Stuff You Should Know - How Lewis and Clark Worked

Episode Date: November 7, 2013

They may be the most famous explorers in U.S. history, but there are plenty of interesting details to the Lewis and Clark expedition that history has allowed to fade. Learn about the origin and the aftermath of America's first early push Westward in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Just fill and chill. Available at participating retailers and at epson.com. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Lewis. Brian. Yeah. I thought you were going to call me Lewis.

Yeah, I thought so. Yeah. You know, like I thought about it. You like that chuckle. Do that dumb joke. I wonder, I wondered if I was related to Mr. Clark. Oh yeah? Yeah, I'm just going to say I am from now on.

Do you like, have you heard of William Clark, the explorer? Lewis and Clark? Yeah. Well, I'm Josh Clark. Yeah. Because Clark's an unusual name you might be. No, but I mean like his family was from the Ohio River Valley. I grew up in Toledo.

Hey, there you go. I wonder, you have an explorer spirit. You're a laid back guy. Yeah. He was laid back. Yeah. Not like Lewis. He was semi-literate.

Yeah. I'm fairly literate. Yeah. That's the big distinction. It is funny, like have you read some of his verbatim journal entries? Who, Clarks or Lewises? Well, both of them, but Clark's way worse. Yeah, Lewis is a pretty good writer, I thought.

Yeah, but he had some weird spellings too. Clark was just like frontier Kentucky boy writing in a journal. Yeah. They were a good pair though. Yeah. And this isn't one of those podcasts or stories where you look back and you're like, oh, you know, history's really pumped this up and they were really kind of like this and like jerks and.

No, no. This was really a great story and they were actually true American heroes. You know? Yeah. One semi-tragic, I would say. Well, the ending is pretty tragic. No, but Lewis, Lewis is manic depressive. Yeah.

By all accounts. Yeah. Back then they called it prone to, you know, prone to fits. But modern people say, no, he was probably manic depressive. Right. And I prepped by watching the four hour Ken Burns documentary last night. Four hours? Yeah.

I thought it was two hours. And I was like, oh, I got this. And then I got to the two hour point and I was like, wait a minute, they just hit the continental divide. I don't think I'm at the end. That's so funny because in the email, you emailed me to suggest that I watch it. You called it a six part, not four hour. Well they had it on YouTube in six parts, but in actuality, it's 12 parts.

That's hilarious. All right. So let's do this. This is one of my favorite stories in history. Is it really? Yeah, man. And again, I've said this before, why isn't this a movie? Like a really good movie.

Have you seen almost heroes? Yeah. Right. There you go. No. All right, so Chuck, Lewis and Clark, Maryweather Lewis, William Clark, a pair of army folk turned explorers, thanks to a little bit of, I guess, serendipity. It would have been somebody else had it not been these guys because really the whole idea

of this expedition, which was called the core of discovery, it sounds like a soccer team. It was the brainchild of Thomas Jefferson. Yeah. And the brainchild of TJ because he's like, hey, I just bought, I just doubled the size of our country by buying a bunch of land from Napoleon. Do you know the background on that? The Louisiana Purchase? Yeah.

I know it's the greatest land deal in the history of the world probably. Yeah. But what do you mean? Well, it was the French's land and they were about to get it from, they were about to get it, give it to the Spanish. Well the Spanish were west of them, so probably. And the French like have barely any presence in this area, but it was their land. But the Spanish, had they taken over, they would have been a real problem because the

Americans had access to the port of New Orleans because the French were basically absentee landlords there. And so the idea that the Spaniards were about to get it, that was a big problem. So Jefferson sent some people over to France to try to negotiate something. Right. And it turned out Napoleon was having all sorts of problems and it had been recommended to him by his people, like just sell it to the Americans. They're coming over, they want to talk.

So I think James Monroe was sent by Thomas Jefferson with the limit of ten million dollars to do something, to buy Florida and New Orleans or New Orleans for up to ten million dollars. Monroe found out he could get all of the Louisiana Territory, which went up to Canada. Yeah. Louisiana is really under sells it. It was. They went from the Rockies all the way over to the colonies and then up to Canada and down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Yeah. It was double the size of our country. Yeah. Over night. So Monroe was like, I'll give you 15 million dollars for it. In the French, you're like sold. So he bought 827,000 square miles of North America. Yeah.

About three cents an acre. And that was a chunk of change though. I think that was double what our gross economy was at the time. But it's a pretty good investment. It was a great investment. Yeah. Could you imagine though how weird that would be if it had gone a different way, the United States could have ended it about the Mississippi River, which it did at the time.

And just beyond that, on the other side could have been Spain. Right. Or not Spain, but you know what I mean. A Spanish colony. Well, it could have been a lot like Africa, you know, like all of these former colonies that are just like adjacent to one another, but this is a French colony, this is a Belgian colony. This is a British colony.

And I think the Brits controlled Canada and like the Oregon territory at the time. Yes. Yeah. We were all sandwiched kind of in there together. Yeah. So we buy from the French. We go fight the Spanish for the rest of it. And in between all of this, we send Lewis and Clark to go check out what had just been

bought. And this expedition was going to happen anyway, but we thought that we were going to have to ask for permission to go through this area. Right. But now all of a sudden it was America. And that added a facet to this expedition that hadn't been there before, which was basically informing the Indians that they were now living in America. And they had a new great father, which is how Meriwether Lewis put it.

