Chasing Lewis's Monkeyflower

By: Elizabeth Adelman

Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2026-02-17

A look at the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the plant specimens the great explorers gathered on their way—and of their amazing afterlife. Elizabeth Adelman's Chasing the Missing Monkeyflower is 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. Thomas Jefferson handpicked Meriwether Lewis to lead the expedition, gather notable specimens along the way, and then write the journals, with one volume to include science-worthy descriptions and classifications of the plants that Lewis collected and pressed to preserve. Not a botanist, Lewis needed help to write this part of the journals. Ambition, deceit, theft, wealth, debt, alcoholism, loss, suicide, serendipity, and stubborn persistence cross the plants’ paths in Philadelphia, New York, and London. This is the first work detailing the places, practices, and times of a cavalcade of people who touched the plants. A fascinating chronicle of an unexplored byway of the great American story.