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and I?ve sat around his campfire*..
Familiar as he is with Lewis?s life, Ambrose has no intention of carrying the parallels too far. As Undaunted Courage makes clear, America?s greatest explorer was as haunted as he was brilliant. ?Lewis was a worldwide celebrity at 35 and couldn?t handle it,? Ambrose observes of the man he believes was a manic-depressive who killed himself three years after his triumph. While some historians think Lewis was murdered, Ambrose says the explorer?s many troubles prove otherwise. ?He was an opium addict and a serious alcoholic. Had a terrible writer?s block?couldn?t get the journals published?and was bankrupt.? While Lewis?s achievements as the groundbreaking expedition?s primary leader make him a giant, it is his flaws, Ambrose says, that make him compelling. ?His breakdown was so modern,? he says. ?Everybody can identify with it!?
Many readers might also identify with Ambrose?s own American journey. Born the second of three sons to a U.S. Navy doctor and his wife, a homemaker, he grew up in Whitewater,
Wis., a picture-postcard town of picket fences, unlocked doors and, to Ambrose, suffocating conformity. ?There was no taste, no culture,? he says. ?All these Republicans who made over $10,000 a year ran the town, and my old man was one of them. I couldn?t wait to get out of that godforsaken place.?
Fleeing to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Ambrose studied American history, eventually earning a Ph.D. in 1960 and teaching at the University of New Orleans (he retired last year). His first wife, Judy, whom Ambrose married in 1957, was a manic-depressive who committed suicide in 1963. Ambrose married his second wife, Moira, in 1965.
When, in 1962, Dwight Eisenhower read Ambrose?s first book (a biography of Gen. Henry W. Halleck, Abraham Lincoln?s chief of staff), the former President invited Ambrose to help edit his papers, then asked the young scholar to write his biography. ?It changed my life,? says Ambrose of his days with Ike. ?I was a 28-year-old historian who?d written one book.? Afterward he went on to publish a dual biog-
raphy of Crazy Horse and Gen. George Custer, a three-volume study of Richard Nixon and three books about World War II, including D-Day, which brought accolades from another popular general, Colin Powell.
As for the man who earned his accolades almost two centuries ago, it was a copy of Meriwether Lewis?s journal,

Ambrose and his e (with daughter ice) summer in ena, Mont.
Above the Mis-iri River, Am-se hikes with ndson Riley, 6.
given to nim by an aunt in 1975, Ambrose recalls, that ?hooked? the author on his subject. ?I knew,? he says, ?that I had to go out there and see this country.? Which is what he did the following summer, packing up his family?he and Moira have five children between them, now grown?and hiking a small stretch of the rugged trail. (Ambrose will soon venture into another untamed wilderness: television. He has optioned Undaunted Courage, for six figures, to National Geographic Television, in association with Hallmark Entertainment, which plans to turn the book into a miniseries.)
Reading aloud from Lewis?s journals that summer 20 years ago, Ambrose unwittingly embarked, like Lewis and Clark, on a journey of discovery, the outcome of which he could not possibly have envisioned. ?The single thing I most wanted was to enlarge the circle of those of us who sit around the campfire talking about Lewis and Clark,? he says. With 197,500 copies of Undaunted Courage in print, that modest goal has clearly been met.
?	PETER CARLIN
?	RON lilDIMIOI R in Bay St. Louis