The seventh volume of this new, definitive edition of Lewis and Clark's journals begins as the expedition turns homeward. On March 23, 1806, the Corps of Discovery left Fort Clatsop, their winter quarters on the Pacific Coast, for the long return journey to the United States. Although they were largely retracing their outbound route, their journals were still filled with descriptions of the country and its people, and new discoveries were yet to be made. They departed from the Columbia River at one point to take an overland shortcut between the Walla Walla and Snake rivers and reached the latter a little below the mouth of the Clearwater. Detained by winter snows at the edge of the Rockies, the Corps camped among the friendly Nez Perce Indians. Here, in modern west-central Idaho, the captains attended to sick Indians and continued their scientific studies while others in the party passed the time hunting and socializing. By June 9 the captains decided to resume their move eastward. According to the Nez Perces, the snow would not be gone from the mountains along the Lolo Trail until early July, but the party, looking homeward, left the Clearwater valley for the flats above the river.
Incorporating substantial new scholarship concerning all aspects of the expedition from Indian languages to plants and animals to details of geography and history, this edition greatly expands and updates the annotation of the last one, published in 1904–5.
"The University of Nebraska Press has become the pre-eminent publisher of Lewis and Clark titles, including what is now considered the definitive edition of the journals edited by Nebraska history professor Gary Moulton."—John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Moulton not only edited the transcriptions of the journal entries; he also provided a detailed index and oversaw a team of consultants who provided expert annotations on botany, zoology, astronomy, archaeology, linguists and medicine. As a result, readers can understand the expedition in its full context. It's no wonder that the series has received many plaudits."—Omaha World Herald
"[This edition] stands as one of the great accomplishments of American scholarship and scholarly publishing alike. The work of historian Gary Moulton and a team of some three dozen specialists working through the University of Nebraska's Center for Great Plains Studies with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the 13-volume Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was published by the University of Nebraska Press from 1983 to 2001."—Gregory McNamee, Washington Post Book World
"The journey of the Corps of Discovery, under the command of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, across the American West to the Pacific Ocean and back in the years 1804-1806 seems to me to have been our first really American adventure, one that also produced our only really American epic, The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, now at last available in a superbly edited, easily read edition in twelve volumes (of an eventual thirteen), almost two centuries after the Corps of Discovery set out. . . . This important text has not been fully appreciated for what it is because of two centuries of incomplete and inadequate editing. All three editions previous to this excellent one from the University of Nebraska . . . Were flawed by significant omission. . . . Thus my gratitude to the present editor, Gary Moulton, and his assistant editor, Thomas Dunlay, for bringing what I believe to be a national epic into plain view at last. . . . For almost two hundred years their [Lewis' and Clark's] strong words waited, there but not there, printed but not read: our silent epic. But words can wait: now the captains' writings have at last spilled out, and fully, in this regal edition"
"Lewis and Clark loom over the narrative literature of the West as the Rockies loom over the rivers that run through them. These Journals are to the narrative of the American West as the Iliad is to the epic or as Don Quixote is to the novel: a first exemplar so great as to contain in embryo the genre's full potential. The narrative writing about the West that came before Lewis and Clark seems fragmentary and slight; what came after them seems insipid and slight, lacking both the scale and the force of those Journals."—Larry McMurtry in the New York Review of Books
"Meticulously edited, with detailed (and absolutely necessary) footnotes, these volumes are a triumph of scholarly publishing. . . . One version or another belongs on most readers' shelves—and should accompany any road trip through the West."—Atlantic Monthly
"Meticulous scholarship marks this landmark revision. . . . Essential to every American history collection."—Reference and Research
"A narrative that is as gripping as an adventure story."—John Logan Allen, Utah History
"A much-needed and long-awaited improvement over the hitherto standard . . . Edition of 1904–5."—North Dakota History
"A milestone in publishing."—Salt Lake Tribune