Ep. 883: A New History of Lewis and Clark

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Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast.

00:00:18
Speaker 2: You can’t predict.

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00:00:43
Speaker 2: Welcome everybody. Today, we’re gonna dig up.

00:00:45
Speaker 1: We’re gonna dig way in on the Lewis and Clark expedition, which comes up all the time on this show.

00:00:48
Speaker 2: I don’t know if you know. Of all the interviews you’re gonna do, how many interviews have you done so far?

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Speaker 3: Too many to count. Okay, but but well we’ll get into it here for sure. Okay, this is gonna be the one. Remember how I was just saying, turn those off, it’s all good.

00:01:03
Speaker 2: This is gonna be the one.

00:01:04
Speaker 1: This is actually important, but not as important as Lewis and Clark, not as pressing. Of all the interviews you did, this is gonna be the one where the audience knows most about what you’re talking about.

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Speaker 4: I love it.

00:01:15
Speaker 1: That’s a guarantee unless you go to like the Lewis and Clark Remembrance Association or something.

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Speaker 3: Let’s see, I have to talk to them, so so’ll it’ll be a good time.

00:01:25
Speaker 1: Next to those suckers. This is gonna be the most informed audience you’re going to talk about. But you got a brand new book out, this vast enterprise. And we’re joined by Craig Furman, who wrote a book prior that I would be way less inclined to read, but still interesting. Author is a previous book author in chief, the untold story of our presidents in the.

00:01:49
Speaker 2: Books they wrote. But how many books have they written?

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Speaker 4: Again?

00:01:54
Speaker 3: Too many to count. Yeah, I mean to pick which ones you wanted to talk about. I picked the ones that were interesting. So with Teddy Roosevelt, you know, would focus on his outdoor writing, his great nature writing, and then focus on when he wrote about the War of eighteen twelve from like a naval perspective, because that book is still important to historians today even though Teddy Roosevelt wrote it what he is at Harvard as a student. So I would just pick the presidents that were most interesting, picked the books that were most interesting, and then that book sort of also told the history of communication. Like when I was writing about Reagan, I was also writing about the rise of like Walden books and how bookstores and malls changed the kinds of books people wrote.

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Speaker 4: And so Jimmy Carter wrote a bunch of books, a lot of books.

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Speaker 3: But unfortunately he’s only like a couple paragraphs in my book because he was operating in the same world as Reagan. So like with Carter, he was one of the first people to use a word processor.

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Speaker 2: You know.

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Speaker 3: He would have like these floppy disks that could hold twelve pages on it, and he had to pay thousands of dollars to bring this giant microwave size word processor into his house. So unfortunately for mister Carter, I only focused on the word processor, not the books. But I wanted it to be a good story. Who’s your favorite President Lincoln?

00:02:57
Speaker 2: Lincoln?

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Speaker 4: Yeah, I’m from Indiana. What else am I going to say? Man?

00:03:01
Speaker 2: I thought he’s like land of Lincoln’s Illinois.

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Speaker 3: Well, there’s the Midwest fights over him quite tenaciously. It was born Indiana, he was born in Kentucky. So I’m telling you it’s it’s it’s tough stuff.

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Speaker 2: Good. But so why why do you say Indiana?

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Speaker 3: Well, because he has formative years were there, and so like a lot of the stories we think about with Lincoln, like trading in some ears of corn to get a copy of a book, and then the book gets waterlogged and he has to work even more to pay off the book. That all happened in Indiana. So that’s the bigges stuff. I mean, it’s it’s big to me.

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Speaker 2: I Yeah, no, that’s great, that’s great.

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Speaker 1: I like those people that get I like those people to get claimed by a lot of places, right, there’s a lot of them all through time, you know, like like Elder Leopold. Sure he’s he’s claiming like a lot of ways. Claimed by New Mexico. He’s claimed by Wisconsin. Jim Harrison’s claimed by Montana, Key West, you know, Michigan. Yeah, Hemingway is claimed by Cuba, Michigan, Illinois, Idaho, Idaho.

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Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:04:01
Speaker 1: Like these people that really a lot of people want to draw them in. Yeah, Daniel Boone claimed by Missouri and Kentucky. Yeah, probably somewhat by North Yeah, definitely by North Carolina.

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Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, yeah, no, it’s saka Juwia’s the same way there’s different native nations that claim here, and to me, that just speaks to any of these historical figures. Like their story is so inspiring and so exciting that it makes sense that a lot of people would see themselves in it.

00:04:24
Speaker 2: How long did you work on your Lewis Clark book?

00:04:26
Speaker 4: Five years?

00:04:27
Speaker 2: Okay, tell me why it’s different than other Lewis and Clark books.

00:04:32
Speaker 3: Well, that’s a fair question. And when I started out, I wanted to write an adventure story like I had done the first book about presidents and the books they wrote, and I think that’s a good book. But I just I think any good writer when they tackle a new book, they want a new challenge. So it’s like, let’s get outside, Let’s do an adventure story. And so the best adventure story in American history is Lewis and Clark. Of course, the counterpoint here is that there have been a lot of good books written about Lewis and Clark, so I didn’t have a deep familiarity with the topic. Like I remember when my dad went on a big motors cycle trip to the West, I bought him a copy of the Lewis and Clark journals because I knew, you know, and so he was like sleeping outside and reading it, and I was reading it. We’d talk about so I had like some familiarity, but not a deep familiarity. But I just thought, let me look at their journals and we’ll talk about the journals a lot today. Because they’re more than a million words. There is no record like this for in.

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Speaker 2: Is that right?

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Speaker 4: It’s true, it’s insane.

00:05:19
Speaker 2: Just for people’s point of reference. How many pages is your book?

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Speaker 3: It’s about four hundred pages for the main story.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, but how many words? Sorry?

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Speaker 3: Yeah, no, main part of the story is about one hundred forty thousand words.

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Speaker 1: So that’s that’s just for people’s perspective. That’s a heavy book.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, like you’ve probably, like like listeners, you’ve probably read a lot of books that are eighty ninety thousand words.

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Speaker 1: So you were talking about the journals or a million words. Yeah, I never thought about them in a word count sence.

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Speaker 3: Yeah no, but it’s I mean that I think conveys just how detailed they were, and you also have them from different perspectives. So something will happen. You’ll see what Lewis and Clark are seeing. But then one of the enlisted soldiers might notice something different, and so that’s why it’s such an incredible resource. So I read all a million words, and what I noticed was that, like I only knew how the story even as somebody who’s a historian, who’s like pretty well informed on these topics, I kept noticing these human details again and again that I didn’t realize. So at that point I was like, well, this is this is worth spending a couple of years on. But then I found more new stuff in the archives. I really thought there’s nothing new to find on Louis Oh.

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Speaker 1: I would imagine that there’s no thing because so many historians and writers and just old dudes with a lot of spare time.

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Speaker 3: Right have just dug in dug telling you man, I found so much. I found new stuff about Lewis and Clark, to say nothing of all the other people I wrote about. I found a lot of new.

00:06:33
Speaker 2: Stuff, new stuff you haven’t seen in other books.

00:06:35
Speaker 4: That’s right.

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Speaker 3: You want to you want an example, Wolfcaff, Wolfcff. That’s probably the biggest one. This is an interview with a blackfoot man named WOLFCLF and one of the two big interactions between Lewis and Clark and Native people. One was with the Lakota, and the other was with the Blackfoot on the way back. It was just Lewis. And so we’ve always had Lewis’s journal. And then there’s been a letter of a guy named George Bird Garnell, who your listeners probably know because you all are so well informed. Where George Burd Grenell was like, I interviewed this guy who met Lewis and Clark. But in that letter, George Bird Grannell is like, I might have more from my interview with this guy in my notebooks. I’ll let me check, and he never checked, but his notebooks are just sitting there at a library. So I went to his notebooks. Not only do I find the three pages of transcripts from the interview Grenell remembered wrong. So Grenell’s version of this guy’s interview in the letter is completely different than the actual interview. So in my book in the back, I just print the whole interview because that’s a big document for historians, but I also hope readers read it too, and they can kind of see, like to get Wolfcaff’s perspective versus Lewis’s perspective, And I print Lewis’s journal entry too, So like side by side, you have Lewis’s journal entry, you have Wolfcaff’s interview. You can see the two different accounts of this episode.

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Speaker 2: Did one do they contradict on factual matters?

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Speaker 3: They do in some ways. But I really found while working on this book that it was rarely about opposition. It was about conversation. So like Wolfcaff says, we tried to steal the American horses, but everybody else who’s written about this said that the Blackfoot people tried to steal the American guns. So there’s like a long tradition of horse raids on the planes that that was kind of a that’s a different thing. But going for guns obviously that’s an escalation. And so Lewis and his journal entry says they went for our guns. But once I read Wolfclfs saying, well, actually all we wanted were the horses. And once I read a bunch of scholarship by people like John Ewers, who like dedicated their whole lives while he worked at the Smithsonian to studying these horse raids. The horse raids were almost never violent, they were focused on horses. So then I went back to Lewis’s journal entry, and I noticed something that nobody had seen before. And this is like, this is not a discovery, because that journal has been there for anybody to find. But you can read things differently. And what was interesting is that Louis was asleep when things went sideways, So like when they either went for the horses or guns, Lewis, by his own admission, was in a deep sleep. So what you have here is not Louis’s word versus Wolfcaf’s word. You have this one enlisted soldier who was probably asleep while on watch, which was a capital crime. You have his word against Wolfcaff’s word. And the American soldier had every reason to play up the violence of the Native people because he screwed up. He’s the one who fell asleep, he let this happen. He’s the one who his brother ended up killing one of the Native people in the in the battle that followed. So for the American guy, like these two brothers are the ones who tell the story to Lewis after the fact, and they have every incentive to make it seem as scary as possible because they’re the ones who let it happen, and they you know, and so in my book, I try to hedge here carefully, and I try to say, you know, I think wolf Calf was right. I think his version makes more sense. But I’m not going to say that his version is completely right, because we’ll never know. But I think what’s cool in my book is you can get both versions and kind of lay inside by side. Do me a favorite, real quick, yeah, or however long you want to do it for. For people that I was just talking up. People know this story, well, let’s just say they don’t. Sure, do you mind laying out in a way that entertains me?

00:09:43
Speaker 2: And Randall?

00:09:44
Speaker 1: What do we mean when we say the Lewis and Clark expedition?

00:09:50
Speaker 4: Sure?

00:09:50
Speaker 3: So let’s you could start it in Washington, d C. With like Thomas Jefferson’s political stuff. That’s all new in my book too, but I’ll try to keep it more entertaining. So let’s start near Saint Louis. So spring of A eighteen oh four, they leave near Saint Louis, they go up the Missouri River. They Jefferson thinks that the Missouri River and the Columbia River basically touch. That was sort of the like default idea in this time period. So the idea is they’re going to go up the Missouri River, hop over this a mountain or two because the Rockies aren’t that much to deal with, then go down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. And so they want to find this water route because it’s good for traders, but it’s also good Jefferson is already thinking about the future, because Jefferson always thought about the future. So he’s thinking about like traders today, farmers tomorrow. And so Lewis and Clark go up to the Missouri in eighteen oh four. They make their first winter quarters in what’s now North Dakota at Fort Mandon, and then in eighteen oh five they keep going along the Missouri. They find out that the Rocky mountains are the Rocky Mountains, and so they get through that, go down the tributaries and the Columbia River, and get to the Pacific Ocean, spend another winter there on the Pacific coast, and then in last year eighteen oh six, come back to Saint Louis and then to Washington, Okay eight thousand miles.

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Speaker 1: And just to go back one step previous to that, like sort of an initiating sure instance is kind of lay out the national picture with the Louisiana Purchase and manifest Destiny.

00:11:08
Speaker 4: Sure, all that kind of good stuff.

00:11:09
Speaker 3: People love to bring up the Louisiana purchase, and it does become important. But Jefferson had been working on the expedition way before the Louisiana purchases.

00:11:16
Speaker 2: He would have gone and done it anyway.

00:11:18
Speaker 3: He was trying to do it. In seventeen eighty three, he asked William Clark’s older brother, George Rogers Clark to lead this expedition. I was a badass, he was, he was, but he would not do it because he thought, he’s like, America screwed me over. They haven’t paid me enough for all the fighting I did. So no, I’m not leading your expedition.

00:11:30
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:11:31
Speaker 3: So thirty years later Jefferson works it out with Lewis. Lewis brings on George Rogers’s baby brother William. But yeah, Jefferson was always thinking about land. And that’s one thing that’s doing in my book is I found all these small details where you can see Lewis and Clark are talking in political terms, like there’s this idea of the right of soil, like Native people, like do they who claims the land? And who do we negotiate with to buy it? And when Lewis deals with the Grizzly Bear, he says that the grizzly bear was quote tenacious of the right of soil, which, ay, that’s just a great joke, like Lewis is a funny guy, but that’s also like a term that could have been used in the White House. So you can see that Lewis and Clark are always thinking about land, who owns it, where America is going to go next? And this is this all started before the Louisiana purchase. The Louisiana purchase was like a happy accident that supercharged it.

