Author in Chief, was described by Thomas Mallon in The Wall Street Journal as “one of the best books on the American presidency to appear in recent years.” Fehrman lives in Indiana with his wife and children.
He applied the "Page 99 Test" to This Vast Enterprise with the following results:
Page 99 finds the expedition about four hundred miles up the Missouri River -- still in their first year but well underway, their fears about encountering Native people as pitched as they will ever get.Visit Craig Fehrman's website.
I think this page give a great sense of my book because it incorporates multiple perspectives. Each chapter in This Vast Enterprise moves to a different point of view -- think As I Lay Dying or, if you prefer, Game of Thrones. Page 99 is in the middle of a Clark chapter, and I describe him noticing and analyzing Native art. (I found Clark's college notebook; he's an underrated Enlightenment thinker.) But I also describe the perspectives of John Ordway, a working-class soldier who was curious about Native people, and Joseph Whitehouse, a working-class soldier who was terrified of them. When it comes to history, people like to ask whether someone was a "man of his era," but I think that's the wrong question. People believed many different things in 1804, just like they believe many different things in 2026. I tried to capture this period's range of perspectives. Within a few pages, the book will rotate to a new chapter and a new point of View -- that of Black Buffalo, a brilliant Lakota leader who was as interested in using the Americans as they were in using him.
Page 99 also includes details about what the expedition felt like. This was important to me -- I wanted to put readers in the canoe or, for this stretch, on the barge.July was hotter and harder. The barge continued to wheel, and when the soldiers tried towing it barefoot on the shore, the sand scorched their feet. The Missouri’s bacteria-rich water sloshed in their scrapes and burns, leading to boils and abscesses. Their sweat soaked their shirts in minutes. It was more perspiration, Clark admitted, than he’d thought “could pass through the human body.” The heat produced some positives, including plentiful strawberries and plums. But it also brought ticks and gnats and especially mosquitoes, though Lewis had anticipated these pests and brought netting to help the men sleep at night.That's the page's last paragraph.
--Marshal Zeringue
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