The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 346: Sex and Suicide on the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Episode Date: July 4, 2022

Steven Rinella talks with Brad Tennant, Janis Putelis, Ryan Callaghan, Brody Henderson, Spencer Neuharth, and Phil Taylor. Topics discussed: How Steve isn't too into Lewis and Clark; Dustin Huff not learning a thing from us about keeping secrets; 400 stitches for the 9-year-old girl who survived the mountain lion attack in WA; when old men loot an ancient archaeological site in Tightwad, Missouri; Steve, the metal detecting enthusiast; all of Jefferson's trip plans; eating dogs and all the things on the expedition; Russia's thunderbolt mercury laxative; lashes from the cat of nine tails; the universal sign language between mountain men; how to pronounce Sacajawea's name; diaries and sexual relations; the National Park Service and exhuming bodies; encounters; the tigercat story; failing to accomplish the number one mission objective; Hollywood movies made about the expedition stories; critters named after Lewis and Clark; how experts never agree; and more.    Connect with Steve and MeatEater Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop MeatEater Merch See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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underwearless. We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything presented by first light creating proven versatile hunting apparel from merino base layers to technical outerwear for every hunt first light go farther stay longer all right everybody uh first off brad tenant is here. History professor at Presentation College in Aberdeen, South Dakota. And is described as a Lewis and Clark nerd. Do you prefer expert? I prefer expert, yeah. Did you, did you, did you, are you formally educated in Lewis and Clark?

It's just been something that I've grown up with. I grew up about 15 miles from the Missouri River, so a very historic area. And Lewis and Clark was always part of the history of the area and also state history. And then as I went into teaching, it was an area that I taught quite a bit about. Did you study up on it in school?

Like, did you pursue it for any of your degrees? Not so much in school, but it's when I started teaching that I really started delving into it a lot more in detail. Spencer, you found him, right? Yes, he came on a YouTube show that we made looking at Lewis and Clark

catching catfish. And I consider having Brad on this podcast is like one of my greatest career achievements so far because you don't think Lewis and Clark are all that cool. No, I think it's big government. That's why i like free trappers man uh-huh

well so what what is it you don't love about lewis and clark's big government yeah like now a couple dudes wandering around out there trapping beavers is cool you already messed it up steve when you say big government you have to follow it up with i'm not gonna say anything just do the research okay exactly uh that's a good point no i'm mostly joking but it's like it's just too or it was i thought it was too organized yeah but like a lot of people too organized i like the stories about just a couple dudes like for instance i don't know if you're familiar with a fellow named john colter brad i am uh um now his first trip out with lewis clark whatever but before he gets back he joins up with some trappers and turns around and goes back that's interesting but i got a question for you weren't some of those mountain men involved in some very organized, heavily manned expeditions too?

Well, that's why Yanni will now educate you on what a free trapper is. Oh, I will. Well, because you know that guy that used to tell you he's a free trapper. I like to walk around, yeah, saying that we're all free trappers and we do whatever we want to do. But I don't know if I know the definition. You had company in the mountain man area. You had company trappers or brigade trappers and you had free trappers and a lot of those famous dudes were both both but linked up with you usually started as a company trapper and then

you became a free trapper or you could be just a free trapper and uh you know so when you say like if if uh you're going out fishing you fishing and your spouse is like, you're what? You'd be like, I'm a free trapper, bro. Walk out. I'll keep that in mind next time I go fishing. Now, Brad, we got some other stuff to cover before we get to Lewis and Clark. We got to introduce Tommy. Sure.

But to titillate Steve for now, what would be your elevator pitch on why Lewis and Clark are so damn cool? Yeah, that's a good idea. Now that I dogged on them so much. Well, I think it's a part of the story that still residents today that, you know, here we are coming up on 220 years and we're still talking about Lewis and Clark on a podcast. I think that tells you a lot. It's something that has grown because it used to be that you talk about Lewis and Clark expedition leaving the St. Louis area in May of 1804 and coming back in September 1806. Now they've extended the Lewis and Clark trail all the way back to the east. So it covers a lot more states. Goes back to the Ohio Falls when Lewis and Clark first actually joined together as part of this expedition after all the planning. there's there's just i

always say it's a lot of stories that's not really just one big story it's a lot of stories involves a lot of different people a lot of different places a lot of different events perfect and we're going to cover um in particular we're going to i want to talk about the mystery of um lewis's death. Yes. So before we get into the story, I just want to ask you this. Then we're going to move on to some other stuff for a minute. Are you on his death, without telling any of the circumstances, are you lean in suicide or are you lean in murder?

I lean suicide. Okay. And I'm sure there will be a lot of things that will be discussed today, a lot of things that I'll say that are very controversial. Really? I always tell people that when you go to a Lewis and Clark conference, the nice thing is that everybody's an expert on Lewis and Clark. The bad thing is that everybody's an expert on Lewis and Clark, and they never agree.