00:12:17
Speaker 1: So what like what was his what was his deal if they hadn’t have done the if they hadn’t have bought the land, he was just gonna send guys out and have him duke it out with this, have him duke it out with the Spanish or what.

00:12:27
Speaker 3: Well, first of all, the Louisiana purchase didn’t cover the whole route, so the Pacific Northwest, like.

00:12:31
Speaker 2: Well, I mean the kind of the big chunk of it.

00:12:34
Speaker 3: Well, but I mean they were really interested in the Pacific Northwest, Like out there you had like Russian ships, British ships, Spanish ships, French ships, American ships, all circling on that coast. So part of it was getting out there, like different ships had gone there, but having but going the route by land offered you a different claim. All these empires had this. There’s this idea called the law of Nations, and so there are all these rules and and sort of theoretical debates. The native people were just like, we don’t really care about theoretical debates. There are more of us than there are of you in this time period. But Jefferson was thinking about how do we like advance America’s legal claims, and so sending Lewis and Clark would help in the Pacific Northwest, and they were already i in the Louisiana the area that would come the Louisiana purchase. Like Jefferson’s secretary of Treasuredy Gallaton, whose name we see all over the place here. Gallaton said, and when they were planning out the expedition, He’s like, the Missouri country is a particular interest to us because that’s the first place Americans are going to go. So there’s no question that Gallaton, Jefferson, Lewis Clark, they were thinking in these terms.

00:13:31
Speaker 1: Huh, that’s something I had. That’s something I hadn’t realized that he would have gone ahead and done that anyway.

00:13:35
Speaker 3: Yeah, they would have, just like the Spanish were not intimidating, so like British traders have been sneaking past them for decades, and so Jefferson thought the America like he tried to get passports and like dot his eyes and cross his teas, but he knew at the end of the day Lewis and Clark could just sneak by them and keep going.

00:13:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, like so hard to find somebody.

00:13:51
Speaker 3: Exactly, although the Spanish did almost fine. And that’s another thing that’s in the book is that the Spanish sent four different missions, more than a thousand soldiers to try to track down Lewis and Clark because they were pissed off. Even after the Louisiana purchase, Spain was still trying to stop American expansion. And so at one point, this is a new thing in the book. I used native maps and compared them to like Jefferson’s documents, the Spanish were within one hundred miles of them. So like when we’re talking the scope of the Great Plains, like to get with one hundred miles, that’s as close as you can come to and still miss You know that there could have been an international war breaking out on the banks of the Missouri.

00:14:23
Speaker 2: Well what uh?

00:14:24
Speaker 1: I don’t want to spend too much time on this, but sure, what uh? What part after the purchase? What part were they? What were they?

00:14:34
Speaker 2: What were the Spanish imagining as the line?

00:14:41
Speaker 3: Like?

00:14:41
Speaker 1: What were they imagining that they don’t want the Americans to do?

00:14:44
Speaker 3: What?

00:14:45
Speaker 4: Right?

00:14:45
Speaker 3: Well, the thing is the lines were up for debate, like the Louisiana purchase happened, but nobody knew what the Louisiana purchase meant. That’s one reason Lewis and Clark were important, because they were going to get latitude and longitude readings and bring back Enlightenment science to adjudicate this. But like one of the reasons that Wis ends up meeting with the Blackfoot people is that Jefferson was like, no side missions, just focus on the rivers. Just get there and back. But once Lewis realized the rocky mountains are here, I’m not gonna be able to find this river route that the president wants. Because Lewis and Jefferson were very close and so this was not just about doing a good job. There was something personal to this relationship. And so on the way back, Lewis is like, I’m going to do a side mission. I’m going to disobey the president because if I can go, if I can find that this river goes far enough north, then the Louisiana purchase is actually gonna be hundreds of thousands of miles bigger. And so he goes up there trying to get that reading. The clouds don’t cooperate, so he can’t get the reading. Then he runs into the Blackfoot people and has this huge blow up that impacts relations between the Blackfoot and the Americans for decades to come. Which that’s how history works, right, Like you think you’re going to do something, and then something else happens. Sometimes it’s amazing. Sometimes it’s a battle where a person dies.

00:15:47
Speaker 5: You.

00:15:50
Speaker 1: In the book, you kind of take a perspective of you set out a mission to really get into these personalities, right, you know, like sort of set you know, the national motivation or Jefferson’s motivation, but you sort of get into what are like the people motivated by right, which which is like, uh, if if anybody sits and imagines a uh, if you imagine a World War how like generally World War two movies work right about a squad or whatever, you know, platoon, whatever it is. It’s like, you know, all the like geopolitical things going on, but in time they’s you know, the object of the movie is what made right Captain Thompson join? And what are his fears and anxieties? You know, Like people are very familiar with this format, but right, no one’s taken that approach here.

00:16:49
Speaker 4: Right exactly.

00:16:50
Speaker 3: So I like, in my book, You’ve got you know, Jefferson is like the Churchill right, Like that’s the national motivation if we’re going to do the World War two analogy. But my book is almost all at the platoon level. Like what I always tell people is I tried as a writer to put you in the canoe, but I think it’s really important to put you in different canoes because like even Lewis and Clark best friends, both grew up in the same state, both in the army, they had really different views about some issues, and so I felt like my job was to really show what each person saw. So the book, if anybody has read Game of Thrones, you know, how like the chapter’s rotating points of view, Like one chapter you’re going to get a king’s point of view, and the next chapter you’re going to get like a knight’s point of view.

00:17:25
Speaker 4: That kind of thing.

00:17:26
Speaker 3: Not familiar, but yeah, thank you, I appreciate it.

00:17:31
Speaker 4: Well, I’ve got you all right, all right.

00:17:34
Speaker 3: I could have cided as I lay dying, Maybe that would have been the better move. A lot of books do this rotating point of view, but not many history books do. And so that’s what you’re talking about, that kind of platoon perspective. So chapter one is from Lewis’s point of view. Chapter two moves to the perspective of York, who was the enslaved guy who Clark brought along. He was on this entire expedition too, And so I still try to hit like the greatest hits, like we’ve still got the Rapids, We’ve still got the Rockies, we’ve still got the eight thousand miles. But I really wanted to show what this felt like to individual people, because I think human beings are always the most interesting subject, and so I just really tried to capture for Lewis, for Clark, one of my favorite people in this book, is a guy named John Ordway was like a working class sergeant. And you want to talk about platoon level dynamics, You’ve got Lewis and Clark like trying to keep Jefferson happy. You’ve got these enlisted soldiers who can kind of be a pain in the ass, and you’ve got Ordway stuck in the middle trying to navigate all this stuff. So when I’m writing his chapters, I’m really trying to dig into those kind of soldierly dynamics. And I do that in all the chapters that kind of wrotate points of view, and I just hope it makes the book feel more human. And you know when I said why I write this, like this is this reason? I wrote this because I felt like I could tell like the other half of the story.

00:18:43
Speaker 6: I think the one of the chapters that I read is the chapter on the the winter on the Oregon Coast, sure, and it’s told from the perspective of go Boy, and he’s.

00:18:56
Speaker 5: A class of leader.

00:18:59
Speaker 6: And I feel like I’ve read a lot of Lewis and Clark stuff that that moment in the story is sort of like a downtime and a lot of these narratives and it’s kind of like they waited out the winter.

00:19:14
Speaker 5: It was pretty miserable whatever.

00:19:15
Speaker 6: But I gained a totally new perspective on that moment because it’s the story is told from the perspective of someone who sort of these guys have showed up. It’s like, a he’s a he’s an older guy. This is kind of a blip on his radar of his whole life, right, and he’s thinking about how to make it advantageous for his people. But these guys just keep shooting elk. They keep shooting elk, and he’s like noticing little details, like they’re there. They’ve been picking away at some of the boards, the roof boards from the class of lodges, and it’s like, all of a sudden that winter isn’t just this gray, dull waiting period. It’s like really active and there’s all these maneuverings and even the trade, like they’re their disinterest in trade. So I don’t if you want to tell that story better than I can. Like that was one example for me where it was just like, oh, this is this could have I would skip over that right in my read in my like elevator pitch retelling of Lewis and Clark right, all of a sudden, it became very interesting to me.

00:20:25
Speaker 3: Well, I really appreciate you saying that, because I I definitely as a writer, I’m always thinking about like keeping this, keeping the pages turning right. So like if I had just done Lewis and Clark’s perspective, or even York’s perspective or Orway’s perspective, that’s like the third winter quarters they built at that point. So I’m like, how many ways can I talk about them chopping down logs and building huts?

00:20:42
Speaker 4: You know.

00:20:43
Speaker 3: So that’s why that was the perfect spot to move to the native guy’s point of view. And so I did a lot of research on these native people’s points of view and what mattered to them. And Koboway and the clats Up they were incredible traders. Like when I think of kobo Wa, I think he should have been on Shark Tank. And I don’t mean it’s like one of the people pitching the show. I mean as one of the sharks, because he was a brilliant trader. Because we mentioned all those ships coming in they wanted otter skins, but Koboy also had he was right on the mouth of the Columbia river. So he also had all these native people to the east who would have, you know, starchy grains or different vegetables to offer, and he was kind of the middleman, so he would buy you know, whale stuff, whale meat from one person, sell the whale meet to somebody else, make a little more money, buy some apoto from them, sell it somebody else, get some otter skins. And he was always kind of facilitating all these trades, which meant he was very powerful, but he was also very knowledgeable, and so when you think about his point of view, it helps you reframe so many episodes too. Like one of the most famous time examples from Lewis and Clark is when they vote right like they’re on the Pacific coast and they’re going to have this vote about well, you know, where are we going to put our winter quarters And they famously let York vote in this, which is is amazing. People say they let Sacajuia vote, but that’s not quite true. What happened is Saka Juya spoke up, because like if you look at Clark’s journals, you can see that he didn’t leave a space for Saka Jueia, and then she just like blurted out, here’s what I think we should do. So he had to kind of add her at the bottom, which is it’s a cool detail.

00:22:01
Speaker 1: But like for people that are as familiar York as a York is a slave right now, the only slave on the trip.

00:22:08
Speaker 3: That’s right, that’s right. And and there have been lots of votes previous to this, and he they did not let him have his say, but by the time they got out there, he had done so much work, you know, dealing with rapids, hunting, helping build forts, that they were like, we’re going to give you a say as well.

00:22:23
Speaker 1: Which see also the only I wanted to keep going on this, but he also the only person not on payroll.

00:22:27
Speaker 3: Well, here’s what did they put him on payroll? Here’s what’s screwed up. He’s on payroll, but not in the way you think, because the army would compensate officers if they brought their slaves. So the person who got paid for all York’s work was Clark. Clark would get seven bucks a month for the like, the like, wear and tear on his property, but his property was York.

00:22:44
Speaker 2: Did he kick it back to York or does no one know? You know?

00:22:47
Speaker 4: You know the answer to that. He answer, he.

00:22:49
Speaker 3: Did not kick it back to York because when they got back York said to Clark, I’ve looked at all the stuff I’ve done. I’ve earned my freedom and and Clark said, no, you haven’t. And so he kept York enslaved for another ten year after that a bit. There’s a lot of things I like about William Clark, but that is not one of them. So yeah, this famous vote on the coast where again things to like about William clarky and Lewis let York have a vote there. There was foreign interference in that election because the clats up and Kobowe wanted the Americans to set up camp on their side of the Columbia River because they’re like, we can trade with these people. So if you read the journals closely, and the journals those million words, they’re always a great source not just for what the Americans are doing, but for what Native people are doing too. You just have to pay attention to the native stuff. Like three times before the vote, clats of people go over to the Americans camp and I’m like, hey, you know where there’s a lot of elk. There’s a lot of elk on our side of the river, and they were right, but also that persuaded the Americans to go to their side of the river where things went sideways. As you said, is that the Americans killed more than one hundred and fifty elk that winter, and so the elk would normally I tracked all this stuff really carefully. Elk would normally like spin the winter down by the river and then go back up into the mountains. They would normally stay by the river until May. But by March first the elk gone because the Americans that hunted them so aggressively, and from the American point of view, they needed elk skins to make moccasins, they needed elk brains to mash into pace to soften the elk skins, and they needed to eat. But they hunted so aggressively that they overhunted, and that just like only made the dynamics more tense between them and the class them.

00:24:20
Speaker 1: Have you found in looking at this this thing, I feel like is well, I don’t know if I think it’s true or not. Just then observation I’ve had if you went and talked to how do I put this? Have you found that as you go along the Lewis and Clark Trail today that people that the people that live along those places currently tend to pay most attention to what happened near them, meaning in Oregon, are they way into the part of the Lewis and Clark story that occurred there, Because it seems to me that the stuff that happened along east of the Rockies, out on the Great Plains has always seemed to get much more attention public attention. But maybe just feels that way because I live here. But I remember another person that doesn’t live here that was writing about this.

00:25:23
Speaker 2: Was saying, no, I think it’s true.

