The Explorers: A New History of America in Ten Expeditions

by Amanda Bellows

William Morrow 2024

In her first book for a general audience, the historian Amanda Bellows assumes her readers are unusually ignorant. How else could she justify her book, a collection of short biographies of ten explorers, in this way? “For too long, we have focused on adventurers like [Daniel] Boone, whom we elevated to mythical status in our collective imagination. By doing so, we have overlooked other important explorers—male and female, Black and white, Indigenous and immigrant—whose discoveries also helped make the United States the country that it is today.” These other important explorers—the table of contents tells us—include Sacagawea, Laura Ingalls Wilder, John Muir, Amelia Earhart, and Sally Ride. Sacagawea overlooked? Amelia Earhart overlooked? Laura Ingalls Wilder?

Even the less well-known explorers are remembered. James Beckwourth, discoverer of Beckwourth Pass, can be found in histories of the American West. William Sheppard, the Presbyterian missionary who publicized King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo, dwells in the pages of Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. The ornithologist Florence Merriam Bailey, who campaigned against the use of birds in women’s fashion, is the subject of a recent children’s book. Polar explorer Matthew Henson is the subject of at least five. Harriet Chalmers Adams, founder of the Society of Women Geographers and the most obscure of the ten explorers, has an entry in the American National Biography. There are one-volume biographies of Beckwourth, Sheppard, and Bailey.

Without this assumption of ignorance, many of Bellows’s claims are but so much cant. By focusing on these “overlooked” explorers, Bellows claims, “we will gain a fuller understanding of the American story—something richer, more complex, and more diverse than we ever imagined.” Who is this we?

The first person plural is typical of Bellows’s style, which often approximates that of an educational film. The prologue announces that “We will cross the frozen Arctic Ocean and descend into the jungles of South America and Africa; we will journey by canoe and horseback, dogsled and steamship, airplane and space shuttle.” The style persists in many a hackneyed flourish. Amelia Earhart, for example, “would become more comfortable with the notion of feminism and showed the world what women were capable of through her own success as a pilot.”

Bellows’s prose lacks control. Idiomatic expressions are misused—Sheppard and a fellow missionary are said to be “mowed down” when they contract and survive malaria—and phrases are thoughtlessly repeated: “Beckwourth honed his hunting skills”; John Muir “honed his climbing skills”; Bailey “would hone her observational skills”; Ride “had honed her skills from mission control”; Adams “honed her athletic abilities.”

Despite this carelessness, Bellows attends carefully to one word: “exploration”: “We have embraced a limited definition of exploration,” she writes, “which emphasizes the acquisition of land and understates the consequences of settlement for Native peoples.” Readers frequently encounter new types of explorers. “Laura Ingalls Wilder represented a new type of explorer.” “Sheppard represented a new kind of American explorer.” These new types turn out to be the familiar ones of settler and humane missionary.

In her attempt at redefinition, Bellows indicates two major themes of The Explorers: violence against Indigenous people and the destruction of the environment. Bellows returns to these themes throughout several chapters, sometimes unexpectedly. She notes that as a child Florence Merriam Bailey lived in upstate New York, “where she was largely sheltered from . . . the violence against Indigenous people that accompanied the settlement of the west.”

Focus on these themes threatens to overwhelm the book. There are major questions—why are Amelia Earhart and Sally Ride included?—and local difficulties. After ten paragraphs narrating the failures of Wilder and her husband Almanzo to make it on the prairie, Bellows confusingly asks, “Why had so many settlers destroyed the native grasses, killed the bison, and driven away the wildlife, only to forsake the land and community where they had so desperately tried to build a life?” Bellows ignores her own case study to remind readers of the environmental consequences of settlement.

Bellows ultimately judges many of the explorers for their responses to violence against Indigenous people and the destruction of the environment. Muir, for one, is docked points:

In his essays, Muir spilled far more ink on the destruction of the environment than on Native Americans’ forced dislocation from places like Yosemite Valley and other regions of California. When he did record his encounters with people indigenous to the Sierra Nevada, he sometimes described them using insensitive language that reflected his biases and a lack of compassion. In moments like these, the preservationist failed to make the key connection: American settlement had not only ravaged the environment but also violently upended the lives of Native Californians.

These repeated reminders of violence and destruction leave the impression that the book focuses on the wrong people. Perhaps this impression is unavoidable. A past in which colonization and environmental destruction are central cannot be studied by replacing Daniel Boone, insofar as he represents a spirit of conquest, with more benign figures. Daniel Boone is, by The Explorers’ own lights, at the center of history.

Will Ramsay is a book critic living in Alabama.