American History Tellers - Lewis and Clark | The Journey and the Journals | 4

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

The Lewis and Clark expedition changed the course of American history. But after its bold, charismatic leader, Meriwether Lewis, ended his life in an apparent suicide, the expedition was largely forgotten. Not until the 20th century would the exploits of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery recapture the imaginations of historians and the general public.In this episode, Lindsay speaks with Clay S. Jenkinson, an author, historian, and host of acclaimed public radio show and podcast The Thomas Jefferson Hour. They’ll discuss Jefferson’s motives for ordering the expedition, its impact on Native American societies, the mysterious circumstances surrounding Lewis’s death, and the legacy of Lewis and Clark today.Please support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's September 15th, 1809. You're the commanding officer at Fort Pickering, an army outpost that's perched on Chickasaw Bluff, overlooking the Mississippi River in Tennessee. This afternoon, a boat carrying Captain Meriwether Lewis landed at the fort. But your initial meeting with him has left you deeply concerned.

A soldier opens the door to your quarters and shows in a man dressed in buckskins, Lewis's boatman. The soldier salutes and steps out as you gesture for the boatman to sit. Thank you for coming, sir. I want to ask you about Captain Lewis. He seems... Deranged? You're taken aback by the boatman's bluntness.

Well, deranged... Drunk, perhaps. Oh, he's drunk too, but there's more than that. He tried to take his own life. A suicide. You're certain? Positive. He tried it twice when we were headed downriver. Nearly succeeded once, but the crew managed to restrain him. He also wrote his last will and testament. He is not well, not well at all. You lean back in your chair and rub a hand across your face, pondering this dire news. Lewis isn't just the famous explorer who went to the Pacific. He's also the governor of Louisiana

territory. If he is mentally unfit, you can't ignore it. You press the boatman for more information. Do you know Captain Lewis's plans now? I couldn't get much out of him that made any sense. He's headed to Washington to see President Madison. We were supposed to continue downriver to New Orleans so he could get to Washington by sea, but now he wants to disembark here and travel by land through Tennessee. Why? He's got it into his head that the British Navy might intercept the ship and seize his journals from the expedition. Well, those journals would be of great value to the British, but it raises the question, why is he traveling with them? He's talking about getting them published.

But the way he's behaving, I'm not sure he'll make it to Washington, no matter how he tries to get there. You nod in agreement. Indeed. Which is why I'm now going to take possession of Captain Lewis and his journals. Please bring him here. My soldiers will assist. He needs to be under watch at all hours until he recovers. The boatman leaves to fetch Lewis,

and you put on your tricorn hat and prepare to address your men. You dread giving them the order that Meriwether Lewis, a national hero, must be seized and detained, but you have no choice. It is your duty to prevent him from ruining his reputation by taking his own life. You just hope by taking action now, you can pull him away from the brink. to warn those who lives were in danger. Follow Kill List wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C true crime shows like Morbid

early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. I'm Saatchi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the hosts of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of the most infamous scams of all time,

the impact on victims, and what's left once the facade falls away. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers. Our history. your story. In 1809, Captain Gilbert Russell put Meriwether Lewis on a 24-hour suicide watch at Fort Pickering, an army outpost at the present-day site of Memphis, Tennessee. Lewis was drinking heavily, taking opium, depressed, and in poor health. It had been three years since he returned from his famous expedition with William Clark, but in those three years, he had repeatedly failed to publish his account of their travels.

Captain Russell kept Lewis at Fort Pickering for two weeks, getting him sober and failed to publish his account of their travels. Captain Russell kept Lewis at Fort Pickering for two weeks, getting him sober and trying to lift his spirits. Russell wanted to accompany Lewis to Washington, but his request for a leave of absence was denied. So Lewis left Fort Pickering on September 29, 1809, on his own recognizance. Just twelve days later, he was dead from an apparent suicide. Here with me to discuss Lewis's life, death, and extraordinary expedition is author, historian, and radio host Clay Jenkinson. Clay is the author of 13 books, including the character of Meriwether Lewis, explorer in the wilderness, and editor of A Vast and Open Plane, the writings of the Lewis and

Clark Expedition in North Dakota. He is also the creator and host of the widely acclaimed national public radio program and podcast, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, on which he portrays our third president. Here's our conversation. Clay Jenkinson, welcome to American History Tellers. I'm glad to be here. Thank you. You've spent a lot of time with Lewis and Clark as a subject for a book. You've portrayed Lewis on stage. You lead cultural tours across the Lewis and Clark Trail.