That's what I say. That's one of the things I say about Montana is you have an entire state where everyone's a Grizzly expert. Next to you Brad is Tommy Edson who's here for no purpose right now none whatsoever

Tommy tell them what you do for a living I move cardboard boxes I work in a big industrial food warehouse Tommy get close to that mic as though lapping an ice cream cone

I work in a big industrial food grocery warehouse and on lunch break what do you do once a week well you originally it started on lunch break but yeah i play we play meat eater trivia and and tommy me and tommy are old fishing buddies from from the pacific northwest tommy's an excellent fisherman i've said this in the past i I'm going to just to help tee up Tommy's presence here.

I've pointed out multiple times that everywhere you go in this country, everywhere you go, you will find a person who can't, who's frustrated because they can't get to it all. There's too much to do. Outdoorsman. There's too much to do. You can't do it all can't scratch the surface and then next door to him is the guy who everything's ruined the blank are gone you know

fishing game screwed it up the wolves got them all whatever no tommy's the one that can't scratch the surface no too much to do yeah and this time of year especially it's like i'm frozen with indecision i'll get up in the morning planning to go do one thing man and i'll be thinking about doing something else the whole way there you know because there's just so much to do and tommy's always sending me his scores for me to eat a trivia he's here because we're gonna play trivia in a little bit. And like last week, he beat me, but Yanni beat him. Yeah.

I had seven correct last week. Yeah, Steve's over here spreading all sorts of misinformation that I would have whooped y'all every week. That's not true. I'll be the first one to set the record straight. He's been posting some strong scores. Strong scores, yeah.

So we had to have him out just to play in person. Twice now, strangers will have walked up to me. It used to be just, hey, Giannis? You Giannis? Yeah, yeah. Oh, love the content. Great.

Now that's changed to, hey, Giannis? Yeah, man, yesterday I would have beat you. Like, really? Okay. That's what the world is these days. Tommy educated me on how to catch surf perch. Love fishing surf perch, man. Yeah.

Talking, speaking about Lewis and Clark, even where the trail ends in Seaside, Oregon. Isn't that correct? Yes. Yeah. I fish surf perch. Man, a pistol shot from that monument. Oh, there you go. That's why he's here.

Yeah. See there? Brody's here. Man, that's like a segue. I was just going to say, see how's here. Yeah, see there? Brody's here. Man, that's like a segue. I was just going to say, see how I tied that all in for you? Brody's here.

Phil the engineer. Phil, look tight on the haircut, buddy. Yeah, thanks, man. That looks great. Callahan, same haircut as normal? It's still growing.

Spencer, he's already perched up for his trivia show later on, but he's here because he found our guest. And lobbied, Brad, he lobbied heavilyched up for his trivia show later on, but he's here because he found our guest. And lobbied, Brad, he lobbied heavily on your behalf. For years.

Even before we found the official Lewis and Clark historian, I just wanted a Lewis and Clark historian. Now you're the one. And he's like, now I found him. And I think we were talking about sex on the Lewis and Clark trail. Yep. Okay. That's titillating.

And then, of course, Giannis is here. A couple things. Recap. We had Dustin Huff on who just killed the biggest typical, not just, recently killed the biggest typical whitetail ever killed in America. And he was being pretty fast and loose with landowner names and locations.

And we teased him about this and then he thought better of it and so we ended up bleeping out the landowner names and locations then dustin huff goes home and posts a screenshot of on x showing exactly where he killed so so it's out it was an instagram. It was available for 24 hours, so you got to do some sleuth, and I have a screenshot of it where it's like, here it is.

Here's the spot. Here's where the tree stand was, so he, God bless him. I think what Doug Duren said got into his head. Doug's like, you know what?

That buck's gone. Was it ever really a secret, though, anyway? I mean, come on. Probably not. I don't what? That buck's gone. Was it ever really a secret, though? I mean, come on. Probably not. I don't know. The buck's gone. Spencer already angled for permission at the guy's neighbor's place.

Yep, sending letters. How's that trampoline coming, Steve? They haven't called yet, man. I was just texting about something different. It's summer break. The kid taking care of is real intense right now because it's summer vacation. I was staring at my buddy's backyard in missoula the other day and big old trampoline out there every little kid's dream it's just like covered in three inches of old fall foliage

so it lets you know how long it's been sitting there unused cal i can tell you something um i didn't want trampoline not not for the normal reasons. I think people don't want them because their kids are going to break their arms on them. Yeah. I actually wanted one without the net. Yeah. It's hard to find. But my wife's like, it has to have the net.