How would you describe TJ? Yeah. You have a new great father who lives in a lodge in Washington, D.C. and you can come visit him and see how great it'll be to live under his patronage. But not really. Right. Sign this treaty. So he was his private secretary, Lewis was, his kind of personal aide.

And he knew what kind of dude he was, maybe drank a little too much, was prone to depression. But he sort of gave him this job to help him out. He thought he'd be good for it. Don't get me wrong. Right. He groomed him for the position. But yeah. He had, he had vested interest in the man and he's like, this is going to be really

good for Lewis. This is what he needs. Right. He's 29 years old, which is remarkable to me. Good sharpshooter. He said, you pick your partner. He picked William Clark, who was his former captain, I believe in the army, a couple of years older and he looked up to Clark quite a bit.

Right. It was like, I need you, brother, because you, you complete me. Right. Which, by the way, we should probably say there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that Lewis and Clark were ever gay. Clark definitely wasn't. Is that a rumor? Yeah.

There's a lot of conjecture about Maryweather Lewis was, he courted several women and was rejected by all of them. He was a total eligible bachelor, never married, never was engaged or betrothed or anything. So of course, as time wore on, people were like, well, he must have been gay. I'd never heard that. Yeah. He had a lot of conjecture and they've come up with the idea that he probably wasn't gay, but that he was, um, by, no, that he had something of an aversion to women that was not necessarily

based on any kind of sexual orientation. He just didn't know what he was doing and he didn't feel comfortable around women. Well, like we said, he was by all accounts manic depressive, so he was kind of a messed up guy in a lot of ways. A little bit. All right. What's the magic figure you said? Yeah.

And we'll get to that. Um, the main goal, well, there are a couple of main goals. The main goal for Jefferson was, hey, I want to find this all water route to the sea. That's really important for trade. Right. And also, hey, let's check out this thing we just bought and go out and record as much of it as you can, animals, plants, people, uh, what the heck is out there basically? Come back and tell us.

Right. I think it's exactly a slouch when it came to this kind of stuff. His mother was a, um, celebrated herb doctor, um, in Virginia. Yeah. She knew what she was doing and, um, she kind of raised him in the woods. So he was, he was pretty good at botany, but to just kind of further his education and not just that, but all sorts of other things that would come in handy on the expedition. Jefferson sent him to the American Philosophical Association, which is the first learned society

in North America. And basically he underwent this like grueling crash course of everything from astronomy to cartography to geology. Medical training. Everything. Everything you could, you would need. They basically just filled Lewis's head with, and he in turn filled Clarkin on a lot of it too.

Yeah. Also a lot of what they might encounter in ways of, uh, we'll call them Indians for the purposes of the show because that's what they call them. Right. And Jefferson was like, and don't forget to call me the great father. That's awesome. So, um, Lewis is in Pittsburgh or in Philadelphia getting this training. He writes to Clark says, please join me on this.

And you are my captain. I'm a captain now. We're going to be co-captains on this just so there's not any kind of weirdness or anything like that. Like I'm, I was chosen to lead the expedition, but I'm choosing you for help, but let's do this evenly, which is unheard of. Yeah. It actually even more unheard of, it worked out really well.

Yeah, it did. Like there wasn't any kind of like backbiting or problems and they actually ran it a bit like a democracy too. Yeah. In the end, um, the, they were kind of described as a family, like really, really tighten it. I kept waiting for the story to go off the rails, but it didn't. They really hung together and stuck together after some initial discipline problems. Once they kind of weeded out, I think from summer to fall, they kind of weeded out some

of the bad apples. Well, what's funny, one guy got discharged for mutinous acts and another guy got discharged for desertion, but they, they, this happened in the middle of the, the first leg of the trip. So they had to stay on until they could get them to a place where they could go back. So they just had them doing hard labor the whole time. Wow. So, um, they brought along a couple of people of note.

One Clark took his slave York that he had had since he was a kid. He was only, uh, only black guy and only slave on the, uh, on the party, right on the adventure party. We'll call it. He was, um, he was technically a man servant, I guess, like a valet or something like that to Clark outside of the expedition. But on the expedition, York was, um, basically just a member of the party. Yeah.

He was a member of the party. Um, he played a really great role in diplomacy because, uh, the American Indian was, had never seen, uh, black people before and they didn't have hangups. Obviously like white people did. So they're like, this guy is awesome. He's huge and he's strong and look at that like amazing black skin that's even darker than ours. He really thought he was great.

Yeah. And I'm, you know, I'm sure all the white people on the thing were like, well, yeah, you know, look at me. Look, what about me? Yeah. My pale white skin. I'm friends with the great father, but he played a great role in diplomacy. Um, and like you said, was generally treated pretty well.

Um, although he did get sort of, sort of some of the crap duties. Well, plus he also got royally screwed over at the end of the expedition. Oh yeah. We'll get to that though. Okay. Uh, and so we have York with Clark and then, um, Lewis purchased a dog for $20. Yours name Seaman. And they used to think it was Scanan because they, these guys, um, handwriting was so bad

that for, yeah, basically a century, like everybody thought it was Scanan for two centuries. And then somebody figured out, well, wait a minute, why is one of these rivers called Siemens Creek? Right. And then they realized, wait, that's the dog. That's the dog. Everybody, by the way, had something named after them and they had trouble coming up with names for everything like York, the York islands of Montana, like everybody on that

tour had something named after them, which is kind of neat. Yeah. Uh, so he was a newfoundland dog and he made it the whole way. We're happy to go ahead and spoil that one. Yeah. Which is great. Cause they ate dogs, by the way, at some point on this trip, they ate a lot of horse. Uh, yeah, they did.

