Electronic Web Sources for Early American Literature

Westward Expansion & Travel Literature

American Journeys
"American Journeys contains more than 18,000 pages of eyewitness accounts of North American exploration, from the sagas of Vikings in Canada in AD1000 to the diaries of mountain men in the Rockies 800 years later." Wisconsin Historical Society

American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920
Library of Congress "American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920 comprises 253 published narratives by Americans and foreign visitors recounting their travels in the colonies and the United States and their observations and opinions about American peoples, places, and society from about 1750 to 1920. Also included is the thirty-two-volume set of manuscript sources entitled Early Western Travels, 1748-1846, published between 1904 and 1907 after diligent compilation by the distinguished historian and secretary of the Wisconsin Historical Society Reuben Gold Thwaites. Although many of the authors represented in American Notes are not widely known, the collection includes works by major figures such as Matthew Arnold, Fredrika Bremer, William Cullen Bryant, François-René de Chateaubriand, William Cobbett, James Fenimore Cooper, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Sir Charles Lyell, William Lyon Mackenzie, André Michaux, Thomas Nuttall, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Robert Louis Stevenson. The narratives in American Notes therefore range from the unjustly neglected to the justly famous, and from classics of the genre to undiscovered gems. Together, they build a mosaic portrait of a young nation."

Louisiana Purchase Treaty, April 30, 1803
National Archives

Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition
Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery
Ken Burns, PBS
The Journals of Lewis and Clark
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library
Discovering Lewis & Clark
From Discovering Lewis & Clark®
Lewis & Clark Trail Heritage Foundation
The National Council of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial
The West
PBS