Where did this fascination for these early American adventures come from? I studied at Oxford University and actually was working on the 17th century English poet John Donne. I came back to the United States for the summer here in North Dakota, and I read a book called Those Tremendous Mountains about the Lewis and Clark expedition. Before that, I knew a little bit about this because, of course, they came through North Dakota in 1804 and early in 1805. But I was reading along in the book, and I came to this passage around page 230, in which the author said, and then Meriwether Lewis put a gun to his head and killed himself.

And I have to say, I was shocked. I had never heard this before. I had always thought of Lewis and Clark as sort of interchangeable, cheerful explorers, almost arm in arm, looking west like a couple of Boy Scouts or Tweedledee and Tweedledum. And I had never thought about the aftermath of the expedition. And suddenly, I learned that Lewis killed himself. And I wanted to know why. Why would a hero, a protege of Thomas Jefferson, the governor of Upper Louisiana, why would he kill himself? And so I've really spent the next 30 years trying to understand that. Ultimately, it can't be understood. He didn't leave a suicide note. Suicide is always a mystery. But I've spent decades investigating the journals, walking the Lewis and Clark Trail,

canoeing the Lewis and Clark Trail, flying over the Lewis and Clark Trail, doing everything in my capacity to try to make sense of this. And I still don't know, of course. We'll never know. Yeah, it is indeed a strange result for what in modern day we think of as a hero. But before we get to his death, let's learn a little bit about his life. Who is Meriwether Lewis the man? How would you describe him? Meriwether Lewis was born within sight of Monticello. Jefferson had no living sons. Lewis's father died when he was just a child.

When Jefferson became president in 1800, he out to lewis whom he knew and asked him if he would come to washington to serve as his private correspondent secretary in the white house lewis did that jefferson knew that lewis had a kind of an urge to travel that he was a rambler by nature and in fact lewis had attempted to get je get Jefferson to support his participation in an earlier exploration of the West, one that did not come to pass. So Lewis was not particularly well-educated, but really intelligent young man, an army officer, someone who was habituated to the woods and had the right stuff, as we would put it, and someone who had a kind of a wanderlust and a romantic idea of the

destiny of the United States in the American West. He was high-strung, tightly wound, somewhat self-critical. Several times in the course of the journey said that he estimated the very value of his life with the success of the expedition, which is putting extremely high pressure on himself. He tended to get angry easily. He was a brilliant prose stylist, but erratic in keeping journals and sometimes inexplicably silent in responding to letters from the War Department or from Thomas Jefferson. And as we all know, at the time of his death in 1809, he hadn't written a single line, a single sentence for his projected three-volume account of the expedition. So he's a paradox and a mystery, which is the fascination.

If he were just a relatively normal, thoughtful, reliable, even-tempered explorer, we probably would not be having this conversation. You mentioned something that sparked my interest. The phrase Manifest Destiny wasn't coined until 1845, but here we are in 1803 when Lewis and Clark's expedition started. So this is a full generation ahead of, well, when the phrase was coined. What was the tenor of the American relationship with the West? Even if it wasn't coined, was Manifest Destiny that ingrained already? Somewhat. And the person who did it, wasn't coined, was Manifest Destiny that ingrained already? Somewhat. And the person who did it, by the way, is Thomas Jefferson. I don't think that

George Washington or John Adams would have sent the Lewis and Clark expedition up the Missouri River in 1804. I don't think that James Madison or James Monroe would have done it. Jefferson was uniquely fascinated by the West. And Jefferson is the person who coined the term empire for liberty, such as the world has never previously seen. Jefferson envisioned a two-coast continental republic, and Jefferson alone amongst the founding fathers had this sort of obsession about the destiny of the American people beyond the Appalachian Mountains. At the time of Jefferson's inauguration, there were 6 million Americans. Most of them lived within about 70 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. Maybe 200 or 250,000 were on the other side of the Appalachians in the interior.

