Ronda examines Thomas Jefferson’s complex and evolving vision for the trans-Mississippi West, tracing how the Lewis and Clark Expedition both realized and undermined the president’s expectations. The article explores Jefferson’s pre-expedition assumptions — the passage through the continent by water, the orderly integration of Native peoples into American agriculture, and the potential for a continental commercial empire — and how the expedition’s findings challenged each of these ideas. Ronda demonstrates that the West Lewis and Clark actually encountered — vast, arid, mountainous, and populated by powerful and autonomous Native nations — bore little resemblance to Jefferson’s imagined landscape of navigable rivers and cooperative indigenous populations. The article argues that Jefferson’s response to the expedition’s reports was selective, embracing information that supported his vision while downplaying evidence that contradicted it, a pattern that would shape American western policy for decades.
Our Partners