So like you said, they started in Pittsburgh, but the official start, uh, was really in St. Louis, uh, in December of, um, 1803, and they're like, all right, let's hit the river, the Missouri river. Well, that's where they assembled camp and wintered in St. Louis and assembled all their people and ran them through like army training and took the best of the best. They officially started in May, the following spring, of course you wouldn't start in the winter. Right.

Uh, so they had a big keel boat and a couple of smaller canoes and said, let's hit the river. And they did so. They said, let's do it because again, ultimately Jefferson was looking for a Northwest passage across the continent to the Pacific and he wanted to see if you could basically ride a river all the way across the country. Yeah. Uh, by the time, I think there were about 45 people at first, but when they eventually

whittled it down, the official core of discovery was 33 people. Right. So they, they head out and they start going upstream up the Missouri river. And it was rough going at first. Yeah. They were pulling their boat out from outside the water, waist deep by tow rope against the current again. Yeah.

They're going upstream the whole way to the source of the Missouri river. Yeah. So the first Indians they encountered, well, not the first, the first situation they encountered where the Teton Sioux or the Lakota and they're actually warned by previous American Indians like watch out for these guys. They're basically the mafia of the Missouri river. Oh yeah. Like they'll demand payment, they won't, uh, they'll take your goods, they'll control

the trade. Yeah. They wanted them to trade exclusively with them. Yeah. And they had done this to the French and the Spanish for years. Uh, and they, I think Lewis called them the pirates of the Missouri, but, um, when they did reach them, it came to a standoff over a canoe that they're, they gave them their gifts.

The first thing they would do whenever they encountered a new tribe was to like give them these trinkets, tell them about the great father, uh, give them like handkerchiefs and things like we come in peace. And, um, with, with the Teton Sioux though, there was a standoff over a canoe that they wanted and they're like, we're not giving this canoe. And it literally came to a point where guns were raised and like hundreds of Indians had their arrows pointed at them and it was about to go down. And, uh, chief black, uh, Buffalo intervened and was like, you know what, let our women

and children tour your really cool boat that we've never seen and meet all you guys and then y'all can have safe passage. So they managed to get through there unscathed, but that was their first like run in where they were like, man, this could go down pretty badly. Yeah. And luckily that was one of just a few. I think as far as cross country uncharted expeditions, uncharted expeditions go, this went about as good as you could possibly hope for.

Yeah. I mean, it was super peaceful. Um, they were the core of discoveries. Yeah. Then the core of bloodshed or something. Well, they only shot one bullet in anger the entire trip. Is that right? It was pretty remarkable.

And that is neat. Uh, so they hit the great plains and that might as well have been Mars to them. Um, if you think about it, if you'd never been west of, I think there's a saying that a squirrel can jump from tree to tree till it hits the Mississippi. Oh yeah. And so when they hit the great plains, they had never seen anything like it. Like there were no trees. This is planes.

It's just planes. And it was just, you know, they were absolutely blown away by this. And, uh, there they encountered the Mandan and Minotauri or Hidatsa Indians. Right. And they decided, all right, this is a pretty good place to build a camps here for a few months. And they built Fort Mandan, which they named after the local, uh, one of the local tribes. And, um, and they were buddies.

They had like lived together in harmony. Right. They got the, they forged friendships. They were visited by locals and, uh, something big happened here, which we'll get into in a second, but first let's do a message. This message is brought to you by discover. Did you know you could reduce the number of unwanted calls and emails with online privacy protection?

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Just go to stamps.com, click on the microphone at the top of the page and enter our code stuff. Okay, Chuck. So we're at Fort Mandon. Yeah. Which is wearing South Dakota. I think. Yes.

They were having a good time hanging out, having lots of sex with the local ladies. Yeah. There's a big problem with venereal disease on the expedition because like they were having a lot of sex with Indians and the Indians had syphilis, which is something that was unknown to Europeans and Europeans contracted it very easily. So that was a big thing. Well that was another thing about Lewis too. Apparently like everybody else in the expedition had sex with Indian women and he was like

he stayed away from it. His journal entries about like Indian sexual practices were very like snide, I think is a way one person put it. Yeah. It's just, he's an odd duck I get. What if he tried to put on that he was just cleaning up and they're like, Lewis, it doesn't hurt when he pees. Like something's going on.

Right. It doesn't burn. I don't think he's having sex. He's an outlaw. No. He says he had sex with all those women. Right. Yeah.

It doesn't burn when you pee. Right. It doesn't burn when Lewis pees. Yeah. So apparently burning when you pee was a big thing on the core of discoveries discovered syphilis too. All right. So the other important thing that happened here, which is I think what you were getting

to was they hired a French Canadian trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau, but they really, what they were doing was hiring his wife. Yeah. Sacagawea. Sacagawea or Sacagawea. I didn't mispronounce it. You didn't mispronounce it. There's a lot of pronunciations.

Yeah, but there's only one that's right, and the right one is based on the journal entries of Lewis, Clark, everybody else on the expedition, because this was an expedition. Everyone was expected to like make notes and write the stuff down. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And Sacagawea is mentioned dozens of times in these journals because she did do some outstanding stuff.

Oh, yeah. And she's mentioned phonetically. So it's Sacagawea. Yeah. So at some point, it's also mentioned that her name is Shoshone for bird woman. Yeah. And in Shoshone, Sacaga is bird, and Wea is woman. So it's Sacagawea, not Sacagawea.

