Brilliant but troubled, Meriwether Lewis never found his footing after returning home from the West in triumph. It is with some reluctance that the young discoverer accepted the job as Governor of the sprawling new Louisiana Territory he had just explored. Within a year of arriving in St. Louis, the remote frontier town that served as capital of the West, Lewis’s life had entered a downhill slide. He became convinced that he would soon be dismissed in disgrace by the corrupt politicians in Washington he had sworn to serve, and vowed to travel to Washington to set the record straight. The next weeks of Meriwether Lewis’s life can fairly be called one of the great unsolved mysteries of American history. All anyone really knows is that on October 11, 1809, Meriwether Lewis was found shot dead in a remote inn on the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, a road through the wilderness so dangerous it was called “The Devil’s Backbone.” Was it suicide? Or murder? To this day, historians cannot agree. No inquest was ever held into Lewis’s death; no investigation was ever undertaken. Based on extensive historical research, To the Ends of the Earth reconstructs Lewis’s last days and brings alive the atmosphere of intrigue and danger that characterized the early American West. Then, in a powerful reimagining of the tale, it is given to brave William Clark, Lewis’s best friend and partner in discovery, the role of discovering the truth. Clark’s relationships with Lewis, his teenage wife Julia, and his African-American slave York form much of the emotional core of the novel. Readers will join Lewis and Clark on the final voyage of their legendary friendship in a story of honor, vengeance, and, ultimately, redemption.

Lewis and Clark are famous for their expedition to cross the United States from east to west, this novel is set a few years later and deals with the still mysterious events surrounding the death of Meriwether Lewis. Francis Hunter (actually the writing team of sisters Mary and Liz Clare) has seamlessly woven together historical fact and fiction to create a story of greed, political rivalry, ambition and betrayal in a still relatively lawless part of America. The descriptions of the privations of a journey through the wilderness evoke a sense of time and place; the complicated relationships between slave and master, free black and employer are compelling; the description of the deprivations suffered by American soldiers realistic; the contrasting aspects of Lewis’s character well described. In an attempt to re-create the final days of Lewis the authors have laid a focus on his friend, William Clark, through whose eyes we see the strengths and weaknesses of the explorer. Clark’s obvious struggle to come to terms with different aspect of Lewis’s character and behaviour during the last weeks of his life and his relationship with his own wife, who is more distant from Meriwether Lewis and therefore perhaps more open minded, are used to present the two very different views currently held by historians as to what really happened to Meriwether Lewis on his final journey. Was it murder or suicide? I must admit, however, that I found some parts of the plotting which related to Julia Clark a little far-fetched for the type of woman she was and the time she was living in.

To The Ends Of The Earth is not a deep narrative in the sense of a historical novel such as Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel but is more like the type of adventure story such as The Royalist by S J Dees or The Fire Court by Andrew Taylor. If you are a fan of adventure stories set in the past and also have an interest in historical mysteries then this book is for you.

To The Ends Of The Earth can  be found on Amazon

You can find out more about Frances Hunter here

You can find more of my Recommended Reads here