"Jefferson's America: The Expeditions That Made a Nation" Topic

"The surprising story of how Thomas Jefferson commanded an unrivaled era of American exploration—and in doing so, forged a great nation

Jefferson's America sheds new light on one of the key aspects of Jefferson's presidency. Almost everyone who has taken a U.S. history course is familiar with Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase and the travels of Lewis and Clark, but that's not where this formative episode in American history begins or ends. In fact, Jefferson sent four other expeditions West—Zebulon Pike was dispatched on two missions: first, to the headwaters of the Mississippi, and second, toward what is now Colorado. William Dunbar and Dr. George Hunter explored northern Louisiana and Arkansas. Peter Custis and Thomas Freeman (with military officer Richard Sparks) followed the Red River of North Texas and Oklahoma.

The stakes for American expansion were enormously high—at a time when Britain, France, and Spain were also all vying for control of the vast expanse of land west of the Mississippi River, the geopolitics of discovery were paramount. Jefferson, a true student of the Enlightenment, sought out men of science to undertake these urgent missions into the frontier. But they weren't always well-matched—with each other, or even with the task of exploring itself. Tensions between Dunbar and Hunter in particular threatened to undermine Jefferson's progress, leaving the United States in danger of losing its foothold in the West.

Jefferson's America will rediscover the robust and often harrowing action from those seminal expeditions and use them as a means of understanding the Jeffersonian era and the president's vision for a continental America."
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Amicalement
Armand

To connect this to Miniatures, which this site is about, Pete Panzeri once put on a very interesting Lewis and Clark game at Fall In, don't know the year. I would have liked to have the rules.

Pete, if you are out there, are these available?

I was thinking that a game like Ross Maker's great Source of the Nile would be good for this episode, too. Done with miniatures.

I've also run Lewis and Clark games. They were a military expedition with the likely goal of sticking a finger in the eye of Spain. Spain twice sent out military expeditions to find them, and my game was based on what might have happened if they'd been found. One of my favorite games.

Don't know the book Tango is referring to, but several books have been written on America's imperial aspirations, beginning with the Corps of Discovery and subsequent military expeditions into the west. It's a fascinating period.