That's right. Well, I mean, that's a big point. It's true. Although in the Ken Burns thing, these historians all pronounced it differently. Yeah. Which was sort of frustrating. Well, yeah. There's Sacagawea.

Yeah. And then Sacagawea. Well, yeah, one of the ladies called her straight up Sacagawea, and I was like, straight up Sacagawea? Straight up. So she was very important because, A, she was a translator, B, she was essentially a white flag everywhere they went. Yeah.

And I don't think we said this, but by the time they broke camp to leave, she had a baby. Yeah. She actually gave birth to her first child in Fort Mandon. Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. Yeah. Who's pretty cool, grew up to be pretty cool. Yeah. But Sacagawea, if we say Sacagawea, too, I think that's fair.

Okay. She was 16 at the time, and she was married to Charbonneau. Yeah. She was one of two of his wives. And I didn't hear anything about the other Shoshone woman. Did she not go along? I don't think so. Okay.

All right. So, Jean Baptiste and Toussaint were a family, even though Sacagawea was Toussaint's slave wife. Like, he purchased her. Yeah, yeah. But she was Shoshone, and the reason why she was so valuable is because the expedition leaders had found out that the Shoshone were known for their horsing abilities. Yeah.

And the expedition had two horses that they set out with, and we're like, we're gonna need a lot more. Sure. At some point. So, we need to trade with the Shoshone when we make it to the Rockies, and we will need this woman. And she comes in handy to a spectacular degree in this sense. Yeah.

And not only was she a white flag, she was just great for the spirit of the camp to have a woman there. Yeah. And the baby was a charmer, too. Oh, of course. You know, you can't pull up with a woman and a baby and say, like, we're warring people. Exactly. You know.

Apparently, across all tribes along the plains, if you have a woman and a baby in your party, you're automatically not a war party, and therefore, you come in peace. Yeah. And she was also pretty awesome. And Charbonneau himself was described as quite average, but Sacagaway was the real deal. Like, one of the bravest members of the expedition, and at one point, one of the boats overturned and they were losing a lot of their important records and things, and she was the main one that was like, boom, in the water, retrieving the stuff while Charbonneau was, I don't know

what he was doing. Oh, who knows what Charbonneau was doing, but Sacagawaya was swimming, retrieving the stuff. This is after she'd given birth. She was breastfeeding, walking scores of miles in any given week. She was pretty tough. Yeah. And you know, we'll go ahead and spoil this.

That baby, like we said, lived, it made it all the way there and back. This brand new baby till the age of about, I guess, two and a half. And he just stole William Clark's heart. Yeah. He loved him. He ended up adopting him. He did. Yeah.

He adopted him and educated him in St. Louis. Yeah. After she died. Yeah. So, but yeah, his name was Jean Baptiste, the baby, and he was nicknamed Pompey because of his pompous little dancing antics. Right. Clark found him to be quite the little dancer.

So the other way that Sacagawaya was helpful to this expedition was that she was a translator. She could speak Shoshone, obviously. Yeah. She could also speak Hedata. And so her husband could speak Hedata. So if she was speaking to a Shoshone, let's say they encountered a Shoshone person. The Shoshone would speak to Sacagawaya. She would say what they said in Hedata to her husband.

Her husband would say in French what had just been said in Hedata to another man who would in turn tell William and Maryweather what had been said in English. That was the translation line. Yeah. And Sacagawaya was the pivotal point of this as far as speaking to Plains tribes went. Yeah. And you would think that setting it up to say in like big problems arose because of it, but it really worked pretty well.

No, because they were also trained in plain sign language too. Apparently, there was a lot of gesturing that was fairly universal that a lot of the people who were recruited in St. Louis originally were familiar with too. Yeah. So they got along pretty well. They did. Okay. All right.

So after the Mandan villages, they broke camp and went on to the confluence of the Yellowstone with the Missouri and entered a land where they started seeing like when they hit the plains, they started seeing these crazy animals they'd never seen before. It's important to say they didn't discover anything. Yeah. It's very important to say that. They were just the first white guys to record it for science. But prairie dogs and elk and buffalo by the tens of thousands, antelope, all kinds of things

to them that were just these weird animals, they actually sent a live prairie dog back to Jefferson, which is pretty neat. It's hilarious. And it made it all the way. Grizzly bears, they encountered those for the first time on this expedition? Yeah. They were warned of the grizzly by the Indians and they were like, we've hunted brown bear and black bear.

We know we're talking about bear. And then they were kind of like, holy crap, in their journals, they were like, I've never seen anything like this. It took 10 shots and we almost died and the grizzly bear is to be reckoned with. Lewis said something like, I'd rather fight two Indians than one grizzly bear. So here we are in early June. They reached the point where the Missouri divided that they weren't told about this fork.

So they're like, huh. What should we do here? It went in equal parts north and south. Yeah, I mean, it was like a hardcore left and right. Yeah. Hardcore. It was basically everyone in the party agreed on one direction except Lewis and Clark. They were like, we were old school, we like in sync.

So they, despite the fact that everyone disagreed, they followed them and that just shows like how united they were. They were like, you know what, we don't think you guys are right, but we're going to follow you because you are our captains. Right. And we want to see your faces when you realize you're wrong, which actually would happen. But it wouldn't lead to like eating each other like the Donner party. No, huh?

