Finding New Horizons and Saving a Disappearing Language

One good book can lead to another.

My latest literary journey began when I followed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition to the Pacific in Craig Fehrman’s “This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark.”

Lewis, Clark and several of the 30 men with them kept detailed journals, and Fehrman has drunk deeply from them as well as from recollections of the Native American leaders they encountered along the way. I felt like I was sharing the vistas, smells, discomforts, injuries, terrors (grizzly bears!) and occasional joys of an expedition now over 200 years back.

One of the men, York, was enslaved by Clark. Clark doesn’t come off well: Fehrman vividly depicts his unquestioning sense of York as less than human despite the fact that........

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