So most of the country was terra incognita as far as white people saw it. Of course, it had a great number of Native American peoples living and doing quite well. But when Jefferson looked west, he didn't see Native Americans. He saw empty land on which the American people would write the world's most extraordinary society. So Jefferson really was the person behind all of this. And if you want to trace Manifest Destiny back from 1845 to the founders, that person is Thomas Jefferson. And Lewis was his protege, and so he carried some of that with him. But we also have to remember that Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment, and he was at least as much interested in just seeing what was out there, how the rivers interlocked, how high were the

Rocky Mountains, did the great rivers on the other side of the Rockies interlace with the Missouri? What sort of native peoples were there? What sort of minerals could be found in the West? There had been rumors that the lost tribe of Israel might still be out there somewhere, or that there was a mountain of pure salt. And so there were lots of legends, lore, mythologies, but most of it based upon sheer ignorance and uncertainty. And one of Jefferson's missions was to send Lewis out to do an inventory, not just of the Louisiana Purchase, but an inventory of the entire continent. Well, speaking of terra incognita, we tend to picture Lewis and Clark as the first white men

to explore many of the places they went to. But I'm wondering how accurate is that? How much of the Louisiana territory in the Pacific Northwest had been already explored and settled by Europeans by the time the core discovery passed through? Some white people had been from St. Louis all the way up to the Great Bend of the Missouri in what's now North Dakota, north of Bismarck. And other whites had come down from the Winnipeg area. These were Canadians, traders and trappers, and they had gotten to the Mandan and Hidatsa villages in today's North Dakota.

But west of that, it was much closer to true wilderness. And when Lewis left Fort Mandan on April 7th, 1805, he writes this grandiloquent passage in his journal in which he says, we are now about to penetrate a country at least 2,000 miles in width upon which the foot of civilized man has never trodden. And Lewis's sense was that every step he took, every time he rounded a bend in the Missouri River, every time he climbed up a ridge and looked west, he was seeing something that no white person in all of human history had ever seen. Now, he wasn't probably absolutely correct in that,

but he was the first white person who kept records who went into that country. And as you know, history belongs to the record keepers. So if there were a few others, trappers or traders or people just filled with a desire to explore who had moved into that territory before, we have no record of it. And many of the tribes that Lewis encountered seem to have been first encounter. In other words, that he was indeed the first person that they remembered who was white, who had ever come their way. Well, let's talk about the records that he kept. The journals that Lewis and Clark kept, I wonder if you could describe them and the language used.

I'm sure you've studied them quite often. So what might be remarkable to you in them? Well, the good news is they had records for every single day from May 14th, 1804, when they left St. Charles, Missouri, until September 23rd, 1806, when they got back to St. Louis. There isn't a single day in that 28-month period which is not accounted for by one or more of the journal keepers. So Clark keeps a record for all but about nine days. He was off on a winter hunting trip, and he summarizes those on the 10th. So Clark is a very reliable journal keeper. Lewis is missing for 441 days out of the two years and a couple of months that they were there. That's more than half. And so this is one

of the great perplexities in the Lewis and Clark world. Were some of the records lost? Did he not bother to keep records? The sense I have is that Lewis soon determined that if one of the two of the captains, he or Clark was keeping a record, that would count as a sort of captain's log. But it's a great loss to us because when Lewis is writing, he's far and away the most interesting of the journal keepers. He has a beautiful prose style. It's a little bit, you might almost say, pretentious, but certainly he had a sense of

destiny. He's constantly stepping back and talking about the meaning of the expedition and how important it is to succeed and how some impediment or other, some crisis or other might, to use his phrase, defeat the expedition altogether by damaging the esprit de corps of the group. He's a brilliant natural scientist. He has a great observational talent. He's able to describe animals in the wilderness that naturalists back in Philadelphia could immediately identify using Linnaean classification terms. He's brilliant, but he's erratic. If there weren't Lewis in the journals, this would be just a sort of adventure story. But Lewis lifts it beyond what one jots down at the