So they keep moseying along and they're doing pretty well. They apparently they got to a point where Clark looked down one day. I think it was Clark. It was possibly Lewis too. It was Lewis. And he realized that a little stream at his feet was running west and he realized that they just crossed the continental divide. Yeah.

That was the mouth of the Missouri that they were literally straddling with your feet. Yeah. And they, uh, that meant that now they had just left the Missouri and we're going to hook up. First, they went onto the Snake River, but that would take them to the Columbia River, which by their reckoning would take them to the Pacific Ocean. So they'd made it like a substantial amount of distance. Yeah.

That was a depressing moment though for Lewis because he, he thought when he reached that ridge that he would look and see just downhill to the ocean. Yeah. And what he saw was Rocky Mountains. Nevada. Yeah. And he was like, oh man, this is not going to be very easy. No.

We didn't know about the Rocky Mountains. No. And even, uh, even still when they finally do think that they see the ocean, they still were 25 miles away from it when they finally get to that point. Yeah. Which we'll get to. Oh, sorry. That's right.

And so what they ended up doing, they made a mistake because there was a shortcut they could have taken. Oh really? That would have taken four days and instead they had to go work their way around the great falls of Montana, which took, uh, 53 days of portage, uneasy portage. Yeah. Because this portage was like carrying these boats. Yeah.

But also these guys were wearing like moccasins and stuff and they had a huge problem with prickly pear. Yeah. Which would just go right through your moccasins. It was basically like stepping on nails the whole time while you're carrying a very heavy boat. Yeah. And all your supplies.

Right. Whiskey and, you know, food. Yeah. Salt. Uh, so on July 25th, they arrived at another fork, uh, three forks. They named them the Gallatin for the secretary of treasury, the Madison for the secretary of state and the Jefferson and decided to follow the Jefferson because, uh, there was more to it, I think.

Yeah. And I think they were like, this is the one that is going to head west. Right. And they followed that. I think at this point or either right before or right after, they, they, um, meet up with the Shoshone. Have they met the Shoshone yet? Uh, well, at this point, Lewis went off by himself, um, and a couple of more people to

find the Shoshone, including Saka Gawai. Right. Or no, she wasn't there yet. I don't think she was there yet. Okay. But, uh, he did find them and, um, he basically said, Hey, we come in peace, we have a camp back here. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, they were in bad shape apparently. The Shoshone were. Oh, they were. Yeah. They were pretty worse for the wear and very docile as a result. Um, so he met these women and children and, and told them all that stuff. And they came back and hung out with them and at camp, Saka Gawai recognized one of the

women. Yeah. That, uh, Clark. Was it Clark or Lewis? Uh, I think at this point it was both who, who they came back with and said, Hey, we found some Shoshone. And she said, Hey, that's actually my BFF from first grade. Yeah.

Cause remember Saka Gawai had been, um, kidnapped and sold. Yeah. So there were still members of her tribe living around the Rockies and, um, she actually met up with them. And with her brother, who was now chief. Yes. She was like, you're chief. You know, you know it.

Little sister. Yeah. And he went, you're married to a French trapper. She was like, that guy, not really. He bought me, uh, which is not funny at all. You know, um, so then they proceeded across the continental divide to the main village with the Shoshone's and, uh, hired on a tour guide, old Toby, which is a great name for an Indian tour guide and said, Toby said, you know, I'll lead you through these mountains.

But we're going to need some horses to eat cause it's going to be rough and to travel with. Right. But this is where they were really eating a lot of horse meat. Yeah. The Bitterroot Mountains. It was pretty rough through Montana and Idaho. Uh, and that was when, you know, their spirits were never broken, but that's when they were

dampened for sure. So, um, when they make it through the Bitterroot, I don't remember why they did or where, but there was a point where they said, we can't use these horses anymore. I guess it's when they got onto the Columbia River, right? Well, maybe is this where they were eating salmon and the salmon was making them sick? Yeah. So they come to a Nespears village with old Toby, I believe it at the lead. Yeah.

And, um, they're celebrated, welcomed, they throw a feast for them, and it makes everybody violently ill in the expedition. Yeah, they're like, this salmon is awful. Yeah. Or these roots or whatever. I'll bet it was the roots that got them. Yeah, I think it was. So apparently everyone recovered, um, but they say, okay, well, here's the Columbia River.

We can't really use these horses anymore. I think one of the things that's very much overlooked in the history of this expedition is just how much the Corps of Discovery relied on friendly tribes. So like when they hit the Columbia River, they said, hey, Shoshone, or no, Nespears friends. Yeah. Will you watch our horses for us? And the Nespears said, yes.

Yeah. You guys go to the Pacific Ocean when you come back, we'll have your horses. Go ahead and brand them so you know which ones are yours. And they did. Yeah. So this is with the Nespears. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was kind of a best case scenario of story for most of the trip.

Yeah. It's pretty cool. And that is actually too where they were, uh, where they traded for dog to eat, which was one of the only disappointing parts of the story for me. Yeah. Um, that and what happened to York. All right. So this point, it's, uh, mid-October.

Yeah. It floated down to, uh, the great falls of the Columbia, which is now salillo falls. I think about how much easier it was at this point. Like they're not going upstream any longer. They get to go with the current true, but it was the Oregon territory. So they were getting rained on constantly. Oh yeah. I mean, it was pretty brutal conditions, um, but you're right.

It wasn't like slugging through in the summertime, pulling that boat upstream, stepping on prickly pear. Exactly. Uh, so this is where on November 7th, they thought that they saw the ocean. Uh, it was actually a bay about 25 miles inland. And one of us said ocean and view O C I N. I love the ocean O T E A N in this, the same paragraph. They misspelled ocean two different ways.

