In the following review excerpt, Hallock asserts that "the focus upon one individual leaves Ambrose little textual room to explore the West."

In a small but telling coincidence, two very different books on the Lewis and Clark expedition begin in the same way, with the author revealing where he first read the Journals. Stephen Ambrose borrowed the Nicholas Biddle edition from his aunt in 1975, plowed through the set, and the rest is (shall we say) history: the following summer, Ambrose celebrated the Bicentennial with his family, friends, and 25 students at Lemhi Pass, where the Corps of Discovery crossed the Continental Divide; he has traced the country almost every year since that glorious Fourth of July; patriotism and a profound identification with Meriwether Lewis breathe through his biography of the explorer. Paying quieter homage, Albert Furtwangler recalls the pleasure of reading Bernard DeVoto's classic abridgement on a crosscountry...