DeVoto sets out to show how it was  the continent of North America, became to be controlled by one political entity, the United States.  And while he maintains it was inevitable that this happened, the argument breaks down when DeVoto tries to explain why Canada did not become part of the US also. But that is just a minor irritation, because this book is rich in details of the explorers of the North American continent, from the initial Spanish explorers culminating in the Lewis & Clark expedition.  What is probably most enjoyable is DeVoto's sarcasm and his constant ridicule of the foibles of man searching for gold and other riches based almost solely on their dreams and fantasies ignoring all experience to date that would have, should have, convinced them their quest was hopeless. DeVoto does not save his ridicule for the European explorers.  His view of the Native Americans is realistic and refreshingly politically incorrect.  The Indians could be just as brutish, duplicitous and murderous as the explorers.  It is a far cry from the current day portrayal of the Indians as the noble savage. The book builds up to, and is really culminated by a description of the Lewis and Clark expedition.  Although less detailed than Stephen Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage," it is a fuller account, because it puts in context the purpose of the expedition and the stakes involved: control of the North American continent by the Americans opposed by the French, English, Spanish and Russians. And one passage that haunts me.  DeVoto contrasts the expedition with the millions of others that would follow:
				Talking to men who but lately had kissed their wives good-night and slept under storm-tight roofs, they must have had a look in their eyes and a way of standing.  Their shirts and breeches of buckskin or elkskin had many patches sewed on with sinew, were worn thin between patches, were black from many campfires and greasy from many meals.  They were threadbare and filthy, they smelled bad, and any Mandan had a lighter skin.  They gulped rather than ate the tripes of buffalo.  They had forgetten the use of chairs.  Words and phrases, mostly obscene, of Nez Perce, Clatsop, Mandan, Chinook came naturally to their tongues when they asked what word from Kentucky and was John Bull still fighting the frogs. And still, men who by guts and skill had mastered the farthest wilderness, they must have had a way of standing and a look in their eyes.  While they scanned the faces of white men, their glance took in the movement of river and willows, of background and distance.  While they talked as men talk nearing home and meeting someone newly come from there, their minds watched a scroll of forever-changing images.  What they had done, what they had seen, heard, felt, feared--the places, the sounds, the colors, the cold, the darkness, the emptiness, the bleakness, the beauty.  Till they died this stream of memory would set them apart, if imperceptibly to anyone but themselves, from everyone else.  For they had crossed the continent and come back, the first of all.
		I know my dry history classes did not come close to doing justice to the courage of the men and women who conquered this continent.  DeVoto does them justice.
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