Only reason I didn't want it is because I feel like my kids are going to have a hard time mowing underneath it. And it's going to obstruct my archery lane. And the whole point of having a trampoline is so you can like jump off of stuff onto the trampoline or jump off the trampoline onto stuff. And you can't do that with the net. So, but I'm telling you this. Listeners are probably confused. Steve is getting a trampoline for his kids.

That's what we're talking about. But here's the thing. I guarantee. Cause there's trampolines in two directions. Two different neighbors have them. Our kids live on those trampolines. This trampoline will get heavy use. Yeah, our neighbors got one which is the perfect place for it.

Then our kids can use it and I don't have to have one in my yard. I always like to point out though, my wife always thinks that what I take the kids to do, she thinks that stuff's dangerous. Okay. Yeah. Now, every emergency room visit I've gone on, she got them a swing set. It's like two days later, broken arm, down in the emergency room visit I've gone on She got him a swing set It was like two days later

Broken arm Down in the emergency room Uh Scooters Stitches Legos Stitches Every

Explain that one The couch I don't know He fell on He had a Lego on a chair And tripped and landed on it Gouged a hole in his head Cal looked at the picture of his head

Which had a square hole in it And Cal was like Looks like you can pull a Lego out of there And that was before I knew that it was a Lego. We were in Mexico. But, yeah, man, nothing I do ever gets them in trouble. Everything, like, they get injured by

I guarantee they'll get injured on the trampoline. It's one child out of three, though, is particularly prone to all that. I think everything you mentioned is one kid. No, Jimmy broke his arm on his swing set. Matthew cuts his head open all the time. He's had three rounds of stitches

in his head. Speaking of stitches in the head, 400 stitches that that little girl got in her head and body after she got attacked by that mountain lion in Washington. Isn't that crazy? 400. Washington didn't have a lion fatality for 98 years

and then had their first fatality. Now that little girl got scratched up. Yeah. I'd call that getting scratched up, maybe a little bit more than scratched up. Mauled up. But what was cool, the reason I'm bringing this up is that Bart George, our buddy,

is doing the research on the mountain lions over there in Washington, he invited the nine-year-old girl that got attacked by a lion out on a cat, part of the study where they capture the lion and then tranquilize it and then take off the collar. The cat was done with its part of the study. And she agreed and she went along. There's a picture of her. And she got to kick it.

She got to what? Kick it. Kick the cat while it was down. No, she looked like she was just happy to be there, but pretty impressive. Very cool. I told my daughter. I wonder if that had to have been somewhat therapeutic.

Exactly. Work through the trauma. Yeah, you hope. What was interesting is I was telling my daughter, who's about the same age, about that,'s like wow that's like a lot that's pretty courageous for that little girl i don't know if i could do that after being attacked by that same animal you know it's heavy sounds strong the the pictures that went along with that article when it first came out when that whole thing broke man they were hard to look at. Oh yeah. Very.

Did they catch that line and kill it? They got, they got it on site right then before DFW even showed up. Who did? Her family? I think just some people that were there. It was, yeah,

it was at a, uh, I believe Russian, uh, Bible camp. And, uh, as my buddy that was one of the first guys on scene there said,

he's like, it was the most well-armed Bible camp I've ever been to. And yeah, that cat. He went to the wrong camp. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is kind of interesting. So we've covered on the show a fair bit like both sides of picking up arrowheads, Indian arrowheads.

Man, fella can make a hell of a segue out of this into Lewis and Clark. Oh, and that's up next, too. Keep that in mind, Yanni. This story has many layers. The Missouri guy. Mm-hmm. So, we've covered the impulse, which I'm no stranger to, is that you're out wandering around, there's an arrowhead sitting there.

And you're like, well, you're not looking around there's a arrowhead sitting there and you're like yeah you're not like anything put in your pocket bring it home put it on a shelf then it winds up in a whatever yeah box uh we've talked about why that we've acknowledged the enormous uh sort of like psychological uh gravity right that pulls you in that direction then we talked about the reasons one might not do that and this fellow named johnny lee brown of clinton missouri just got a little carried away with his arrowhead hunting and is in big trouble so they were going into prehistoric prehistoric native american archaeological sites i think these are all from the archaic period so three thousand to five thousand year old sites using shovels rakes other tools digging up artifacts okay the name of the site is fantastic as well hit us with that the tightwad site yeah but it's not because of the site itself it's because of the name of the town

which is also tightwad missouri right i don't know how i never heard of tightwad missouri me neither i'd love to know the should have wikipedia'd that for the background so this guy johnny lee brown who's 70 years old he's still getting out there for seven. You think like a 70 year old, just kind of calming down on crime, you know, don't you? I think his age is important to point out because like, what's he got left to lose. If he wants to go destroy an archeological site,

there's a lot of, you think that's what he thought to himself? Spry 70 year old. I'm not, I'm not making an excuse for him, but it's 70. What's a $300,000 fine? I think there's still 70-year-olds running

marathon races. I don't know about that outlook. 70. Still getting at it. 70 years old, two co-conspirators, and they start going down to this site. From June, they're just getting in trouble, or just getting,

you know, it's finalized, getting finalized now, but they were active from June 2016 they're just getting in trouble, or just getting, you know, it's finalized, getting finalized now, but they were active from June 2016 through September, looting these sites, okay? So they believe this was a campsite where they're camping, processing stone. They were using handheld trowels, shovels, rakes, hoes, buckets, and backpacks to take items away from the site.