end of a very long, tiring, and busy day into something like lyricism. And so Lewis is the voice of the expedition. Clark is more reliable. So Clark, on an average day, will say how many deer they killed, whether a boat sprang a leak, if somebody mouthed off, whether the men danced to the fiddle of Pierre Cruzat late in the evening, what sort of meals they had, were there snags or other impediments in the river, did they encounter some native peoples? Lewis, if he's writing, will do better. But Clark is providing all of those rich details, and they are then woven together by historians to create a linear narrative of the expedition. And if Clark had not done that, we'd be deeply impoverished. And we need both. We need Lewis's more high-flown prose, and we need Clark's sort of daily diary jottings, which give us all the rich detail which makes the story so interesting to everybody.

And together they make a really extraordinary team, but either one alone would have been a much less interesting adventure story. This is the emergency broadcast system. A ballistic missile threat has been detected inbound to your area. Your phone buzzes and you look down to find this alert. What do you do next? Maybe you're at the grocery store. Or maybe you're with your secret lover. Or maybe you're robbing a bank.

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It was done almost by fiat or executive power rather than through Congress. Tell us more about his desire for this empire of liberty, his maneuvering to get the Louisiana Purchase accomplished, and then perhaps his full impetus for sending Lewis and Clark west. I wouldn't say conniving. I would say clever, subtle, really with a great sense of timing. Jefferson said that we were going to possess the entire continent. The Mississippi was sort of the interstate highway of the interior, and the Spanish and French were trading off the territory of Louisiana and opening and closing the river somewhat capriciously.

And Jefferson knew that he had to keep that river open. It was essential to American commerce. So Robert Livingston was already there as an American minister. Jefferson sends James Monroe to help him. They offer money, and a lot of it, to buy either the village of New Orleans or perpetual rights of access to the lower Mississippi. And Napoleon, spontaneously and uninvited, gives them a counteroffer that he will sell all of the Louisiana territory for about

$16 million. That's 828,000 square miles. Jefferson had not contemplated this. I mean, he knew in the long run we might possess that much of the interior, but he had no interest in this at the moment. And he considered it a problem because he was a strict constructionist of the U.S. Constitution, and he knew that the Constitution strict constructionist of the U.S. Constitution. And he knew that the Constitution did not authorize the purchase of territory. And so he fretted about this. It was an illegal thing for him to do. Well, fortunately, his Secretary of State and closest friend James Madison said, wait a minute.

This is the greatest land sale in human history. You're buying 575 million acres for three cents per acre. Just do it. And so Jefferson repressed his constitutional qualms and made the purchase. But he didn't think that the Louisiana Purchase was going to come into his administration, and he was a little bit surprised and even freaked out when it did. But it absolutely did. He made the moment, and then all of a sudden, he has more than doubled the size of his nation, and he needs to do something with it. What were his first impulses? He had already authorized the Lewis and Clark expedition. Congress had

authorized it in the spring of 1803, and it was going to be looking at the interior of the United States, which ended at the Mississippi River, and then moving into a kind of no-man's interior of the United States, which ended at the Mississippi River, and then moving into a kind of no man's land of the upper Missouri, which was claimed by the Spanish and the French and to a certain degree, the British. And so we even got passports for Lewis and Clark from some of those foreign nations. But then the Louisiana Treaty came, and now we owned everything up to the continental divide of the Rocky Mountains. So the mission changed. Lewis was going on what Jefferson called a literary expedition before the purchase.