Give them a break. Come on. Uh, finally, finally, finally by mid-November, they strode upon the sands of the Pacific. And this is the really sad part is that Mary weather called it tempestuous and horrible. Like he wasn't like, Oh, we made it. He was, he was depressed and he was like, this isn't like the Atlantic ocean. This is Rocky and beating us with waves like the Oregon coast is rough. Yeah.

Uh, and he didn't cotton to it. Um, but what he did cotton to was being an accurate dude by dead reckoning over the course of over 4,100 miles. He was only off by 40 miles. Wow. And charting this, this ride, that is pretty amazing. It's pretty remarkable. So, uh, Sacagawea, um, one of the reasons she signed on, aside from being a slave to

her husband who signed her on, um, was that she wanted to see the Pacific. She'd heard about the great waters. Oh yeah. And yeah. And so when they were getting closer, um, she petitioned Lewis and Clark saying like, there's no way you can't let me not come with you to see the Pacific Ocean itself. Right. And they let her come along.

They had word from some local tribe, I'm not sure which one it was that there was a monstrous fish on the beach and Lewis and Clark are like, well, they're talking about a whale. We should go get some blubber and Sacagawea is like, I'm there. I'm coming with you. So they took her along and they all got to go see the Pacific Ocean and it was a personal that first time. Yeah. They got a bunch of blubber and oil and stuff from it.

Um, and it died first so you can keep liking Lewis and Clark. Um, so, uh, they camp there. On the Pacific for a full four months. Yeah. Basically they were trying to, two things they were trying to decide what to do and they were technically they were waiting for a boat to come by say a letter of credit from Jefferson that said, Hey, if you're a boat, give these people a ride back and we'll pay you like good money.

Right. I read that they never seriously thought that they were going to take a boat back. Well, that was the deal is technically they were supposed to be waiting for a boat. What they were really doing was just sort of weighing their options as to how best to go back and win. And this is the really cool part. They put it to a vote. They did put it to a vote.

Um, and it was a vote that included an African American and a woman and a native American. Yeah. And it was a who Sakegawa and York both had both their votes were given equal weight to everybody else's. Yeah. It was very cool where to camp set up camp for the winter. Yeah. So they, uh, elected to cross the river to the south, um, where they were informed that

there was elk and deer. You can hold up here. You can hunt all winter and they did and prepare yourself for the return journey home, which we'll get to after this message. This message is brought to you by discover. Did you know you could reduce the number of unwanted calls and emails with online privacy protection, the latest innovation from discover, discover will help regularly remove your personal info, like your name and address from 10 popular people search websites that could sell your

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stuff. All right, so here we are at Fort Klatsop, Oregon, Oregon, named after the Klatsop tribe. They were hunting. They were storing up. They were getting their provisions in order, getting ready to go back and they hauled butt on the way back as they did. Yeah. You know how it is.

Sure. Plus it doesn't take as long because now you know how long it's going to take. Yeah. And they weren't stopping to record everything. They did actually split up. They're like great dogs. We've already seen it. Yeah.

Been there. But the group wasn't as happy. They were irritable, especially Lewis. He kind of fell into a depression on the way home. He didn't. Did he come out of it at all while they were at the Pacific or did it just stick the whole time? Well, I mean, I think it was up and down.

Basically, they believe when he was not recording in his journal, he was depressed. Oh, okay. But he is remarkable in that he soldiered on like, this is a manic depressive who was still like getting up every day and doing this, and like the worst thing he did was not journal. Right. You know, actually, the worst thing he did was on the way back, he stole a canoe at one point, which is really out of character and he was described as kind of like cracking

at the seams at this point, which is really sad. So March 23, 1806, they started back up the Columbia with these new canoes, bartered for some horses, and camped with the Nez Pierce for a month. No, they got their horses back from the Nez Pierce. Those horses, those were theirs, the ones they branded and left with the Nez Pierce. Well, now this is before they got back there to the Nez Pierce. They bartered for some horses and then eventually hooked back with the Nez Pierce and camped for like a month.

And got their horses back. Got their horses back. I think that's your favorite part of the story. I think it's cool. Hey guys, will you hang on to this for us? They also sunk their canoes at a certain point and then went back and got those. Yeah, to keep the canoes from being sent down river, they just sunk them and then they came back and got them.

That's pretty cool. So they basically retraced their trail through the Bitter Roots. Only one retrograde March on the entire journey, which means you have to double back basically, which is in itself pretty remarkable. And then on July 3rd, 1806, they separated back where they were at that original shortcut that they should have taken and said, hey, let's send off some different factions here and do a little bit more exploring and a little bit more recording of things. They're like, we've slacked off.

Well, yeah, because they were kind of like I said, they were home, but on the way home. This is where Lewis, where they ran into their first kind of violent episode with the Black Feet Indians and a dude shot at Lewis. He shot back, hit the guy in the belly. Another guy stabbed the Black Feet Indian or is it a Black Foot Indian? I think Black Foot. And they rode away like the Black Feet did, but two of them died and it was, you know, it was sad.

They had gone all that way without violence and they finally kind of had to. Their hand was forced essentially. Chuck, also, there was another shooting that took place during this period, but this one was accidental. Oh, yeah. Lewis was actually shot when he was mistaken for an elk while he was out hunting with a member of the expedition, Pierre Cousette. And Cousette didn't fess up to it immediately.

