Wilderness Aesthetics.

The article focuses on the expeditions of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. The expedition, was a trek into an unfamiliar and often frightening wilderness. It was the first, longest, and largest of nineteenth-century US government expeditions into terra incognita. Launched from St. Louis in 1804, the "Voyage of Discovery," as it was called, lasted two years, four months, and ten days. Round-trip, it covered 7,689 miles between the mouth of the Missouri River and the Pacific outlet of the Columbia River. Beginning in 1983, The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition have been appearing piecemeal from the University of Nebraska Press in a projected standard edition of 13 volumes, the diaries of four enlisted men, and the complete journals of the expedition leaders, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.