - activity in which explorers, often armed with instructions from federal government, gathered information that would support national goals for new lands. As national needs and frontier's image changed, West itself was rediscovered by successive generations of explorers, a process that in turn helped shape its culture. Nineteenth-century western exploration, Goetzmann writes, can be divided into three stages. The first, beginning with Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804, was marked by need to collect practical information, such as locations of best transportation routes through wilderness. Then came era of settlement and investment - drive to fulfill Manifest Destiny of a nation beginning to realize what immense riches lay beyond Mississippi. The final stage involved a search for knowledge of a different kind, as botanists and paleontologists, ethnographers and engineers hunted intensively for scientific information in frontier laboratory. This last phase also saw a rethinking of West's place in national scheme; it was a time of nascent conservation movements and public policy discussions aboutthe region's future. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources, Goetzmann offers a masterful overview of opening of West, as well as a fascinating study of nature of exploration and its consequences for civilization.