He was like, oh, I guess some Indians, it must have been those Black Feet. And finally, when they searched the area and found no sign of Black Feet, Cousette was like, I'm sorry. I thought you're an elk. I'm blind in one. I don't forget. But I'm the fiddle player and everybody loves me. Yeah, exactly.

And Lewis was like, we'll just let it go. And apparently was really in a lot of pain. It hit him in the thigh and like he had a very long and difficult recovery for the rest of the time. But it was about this time when everybody came back together. Yeah. And this, you know, we're sort of simplifying this part of the story, but they eventually did all meet back up pretty remarkably.

Like I think the story is one of them rounded a bin and right as they did that, the others were rounding the bin and they're like, oh, hey, it's you. They're like, it's you out here in the middle of nowhere. So they eventually went back to the Mandan villages. That is where the Charbonneau family left the expedition. And that is where a private John Coulter who was one of the men said, you know what, St. Louis, like, I didn't like it there. I really like it out here.

Can I kind of go back? And they're like, sure, man, go, go West, young man. Exactly. And he did so. He did. He was going to work with some French trappers. And they had a following up pretty quickly after. And then this guy, Coulter, he went off on his own and they think he was the first white

person to enter what's now Yellowstone Park. And he was. He was the first to recount the geysers and even still there's part of it called Coulter's hell. Oh, cool. The geyser area of Yellowstone. Very cool. So reportedly the only thing they did not run out of on the way home was powder, lead,

paper and ink. Wow. Or at least that's what Ken Burns says. You know how they put a little cherry on top of everything. Right. Finally, in September of 1806 on the 23rd, they arrived victorious in St. Louis and the river was lined with people cheering for them, shooting their guns in the air. And like we should point out, everyone thought they were dead.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, for a long time, like they were sending messages back in prairie dogs, but then at a certain point that just wasn't possible. So even Jefferson had given up hope. They've been like, they've been gone for two and a half years. Yeah. Like we're not going to hear from Lewis and Clark again.

And then they did. And then they did. And covered about 8,000 miles over two years, four months and nine days. Recorded, I'm sorry, not discovered, saw recorded 122 animals that they had never seen, 178 plants that they'd never seen and did a pretty darn good job of cartography, right? Cartographing. Is that even a word? Yeah, I think it is.

Drawing maps. That was great. Describing the Rocky Mountains and Jefferson was like Rocky Mountains. I have mountains now. What are those? and they were like, they're snow capped even in the summer. And they were, you know, they'd never seen any of this or blown away. So after this, Clark sets up shop in St. Louis. Yeah.

They doubled everyone's pay, which was nice and gave everyone a bunch of land. Right. You got, I think 320 acres. Yeah. Lewis and Clark got 1600 each, but the rest of the guys got like 320. Almost the rest. Two people did not get any land or any money and that was Sacagawea and York, which sucked. Yeah.

And apparently York had a difficult reentry into slavery. I can imagine so. Could you think about like living like that and then going back to being a slave? Yeah. And so he asked Clark for his freedom. He's like, I know I don't get land and all that stuff, but how about my freedom? And Clark was like, no. And not only that, he wrote his brother a letter and said, you know, York is being kind

of uppity since he got back. He's not, he's not being a good slave and he's having trouble and so I had to beat him. No. Yeah. That was the one time I was like, oh man. Yeah. That's pretty awful.

This was like really headed in the good direction. And all that had to happen was he could have just said, yes, you are free. And then it would have been the best story ever. Man, that's, that's really awful. I had no idea about that. Yeah, and then there were, there were various accounts that he might have been freed a few years later or perhaps escaped. No one is quite for sure, even though, but notice Ken Burns does a lot of factual stating

of things that are disputed. Yeah. Like he just said straight up that he was freed five years later and I read up on it and people are like, oh, maybe not. Ken Burns just does whatever his haircut tells him to. I'm a sucker for those things though. I mean, I know a lot of documentary filmmakers kind of poo poo him. Oh, yeah.

Well, I mean, it takes a certain interpretation and that's that. Exactly. Like you said. So, wait, hold on. I'm really disappointed in Clark. I know. That stinks. What do you want me to do?

I don't know. It is very sad. I guess talk about Lewis. Yeah. I mean, Clark went on, we should say to have like a very successful rest of his career. Well, hold on. You want to bright side? Okay.

So, in 2001, gave a posthumous rank as Sergeant in the Army to York. Oh, great. So that's kind of nice. And... Way to go, Clinton. Today, there are some statues commemorating York. One in Louisville, Kentucky, I think there's one at Lewis and Clark College in Portland in Kansas City.

There's one. Nice. So, he's definitely been smiled upon historically as like a great man and adventurer. Great. By everyone but William Clark. Yeah. And his family. Who was like, no.

So Lewis had some difficulties upon returning home. He's made governor, appointed governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory. I think started out well, but then he kind of got into financial trouble. I think his territory got into financial trouble, right? Yeah. And he was going to Washington. He wasn't able to complete... The big thing was he wasn't able to complete what he was supposed to do, which is come

back and write about the whole thing. And yeah, those weren't published until 1814, which is eight years after they returned. And even then, they were published after his death. Yeah. So, he was, by all accounts, pretty depressed. He was on his way to Washington supposedly to plead for more money for the territory. Yeah. To kind of...