00:25:24
Speaker 1: I think that most national attention focuses on the Great Plains. And his theory on it was because it’s the place you can go and you can look and you can be like, I can picture it. Sure, you can go and be like, I can picture what it looked like. Significant changes have happened, but I can picture it. And so that’s why he feels it that’s the way it is. But did you find that to be truer? Do you find that like residents today, you know, out in a story or wherever or whatever, you know, are very fixated on those parts of the narrative.

00:26:00
Speaker 3: I mean, we were just talking about Lincoln and how different places have claim to them, and I think Lewis and Clark are absolutely at that level where different people have claimed to it. So people who don’t live anywhere near the trail, I do think they picture the great planes and the bison and that kind of stuff. There’s no question about that, because then a lot of the Limb high Pass still looks pretty much.

00:26:19
Speaker 4: What it looked like lo Lewis and Clark saw it.

00:26:21
Speaker 3: But I think if you talk to people who live in any of these I mean, if you talk to people in Saint Louis, like they just want to talk about Lewis and Clark and Saint Louis. I just did a book of it there and it was amazing, and there were so many people who could really get into the nitty gritty about there.

00:26:33
Speaker 1: What they did there, uh huh, just like buying shit and getting all ready to be exactly or like.

00:26:37
Speaker 3: The near mutinies where the men would get pissed off and the ord way that sergeant I was mentioning like had to like calm everybody down. So like the Saint Louis people, they love the whole story but they really love their connection to it, And that makes sense to me. I mean, who doesn’t look like it. This is our national epic. This is such a great adventure story. So who doesn’t love to have some kind of personal connection to it. I think that’s great. That’s one of the reasons I was excited and a little terrified to write this book.

00:26:58
Speaker 7: I can kind of speak to that too, because I grew up in vancer Over, Washington, and Lewis and Clark was a massive part of our middle school and high school curriculum, and it was all west of the Rockies. It was heavy on Fort clats Up. We took multiple field trips to Fort clats Up seaside, Oregon. Uh And, and I know I can tell you almost nothing about the planes.

00:27:16
Speaker 4: In your in your school version. Did Kobo wait, come up? Nope? Well there you go. That’s what’s new about the book.

00:27:23
Speaker 6: Before before we started recording, Phil, I’m sorry that I said that was a boring chapter of the story.

00:27:28
Speaker 4: Well that’s what.

00:27:30
Speaker 7: Eve.

00:27:31
Speaker 1: Until today, I always thought it was a boring part of the story. Yeah, but how did I not know about this whole elk hunting deal? Yeah, that’s interesting.

00:27:37
Speaker 4: It’s all in the journals. You just got to know because.

00:27:39
Speaker 1: I just you know, people have their myopia and and whatever.

00:27:45
Speaker 2: I don’t know.

00:27:45
Speaker 1: In the work we’ve done, we’re always talking about them hanging out on the planes, buffalo running every which way, wolves all running around, grizzly bears tracking everybody.

00:27:57
Speaker 2: Like that’s in my mind. It was just a.

00:27:59
Speaker 1: Bunch of boring shit. And then they got out there and kicked and kicked it head.

00:28:04
Speaker 4: They kicked ass the entire time, is what I would say.

00:28:08
Speaker 1: But you know, for a while I toyed with this idea that that I didn’t like him because it was big government do I mean, because you have all these schwash buckling dudes right kind of like doing all this crazy stuff and no one pays attention to him. Then like the government goes out there and then everybody’s all into.

00:28:25
Speaker 4: It, right.

00:28:25
Speaker 2: But I gave up on that.

00:28:26
Speaker 1: Well, but for a while I was kicking around not liking it because it was because it was it wasn’t these kind of freelance crazy dudes right right, Like who would turn up in these places ahead of them?

00:28:40
Speaker 4: Right?

00:28:40
Speaker 2: And people don’t talk about that that much.

00:28:42
Speaker 3: Well, I think it’s important to see it as like a two part story, and if you’re interested in an American and as an American story, you have to start with them. Because all those free, free buckling, swashbuckling kind of guys were mostly French or Spanish or British. But Jefferson is kind of contradictory like many politicians in that you know, he’s he’s a small government guy. But I do think Lewis and Clark was big government. One of the things I did was really crunch the numbers on how much it cost, and that the official the official price tag was like thirty eight thousand dollars, which is a crazy number today doesn’t seem like anything, but back there was a lot of money. And but that number is wrong. Like once I went back and like actually checked the numbers and did the work, it was closer to one hundred thousand dollars. So then to try to like understand what that means.

00:29:19
Speaker 2: The same accountant was just running numbers on the Iran War.

00:29:22
Speaker 4: I think you might be for that.

00:29:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, we can talk about the Missouri River as the news straight or the old straight of hormones if you can do that too. But but yeah, so like the one hundred thousand dollars. If you look at that as like a percentage of federal spending, Jefferson spent as much on Lewis and Clark as we spent on NASA today. So that’s that’s absolutely true. So that’s the scope we’re talking about. Like when I called the book this vast enterprise, it’s not just vast in terms of the territory they covered, it’s it’s vast in terms of like the conception how many people.

00:29:51
Speaker 4: Are involving me. I’m serious.

00:29:53
Speaker 5: Yeah, I also think it’ll go.

00:29:55
Speaker 2: Back to not liking it because it’s the government.

00:29:57
Speaker 4: Well, give me the rest of the episode. Maybe I can have suage you.

00:30:00
Speaker 6: I also liked the one of the I guess one of the things that always spins around in my mind when we’re talking about the Lewis and Clark expedition is there’s obviously two guys and they have a lot of words, but it’s a group of like forty people.

00:30:17
Speaker 4: It fluctuates thirty to forty, thirty to forty.

00:30:19
Speaker 6: And they’re encountering all these different nations and it’s such a sprawling If you were to make no One’s done, No One’s pulled off. The HBO mini series yet. But if you were to make a Lewis and Clark HBO mini series, you’d need a huge cast of characters, right, And so I think that like one of the ways in which your book helps kind of reshape how people think about the story is the emphasis on how many individual lives are intersecting along this trail.

00:30:59
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, and that’s it was always an ensemble. Like the signs on the Lewis and Clark trail, it’s just two guys, right, and there’s brown and white signs on the side of the road, and they’re wearing the wrong kind of hats.

00:31:09
Speaker 4: They’re wearing like Revolutionary War era hats.

00:31:11
Speaker 3: If you want to get mad at big government, there’s the National Park Service should maybe do a rework on those signs. But if they get the right hats on them, they should also like there should be more people in the sign too, Because you’re exactly right, this was always and Lewis and Clark knew this. Like this does not take away from Lewis and Clark. This fast enterprise is a quote from Clark’s letters, So like they always knew they needed lots of help. I’m just trying to remind people to like see the story the way the captain saw the story themselves.

00:31:36
Speaker 1: You know, It’s it’s interesting that two things that have flummixed filmmakers will be Cormick McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the Lewis and Clark story. Yep, everybody tries, but no one can do it. I know people start and then they quit.

00:31:55
Speaker 4: Yep.

00:31:57
Speaker 1: But here’s here’s my question for you. I’ve kind of teen us up early. I didn’t get there before we started recording. You were telling me how sack of juey. It was funny, and I’m like, come on, but let me let me teet us up a little bit better.

00:32:12
Speaker 4: Take your time.

00:32:13
Speaker 2: Do you have do you ever read.

00:32:14
Speaker 1: When Larry Larry McMurtry, so the author of Loansome Dove, Loansome Dove, Larry Murtry, he wrote, all my friends are going to be strangers lonesome Dove, I mean millions of things. He wrote a biography of crazy horse. Okay, many people have done that. Guess how thick Larry McMurtry’s biography of Crazy Horses. It’s about like a as thick as this this laptop screen. You know why because he admits, I mean right in the beginning of the book, he admits he’s like, really, honestly, we don’t know much, Like we don’t know much. I’ve read somemations here and there. I’ve read summations of like what actually is known about Sackage? Wea and the thing we ran on I call this in some of our American history works is we do this, We do this bit of how do.

00:33:19
Speaker 2: We know what we know?

00:33:20
Speaker 4: Sure?

00:33:22
Speaker 1: Meaning everybody knows that blank, right, but how do we know what we know? And then you kind of dissac where does it come from? And in the process of how do we know what we know? You often find this thing where like we don’t really know that. Yeah, and we don’t know that sure it someone wrote a history that history informs other historians, and then you build up this mythology.

00:33:46
Speaker 2: Sure, okay, so.

00:33:47
Speaker 3: I’ve read I can’t even remember where or when, but I read it, like what is actually like when historians look at sackage we as narrative?

00:33:58
Speaker 2: What are the sources? What are the actual sentences?

00:34:01
Speaker 4: Sure?

00:34:01
Speaker 2: And it’s not much. Sure, I haven’t read it in a long time.

00:34:05
Speaker 1: But we were talking about the writer Jack Hit, who’s a very funny writer.

00:34:10
Speaker 3: Jack Hit wrote a piece, and I wish I had reread it ahead of our interview, But.

00:34:14
Speaker 1: He wrote a piece where he tracks our understanding of Sakagui and it’s sort of like what we think about Sakaguia says a lot about where we’re at in time. Sure, right, So during those years of putting a heavy emphasis on cultural inclusion, she elevated when when there’s geographical features all around the American West Squaw River, Squaw Peak, when they were renaming one of the squaw peaks in Montana at the squaw being a derogatory term for a Native American woman, Sure one of those peaks became you guessed it, Sackagewea Peak, Right.

00:34:59
Speaker 2: So she.

00:35:01
Speaker 1: Has she’s utilized like a tool sort of the understanding. So when you said she’s funny, I don’t think we’re an era of great comics, and so you’re trying to make her fit the times.

00:35:15
Speaker 2: But like, how can you say that? Where are her jokes compiled?

00:35:20
Speaker 4: Sure?

00:35:21
Speaker 3: No, I’m really glad you asked this because this is a very good question. And just as an aside, the idea of using her as a tool, that’s not new either, Like there are more statues of Sakagulia than any other woman in North America. And the reason there are some, Yeah, the reason there are is because suffragettes used her as a tool. So way back in the early twentieth century. They were like, oh, a native woman who was strong and empowered, we can help use her to help us get the right to vote. So like, this is there, this has always been happening.

00:35:44
Speaker 1: More more than the fictional Rosie Derivet right is fiction, more than Betsy Ross.

00:35:51
Speaker 3: I mean, it was all of the above. It there’s a lot of work to get women the right to vote. But yeah, Sakagula was one of the tools that they used. But let me answer you in two ways.

00:36:00
Speaker 1: Oh no, I was I wasn’t referring to the suffrages tool. I was referring to like statue figures, right, But yes, oh yeah, yeah she was right.

00:36:09
Speaker 2: She was.

00:36:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, there’s more than National Park Service as that staff. How do I know she was funny because there’s a story in the journals from Lewis and from Clark that show that she was funny. Like story, Okay, I’m sorry that we’re going back to Fort class I. We’re gonna spend this whole podcast.

00:36:22
Speaker 2: The exactly on Phil’s dumb boring part.

00:36:26
Speaker 4: I know, I promised.

00:36:28
Speaker 3: The Lakota have a huge part of the book, like, like there’s so many bies that like the rest of the stories.

00:36:32
Speaker 1: And Phil the episode from back there behind his warped uh work bench.

00:36:38
Speaker 3: Yeah, hats off, very strategic. But when they get out there, they like, they can’t go see the ocean first because the waves in that part of the Columbia River are so big. Their canoes keep getting swamped, so they like it’s hard for them even to find a place to stay dry. Their clothes are rotting, their tepees are rotting. It’s just it’s it’s a disaster. So they finally figure out what side of the river they’re going to go on with the Clatsup sort of guide them there because the elk and all that, And so then the clats Up come back and say, hey, there’s this huge beached whale that washed up on the shore, and so everybody’s like, cool, let’s go see that. And a lot of them haven’t even gone to see the ocean yet, even though they’re only a few miles from the ocean. The conditions are so tough that they’ve just been kind of pinned in this camp, and so they’re getting ready to go, and everybody is, you know, like the guy who owns Sackageia or is her husband, depending on how you want to frame it, like he’s getting ready to go. A lot of the soldiers are getting ready to go, and Sackaguia like nobody says she can go, and so she speaks up like she’s like the phrase from the journals is it would be very hard if she does not get to go. She’s come all this way, and so for her not to get to see the whale and the ocean, that would be very hard. And so I think that’s funny. I mean I think she’s like funny. Yeah, you don’t think it’s funny if she’s like if they’re like you got to stay back here at the camp, and she’s like, that’s fucked up.

00:37:52
Speaker 4: I’ve come all this way too. I want to go see the ocean too. You don’t think that’s funny.

00:37:54
Speaker 2: Are you married?

00:37:55
Speaker 4: Yes?

00:37:57
Speaker 2: If you’re so, when your wife gets mad at you, you think it’s funny.

00:38:02
Speaker 3: Maybe not in the moment, but later on, like the next day when we’re good again.

00:38:07
Speaker 5: Huh, when you realize that you hadn’t seen her.