But afterwards, it was an important strategic and diplomatic mission. And so what Jefferson wanted to do first was get an inventory of all this land. Would it be good for farming? Did the rivers cooperate with our plan to make them the roads into the West? Was there a Northwest passage between the Missouri and the Columbia? He wanted all this knowledge and he wanted latitude and longitude and a catalog of animals and a catalog of plants and specimens to come back and maps and reports and weather data. And he wanted soil samples and to know what minerals were there,

and maybe there are gold mines or lead mines or salt mines out there. So he wanted this grand Enlightenment inventory. This portfolio of priorities for the expedition is expansive and difficult. How much leeway were Lewis and Clark given to shift their priorities or improvise? So Jefferson produces this endless list of things he wants them to do in his famous instructions of June 1803. So they're to do latitude and longitude. They're to take down Indian vocabularies. They were to learn whatever they could ethnologically about the native peoples they met. And they had gotten a list of medical questions from Benjamin Rush to put to the natives that they met. They were to do this diplomatic thing of explaining to the Indians of the West that Jefferson was their new great father and that their relations should be peaceful and with us only, and so on and so forth. But mostly Jefferson wanted them

to get out and get back and keep good records, which they did. Basically, they were able to fulfill most of Jefferson's list of desiderata, as he would have called it. They were extremely reliable. And this is Clark doing the legwork of keeping them moving. And so it's really amazing how much Lewis and Clark were able to accomplish, given the fact that they were moving fast and they were using extremely primitive instruments to try to take down what they could. Making it even slower was the enormous amount of just stuff they brought with them. But I'm interested in that almost a third of their load Lewis spent for gifts for different tribes. This was clearly a diplomatic mission. If they're dedicating one third of their supplies to be given away

to the tribes they will meet, what were they giving? Right. So let me start by saying they were carrying from St. Charles, from St. Louis, about 60,000 pounds worth of food, tools, scientific instruments, a small library, medicines, extra clothing, rifles, powder, lead, etc. And that payload had to take them all the way to the Pacific and back. The budget was $2,500 that Congress gave them, and Lewis spent a quarter of it on these Indian gifts. Gifts is not really the best term. What Jefferson believed in short was that we would begin by meeting native peoples. We would set up trade networks with them to give them things that they couldn't produce,

like pieces of metal, awls and needles and fishhooks and hatchets and also kettles and other things that they couldn't, they had no metal manufacturing. They would then become addicted to what industrial civilization can provide. The other things that they took, including beads and cloth and so on, were things that they thought natives would be attracted to and would want more of, but they didn't have any particular day-to-day utility. And then there's a third category of what I call sovereignty tokens. They took peace medals with Jefferson's face on one side

and the clasped hands of peace on the other, and the motto was peace and friendship. And they had certificates of good behavior printed on paper in which they could actually fill in the name of the tribe and the leader to show them that they were well regarded by the United States government. But these were sovereignty tokens. And by accepting one, let's say the leader of the Mandan or the leader of the Shoshone, whether he knew it or not, was committing himself to live within the diplomatic orbit of the United States of America. So they carried all that.

That brings up an interesting story because they brought to the native tribes an instrument of modernity of the time in the corn mill. But the natives weren't so interested in it. Can you tell us more about the mill that the expedition brought these tribes? Lewis obtained two corn mills. These were basically coffee grinders, but these were metal corn mills. And the idea was to wait till you find the tribes that have the most promise to become farmer Indians instead of nomads and then ceremoniously give them this extraordinary engine, this great machine. And so the great story is amongst the Mandan and Lewis and Clark wintered in what's now North Dakota. In fact, they spent more time in North Dakota than in any other state.

And the Mandan and Hidatsa were very friendly. And Lewis and Clark spent about five months with them between late October 1804 and April of 1805. And this was one of the most harmonious and mutually respectful interludes of the expedition. But with great pomp and circumstance, Lewis finally gave one of these corn mills to his friends, the Mandan. The Mandan had been farming for centuries, even millennia. And in fact, they were the master gardeners of North America. They knew exactly how to grind corn with mortars and pestles.

And they had 13 different varieties of corn. They had huge underground storage facilities. They were superb at all of this, and the last thing they needed was a bunch of huffing and puffing white people to come and tell them how to be farmers. You know, pretty much except for this wintering period with the Mandans, which was an extended period of exposure, Lewis and Clark, on average, spent two days with each tribe that they met. Having spent these few days, then they'd move on. But I was wondering then, how impactful were these encounters? How were the tribes left in the long run? Well, of course, Lewis and Clark thought that they represented the most extraordinary

civilization that had ever existed on Earth without a single exception. They were children of the Enlightenment. They were official representatives of the new Republic of the United States, the only nation really in the world that was attempting this experiment in self-government. And so they took themselves very, very seriously. And they assumed that everybody else on earth would want to be like America if they could. They came to these 50-some Native tribes that they met, and they carried that confidence with them. And so the Natives would listen and take this under advisement.

