The 2024 Stephen Ambrose Memorial Lecture presented Missoula writer Peter Stark on Tuesday, October 15, at 6:30 p.m. in the Helena Library’s Large Community Room.

In this lecture, Stark focused on the push of the infant United States from the East Coast, over the Appalachians and into the Ohio Valley -- the earliest days of the Western Movement.  Both President Washington and President Jefferson were instrumental in this earliest Western push.  William Henry Harrison, son of a Founding Father, was Indiana Territorial Governor from 1801-1812 and played a central role as a young man -- and one that is not widely recognized -- in launching the Western Movement by taking Indian land rights and selling them to “little guy” settlers instead of big investors.  (Much later he became U.S. president.)

The talk touched on the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark Expedition and on John Jacob Astor's first American settlement on the Pacific. The lecture ended with a reflection on how the War of 1812 did not change much on the East Coast, but dramatically altered geopolitics on the Ohio Valley frontier and the West Coast.

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About Peter Stark:  Peter Stark is an adventurer and historian.  Born in Wisconsin, he grew up in an adventurous and outdoorsy family and graduated from Dartmouth College. After taking a master's in journalism at the University of Wisconsin, and working briefly for The Missoulian newspaper in Montana, he set out to write adventure-travel articles about Greenland, Tibet and elsewhere for magazines such as Outside, Smithsonian, The New York Times Magazine, and others. 

With his wife, choreographer and writer Amy Ragsdale, and their two children, Stark and family lived for a year each in Mozambique and a remote region of Brazil. After taking part in the harrowing "first descent" of Mozambique's 750-kilometer-long Lugenda River by kayak in 2002, Stark decided to pull back from edgy adventure himself and pivot toward exploration history.

Based in Missoula, Montana, Stark now researches and writes historical accounts of early American explorers in wilderness settings and their contact with Indigenous peoples.  His book Astoria, a New York Times bestseller in 2014, tells the epic story of the first American colony on the West Coast (at the Columbia River's mouth) and was named a PEN USA finalist and made into a two-part play by Portland Center Stage. 

His Young Washington (2018) was named a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.  His latest book, Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh’s and William Henry Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation (2023), is about the struggle for the continent's center between the great Shawnee leader Tecumseh and the frontier governor (and later president) William Henry Harrison.

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For more information, visit https://www.peterstarkauthor.com

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Watch a video of Peter Stark interviewed by Montana Poet Laureate Chris La Tray at the Missoula Public Library - 1/18/24.