00:38:10
Speaker 6: Perspective my wife or saga your wife, your wife, I mean in hindsight, okay to being Okay, I see it.

00:38:19
Speaker 1: Well, uh okay, okay, she that’s I mean, that’s.

00:38:25
Speaker 3: Somebody who has a sense of humor to stretch. You don’t think that’s a funny story. You don’t think her like, I.

00:38:30
Speaker 2: Mean, like, go check out this whale. She’s like bullshit, dude, like I’m coming.

00:38:36
Speaker 4: That’s not funny to you.

00:38:38
Speaker 2: No, okay, that’d be I’d put that under.

00:38:42
Speaker 1: Forceful, admirable, sticking with for your I mean, unless she had a funny joke.

00:38:49
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, I I feel like at least it’s very human and lively.

00:38:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, three people go to look at a whale? Says we’re called the aristocrats.

00:38:59
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, yeah, Well, at the very least we can disagree on whether or not that’s funny. I think when you remember that she’s sixteen years old, that’s impressive. When you remember that her husband would beat her until Clark would step in and say you can’t do that here, When you remember how tough her life was, I just feel like there’s a real crackling personality behind that.

00:39:18
Speaker 1: For her to be like this is tell the story of her Tell the story of her life, and I know that it’s increasingly controversial. Sure, not increasingly controversial, but it is controversial. Tell the outline of her life. And then if you don’t mind, I wouldn’t mind you touched on some of the a little bit of the custody battle that is underway about again people that get claimed by many places. Okay, but first layout just the known understanding of her remarkable life.

00:39:47
Speaker 3: Well, I can do that while also answering your bigger question, which is like, how do we even know any of the stuff. So maybe she wasn’t funny, maybe she was just spunky. I don’t like pick your adjective. But we know things about her personality because they’re in those million words of the journals, like her saying I want to go see the whale, like Lewis and Clark wrote that down, so we know that that happened. And then we can infer as interpreters, as writers, as lovers of history like what those details mean. But in terms of her life story, the reason we know that is because it’s in the journals too. And this is also something that’s new in my book that it’s not like The outlines of her life story have always been well known, although now they are getting more contentious. She grew up, you know, on the sort of between what is now Idaho and what is now Montana, in that rocky region. Her people it had to move there because other nations like the Blackfoot, had more horses and especially more guns, so it wasn’t safe for the Shoshone to be out on the planes where the bison were. So they kind of stayed in the mountains most of the year, but then once a year they would go. They needed the skins, like to stay warm, they needed the fat, they needed stuff that only they could get from the bison. So once a year they would go out to three forks and then they would go a little bit past that sometimes and they would hunt buffalo quickly as they could get all the buffalo products they could bison.

00:40:58
Speaker 1: Sorry, no, no, well, I’m a buffalo guy, right, Brandon sits on the fence about it, if I may, he’s an old Bison guy.

00:41:05
Speaker 6: To get you guys back on the same page. After the sackage, we have funny not funny controversy, you say in the bus.

00:41:12
Speaker 4: It was like a real split to me and I guess you.

00:41:14
Speaker 6: Make you make a point to say in the book, all the characters in this book are going to encounter buffalo, not bison, right, because that’s what they encountered, That’s what they called it in their time.

00:41:27
Speaker 5: Yeah, I thought you’d appreciate that’s good.

00:41:29
Speaker 3: I mean, this is this is not a book that was twenty twenty six. It’s a book about eighteen oh four. So I really tried.

00:41:34
Speaker 5: You know, nobody saw a bison on the Lewis and Clark.

00:41:37
Speaker 3: Right, And the Americans called the Lakota the sue. So when I’m writing from the American point of view, I use the sue. When I’m writing for the Lakota point of view, I use the word Lakota. Like it’s important to me to give each person’s perspective as they saw it and not to let our modern concerns kind of worm their way in there. But anyway, so like the Shoshone would have to go out and get buffalo slash bison. Try to keep both of you happy each each time in the fall. And so in eighteen hundred, when Saka Julia was like thirteen or fourteen, her people go out there and so they set up camp at three forks, and the men are off hunting buffalo and the women and the kids are sort of you know, back at the camp. And so then one day some armed raiders with rifles which the Shashwoni do not have at this point, from the Hidatsa nation show up, and you know they’re coming on horseback. So the Shoshoni scatter. Most of them get on their horses, which they are famous for their wonderful horses, and escape. But Sakajulia, for whatever reason, can’t get to a horse, so she starts running up the Jefferson River. And so she is running. There is smoke, there is screaming, there are people being clubbed to death. It’s a very intense and violent situation. She makes it a couple miles. Maybe she thinks, I’m going to actually be able to escape here. But then she hears a horse coming up behind her. There’s a Hidatsa man. She tries to cross through the river, gets caught in the middle. He scoops her up brings her back to the camp. So at this point we know that there are a couple like a number of Shoshoni people have been killed, and then some of the young Shoshone women have been captured by the Hidatza people. They take Sakaguia and some other young Shoshone women, including one of her friends, all the way back to their towns, which are in what’s now in North Dakota. This is like the Mandon and Dadotza towns where Fort Manden will be built a few years later. So that’s where she ends up living for a while. Then Lewis and Clark show up in the Winner of eighteen oh four. Her husband slash her owner Sharbono, who’s a real creep. He just tries to like figure out. He sees that Lewis and Clark are big government and he’s like, how can I get some of that government money for myself?

00:43:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, this guy’s kind of in general, it’s just the worst. Yeah.

00:43:35
Speaker 3: And so he tries to get hired, and Lewis and Clark maybe are on the fence, and so he’s like, I have Shashoni wives, And Lewis and Clark know that they’re gonna need to meet the Shoshone and maybe need some of those Shoshoni horses. So they agree to hire him and bring one of his wives with him. Now, how do we know all this? We know this because in the journals, Lewis and Clark write down Sackagewy a story like when they make it back to three Forks, they ask her like, what did you see here? What do you like? Like, what what happened to you here? And she tells them this story, and so it’s recorded in multiple journals. But one thing that I did that was new because I was trying to think about, like what did Saka Julia see? What was her perspective, not just Lewis and Clark’s. Is I tried to be really forensic when I was reading the journals. And so the first time her story shows up, it’s not from Lewis and Clark, it’s from this regular working class soldier named John Ordway. He writes about her a day before anybody else does, and it’s when they first get back to three Fourks. So Clark isn’t even in the camp. Sharbono isn’t easy, so they have not mentioned her till now. They have mentioned her, but they have not mentioned her life story. So she’s often just shows up as like the Indian woman.

00:44:34
Speaker 2: Yep.

00:44:35
Speaker 3: And so Clark and Sharbono and some other people are off on a scout party. Lewis is like doing his astronomy readings and like thinking about empire, and so Ordway and the other men are doing the actual hard work like unloading the canoes, airing out the gear, putting up the tents and sacka. Julia is doing that hard work too, And so if you look at it, the only like the story comes up with her first, and I think it makes a lot of sense. Again, I use careful language at this part in the book, like probably and and almost certainly, because we’ll never know for sure, even though we have the journals about this. But the fact that she told the story to Ordway the day before the captain’s ever mentioned the story, it makes a lot of sense because they were all working at three fourths on this physical site, the river where she was captured. They’re all setting up the camp together. And also how did they communicate well through sign language? Previous historians have not given enough credit to sign language in this time period, And we know from other journal entries that John Ordway was fluent in sign language. We know from Clark’s entries that Sakajuwella is fluent in sign language. So I believe she.

00:45:31
Speaker 2: Was kind of like the Esperanto of its time.

00:45:33
Speaker 1: You know, like people write different tribes on the planes that couldn’t communicate them were from different language groups, will be able to use this elaborate sign language and you could convey some complex messages.

00:45:44
Speaker 3: Absolutely, absolutely yeah, And especially when you think about these are just like human beings who want to be understood by each other. They could really cover almost everything they needed to with sign language. So I can’t say this for sure, but I can say this ninety eight percent for sure that Sakaguilla used sign language to tell her life story to John Ordway the first day, and then the second day when Clark comes back, when Sharbono’s there, when Lewis is there, she tells the story again. And so her story shows up a couple times in the journals, and each time her story is a little different, like what year was she captured. So this is even the stuff we know for sure. We don’t know for sure because like with Sackagia captured in eighteen hundred or seventeen ninety nine, I don’t know. But all this to say that it’s important to read the journals carefully because then what you’re getting is Sackaguia is telling her story herself like if she is using sign language to do this, this is not her husband’s slash owner saying here’s here’s Sackaguia’s story. And I think this is so important for the current discussion because right now, like like in the journals, Lewis and Clark say Sackaguya is Shoshone. Most historians have agreed with that.

00:46:48
Speaker 1: But yeah, there’s this famous narrative that they get to. I mean, you drive by the rock all the time around here, but they get to that that head rock on the big hole right.

00:47:01
Speaker 2: What’s the name of that rockhead?

00:47:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s a there’s a prominent, unmistakable feature, for sure.

00:47:07
Speaker 3: And they get there and she’s like, I know that rock. I’m almost home, Yeah, for sure. And that’s that’s again, how do we know these things about Sakaguya Because Lewis and Clark wrote it down, we just have to read it from her point of view and understand that’s not just an important landmark for Lewis and Clark, that’s a way to understand Sakaguya’s life and like what the landscape meant to her. So so the debate right now is is Sakaguya Shoshone or was she Hidatsa. The Hidatsa people have put together a book, and it’s a really valuable book because remember, there are a few years after she gets captured or enslaved where she’s living with the Hidatsa. So I relied on in the book to understand those years, because that’s like, how did the Hidatsa people see her? What kind of oral traditions have they preserved about her? Now in my book, I’m always very careful if something’s coming from oral tradition to signpost that and say, you know, according to Hidatsa tradition. But still that the book has real value, and it also the book talks about the debate about what happened to Sacaguay after the expedition. When did she die? We honestly do not know when she died, Like I don’t have an opinion on that question, but where was she born? Who did she identify with? I think the evidence is still overwhelming that it was Shashoni. And the reason that the new kind of angle that I have it in my book is like when we ignore this, when we try to say maybe she wasn’t Shoshoni, we’re not just silencing Lewis and Clark. We’re silencing her, because I think the evidence, if you read it carefully, is very clear that she told her story herself through sign language to the other enlisted soldiers. And so that story of being born Shoshoni and being captured, like, it’s a really dramatic and traumatic story, but I also think it’s her story and she was explaining it.

00:48:37
Speaker 2: Well, what is the argument that she was hidatsa?

00:48:40
Speaker 1: How do they explain her familiarity with Turf so far away right?

00:48:44
Speaker 3: Well, what they say is that she maybe had some family ties and so she took trips back there. But the key argument, the key part of their argument is that Sharbono created this cover story. And I defer to no one in my disdain for Sharbono, but the idea that he and this cover story, he said she was just showing it even when she wasn’t because that would make him be able to get this job. But that’s why the moment about her telling the story herself is so important, because Sharbono literally wasn’t in the camp the day she told the story the first time. So if he’s not even there, how’s it going to be his cover story?

00:49:15
Speaker 2: Dots to sell her to Sharbono.

00:49:19
Speaker 3: They either sold her or traded her. And this is another thing that you’re like, how do we know these things? There have been I read a lot of academic research and so there’s been a really good academic research in the last few years about native enslavement, about slavery not just being something that Americans did or British did, but Native people did it too. And there are differences, of course, but still like the term slavery I think is the best way to understand it. And as an aside, Lewis and Clark used this word too, like Clark in an interview after the expedition called Sakaguia a slave. So again, this is not twenty twenty six leeching into the past. This is just paying attention to the past.

00:49:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I.

00:49:52
Speaker 1: Just I have this conversation with my kids all the time, man, because the way like I’m not hacking on school, because yes, you know, you get like so many hours in a day and you’re trying to gloss over a lot of stuff. But it’s funny, American kids today seem to small sample set my kids and their friends right seem to carry this idea that slavery was somehow this kind of like American invention rather than a ubiquitous global occurrence.

00:50:25
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that’s just not true. The class I.

00:50:27
Speaker 2: Found myself all the time home.

00:50:29
Speaker 1: No, no, like this is something that happens everywhere all the time.

00:50:36
Speaker 4: That’s true.