But they had been living this way for centuries. From the native point of view, these were these bearded strangers who turned up one day and made a lot of big speeches, some of which they could understand and some of which was just in a language that couldn't be translated. And then they disappeared. And mostly the natives went right back to the ways of lives that they had developed over millennia, certainly over hundreds of years. And so I'd say that Lewis and Clark's influence was negligible. But of course, they were the harbingers of a tidal wave, a tsunami of white presence, white exploitation, white aggression, and white demands for property, not to mention white diseases and pathogens that were going to

rock the Native American world in the next 70 or 80 years. And some natives had some sense of what was coming because there had been dream visions in their cultures that everything was going to get fundamentally disrupted. But they could not have known what was going to happen in the next decades of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. It was a cataclysm that knocks on the door of genocide. So Lewis and Clark get high marks for their relative innocence, but the native peoples rightly sort of developed a wait-and-see attitude

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Are we excited for this moment? Ah! I cannot believe it. Woo! Buy It Now. Stream free on Freeview and Prime Video. We started this conversation with remarking on the difficulty of understanding Lewis's death. What do you think drove him finally to suicide after accomplishing such an enormous feat? And what other theories are there that might help us understand his death?

So let me start by saying that there are some who believe that he was murdered. Unfortunately, there's no evidence to support that, but there is a substantial group in the Lewis and Clark world that would greatly prefer that he was murdered than that he committed suicide, because suicide somehow seems to cast a dark shadow over his life and the expedition. But the evidence points to suicide. So I wrote a long, long chapter in my book, The Character of Meriwether Lewis, about this. And I don't know that I got it, but I think I got as close as we're likely to get unless we find new evidence. He was a high-strung man, self-critical and self-punishing. He had a birthday meditation out in Montana in which he basically says, I'm underprepared for this. I should have spent my

life better and be better prepared for this moment. I can't do anything about that. Now, I'm going to resolve in the future to redouble my efforts to be a more enlightenment-based figure. It was too late by then, of course, but that's an instance of how self-critical he can be. When he got back, he had a hard re-entry. Clark re-entered easily. He soon married. He resettled in St. Louis. His career was successful.

He was good about getting his financial vouchers in. He bought property. He became one of the most important men in St. Louis. And when he died, there was a huge parade, the largest parade ever held in St. Louis up till that time. His doppelganger, Lewis, never married, was a kind of a self-pitying bachelor. He was like Jefferson a deist. He didn't have a god that he could pray to or ministers that he would trust. His mother was back in Virginia.

He was planning to bring her out, but that never happened. He was an unreliable record keeper. He did not keep in close contact with the United States government, which actually led to what might have been his recall. Certainly, he was under a cloud of rebuke from the War Department. said, when you bend to the moon, what's left? And the rest of his life has been a series of difficulties because he didn't know what the next act is for somebody who's walked on the surface of the moon. And I think Lewis didn't know what the next act is for somebody who has stood and bestridden the source of the mighty Missouri River. He also had writer's block. He couldn't write his book, and Jefferson would write to him every few months and saying, when can we expect the first volume of your three-volume account of the expedition? And so far as we know, Lewis never did it. So lots of things are going wrong. He can't find a wife. He has no God. His dog, Seaman,

has disappeared by this point. Clark has moved on, and they aren't able to spend their daily lives together in the way that they did so beautifully and so intimately, really, in the course of the expedition. And then he just doesn't have the capacity to keep Jefferson and Madison and the War Department happy with him. And he can't write the book. And so some combination of all of that, plus physical illness, he had a severe form of malaria. He probably suffered from depression. I don't want to diagnose him, but some have said bipolar, some have said manic depressive. Jefferson himself said that he was subject to depressions. All of that kind of gathers. And as he was heading back to Charlottesville and then to Washington, he stopped at this squalid inn on the Natchez Trace,

