The Course of Empire
by Bernard DeVoto
Summary
The Course of Empire is the story of three centuries of exploration of North America, from the first Spanish entradas to the moment in 1805 when Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific. Bernard DeVoto wrote it as the final volume of his trilogy about the American West, after The Year of Decision: 1846 and Across the Wide Missouri, and it is the biggest of the three in every sense: a continental history in which Spain, France, and Britain grope across an unknown interior for three hundred years, chasing gold, furs, souls, and a water route to Asia that does not exist. DeVoto organizes the sprawl around geography and error. The explorers carry maps of rivers that are not there, and the story of the continent's discovery becomes the story of wrong ideas slowly dying, from the Straits of Anián to the belief that a single height of land could drain waters to both oceans. He gives the Indian nations real weight as powers pursuing their own diplomacy, unusual for history written in the early 1950s, and he writes with the pace and bite of the professional journalist he was, a Harper's columnist who taught at Harvard only as a part time instructor and never won the permanent post there he wanted. The last hundred pages, which follow Lewis and Clark upriver and over the divide, are as exciting as the material deserves. The book won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1953, joining the Pulitzer Prize that Across the Wide Missouri had already won, and DeVoto followed it by editing the journals of Lewis and Clark for the expedition's 150th anniversary. It remains the grandest single account of how the shape of the continent entered human knowledge.
Historical Context & Significance
DeVoto finished his trilogy at the height of his second career as a conservationist. From the Easy Chair column in Harper's he fought the postwar campaign to transfer federal public lands to the states, and the historian who had spent decades tracing how the West was won argued fiercely about who should keep it. The Course of Empire won the 1953 National Book Award as the sesquicentennial of Lewis and Clark approached, and DeVoto's 1953 abridgment of their journals became the standard popular edition. Historians have revised many judgments since, but the trilogy fixed the exploration of the West in American literature, and conservation writers still claim DeVoto as a founder of their tradition, the historian who turned the story of the public lands into an argument for keeping them public.