00:50:36
Speaker 3: And then it starts to fade out, you know, right, And so that’s that’s absolutely true. And so when I know the class up who we’ve been talking about, they enslaved people. The Shoshone enslaved people when they were at their kind of most powerful. The Hedatsa enslaved people too. So there are lots of good scholarship and then stories in the journals of talking about how Native people would enslave women. But slavery can also be different in different circumstance. And so where things get really ugly is when somebody like Sharbono gets involved. Because these academics have written about how Native people would enslave young women from other nations and then sell them to fur traders. So I went back and looked at documents where fur traders are like trying to provide collateral for new new merchandise to then trade for fur, and like a fur trader will right, you know, my collateral is the little girl I own and really fucked that stuff. And like, let’s remember Sakaguwia is thirteen, fourteen fifteen. She is owned by this guy. He beats her. We know that from the job as child, right, she’s impregnated by him. Yeah, it’s a really dark story. And so when I was writing about it, using that kind of scholarship to see her not just as sort of the plucky tour guide who’s in all these statues, but also seeing her as somebody who had a really tough life. But then that also I think makes her more inspiring that she had to go through all this, She was taken away from her people, she had to deal with all this, but she still found a way to get back to her people. And the other thing that I think makes my account different is I try to look at the choices she made, because like when she’s when she’s telling Lewis and Clark, hey, there’s this important feature. We’re almost back to where we need to be. Like she’s doing that because she’s excited, I’m sure, but that’s also smart, Like she has seen Lewis and Clark protect Native women the entire winter they’ve been together, and so when Clark steps in and tells Sharbono, you can’t beat her here, Like let’s give Clark some credit for that, but let’s give sackage Weia some credit too, because she’s smart enough to know, like if I make myself valuable to them, they’ll protect me. So with this book, I really tried to say, like, this is what Lewis and Clark wanted, but Sakaguea wanted things too, Koba Way wanted things too, and so trying to kind of move the camera around so we can understand each person as a human being. You can do that because of those million word journals, like where does this come from? A lot of it comes from the journals and just paying attention to stuff that other people have glossed over.

00:52:47
Speaker 6: I like when you’re describing the scene in three foks where she’s signing to Ordway and then the next day tells the story to the captains to me and I saw this in different parts of the book, but it it makes the most sense if you just sort of have a gut instinct about social situations and group dynamics, that she would be unloading it, unloading the boats with Ordway and kind of tell him something and then maybe the next day Ordway says to the Captain’s, hey, you should listen to this girl, like she’s actually kind of got an interesting story, right, you know, like that that sort of stuff happens all the time in like workplaces or or whatever sort of group dynamic where there’s a bunch of people working together. One way you can elevate yourself. The person you’re most likely to share something with is someone working side by side you who also has that serves as sort of a middleman to the group leader.

00:53:45
Speaker 2: So it’d be like later today, I’d say, hey, did.

00:53:49
Speaker 4: You hear that vultures killed Randall’s chickens?

00:53:52
Speaker 2: Yeah?

00:53:53
Speaker 5: And then that would get you should ask him play it up right?

00:53:55
Speaker 4: Yeah, valuable information.

00:53:57
Speaker 5: But it’s just, you know, like there’s some like it.

00:54:00
Speaker 6: You know, when you hear these stories about Saka Julia being this like very clear eyed, brave sort of tour guide that comes across as somewhat artificial or a projection, but when you understand her as sort of a social creature like all of us, and making these different connections with different members of the expedition and sort of leveraging her or her influence that way, like it all of a sudden you see these people as more three dimensional humans.

00:54:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, what was the expedition if not a workplace? Right, Sometimes it’s a workplace comedy or not a comedy if we disagree about what’s funny, but more drama, right, exactly, very serious, very somber. But it was a workplace just made up of human beings. And I tried so hard to get that in the book, like another place of where we know what stuff comes from. I really wanted to show Saka Julia as a mother, and this probably came because I have little kids and like I changed, but even more than that, I saw my wife changing diapers and breastfeeding the kids. So I found she show any people and just interviewed them and were like, in your culture and especially in this time period, what was the diaper? And so like we know this carrier, that sackage we have famously had, like a lot of the statues will have that she had the baby strapped on her back and a carrier, but the bottom of the carrier was aligned with either fur or some kind of soft vegetable material or something like that. And so each morning she would wake up, she would unlace the carrier, she would change out the lining, put in fresh lining. She would give her son a bath, so she didn’t just put cold water on him. She probably warmed the water up by putting it in her mouth and letting her body temperature bring it up to heat. Then she would wash him, she would breastfeed him, and so not just for her, for everybody. I really tried to get those like tactile, everyday details and then pay attention to just like how one human being and another human being kind of interact. That’s why this is such a great story. Like the Rocky Mountains are great, the Grizzly bears are great, but mostly because of these journals, we get to see these amazing human beings under the most intense pressure any human being could face, and they do it. They make it, they make it back. It’s just such a great story, and it was like the thrill of my career to get to write about it.

00:56:07
Speaker 2: On the Making It Back Deal. What’s your take on on.

00:56:13
Speaker 3: Is there any controversy anymore about whether uh Lewis killed himself. I’m sure that some people believe that he may have been murdered. I don’t see it, you know, it’s so funny. I kind of forgot about this. You remember a long time ago, we.

00:56:28
Speaker 1: Used to have that little plastic hot Anyways, one of our one of our bodies that we work with, Spencer, he was telling he was talking about Lewis killing himself.

00:56:37
Speaker 2: He described that he.

00:56:39
Speaker 8: Killed himself at at a bed and breakfast. Oh yeah, not just call like butcher station, grind grinders station, yeah, breakfast.

00:56:56
Speaker 5: It was like a melancholy Victorian.

00:56:58
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:56:59
Speaker 3: They brought for everybody like, no sconce for me, I gotta kill myself. Yeah no yeah.

00:57:05
Speaker 1: So yeah, so get into that because you talk about he’s like a sad dude, you know, right, and it has and then has behaves weird when he gets home and he kind of can’t really can’t really settle in what his next gig is going to be. And right probably in some way was haunted by it’s a hard thing to come home from.

00:57:22
Speaker 5: Right.

00:57:22
Speaker 3: Well, And this is this is where I found something new that I think is really important. When I wrote about Lewis, I I tried really hard not to be like he has bipolar disorder or he has PTSD, because like those were not ideas back then. I’m not saying the neurochemical processes didn’t exist but I don’t think it’s helpful to understand somebody in the past with ideas that were not necessarily available in the past. So like Jefferson and Lewis lived together for years, and Jefferson was like, he suffers with addiction and he has Jefferson’s quote with sensible depressions of mind. So to me, I was like, that’s enough, Like what kind of addiction? Mostly drinking but also opiums. Yeah, because he had malaria, and so where do you pick up malaria? Who knows where wouldn’t you pick up malaria in eighteen o four, right, Like it was. It was a real problem back then, So it could have been any number. It might have been on the expedition, but it’s probably.

00:58:09
Speaker 2: I don’t think did it go that far north?

00:58:11
Speaker 4: It was, it was.

00:58:11
Speaker 3: It was a huge problem, especially in the army because they would often like build their forts in pretty swampy damp areas. So like if you go back and read military documents for this time period, like malaria and the various.

00:58:22
Speaker 2: Down like in the well, it doesn’t matter, yeah, but.

00:58:24
Speaker 3: I mean you could you could definitely get malaria along the Ohio River. Like John Ordway’s unit had a huge malaria problem on the Audio River at.

00:58:30
Speaker 4: This time period.

00:58:31
Speaker 3: But anyway, like I just was like, you know, depression and struggles with addiction, like that’s enough, Like we don’t we don’t need any modern categories to understand them. So I when I was reading the journals again, reading the journals closely, Lewis was very self aware. He would write about, you know, like I’m so stressed out about the future, or I can’t stop thinking about something bad that happened to me in the past. But then it’s important to say like he tried to stand up to those things. Then he would remind himself, I don’t want to like, you know, it’s good to be okay, or we’re going to keep working, or the only thing we can do is go forward. So he was very self aware about this kind of stuff. But there’s no question that that on the way back, like the expedition just wore him down. He ends up getting shot in a hunting accident, which we could talk. I didn’t know that tell me that, okay, Well yeah, okay. So they’re on their way back and Lewis is still trying to make Jefferson happy, so he’s still trying to do astronomy readings and get all the data that Jefferson like wants them to do. And so they come to this stop and they stop like twenty minutes too late. Like to do astronomy readings in this time period, you need the sun at a certain height and things like that. So they get there like twenty minutes too late, which sucks. So they’re just gonna have to kill time until the sun is at the right position to do the readings. So they always need more food, they always need more animal skins. So Lewis and this other guy named Pierre Cruzatt go out to hunt for elk and it’s important to know two things.

00:59:49
Speaker 4: They’re on the way.

00:59:50
Speaker 3: Back in the Dakota’s right, in the Dakota’s yeah, on the Missouri and soda yeah. So the two things to know are that a Cruizatte only has one eye, so he can’t see the best And second, they’re all dressed in animal skins at this point because their uniforms and they’re fatigue clothes of all rotted through because they are in the third year the sexpedition. So Lewis is dressed in elkskin. They’re hunting in some willow trees where it’s very thick and hard to see, and so from about one hundred feet away, Cruzatt shoots him and shoots Lewis right in the ass, and so the bullet goes through exits. It’s just like it doesn’t hit any bone or nerve or anything like that, but it’s still a really bad wound. And so on the way back, Lewis has to lay in the bottom of the boat even when it’s raining. There’s nothing they can do about him, but he just lays on his stomach in the bottom of the boat for the way back, and they try to like Clark takes care of him while he’s trying to attend to Lewis. Lewis passes out sometimes and so they have a little like they try to keep the wounds open so they can drain. But one thing I pointed out in my book is that just a couple months before this, Lewis had castrated all their horses, and his favorite horse had died. It had gotten the castration wounds had gotten infected, so like Lewis like had to clean the maggots out and try to keep it alive, but eventually had to put the horse down. And I think that really bothered Lewis because he just clearly loved animals, like he brought a dog with him, semen and everything Lewis writes about animals. You can just see how much he connects with animals. But you know, I feel like Lewis, he’s not just shot and just stuck in the bottom of the boat. You know, they didn’t have germ theory. He wasn’t thinking, you know, in the way we would, but he still knew that like if you have a big wound, bad things can happen. You get a fever, and he writes in the journal like I have a small fever. So there’s just a ton of pressure on him on the way back from this hunting accident. And then he does, heal, he gets better, he makes it to Washington, d C. And he’s he’s a celebrity, like everywhere he goes. I found these journals at the Library of Congress where where he like goes to a play and people come out and just ask him question after question, like nobody cares about the play intermission, Let’s just firebund Like what does a buffalo taste? Back?

01:01:47
Speaker 4: Are the tastes?

01:01:47
Speaker 3: Like are the native people cannibals, like they just keep firing question after question in him because he’s like a national hero. Yeah, and so one of the new things I found was a letter from John Quincy Adams that nobody had seen before. And this is in this Washington DC period when Lewis is finally back, and so John Quincy Adams is a senator at this point, like he had had dinner at the White House with Lewis before, like they knew each other a little bit. And Adam says that he sat down to have dinner with Lewis again after the expedition, and Adams is writing to his wife and Adam says, I didn’t even recognize this guy, Like I knew who I was supposed to meet for dinner, and I could not recognize him. And then Adam says, he looks like he’s aged fifteen years. And so, you know, previous accounts have sort of theorized like what did the expedition do to Lewis? But like, thanks to John Quincy Adams, we know what the expedition did to Lewis. Like that letter, I think is the lynchpin for my entire interpretation of him and why I believe the suicide is just the overwhelming likelihood because you know, if somebody, if you can’t even recognize somebody if they look fifteen years older. And again, in terms of human nature, it just makes sense to go through all this stuff to come back then and then to like, in a sense, the expedition wore him down, but it also gave him something to live for and he doesn’t have that anymore as a human being. It makes a lot of sense. And when you compare it with that new letter from John Quincy Adams about like the physical cost, I don’t think there’s any question that it just kind of broke Lewis down.

01:03:03
Speaker 1: Okay, So where so tell about where he was when this when this happened.

01:03:06
Speaker 3: So this is on the Natchez trace kind of he was on the way he Jefferson had made him the governor of the Louisiana Territory. And I’m not sure why Jefferson did that because Louis was supposed to write a book and like in this time period, exploration was the first step. The book was the second step. Like the whole point was to share this information and the whole world was waiting to read this book, like like there you know, when it finally did come out, when somebody else finished it after Lewis died. There are reviews in England, their reviews in Germany like this was this was global news. It’s like the way we all talked about Artemis two, like that’s how people talked about Lewis and Clark in this time period. And so Lewis has his hands full with this book that he has to write, but Jefferson sends him to be the governor of the Louisiana territory. I think he kind of Jefferson wanted to use Louis’s celebrity, celebrity and his reputation to sort of try to control this this pretty crazy chaotic territory at this point after Louisiana purchase, and so Lewis is just overwhelmed. He starts drinking more. We know from people who knew him, who talked about how much he was drinking in this time period.

01:04:04
Speaker 2: Wonder what he drank.

