THE ATTIC READS: THE EXPLORERS

Let’s start with a word association game, the old “what’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say. . .”  Okay, ready. . .  “Explorer.”

Daniel Boone?  Columbus?  Perhaps Neil and Buzz?  Chances are the word did not call to mind many — if any — women, Native-Americans or African-Americans.  But a new book aims to change that.

In The Explorers:  A New History of America in Ten Expeditions, Amanda Bellows writes:  “Today the time has come to revisit the history of American exploration.  For too long, we have focused on adventurers like 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.”

In researching this unique and welcome book, Bellows had the field wide open before her.  Ten journeys?  Just ten?  But she has chosen her subjects wisely.  Rather than dig deeply to drag ten Americans out of utter obscurity, she introduces us to five people you probably never heard of while also including five familiar names and their lesser-known stories.

You may not consider Laura Ingalls Wilder of “Little House on the Prairie Fame” to be an explorer in the traditional sense, but Bellows makes the case, detailing the Ingalls family’s bravura as homesteaders.  John Muir?  Explorer?  To broaden our understanding of the Sierra Club founder, Bellows recounts Muir’s thousand-mile walk from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico, and makes it come alive.

Sacajawea, sure, but who knew the litany of hardships the Shoshone woman suffered before leading Lewis and Clark west?  Amelia Earhart?  Matthew Henson, accompanying Robert Peary to the North Pole?  Sally Ride?  All are given the full heroic treatment once reserved for Daniel Boone and the boys.

But The Explorers is at its best in profiling explorers unknown or forgotten.  Even those familiar with 19th century “mountain men” like Jim Bridger will be enthralled by the tale of James Beckworth, a black mountain man.  Beyond Peary and Henson, Bellows includes Harriet Chalmers Adams, who trekked throughout South America and the South Pacific.  And although you’ve heard plenty about Dr. Livingston, I presume, you will be amazed by William Sheppard, a black Presbyterian missionary who spent 20 years in the Congo and brought back some of the first horror stories exposing the evils of colonialism.

There are cynics who say we don’t need heroes, that the age of idol worship has passed.  Amanda Bellows (and I) disagree.  The worship of the old pantheon may have led us astray at times, promoting a jingoistic “victory history.”  But the search for admirable lives, as Bellows notes, is worth the effort.  Done well, as in The Explorers, a new pantheon arouses “our sense of the possibilities of exploration.  Along the way, we will gain a fuller understanding of the American story — something richer, more complex, and more diverse than we ever imagined.”