ON THE TRAIL OF AN AMERICAN ODYSSEY\'Undaunted Courage' explores Lewis-Clark quest's complexities.

Byline: M.R. Montgomery Boston Globe

Title: "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West"

Author: Stephen E. Ambrose

Data: 510 pages, illustrated, Simon & Schuster; $27.50

Our rating: Four Stars

Archie Hanna, curator of Western History Collections at Yale University for some 40 years after World War II, had one hard and fast rule when dealing with students. He would help anyone with any research, as long as it had nothing to do with George Armstrong Custer or the Little Bighorn. "All been done a hundred times," Hanna would say. And then Evan Connell published "Son of the Morning Star," and we all learned that a great saga has never been written too many times.

Stephen Ambrose, best known for his three-volume biography of Richard Nixon, several volumes on Dwight Eisenhower and a recent oral history of D-Day, June 6, knew this truth a long time ago when he wrote "Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors." Now he has taken up the closest thing we have to an odyssey in America: Lewis, Clark and the way West. He follows dozens of scholars, popularizers such as Bernard DeVoto, not a few cranks and the multitude of contributors to that dedicated historical quarterly that celebrates the expedition: "We Proceeded On."

Taking on Meriwether Lewis is daring, but an author with the gumption to try to make sense of Nixon's career is not going to be stopped by a pair of explorers, another rather mysterious president or the several dozen books on the expedition (mostly bad) already written, if soon forgotten. Only DeVoto's terribly dated survey, "The Course of Empire," is still in print by a general publisher. Such excellent works as the recently re-edited journals of the expedition (in eight fat volumes) and James P. Ronda's seminal ethno-history, "Lewis and Clark Among the Indians," both from the University of Nebraska Press, are in print, but have not, and cannot have, reached a general audience. (A full biography of William Clark by Ronda should be published soon; it will be a milestone if it has the power of "Among the Indians.")

Lewis had undaunted courage during the expedition, although Clark had just as much grit and more common sense. A half-dozen of the enlisted men who volunteered had equal courage and often superior skills at everything from tracking game to blacksmithing to communicating with the Indians of the plains. They also had a talent for occasional malingering, mild derelictions, drunkenness when possible and sexual proclivity that you would expect from healthy, unattached frontiersmen in the prime of life and away from home.

It was as a group, a "corps of discovery," that they made it, wandering over 2,500 miles of twisting river and vertiginous mountain trail to get to the Pacific Ocean, the "ill-tasting lake where the sun sets." Ambrose at times, and perhaps by default (after all, Lewis is his subject), can give the impression that Lewis was most responsible for the creation of a viable unit, an all-American platoon, out of poor, rough and ready recruits. In fact, shortly after they were assembled in late fall 1803, he literally turned them over to Clark, who kept them in line and hard at work for the entire winter in a viciously dirty, cold and poor camp, while Lewis spent most of the season in the warmth and fellowship of St. Louis' fur-trading community.

And it was as a group, singly and collectively, that they were the most astonishingly lucky explorers since the princes of Serendip. Lewis had done a marvelous job of logistics, providing the 24 men with the best of weapons and the whole party with trade goods and spare parts for their rifles and emergency rations and medicines of true efficacy against the simpler ailments. Yes, he had prepared well. But they, and he in particular, seemed to bear a charmed life for the next two years.

Several of them should have been mauled by grizzly bears, all of them could have drowned (most of them couldn't swim, before or after more than 5,000 miles of round-trip waterway exploration). On their best days at their maximum strength, even a single band of the Sioux nation outnumbered them 20 to one in fighting strength. They managed to pass through Blackfoot country without meeting a soul on the westward trek, and when Lewis and a few companions encountered the Blackfeet on the return, the result was another near-disaster for Lewis, and resulted in the death of two Blackfeet in a tragicomic shootout.

In the very last stages of the return through the wilderness, Lewis was shot through one buttock and creased on the opposite cheek in a hunting accident. His hunting partner was the company's voyager enlistee and esteemed fiddle player, Pierre Cruzatte. Lewis, while hunting elk in a thicket and dressed in elk-skin trousers, had chosen Cruzatte, who was blind in one eye and myopic in the other, as a companion. That was pushing the bubble of luck to the bursting point, but he still got away with it less only his pride plus considerable discomfort.

Ambrose's portrait of Lewis, his knowledge of the sources and the commentators and most especially his judicious assessment of the controversies in Lewis' career are all admirable. Unlike so many amateur historians, Ambrose does not mistake the partisan newspaper reports of the era for fact, and he sensibly sorts out the greatest puzzle in Lewis' life, the manner of his ending of it.

Lewis, after the expedition, was rewarded with the governorship of the Territory of Louisiana. Local politics, personal bickering and petty bureaucratic nitpicking in Washington, D.C., combined with his own mercurial, possibly manic-depressive personality, drove the man to suicide. Triumph often is followed by tragedy.

If this book has a fault, it is one of the most common in recent biographical writing: an unstoppable urge to speculate on what a character might have been thinking. Scattered examples through the book of the "He must have thought ..." modality culminate in more than a page of imagined thoughts that might have crossed Lewis' mind a few hours before he fatally wounded himself with a too-light-caliber pistol: "... was it the Blackfeet and the only Indian fight of his life ...?" that he remembered, Ambrose writes. Further on: "Or was he yearning for more pills? Or more whiskey?"

Lewis was sick at heart. That much we know. His suicide is sad enough, gruesome enough, puzzling enough, that it rather deserves, as they say in nondenominational memorial services, a moment of silent reflection. If that is not enough, like Lewis' good friend, ornithologist Alexander Wilson, we can "shed a tear in the solitary wilderness" of our own heart.

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Photo Though Meriwether Lewis did a marvelous job of logistics in his triumphant trek West, his life ended tragically.