Chasing Lewis’s Monkeyflower: The Amazing Afterlife of the Lewis and Clark Expedition’s Wild Plants

Elizabeth Adelman’s Chasing Lewis’s Monkeyflower is the two-hundred-year saga of finding, losing, and finding again the wild plants collected on America’s first exploration west, the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Thomas Jefferson handpicked Meriwether Lewis to lead the expedition, gather notable specimens along the way, and then write the journals, with one volume to include science-worthy descriptions and classifications of the plants that Lewis collected and pressed to preserve. Not a botanist, Lewis needed help to write this part of the journals. Ambition, deceit, theft, wealth, debt, alcoholism, loss, suicide, serendipity, and stubborn persistence cross the plants’ paths in Philadelphia, New York, and London. Chasing Lewis’s Monkeyflower is the first work detailing the places, practices, and lives of a cavalcade of people who came into contact with the plants. It is a fascinating chronicle of an unexplored byway of the great American story.