SOURCE: An introduction to The Field Notes of Captain William Clark, 1803-1805, Yale University Press, 1964, pp. xiii-xxxv.

In the following essay, Osgood provides background and analysis of the rough journal kept by Captain William Clark from December, 1803, to early April, 1805.

The returning explorer has never been without an audience as he recounted his adventures. Men of all times and in all places, their minds reaching out from the known and familiar to the new and the strange, have listened to him. From the discovery of the New World until the last mile of coastline had been mapped, the last river ascended, the last mountains crossed, each generation watched and listened. The story of the exploration of the North American continent—by Spaniard and Frenchman, Englishman and American—is a great and compelling chapter in our history. From Quebec on the north to New Spain on the south, from...