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Ambrose is writing another book on Meriwether Lewis, as well as a historical account of the Allied sweep through northwest Europe. He will draw from the research of more than a dozen summer forays to Normandy and beyond, including several tours he has organized for war veterans and World War II buffs.
In retirement, Ambrose plans to publish more war books, take an emeritus role at the D-Day museum and follow his curiosity wherever it leads-at least until Powell makes his political ambitions known.
In the meantime, he will learn to do what he has never quite mastered: Ambrose will be patient. “I’ve never been in this position before,” he said. “What I do for the next year has everything to do with what someone else decides.” (TP 4/30/95)
Ambrose On The Trail Of Lewis And Clark
A best-selling historian describes how his family discovered romance, adventure and each other as they retraced the explorers’ steps
In 1804, when Capts. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark set out across the continent, the West was uncharted territory. It took their party-30 men and one Shoshone teenager, Sacajawea, the mother of an infant boy-more than a year and a half to reach the Pacific. Since then ,generations of Americans have retraced their path, including the family of historian Stephen E. Ambrose, whose chronicle of the expedition, “Undaunted Courage” has been on the New York Times best-seller list for 24 weeks. Ambrose says he wrote the book hoping to inspire readers to explore for themselves. He has succeeded. Officials at state and national parks along the route say tourism is up as much as 15 percent over last year, and many visitors cite Ambrose’s work. Here he describes his own family’s journeys into the past.
In the fall of 1975, I read the journals of Lewis and Clark-and was entranced from the first sentence. That Christmas, after dinner, my wife, Moira, and our five children [then aged 15 to 6] got to talking about where we wanted to spend our annual camping vacation. We had always had a historical theme; in the early 1970s it was Crazy Horse and Custer. But with the celebration of our country’s 200th birthday, the summer of 1976 would be unique, and we wanted to go somewhere special. I suggested Lemhi Pass in Idaho, where Lewis became the first white man to cross the Continental Divide. Moira and the kids loved the idea.
We decided to leave from Wood River, Ill., at 4 p.m. on May 14, the 172nd anniversary to the minute of the departure of the expedition, and follow Lewis and Clark’s route to the Pacific.
Through the late spring we made our way up the Missouri River, staying at Lewis and Clark campsites along the way. We canoed the river at every stop. Each night around the fire, we would read aloud from the journals. Those were magical moments. The captains were gifted writers, with such vivid imagery, anecdotes and drama that their journals are literary treasures. Hearing their description of the country you have just hiked or canoed and sitting where they were as they wrote inspires your effort to walk in their moccasins or canoe in their wake.
On June 25, 1976, we canoed through the Gates of the Mountains, the Missouri River canyon just north of Helena, Mont. Stephenie, then 16, had a brief conversation with the gas bou at the dock. Later she informed Moira and me-with deep conviction-that our grandchildren were going to be born and raised in Montana.
On the Fourth of July, we were at Lemhi Pass, where 15 of my students from the University of New Orleans joined us. It was a glorious night; you felt you could touch the stars. Except for a logging road, the place was unaltered since Lewis’s time. Around the fire, we talked about why we loved our country. We sang patriotic songs-as the men of the expedition did-and imagined their optimism for our future.
We returned to Montana and the trail the next summer. That year, at the Gates of the Mountains, Stephenie got to spend more time with the gas boy, John Tubbs, son of Bob and Florence Tubbs, who ran the tour boats Pirogue and Sacajawea. She persuaded them to hire her to work behind the soda counter at the boat landing and to let her live with them at the Gates. The romance blossomed. The next year, John and Steph entered the University of Montana at Missoula, where they eventually earned master’s degrees: Steph in history, John in economics. On June 25, 1983, the anniversary of their meeting, they married in two 90-passinger tour boats tied together in the Missouri River at the Gates {one the bride’s boat, the other the groom’s} near where Lewis’s journal entry for the day, in which he gave the Gates their name. John and Steph live today in Helena, with our grandsons Alex and Riley. Our sons Barry and Hugh are also graduates of the University of Montana, and live in Missoula and Helena. Barry and his wife, Celeste, named our granddaughter Corina Sacajawea Ambrose.
Each summer on the trail brings its own distinctive memories. In 1993 we invited the smartest people we know to join us for a Missouri River trip, a July Fourth camp-out at Lemhi and a horseback crossing on the Lolo Trail. I was getting ready to write “Undaunted Courage” and wanted to know what questions popped into bright people’s minds after a day on the trail and a reading of the journals around the campfire. Among a dozen others were my college roommate, former Colorado governor Dick Lamm, and his wife, Dottie. Dick has more curiosity than any man I’ve known since Dwight Eisenhower. He and the others gave me exactly what I sought: good fellowship, shared hardship and never-ending questions.
Reading aloud: This summer my college-fraternity brothers John Holcomb and Chuck Barnham organized a reunion on the Missouri River. Fifty of us set out-20 of my classmates, along with wives, children and grandchildren-in 25 canoes. The camaraderie around the campfire, after a day of never-ending “scenes of visionary enchantment” as Lewis described the White Cliffs section of the river, was a wonderful thing. I’m a storyteller by profession, and my idea of heaven is sitting around a fire after a day on the trail, reading aloud from the journals, sensing the 6-year-olds along with the 60-year-olds straining forward in the circle just a bit, so as not to miss anything.
As for our family, we have endured summer snowstorms, terrible thunderstorms in canoes and soaking rains on backpack trails. But what we remember most are the countless moments of exhilaration. We got to know one another, through shared laughter and tears, as the kids talked around the campfire about their daily triumphs and tragedies- and their dreams and fears.
The trail has drawn us back so many times because it is so accessible and, in many places, so unchanged. It stretches over two thirds of the country. Along the lower part of the Columbia River, there are dams, towns and cities; along the middle part of the Missouri, there are dams. But even there, on the rivers between the modern intrusions, you pretty much see what Lewis and Clark saw. All along the trail there are state parks, many of them on Lewis and Clark campsites. In Montana, from Fort Benton to the North Dakota border on the Missouri River, a distance of more than 300 miles, there are no towns at all-only a few ranches and a couple of bridges. Otherwise, it is pristine. So are parts of the Lolo Trail. When you are there on a four-or five-day trip, you get a whole new perspective on time, and on what most impressed Lewis and Clark, the vastness and grandeur of the American West. (Newsweek 8/26/96)
HISTORIAN STEPHEN AMBROSE JOINS NOTABLES AT NORMANDY
Back in the 1970s, Stephen Ambrose strolled the University of New Orleans campus sporting fringed buckskin and long hair.
His students chalked the look up to research for his book “Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors.”
Years later, friends chuckled at the uncanny Richard Nixon imitations that accompanied Ambrose’s work on his three-volume biography of the former president.