01:04:06
Speaker 3: I mean, they drank all kinds of stuff back then. Most of what they drank on the expedition was like cheap corn whiskey, because that you just got your soldiers drunk as cheaply as possible, so that was mostly what they had, but Lewis Jefferson is no longer president at this point, Madison is and Lewis sends some receipts back to get reimbursed for this big mission up the Missouri River, which is related to Lewis and Clark’s expedition actually, and the people in Washington, d c. Are like, we’re not covering this, like you have asked for more money than you are entitled to in your government position. And so Lewis freaks out because he has such a strong sense of honor. He’s such a patriotic guy, Like in his letters about the expedition, he’s always like, this is honorable for me, but it’s also honorable for my country. Like he loved America so much and so now to have Americans being like you’re trying to like defraud your government, he freaked out. I mean, he wasn’t in a good place anyway, but he freaked out. So he starts heading from Saint Louis back to Washington and on the Natchez Trace and in what is now Tennessee, he killed himself. And they’re like the detail that always sticks out for me about this is like he’s writing and he’s got a person who’s riding with him, he’s got his dog, Seamen with him, and Lewis just starts talking to Clark like Clark’s not even there, like Clark had just met with Lewis before he left. And Clark even writes in a letter like I’m really worried about Lewis, like something’s not right. But now they are hundreds of miles apart, and like Lewis is just saying things like I always knew you’d come for me, Clark. I always knew you’d save me when I needed it.

01:05:32
Speaker 2: Oh really yeah?

01:05:33
Speaker 3: And this is the way we know this is because the person who is riding with Lewis later told this to Clark, and I just I find that so heartbreaking, like that, like everything Lewis gave for his country, for his men, everything he tried to do, and now he’s just crumbling and he’s like imagining he can hear the horse what Clark is riding on coming up, even though there’s nobody else around, like he was clearly somebody who was just falling apart. And I mean, I think it makes sense, but that doesn’t make it any less sad.

01:06:00
Speaker 1: Well, what clouds what clouds the suicide narrative. So he checks, he gets a booking at the Bed and Breakfast, right right, they’re like scones at eleven. Yeah, he’s up at his He’s up in his room and witnesses here two gun shots. So that has always brought up speculation that it was some kind of highway gang or the Grinders, the Bed and Breakfast owners, the people that ran Grinders station.

01:06:26
Speaker 3: He left them a bad Yelp review and they’re like, yes, can’t stay.

01:06:28
Speaker 1: They offed him or robbed him, you know, because of his two I think that without the two gun shot, it probably wouldn’t be a thing people debate about.

01:06:37
Speaker 3: Right Well, I mean, in that time period, you carried more than one gun with you, and the accounts were that.

01:06:43
Speaker 2: I’m not in any way arguing that you didn’t.

01:06:44
Speaker 1: I’m just trag like, why was it a thing for a long you know, why was it a story for a long time that it was a sort of an asterisk next to that he’d killed himself.

01:06:54
Speaker 3: I think Lewis’s family was very invested in this theory, is that right?

01:06:58
Speaker 4: Yeah?

01:06:58
Speaker 3: Because in this time period suicide, we didn’t understand suicide the way we understand suicide today. So today we would talk about suicide as like somebody with a with a disease who is making a choice that feels rational to them, even if it’s heartbreaking to everybody else. But obviously at that in that time period, it was it was a huge stain on your reputation. Yeah, like you’re condemned to hell, right exactly. So I think that that’s the read. Like nobody wanted to believe that this national hero would do this to himself.

01:07:23
Speaker 1: So they were they were people that like to try to save his reputation or make make their own guilt less or whatever.

01:07:34
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don’t know what their motives were, sort of.

01:07:36
Speaker 1: Like yeah, putting out this idea, will you never know? Or this could be possible because he had because in his suicide attempt, he had to shoot himself two times.

01:07:44
Speaker 3: Right, and he also carved his wrists up to to bleed out like he definitely there’s a quote from from one of the people who ran the Bed and Breakfast where she says that he said, why is it so hard for me to die? Like and I mean that speaks to his toughness, like he he was there’s nobody who could endure more than him. Even I’m not just talking about like compared us today. I’m talking about on the expedition, nobody was tougher than Lewis, Like he was just an unbelievably just he just had perseverance, he was just he had grit. So even at the end you could see that. But I think there’s no question that his family and the people around him were trying to protect his reputation. It’s we’re saying Clark and Jefferson never questioned it. They thought he killed himself, so did they know him better than anybody else. But then also, I think there’s a lot of people who like to look for conspiracy theories in history. That’s never been my relationship to history, but I you know, I understand that can be a fun way to think about history. But I just don’t think, you know, even if you compare this to some of the other great conspiracy theory theories are possible ones in history, the evidence just isn’t there. The people who want to talk about the murder, they try to undermine the evidence that he killed himself, but they never have any affirmative evidence. They’re never like, well, why would somebody kill him? Like bad Yelp reviews about the best they can come up with. They they try to connect it to James Wilkinson and theseolitical conspiracies, and it just just doesn’t make any sense. Like sometimes the simplest explanation is the best one.

01:09:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, what’s that call? There’s a name for that, Lockham’s raised, Oukham’s Raising. I need to get that tattooed on me. So I don’t forget that so often Oham’s Raising. Do you how much time he spent on Colter? John Colton. He’s kind of my favorite dude from the whole thing.

01:09:23
Speaker 3: Unfortunately, there’s not a ton of culture in there because I did the rotating points of view, so I had Ordway’s point of view, so I really tried to talk about Ordway’s life. But but Coulter is amazing, and there there are whole books certain about him. I don’t begrudge your affection for culture at all. He was a he was kind of a little rascally, but once he kind of got himself worked out, he was one of the most important soldiers.

01:09:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, he liked to pull a cork. He got a little trouble in Yeah.

01:09:44
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there there’s this. This is one of the new things I found about him. One of the times he shows up in the book is when they’re in Saint Louis, shout out to my Saint Louis. People who love Lewis and Clark’s relationship to Saint Louis. But when they when they have their first winter quarters there, they’re like, it’s it’s a boot camp basically, like they have half regular soldiers, people like John Ordway, and then they have half people who are just civilians from Kentucky who are really good shots or really good hunters or things like that. And so they got to make these two groups cohere. But they’ve also got to teach the non soldiers how to be soldiers. And so Colter is kind of one of the troublemakers in this period. And at one point Lewis and Clark head to Saint Louis to like have a nice dinner and do diplomatic stuff and Ordway. They leave Ordway in charge, and the men rebel, and like Colter is like, we don’t know exactly what happened, but the most likely thing is that Ordway was like, it’s your turn to stand guard something like that, like some kind of like go do your soldier task, and so Colter and Shields and a couple other people from Kentucky were like, we’re going to kill you. We don’t give a fuck what you say. And you know, people from Kentucky in this time period were ordinary people, and so Ordway showed remarkable self control. Like you know, I think if somebody had done this to Lewis, Lewis probably would have been like, let’s have a duel, Like you just challenge my honor, I’ll kill you. But Ordway was able to maintain calm, and so he waited till Lewis and Clark came back. Lewis and Clark put in some some new disciplinary measures, and tatle told on cold. I mean, if you want to call it that, you can. But here’s what’s cool, because I don’t think Colter would have said it that way. Because Lewis and Clark ultimately asked the men, like, who do you want to be your sergeants? This is very unusual in the military at this time, But it wasn’t just the vote on the Pacific Coast that we already talked about. Lewis and Clark again and again let their men have input. And I think that’s just like they.

01:11:22
Speaker 1: Basically take a vote about in the end, they take a vote about Colter state.

01:11:26
Speaker 4: And if he can go on, yeah for sure and so on.

01:11:28
Speaker 2: Then I real quick just remind people who this guy is.

01:11:30
Speaker 4: Yeah, go for it, Okay.

01:11:31
Speaker 1: So Colter’s when I said he’s my favorite guys. Interesting figure he was. He was hired onto the expedition.

01:11:37
Speaker 2: He was.

01:11:37
Speaker 1: He was a woodsman, hired onto the expedition and had a role as sort of a scout and hunter. What’s cool about him is when the expedition is coming to a close and they’re descending the Missouri, they run into some trader trappers who are going up river, right, and they’re going upriver to engage in the the beaver trapping and trade and enterprise up there, And rather than going home, Colter wants to go with him ye and ask permission and does the thing that I think would be great for a parenting technique. Lewis and Clark say to the guys, the rest of the guys, they say, we will let him go. We will cut Colter loose and let him go up to trap if everyone here promises not to ask the same thing, right yep. And everybody’s like I won’t ask, And then they cut him loose and he goes.

01:12:39
Speaker 3: On and has some crazy adventures, no doubt about it. Yeah, his life after the expedition is wild. But at the beginning of the expedition before he’s kind of proven himself as this beloved soldier because he was enlisted to he was a soldier, not just like, oh sorry.

01:12:51
Speaker 2: He was hired on as a I thought he was. I thought he was hired on as an.

01:12:54
Speaker 3: I mean he was, but they didn’t hire him on, and like, you can still be a frontiersman. Like they they ran a military, like they had to practice their drills every night, Like John Ordway was like, put on your uniform, we’re gonna go learn how to counter march and march.

01:13:05
Speaker 1: And also all those guys had to like had to conform to military standards.

01:13:10
Speaker 3: I see, Yeah, it was. It was a military mission, got it. And so but that like people like Colter hated that at first. So when Lewis and Clark are and Saint Louis Ordway’s in charge, like Lewis and Clark are famous enough and good enough leaders that Culter’s not gonna do this to them. But when it’s just Ordway and Orway’s like it’s time to go do watch. Colter’s like no, And so they end up yelling at each other, Colters literally loading his rifle like next to Ordway, like you can hear the ramrods scraping on the barrel. And so Ordway diffuses the situation. Tattletales slash follows military protocol. But here’s the cool thing they have. Like Lewis and Clark a couple of weeks after, it’s only a couple weeks after they let them in, vote who do you want to be your sergeant? And guess who Culter picks. He picks John Ordway. He respected them, yes, exactly. And so to go from saying I’m gonna kill you to saying I want my life to be in your hands, like that is such an amazing detail. I think it tells you something about Culter. I think it tells you something about Ordway. I think it tells you something about Lewis Clark. Nobody’s ever pieced that together about the voting stuff, but that’s because I was so interested in the human dynamics that we were talking about. Like I figured out that they voted on it, and I figured out, Wow, Culter wanted Ordway, and I think that’s one of the most human details in the whole book.

01:14:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s cool. Yeah, that’s the thing I didn’t know.

01:14:23
Speaker 6: One of the things you point out in the book that was kind of an interesting takeaway for me was when we talk about Lewis and Clark, when we talk about this expedition, we talk about it as this multifaceted you know, they’re they’re establishing diplomatic relations, they’re taking stock of resources there, they’re maybe staking claims to territory, and it’s this big hybrid of sort of diplomacy, economic speculation, scientific understanding or learning. And you make the point that Jefferson, when he thinks of Native people wandering the West, he thinks of them as just being curious and just going from.

01:15:14
Speaker 5: Place to place.

01:15:15
Speaker 6: But you make the point that what Lewis and Clark are doing is a very familiar concept to all of the Native people that they encounter along the way, because when they are moving across the landscape, they’re doing the same thing. They’re interested in land, they’re interested in what’s there, and they’re interested in who they can meet and what those people can give them.

01:15:37
Speaker 5: And so it’s it I don’t know.

01:15:39
Speaker 6: It’s not like a mind blowing concept, but it drew an interesting connection for me that I don’t think i’d appreciate it yet.

01:15:46
Speaker 3: It was like you were saying, with slavery, like human beings have always practiced some form of slavery until today. Well, human beings have always explored too, like these are kind of universal ideas that sort of constitute what it means to be a human. And one of my favorite point of view chapters in the book is this guy named Bahito who was He was a leader for the Auricra in what is now South Dakota and Jefferson like the most big government thing of Lewis and Clark is that Jefferson said, if you meet important leaders, send them to meet me in Washington, d C. Well, taxpayers will fund it, but like I want to negotiate and meet with them in the White House, and I want to show them our power, at.

01:16:18
Speaker 5: Which rings extraordinarily expensive.

01:16:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a lot of the price tag came from this because dozens of Native people like this does not show up in the normal stories about Lewis and Clark. But while Lewis and Clark are heading west, dozens of Native leaders authorized by Lewis and Clark, are heading east. So instead of just like telling everybody’s story, I zoomed in on this one guy Bahito. So he goes from what’s now South Dakota all the way down the Missouri River to Saint Louis, then makes it all the way to Washington, d C. How do we know this because there are newspaper accounts recording this at all the time, Like he would show up in towns and the towns will be like, this is a big deal, let’s write about this. And then once he makes it to Washington DC, people in Washington, d C. Are writing about him in their journals. But the coolest thing, and this is only discovered a couple of years ago. I didn’t find this. Another school a scholar found this. But in France they found a map that Beahito had made of the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. And on that map he records not just how many nations there were there, but also where he met with Lewis and Clark. And so Beahito we know from Jefferson’s papers that he met with Jefferson at least twice in the White House, and so he probably brought this map with it and showed it to Jefferson, and so it was I think that would have been such a cool meeting to sit in because Jefferson’s this older guy who’s like interested in everything, but Bihito was an older guy who was interested in everything too. And so in my book, you know, the front end papers are Clark’s famous map of the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains, but the back end papers are be Ahito’s map too, because I really think to get the full story, you don’t just need Clark’s point of view, you need Behito’s two.

01:17:44
Speaker 1: I was trying to tell my kids about this observation that I was reading about there a few months ago. Now, is this astrophysicist was, you know, they’re looking at some guy. I think it’s kind of going on currently. They’re looking at some things out in outer space whatever, and it’s coloration defies their understanding a little bit. And so there’s this this astrophysicist was ranking the.