He had been called out on some finances and he wanted to go clear that up. And supposedly, he had some of his journals that he wanted to turn in. I got you. It's like, here, I've got this. Right. I got a favor a little bit with Jefferson because of all that, which is kind of stinks. It is because he was groomed by Jefferson. That was a family friend.

Yeah. Like, they were friends. So, Lewis, I guess, is on his way to Washington and he's following the Natchez Trail, Natchez Trace. Yeah. And he stops in Tennessee at a place called the Grinders Inn. Yeah, near Nashville. And that's where he died.

He was found, well, apparently crawling toward the innkeeper's wife, shot, bleeding, asking for water and she just, like, screamed and ran away. Yeah. And this is another disputed thing. Was he killed or did he commit suicide? If you Google death of Marroweth or Lewis, it comes up suicide, but it is definitely in dispute. Yeah.

And Ken Burns straight up said he killed himself and it was very sad. Well, the reason why it's in dispute is because he was shot in the abdomen and in the head. Yeah. He was also an expert marksman. Yeah. And the suicide people, I think, reckoned that back then with guns, like, if you really wanted to do it, you would point one at your chest and one at your head and squeeze at the same time.

Oh, really? Yeah. Like, boom. Yeah. But other people said he was murdered for money and what were you going to say? Nothing. Okay. Sadly, even though this story had a happy ending, it was sort of the beginning of the

end of the American Indian. Yeah. That's a pretty big thing to point out. Yeah. There was a great quote from one of the people in the documentary that said they left his students, came back as teachers, and sadly, America failed to learn the lessons that they had brought back with them. Because if everything had gone the way of Lewis and Clark, it would have been awesome.

They were basically like, hey, you got the great father, like we said, we're going to live in harmony and they believed him and they believed themselves, you know, they weren't like pulling one over on him. Yeah. And it's just sad that it went down a different way from that point forward, basically. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? There was one brief moment when it could have gone a different way.

Yeah. And that was it. Yeah. But Clark and Lewis also, I guess, kind of paved the way for the idea of manifest destiny. True. Although that wasn't coined until about 40 years after the expedition. They are always held up as this idea, and this is an idea that people subscribe to for a very long time.

Yeah. That America was destined to take up the area between the Pacific and the Atlantic. It was our destiny. Yeah. And therefore, anything that stood in our way should just fall before us as we swept outward toward the Pacific Ocean. That injustifies it means. And Lewis and Clark was like, look, they're an example of that.

Yeah. He eventually died of natural causes in 1838. Most of the rest of the party sort of just faded into history. John Baptiste. Well, yeah, he didn't. He became like a courtesan, not a courtesan, but be a lady, a courtier, right? One of the two. Yeah.

He went to Europe. He was Prince of the German Prince. Oh, a German prince? Prince Wilhelm. Oh, OK. And I think the oldest survivor lived to be 99, lived all the way to the Civil War. Oh, yeah. And at the age of 90, volunteered to fight for the union.

And I don't know if they took him up on it or if they were just like, we get it, you're a legend, but we got this. Yeah. So who knows? So that's the Lewis and Clark expedition, the core of discoveries. The dog lived. The baby lived. Yeah.

The dog made it all the way. They only lost one person on the entire trip, Charles Floyd, and he died early on of what they believe was probably appendicitis. Yeah. Burst appendix. And it's pretty amazing. Yeah. They didn't have to eat each other.

No. They didn't even eat the guy who died of the burst appendix. No. Just dog and horse. Yeah. If you, you got anything else? Nope. If you want to learn more about Chuck's favorite story from American history, you can type

in Lewis and Clark in the search bar how stuff works. And since I said search bar, it means it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this diplomatic immunity. Hey, guys, last week, the Dutch police arrested the Russian diplomat, Dmitry Borodin, in his home. They were called in by concerned neighbors because the diplomat was drunk, hitting his kids, dragging them by their hair through the house. The police arrived as and was witness to the brutality against the children and also established

that Mr. Borodin was extremely drunk. They had no choice but to arrest him to protect the children from further abuse. Immediately, the Russian government came into action and Putin, the devil incarnate, if you ask me, this is from Jasper, demanded his release and apologies from the Netherlands. That same afternoon, I started listening to the latest stuff you should know. Lo and behold, it was about diplomatic immunity. As a podcast drew to a close, I received a news update on my phone that the Dutch government had apologized to the Russians for the arrest because it violated the Treaty of Vienna.

And he won out again since then UNICEF has issued a statement that the well-being of the children should be more important than diplomatic immunity. Maybe something will finally change? Probably not. Personally, I hope we declare Borodin persona non grata, but that seems unlikely. Anyway, I wanted to share this actuality of your podcast with you. It's pretty weird that it happened when it did and luckily it wasn't about floods or earthquakes.

And that is from Jasper in Amsterdam, one of my favorite cities. Thanks a lot Jasper. It's pretty interesting. I love it when things happen like simpatico like that. Confluence. Yeah. Well, if you have a confluence email you want to send us, you can send us an email at stuffpodcast.discovery.com. You can also hit us up on Facebook.

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Visit gateonetravel.com for more information or to book your tour. That's gatethenumberonetravel.com. Once again, use promo code HEART20 through January 30th to receive 20% off your 2023 trip. The South Dakota Stories, Volume Two. I could see beyond the black hills and the way they called for exploration. I could feel the air, the way it paints against skin and fills hungry lungs. I could hear the way the water ran for miles and the way the bison grazed, the way our

boots meet the earth as we step past expected. I could imagine my time in South Dakota and I wish to go back because there's so much South Dakota, so little time.