Chasing Lewis's Monkeyflower: The Amazing Afterlife of the Lewis and Clark Expedition's Wild Plants

"A look at the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the plant specimens the explorers gathered on their way--and of their amazing afterlife. Elizabeth Adelman recounts the two hundred-year saga of finding, losing, and finding the wild plants collected on America's first exploration west, the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In the years that followed Lewis's return, ambition, deceit, theft, wealth, debt, alcoholism, loss, suicide, serendipity, and stubborn persistence cross the plants' paths in Philadelphia, New York, and London. Today, specimens of nearly two dozen plants are still missing--one of which is Lewis's Monkeyflower"--