01:18:16
Speaker 2: Likelihood that it was a.

01:18:20
Speaker 1: Basically a I don’t want to say man made because that wouldn’t mean human, but a not natural object, okay, And he was giving some per you know whatever, five percent chance it’s a not natural object. And he was talking about why we need to take more seriously the idea. I don’t take it seriously at all, just personally, but why he feels why we need you to take more seriously the idea that some extraterrestrial life form would show up here and we should be talking about this more. Sure an observation this guy has that’s really interesting, says if it happens, they are not going to be interested. And how we have divided up the Earth, which among many other things, is like, of course they won’t. Like they show up, aliens come down and you’re like, oh no, no, no, you need to talk to the shield, need to talk to the governor of Idaho about that. So like it’s just like such a funny concept. But it would be like the degree to which when you think of Jefferson, whoever, any people’s okay, if you think of the Second Americans, the Second America, the second band of Americans to come down from the bearing straight, how interested were they in how the First Americans had conceptualized and divided up the territory. It’s interesting about Jefferson’s like, ultimately the Americans don’t care. Ultimately they kind of they don’t care, but they’re they’re they’re interested in it. Maybe they’re interested in it because they need to know that to manipulate other things. But they’re like they’re at least initially in some cases, interested about how it was divided up. Yeah, though ultimately that would all be disregarded.

01:20:25
Speaker 3: Right, Well, I mean, Jefferson thought he was doing the right thing. Jefferson was trying to act in a moral and honorable way, and they’re like, they would dissolve.

01:20:34
Speaker 2: Well, of course it would dissolve those like what I mean, of course those boundaries right did not endure.

01:20:41
Speaker 3: No, absolutely not, No, there’s no question about that. But I’m just saying, like, if we’re looking at it from how Jefferson saw the world in eighteen oh three, and there was like a big international context too, because America is still pretty new on the scene and so they want to maintain their reputation with the French and with the British and there. So there’s there’s this like international rule book, you know from the philosophers about like you have to respect who owns it. Like let’s use the Louisiana purchase as an example. What do you always hear in school. We’re really bagging on school teachers today. I’m sorry about that.

01:21:09
Speaker 2: I mean, no, no, no, no, I’m not bagging out no.

01:21:11
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, I guess there’s a lot of cover down, right, there’s a lot of cover downs.

01:21:14
Speaker 2: Well.

01:21:15
Speaker 3: One thing that they might want to tweak slightly in coming years is the Louisiana purchase, because like, what do you hear in school? You hear that it’s like the best real estate deal ever. Right, it doubled the size of America. None of that’s true, Nikola and Aker, none of that’s true because the Louisiana purchase was not about land. It was about this this like extra layer of rights called preemption rights. So what France owned was not the land. France owned the right to buy the land from Native people, and so that’s what they sold to the Americans. But Jefferson would never say we now own all this. He would say we will one day own this. And so a historian has gone back and calculated all the treaties that turned like that before and after map we see in school into actually American land. And most of those treaties were negotiated by William Clark, by the way, later in his life, but America spent another four hundred million dollars. So the Louisiana purchase costs fifteen million dollars. But that’s just this like this theoretical, right, there was another like decades of negotiation, also wars, also, you know, very poor treatment of Native people. It’s a messy and complicated story. But like nobody in eighteen oh four would be like we doubled the size of the country because they didn’t. And so that’s why, like you really got to try to understand what Jefferson thought or what Lewis thought instead of what Andrew Jackson thought or something.

01:22:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I understand.

01:22:30
Speaker 3: And there’s probably you mentioned earlier there were far more at that time, there were far.

01:22:36
Speaker 1: More Native people on the landscape. Yes, and it would have it would appear in that time to be that that would be the case for a long time. Right, So it could have been whether however you felt about native claim to land, even if you ultimately intellectually didn’t.

01:22:51
Speaker 2: Accept it, right, you would have needed to accept the.

01:22:54
Speaker 1: On the ground reality, right that like it, you know, maybe you don’t like it. Maybe that hasn’t been how your government was operating. Right on the other half of the country. But at the time you’re acknowledging that these things are going to be negotiated and purchased. But it’s coming from you know, the same Like if you imagine government as a continuity, it’s coming from the same organization.

01:23:18
Speaker 2: Uncle Sam right, who was also in.

01:23:21
Speaker 1: The practice of buying land from tribes that didn’t own it, and also really struggling to understand like.

01:23:30
Speaker 3: Who exactly do I talk to? Who’s the guy that makes the deals? Two people that don’t have a guy that makes those deals, And one of Lewis and Clark’s jobs was finding the guy, like again and again. If this isn’t in the journals, these are in like some borin reports that they put together later on. But I went back and read those reports and you can see that again and again Clark is asking the Lakota like okay, like how much land do you claim? Where do your boundaries stop? And so like that shows you that Lewis and Clark and Jefferson were imagining that continuity that you’re talking about.

01:24:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was on their minds.

01:24:04
Speaker 6: Can you talk about what the process was like for the oral history that you did for this, because.

01:24:13
Speaker 5: I think that was something also that.

01:24:15
Speaker 6: I you talk about oral history with and you visited contemporary travel groups and talk to them about their relationship to this story.

01:24:25
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that’s not something that.

01:24:27
Speaker 6: I when going through the rolodex of Lewis and Clark stuff, I’ve encountered that you often get included.

01:24:35
Speaker 4: Well.

01:24:35
Speaker 3: I always started with the journals because like, I’m a historian, so like what I know to do is go to the written texts, So like that’s what I would start with. But then I would also do these interviews. I would read lots of academic scholarship and these different points of view. I almost felt like I wrote like ten biographies because I’m trying to understand the world the way each person did. So that’s why it took five years. But once I had like the academic scholarship and the journals themselves, I would often interview native people and sorry, we’re headed back to the Pacific Northwest, but the clats Up were a really good example. I zoomed with them, some people from what’s now called the Chinook Indian Nation because they have kind of subsumed the class Up and some other people. And one of the people I talked to was a direct descendant of Koboys, and so when I talked to them, like they were interviewing me as much as I was interviewing them. Because this one guy named Tony, who was sort of the head of the Shanek Indian nation, he said something to me that I thought about every day I worked on the book, where he was like, you know, what we have left is our history and our stories, and we have shared that with people and that’s been exploited too, and so like it was not like they were like Lewis and Clark, sweet, let’s talk about it. They had to interview me first, and they wanted to understand that. I was like willing to do the work and listen to them and sort of have that kind of conversation. But they helped me so many ways, like that there would be specific details and again in the book I would say, you know, according to clats of tradition, but they would also point me in different directions, like there’s this famous anthropologist named Frank Boaz and he recorded these stories way back in the nineteenth century of kind of like the tales the literature of the of the Shinook and the clats Up people. And they were like, if you want to understand Kobowet and like how he saw the world. Read those stories. Don’t read them for the plot, read them for the values. And I mean we do the same thing, like you know, George Washington and the Cherry Tree. There’s a lot of American values in that story too. So they would help me understand things, and they would help they would direct me to sources and from that interview even like they would give me lines. But because I was writing from Koboay’s point of view, I could put right into the interview. Like I asked them about the elk and then the over hunting we were talking about, and I was like, well, you know, the clats Up asked Lewis and Clark to be there, like was that like you know, was that an issue or something like that? That there’s a famous moment where Lewis and Clark, not them, but some of the men kill some elk and go home and they’re like, we’ll come back and get it tomorrow. And they go back tomorrow and the clats Up have taken some of the elk and some of the skins, and so that creates a lot of friction there. But you know, I asked them about that and I’m like, you know, we’re the clats of stealing from Lewis and Clark there, and the class of people that I was zooming with were like, it’s not stealing if it’s yours in the first place. And so I put that line in the book, not because I personally endorsed that line or that interpretation, but because that chapter is written from Koboy’s point of view, and so I’m trying, like, how did he see the world? How did Lewis see the world and Clark see the world?

01:27:19
Speaker 4: And so on?

01:27:19
Speaker 3: So what those interviews with the oral history did. They gave me some details that I tried to very clearly show where those details came from, but they also helped me just kind of take on perspectives and be able to understand the values. And the other thing is academics have done a lot of research to vet oral sources, Like they’re in the Pacific Northwest, there have been oral traditions for a long time about these giant tsunamis that came hundreds of years ago before any white traders showed up. Those have been recorded for more than a century, but it’s only like in the last thirty forty years that geologists have been able to prove there were giant tsunamis in this region that came in this time period and did this much damage. So like the geologists have sort of proven that the oral traditions at least and broad strokes are correct. So I tried to have an open mind to all these sources, and like we were talking about with Wolf Calf and the Blackfoot interview, I would take the oral sources. I would take the journals, I would take the scholarship. I would take my own understanding of human beings, kind of throw it in a blender and then offer the best interpretation I could. Yeah, they get hard. Oral stories get hard. There’s a there’s a there’s an expiration here.

01:28:22
Speaker 1: We’re already talking about We’re already talking about two hundred and twenty years. You know, I can’t I can’t tell you. I can’t tell you anything about my great grandparents. Sure, right, Like.

01:28:37
Speaker 3: It’s I I accept and agree with the cultural it’s a there’s a cultural gesture that you have to acknowledge. Is there there’s a it’s it’s it’s in some ways in some cases, in some ways is performative. But there’s just like there’s a limit.

01:29:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, tell me about Okay, give me the oral tradition of your family two hundred and twenty five years ago.

01:29:09
Speaker 2: You cannot do it.

01:29:10
Speaker 3: But here’s what I can do. I can tell you what my great grandparents’ values were. They were hard working people, because.

01:29:14
Speaker 2: That’s been a hundred and twenty five years ago, huh no.

01:29:17
Speaker 3: But you can tell family values and how those get passed on. So the first thing I would say is, when we’re talking about family stuff, I’m not saying that I said, what did Koboe eat for breakfast on the day Lewis and Clark showed up? But you can still learn those values which are not my values. And the other thing.

01:29:29
Speaker 1: But check me out though, Okay, what was your what was your great I have to do the math. How many greats ago is two hundred and twenty five years I mean, tell me about the values of.

01:29:41
Speaker 2: Your great, great great great grandfather. What were his values?

01:29:48
Speaker 3: This is an impossible question for me to answer because I’ve read history about this time period too, So anything I would tell you would be shaped by my understanding of what people live in Indiana. But there’s one other thing I would say.

01:29:57
Speaker 1: I’m not down. I’m not like I don’t I think historians shouldn’t do it. I know, I just when I hear it. When I hear it, I often feel and you can contradict me, because you’re in this situation when I hear historians doing it about stuff and I don’t know the date, I don’t know that. I don’t know the time that the life the lifespan. Okay, oral tradition about something five hundred years ago, about five hundred years ago, very very skeptical. Sure, oral tradition about something one hundred and fifty years ago about I’m like, Okay, Somewhere between those, I start to get a little bit like, I feel that the traditions can be more informed by contemporary conflict, contemporary understandings, contemporary issues, contemporary social concerns can outweigh the parts of it that are coming from My great great great great grandfather told my great great great great grandfather this, and he passed it to my great great great great grandfather, who passed it to my great great grandf.

01:31:09
Speaker 4: Like, yeah, do you know what I’m saying? I do.

01:31:11
Speaker 1: It becomes that it becomes more of a commentary about the present right, not saying you shouldn’t do it. I hear it, and I always I just I hear it, and I have a there’s a feeling that washes over me.

01:31:24
Speaker 3: I understand, you know, that feeling of skepticism, and we should be skeptical, Like historians can’t do their job unless they’re skeptical. So I totally get where you’re coming from, though I don’t even disagree with you. The only things I would say is that, first of all, a lot of the traditions didn’t come from one hundred and fifty years ago. They came from fifty years after. So like there there were Native people who met Lewis and Clark, who then talked to a white person, and the white person wrote it down. So a lot of the stuff I’m drawing on is not the historical game of telephone you’re talking about. The Other thing is that Native cultures, because they are often primarily oral, they sort of select people with good memories, who are good storytellers, you know, and so they’re like, you know, my great great great grandfather probably wrote it in a journal and didn’t remember it as well, whereas Native people, you know, one historian when he got older would sort of train the next Native historian. So there is more of a tradition there that I think helps helps you better be able to access those things.

01:32:14
Speaker 4: But really, for me, then there are I.

01:32:16
Speaker 2: Don’t want to I don’t want to beats into the ground.

01:32:17
Speaker 4: But no, it’s it’s an important point.

01:32:19
Speaker 1: But but there are cases where like I don’t want to act like I’m dismissive of the enterprise because the I can’t remember the guy’s name. There was a guy that much later was talked to to the to people Nez Perce who were involved in the Nez Perce.

01:32:34
Speaker 2: War and the children to people involved in Nez pers War.

01:32:37
Speaker 1: Right, you could say, in some way, you could say some of that’s first hand account, like like he took nes Perce warriors to battlefields and they’d be like, no, I was standing there, right, he was staying there.

