History is usually written in the third person, even though it has to be lived in the first, and Fehrman takes advantage of the rich and deep documentation of the Lewis and Clark expedition to try to reconcile the discrepancy. The book adopts the perspectives not only of Lewis and of Clark but also of other members of the expedition, including an enslaved Black man named York, whom Clark brought along as a personal servant, and of five Native Americans whom the explorers encountered. Fehrman doesn’t attempt to speak in the voices of his subjects. He merely focusses on what each individual experienced and knew, while keeping in mind how much they didn’t experience and didn’t know—an analytic technique that historians have always been free to borrow from novelists but often lose sight of in the scramble to accumulate data. With subjects who haven’t left journals or letters, Fehrman guesses their state of mind by making inferences—some credible, others less so.
Fehrman tells the story of the expedition’s first winter camp from the perspective of John Ordway, a sergeant who grew up on a farm in New Hampshire. To climb out of poverty, Ordway had enlisted in the Army, at the time a violent and hierarchical institution. Officers flogged enlisted men, with or without the courtesy of a court-martial, and sometimes had them branded or even executed. One in four enlisted men deserted. When Lewis went looking for recruits, almost everyone at the fort where Ordway was stationed volunteered.
Ordway comes across as methodical and reliable. He carried his journal on a cord around his neck and wrote in it every day, though he unfortunately didn’t start the writing until May, 1804, when the expedition got properly under way, so Fehrman is forced to rely in this section on notes by others and a couple of letters that Ordway mailed home. Fehrman wonders whether, after the Army’s harsh discipline, the milder treatment that Lewis and Clark meted out puzzled Ordway. During that prefatory first winter, living in close quarters without much to do, the expedition’s young men distracted themselves with drinking, brawling, and stealing a neighbor’s hog, and the captains responded only with lectures and an order to build the camp’s laundress a hut. The lenity, in Fehrman’s opinion, was part of a conscious experiment, a decision to “bend the army’s rules not toward cruelty but toward generosity, consensus, and trust.”