about 70 miles from Nashville. And he said before he died, before the gunshots that killed him, he said that it would be better to kill himself than let the war department do it for him. So he had this very, is in a deep mental malaise and probably toxic in several ways, including alcohol and opium at the time of his death on October 11th, 1809. But all of what I say could be wrong. It's at least possible that he was murdered

and he did not leave what we would call a suicide note. So we're left to speculate, but it's a tragedy because with him died a whole brain filled with impressions, with memories, with thoughts, with perspectives on his journey, only a fragment of which had ever found their way to paper. And had he lived to write up his masterful account of the expedition, we can only speculate at how magnificent it would have been and how different it would have been from the somewhat fragmentary materials that have been left to us. So, it's a tragedy for the Enlightenment,

it's a personal tragedy for Jefferson and Lewis, and it is for us just a fundamental mystery. The Lewis and Clark expedition was clearly impactful at the time, and then it, over the decades, became myth and lore. What is the real impact of it today, though? When they came back down the Missouri River in the autumn of 1806, they met more than a hundred people going up in a range of small parties. Most of the people they met said, oh, we thought you were dead or lost. I mean, the country had sort of moved on and even almost forgotten Lewis and Clark. Jefferson alone said, I knew you were going to be fine, although even I was worried. Their immediate impact was not much. The fur trade was going to happen with or although even I was worried. Their immediate impact was not much.

The fur trade was going to happen with or without them. What we're calling manifest destiny was going to happen with or without them. And we lost because Lewis never published the kind of enlightenment treatise that might have shaped some of the way we think about the West. He certainly lost his role as one of the greatest naturalists. he really would have been in a league with Audubon had he published all that he intended to publish because he was a gifted amateur scientist. So, I don't think that the impact of their expedition was very great, but it does do this. You know, we look at what happened in the 19th century and we cringe. The Indian Wars, the cultural genocide, sometimes actual genocide, the appalling land grabs and the breaking of treaties and the cultural disdain that the American government and its official policies brought to Native Americans,

from which they're just now beginning to recover. Lewis and Clark occupy a somewhat more innocent role in that. Yes, they were the ones that were cracking open the door, and others would follow. But Lewis and Clark were largely high-minded. Their hearts were good. They believed that they were representatives of the Enlightenment. They were working on behalf of the greatest Enlightenment figure in American history, Thomas Jefferson. And so their legacy is a paradox.

They were the harbingers of what would be almost the Greek tragedy of what happened to Native Americans in the aftermath. And yet they didn't really set that in motion. And if they had never done what they did, if there had been no Lewis and Clark expedition, the history of the West would be almost identical to what it is. And so what they do give us is this incredible story. James Ronda called it the greatest road story in American history and its first. And the Lewis and Garg expedition and its wonderful journals are endlessly fascinating and perplexing and intriguing and inspiring. And so they give us a window

into the moment before the 19th century really happened. And we get to see 10,000 buffalo in a single valley. We get to see native peoples in their pre-contact cultural integrity. Those things are of inestimable importance to us because it allows us for a moment to imagine not only a different America, but in some sense a different path for American history. Clay Jenkinson, thank you so much for speaking with me today on American History Tellers. I've enjoyed it all. I hope people will read books about the Lewis and Clark expedition. It's endlessly fascinating, Lindsay. That was my conversation with author, humanities scholar, and radio host Clay Jenkinson.

To hear episodes of his acclaimed public radio program and podcast, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, visit jeffersonhour.com. From Wondery, this is the fourth and final episode of Lewis and Clark from American History Tellers. On our next season, in 1927, record rainfall led to the most destructive river flood in American history. The Mississippi River and its tributaries flooded 27,000 square miles in seven states, destroying crops, inundating hundreds of farms and communities, and exposing deep racial divides in the town's hardest hit by the deluge.

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Lindsey Graham for Airship. Audio editing by Molly Bach. Sound design by Derek Behrens. Additional writing by Tristan Donovan. This episode was produced by Morgan Jaffe and Peter Arcuni.

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