01:32:47
Speaker 4: That’s that oral tradition. That’s firsthand, sure, but.

01:32:50
Speaker 1: Huge value and talking to their kids, which at that point I guess is oral. I don’t know, is that oral tradition?

01:32:58
Speaker 2: What is that?

01:32:59
Speaker 4: I think?

01:32:59
Speaker 3: I mean, different historians are going to classify a different way. But for the conversation we’re having, you’re absolutely right that every generation of what you get away, it becomes more tenuous and you need to have more skepticism. I will say, like, I think I maybe put us on the wrong foot by talking about like grandparents’ values though, because like the better example is not what your grandparents or my grandparents values were. It’d be like if I was writing about somebody in France there, I don’t fan France’s values are not my values. So they’re like you sort of need like that basic primer. So when I would talk to people today, it would be less like what did your grandparents do? And it would be more like, how do your people see the world? What does land mean to your people? Did you have an understanding of sort of geographical rights and those kinds of things. So I think for me, at least as a writer, because I am not class up, because I am not Lakota, it was very valuable for me to talk to those people who were generous with their time and said like, these are our values and I and you know, those values have of course shaped like there’s no question. I can think of examples from my interviews where people they would say something to me and I’d be like that it feels like that kind of modern life is impinging on the tradition as much as it is the tradition itself that I mean that happens with us and how we tell American stories too. But I do think that that for me, at least as an outsider, those interviews really helped me sort of feel like I could write from those people’s points of view, and it was just important in the book, Like we have great biographies of Lewis or Culter or people like that, but really I didn’t want the sections on Kobowah or Black Buffalo or Saka Juea to just be like, this is what Lewis and Clark did. I wanted you to feel like you were in the canoe with them, because I wanted the storytelling to be equal, you know, like I wanted you to know what Lewis cared about, but I wanted you to know what Black Buffalo cared about too. And the reason we can know that is often not these oral traditions, but the journals like Lewis and Clark wrote down what Black Buffalo wanted. It’s just my job as a historian to be like that deserves like a scene that deserves some description. He Black Buffalo is not a supporting character. Black Buffalo is a main character. Yeah, and that’s the choice I made in this book.

01:34:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, I got one last question. You got but you go ahead, Randall, No, you got it.

01:35:07
Speaker 1: Uh, I don’t. I probably knew this and forgot maybe, but I don’t know. York the slave he gets back, he petitions for his He petitions for his freedom. Yeah, freedom based on his meritorious conduct. Right is denied? Right what comes to him? How old is he when the expedition ends.

01:35:29
Speaker 3: He’s We don’t know exactly how old he is, but given how relation, like he was what was called Clark’s body servant, Like he was somebody who grew up alongside Clark and took care of Clark. That’s why Clark wanted to take him on the expedition, among other reasons, Like Clark really respected York as a as an outdoorsman too. But so he was roughly Clark’s age, So he was probably, you know, late twenties, early thirties during the expedition. But he requests his freedom when he gets back, and we know that he directly linked it to his service on the expedition because Clark has this letter to his brother, and in this letter, Clark says you know, I don’t agree with Yorke that his immense services have earned his freedom. And so for Clark, again, there’s a lot of things about.

01:36:06
Speaker 1: He’s like, I’d like to raise a counterpoint, right, you know, I feel like I still own you.

01:36:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, right, counterpoint, this is how America works at this time period. But it like, you know, you can hear Clark’s voice in that the kind of dark right.

01:36:20
Speaker 1: Here’s why I feel I should be able to like make my own decisions about myself.

01:36:24
Speaker 2: I don’t know, it’s just throw.

01:36:25
Speaker 4: This out there, yeah, exactly.

01:36:27
Speaker 3: But you can hear york side of the debate too though, right, Like that’s Clark’s letter, but Clark is preserving York’s York’s rationale. And so they had lived in Louisville, Kentucky. Outside of Louisville, Kentucky, and so Clark becomes like the top diplomat with Native people and he has to move to Saint Louis and he will make all these like when he died in eighteen thirty eight, a third of what was American land. Clark negotiated the treaties. For Clark had a very important life after the expedition. So he has to be in Saint Louis to do that. So he tells York, You’re coming with me. But York’s wife is in Kentucky, and we know that York cared a lot about his wife. He’s sent flow skins back to his wife from the expedition for her to have and so York doesn’t want to go, and that’s where this real friction intention emerges. That York’s like, I want to be free, and also I want to stay in Kentucky with my wife, and Clark says, I don’t care. And so they have really really tough interactions. There’s one letter where Clark says, I like, I’m ready to beat York, but Lewis talked me out of it.

01:37:22
Speaker 4: Wow.

01:37:22
Speaker 3: So you can again see like I don’t think it makes sense to just talk about slavery in the abstract. You need to talk about like how did Clark see it? How did Lewis see it? Because even though there’s similar guys, they had very different views on slavery, and so Lewis was basically like, we don’t know exactly why he thought this, but he definitely said, you know, don’t you don’t need to beat Clark or beat York. Right, now, let’s let’s let’s take it easier on him. But either way, Clark waited more than a decade to free York. York’s wife ended up having to move further down south, so he was not able to reunite with her in the way that he wanted, and York ended up dying probably sometime in his fifties, probably of cholera. We don’t know for sure, but that’s it seems pretty clear though his wife was enslaved, yes, by a different ownerferent families, right, because the Clarks, the Clarks had ten or twelve slaves, so often in plantations of that size, you would have to, you know, you would marry somebody from a different plantation.

01:38:08
Speaker 2: You say he did not reunite with his wife.

01:38:10
Speaker 3: He I mean he was once he was freed. He ended up having a wagon business. So maybe he rode the wagon down further south, but that that would be pretty precarious in eighteen twenty to, you know, as a as a freed black person, take your wagon further south. That’s not what most people would do. So we don’t know for sure. Because York couldn’t read or write, but he definitely saw less of his wife than he wanted to.

01:38:29
Speaker 1: We know that, man, there’s you almost think about it like a like like thing.

01:38:35
Speaker 4: I don’t.

01:38:37
Speaker 2: I’m not a big play fan like plays. You know. I like him, okay, but I’m more into movies. But a good play would be you.

01:38:46
Speaker 1: Know, in the Autumn of Boons Daniel Boone’s life, uh huh, he would go on these hunting trips with his slave.

01:38:52
Speaker 4: Mm hm.

01:38:53
Speaker 2: Him and his slave Yep would get in paddle up river, right.

01:38:59
Speaker 1: And due these big hunting rips and like, like what are those conversations?

01:39:04
Speaker 2: Like, Yeah, it would be the two of.

01:39:05
Speaker 3: Them, right, that would that would be like waiting for good Oh but plus slavery, that’d be wild yeah, or York trying to explain, you know, here’s why I think I shouldn’t be a slave, right, But I mean like like how like how does that conversation play out? Yeah, but I mean York was reacting to different circumstances. Like on the expedition he carried a rifle. He was the fifth named guy in the journals to bring down a buffalo. He was a great hunter. Yeah, he was big and strong. He could swim a lot of people in the expedition could not swim, which that’s a fact that I still can’t wrap my head around, like you’re doing this river.

01:39:41
Speaker 6: One of the first questions I would have asked, you know, in my recruiting you would.

01:39:44
Speaker 4: Think so, but yeah, he could.

01:39:45
Speaker 2: He could have taken that rifle and swung it around. Been like your son of a bitch.

01:39:48
Speaker 3: Right right, No, it’s I mean, it’s it’s a it’s a wild it’s a wild dynamic.

01:39:53
Speaker 2: So hard to understand it. It’s really hard to understand.

01:39:56
Speaker 3: I think one reason the journals are helpful is they help you see Clark’s point of view on this too, because you can see how, for lack of a better word, possessive, Clark is like York. The native people once they get far enough to the north, and the native people are obsessed with York because they’ve never met somebody with black skin before. So they like, they come up and they’ll spit on their hands and try to like rub York’s skin to rub the paint off, and then when they realize it’s not paint, they’re like, whoa this is this is something new. And when you read Clark’s journal entries, you can see that Clark is just kind of like jealous in a weird way because he’s so used to being the person above York that once York starts to get more attention, that that makes their relationship get even stranger. So it’s just I think York could beat his ass too. I mean, Clark again and again talked about how big York was, so I think York was probably the largest.

01:40:40
Speaker 4: Guy on the on the whole expedition.

01:40:42
Speaker 3: I can’t remember we had a guest recently or someone turned to sound to this quote. The past is a strange country, you know, because some of the stuff you just can’t understand it.

01:40:56
Speaker 2: I know you can’t. The dynamics you’ll never ever understand.

01:41:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, I felt that tension again and again writing this book, because it’s like, on one hand, Sackage we as actions feel like it’s at a workplace, right, like she’s you know, she’s she’s doing human interactions the same way we would. But on another hand, it’s just a completely different world. And so I don’t think there’s a way to resolve that. As a historian, I think you just need to accept that, like both things are true, and then try to tell the story as honestly as you can But it’s like that that push pull. I felt that again and again in this book.

01:41:28
Speaker 5: I feel like.

01:41:31
Speaker 6: A lot of what you do in this book is you’re sort of building the story out from this myopic understanding of a miraculous journey led by two incredible individuals, right, and you’re building it out, And I’m curious if there’s still a blank spot in your canvas that you weren’t able to fill in. Not to end on a downer, no, but what did you Was there something you wanted to build out in this book that just wasn’t there.

01:42:07
Speaker 3: I spent five years on this. I love all ten of the people in this book, and I still have way more questions than answers, Like is that a crazy thing to say? But that’s like, if you’re trying to be an honest and accurate historian, I don’t know what other response you would have, Like I just wonder what did Lewis think about York?

01:42:22
Speaker 4: Because Lewis specifically.

01:42:23
Speaker 3: Told Clark recruit unmarried men because they knew that like they wanted people without family ties, but they also knew that the men were going to have sex with lots of Native women like they’d been in the army. They knew that they wanted young guys who were not attached, And so Lewis shows up and Clark’s like, Yorke’s coming and York’s married, York’s black, He’s enslaved. So I like, did they argue about that? Was Lewis like this is a terrible idea? Was Clark like, I’m not coming unless York comes. Did Lewis just sort of roll his eyes and have some kind of resentment about it? But they just worked through it. Probably that’s what happened, but we’ll never know. So like, I feel like, unlike William Clark’s maps, my map is still mostly blank spaces. I just tried to fill in as much as I could with this book.

01:43:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know how I do.

01:43:04
Speaker 3: The movie man is uh, we’re talking about the beginning of Apocalypse now.

01:43:08
Speaker 1: This morning Randall was you know, like the hotel scene. I would probably open the movie grinder station. There’s a lot everywhere, you know what I’m saying, and he’s like, oh, like he’s dying, right, And then and then you’d like, what in the world is going on?

01:43:32
Speaker 2: Yeah? You know what I mean? The people downstairs like what is going on up there?

01:43:35
Speaker 4: Right?

01:43:36
Speaker 6: And then he and then he trips back flashback. Yeah, it’s a classic introductory device.

01:43:43
Speaker 2: Because it grab you by the boo boo for sure.

01:43:45
Speaker 6: That scene, maybe that’s the magic key that will unlock the successful HBO mini.

01:43:50
Speaker 2: I just couldn’t think of a good opening scene. That’s the problem. That was the problem all along. It wasn’t how do you tell a three year long story?

01:43:57
Speaker 3: Christian Bale perfect, Yeah, well fingers crossed on the HBO series.

01:44:01
Speaker 4: That’s that’s all same. But yeah, yeah, fingers crossed.

01:44:04
Speaker 3: I think that’s a blank space because I would really like somebody to make a TV show out.

01:44:08
Speaker 6: Of Undaunted Courage, which we haven’t brought up until now. I think that was always the you know that if it was going to spin into.

01:44:15
Speaker 5: A series, that was it.

01:44:17
Speaker 6: But like, this is just such a more human tale that I see the we’ll keep her fingers crossed.

01:44:25
Speaker 2: I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to brag, but I got one in the oven right now.

01:44:28
Speaker 1: That’s going to be prime pickings for movie, which I’ve never had happen.

01:44:34
Speaker 5: I’m sure again he doesn’t want to brag now.

01:44:37
Speaker 4: Howat so good? But other than that, I can’t.

01:44:40
Speaker 2: Say, the only problems. I haven’tritten it yet either.

01:44:42
Speaker 4: Well, I hear that could be a tricky You did the work.

01:44:47
Speaker 3: It’s just a step along the way, you know for sure. Right, Well, good luck. I hope they do get it.

01:44:52
Speaker 1: We’ve been we’ve been talking to Craig firm and author of this vast Enterprise and New History of Lewis and Clark. So a new history of a old and fascinating, fascinating story with endless threads to pull out, and sounds to me like you pulled out some fresh ones.

01:45:13
Speaker 3: I did my best, man, it’s a big story. I gave it everything I had.

01:45:16
Speaker 1: Check it out once again, This fast Enterprise, A New History of Lewis and Clark by Craig Furman,