Book Review: The Gates of the Mountains

© 1963 by Will Henry
Well, now I know more than I ever thought I would about the Lewis & Clark expedition. You know, the two frontiersmen who explored Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase way back at the beginning of the 19th century. Remember? There was a question on it in an eighth grade history test you took all those years ago.
A few years ago my in-laws gave me Undaunted Courage, a hefty tome on the explorers written by historian extraordinaire Stephen Ambrose. It’s still on the bookshelf behind me, sentenced to a Schrodinger-like semi-existence of will-I-read-it or won’t-I-read-it. In all honesty the sheer amount of the book’s pages weighed against all the other books stacked in my On-Deck Circle have tilted me against reading / living it. But now, after reading Will Henry’s The Gates of the Mountains, I may seriously reconsider.
Henry’s novel, as far as I can tell, is a fictionalized account of Lewis & Clarks “Corps of Discovery” two-year exploration of the Louisiana territory. However, and also as far as I can tell, the fictionalization extends only to adding a new protagonist: young Francois Rivet, a half-French, half-Pawnee wannabe scout, son of the famous – but long-lost – frontier explorer Auguste Rivet, eager to make his bones and see the world. All the other details of the expedition that I’ve read about while reading the novel – from a terrible death by appendicitis, Clarke’s black slave named York, and various Chieftains and Indian tribes – all other details seem really to have happened.
So through young Rivet’s eyes we follow the expedition as it moves up the Mississippi / Missouri river system, heading north, then north-west, then west, in search of that elusive waterway passage to the Pacific. The challenges they face – hostile Indian tribes, fierce floods and unpredictable snowstorms, wolves, starvation, disease, the constant pressure to follow the correct river fork – intertwine with the characters to form a nice, fast-paced read.
And then there’s Sacajawea, in all her Shoshone glory – beautiful, magnetic, elusive, wise – and yet, in a powerful scene late in the novel that could never be published today, brutal and ugly. A paradox, I guess they call it, and if we have too much Sacajawea in the narrative (especially since Frank fawns over her relentlessly and tiresomely for half the novel), we have not enough Captain Lewis and just the right amount of Captain Clarke.
What did I learn?
– The Lewis & Clark Expedition to explore the Louisiana Purchase did not begin, as I naturally thought, in Louisiana. It launched from St. Louis.
– Wild wolves get something called “hydrophobia” that I think (without consulting wikipedia) is a really, really bad case of the rabies. When a hydrophobic wolf bites a man, he gets a really, really, really bad case of the rabies. And dies. Painfully.
– As harsh as living life as a frontiersman in 1805 was, it was exponentially harsher living life as a plains Indian.
– I could never force myself to eat what they had to eat. No matter how hungry I was.
– Captain Clarke, renaissance man: soldier, explorer, cartographer, carpenter, naturalist, doctor, writer. A man who truly bent his environment to his will. We need more renaissance men.
– How muscles must ache paddling eighteen miles in one day – upstream.
– Books like this are much, much better when maps are included.
– I would last about three – maybe four – hours in the wilderness before succumbing to starvation, wildlife, and the elements. How these men survived off the land is something a veal like me just has absolutely no comprehension.
All in all, The Gates of the Mountains was a nice, sweet read.
Grade: B+