The indictment doesn't say what exactly they did with the stuff. What they are saying is that this illegal excavation caused $300,000 in damage. And the U.S. Attorney's Office in Kansas City is after the guy. There's a bunch of interesting tidbits in that story where they're like, sometimes they'd be at the site for 10 minutes. Other times, many hours. But at the same time, they don't know exactly what they got away with. I'm like,

well, how'd you know the timelines and, and not know what they got. They don't know, uh, where a lot of what they got ended up, like how it was fenced or moved or. Did it say how they got nabbed,

how they got caught? Someone turn them in or. I, I think that must be it. I mean, there's, there's a lot of some, there's some sort of fuzzy documentation there that is probably going to come out once the case is fully prosecuted. Yeah. I would imagine. Because like reading through the story, you're like, how?

Like, how do you know and not know is what kind of the story reads, but it does overlap with, um, a lot of interesting pending legislation that's coming down the pipe right now, as far as, um, you know, better, uh, protections for cultural sites on public ground on on federally managed ground state managed ground i'm reading carl malcolm's favorite book he always he always likes to cringe when i say it's his favorite book but uh he turned there's a book called black range tales oh yeah yeah it's it's mostly like the memoirs and recollections of a miner a prospector and miner who was active in the 1880s down in new mexico in the black range but all around that area what's funny about it is the first pay oh i can't say this never mind never mind um he talks

about 50 pound turkeys in that book i almost just gave away a sweet turkey hunting spot uh so in there he talks about going in to we were hunting not far from within the heat within the gila wilderness there's a pueblo site and we never made it over there but we're hunting not far from a pueblo site in the gila wilderness and this guy talks about going in there. And so he's talking in the 1880s, looting a Pueblo site. And him saying how in the 1880s, he's saying how it's picked over and most of the good stuff is gone. But they walk away with a mummified body. But most of the good stuff's picked over. How old was the body?

It doesn't say. It just says they had, and he talks about its history. It was sitting in some window. It was sitting in some window at a curio shop in some town in Arizona or New Mexico. I can't remember where, and now that no one knows what happened to it. But he was talking about in the 1880s, ransacking Pueblo sites, and he talks about there's still corn in jars. And they didn't even know who the hell right at in that year they they'd lost track like who the people were people are so like the fact that in that year it was sort of like a like that looting antiquities you know i, those people who built that

fathers and grandfathers were probably engaging with Euro-Americans. The, the, to kind of like jump back to like how you come up with that figure of $300,000 when you don't really know. Yeah. I don't get that. Yeah.

I mean, it, it has to be like, we always talk about like why you don't move artifacts because you're destroying the story that is, that the ground holds around the placement of that artifact. Yeah. And I imagine that has to be part of it, right? You're digging through all these soil layers, get rid of all the fossilized pollens and things like that that could also tell a lot more about whatever they're pulling out of the ground. Yeah.

But it's hard to assign a dollar value to it. Right. And that's a huge question mark of mine for this thing. I wonder if it had to reach a certain threshold to make it a certain level crime. That's good thinking too. Brad, do you have any artifacts related to the Lewis and Clark expedition?

I do not. But at the Cultural Heritage Center in Pierre, they do have one of the peace medals. And it was found and somebody turned it in and offered it to the museum. So they have that there. Can you explain what that is? I'm not ready to get into this yet. I got one last thing to say. I will talk about a Rickra sites along the Missouri River, though, because there are a lot of fishermen over the years and just other people who went out along Lake Owyhee and the Missouri River. And when the river's down, a lot of those Rickra village sites are exposed.

And it's easy. I mean, you're just, it's not a matter of really going out and excavating full scale, but it's easy to walk along and find a lot of different artifacts and a lot of burial remains too. So I remember being a child and my mother and father were invited out to a farmer's place for dinner. And my younger brother and I went along and down in the den, there were six human skulls that this man had in his den. Now, of course, it's perfectly, completely illegal today, but those are the things that are readily available along the Missouri River. But it is, of course, illegal. Well, illegal, and there is a case in Washington where a skull had eroded out of a bank.

Kennewick Man. Is that the Kennewick Man story? Well, I don't know. It sounds like it. But, you know, obviously. Were they trying to go to a, they were trying to get illegal access to watch a riverboat race a boat race yeah or i was just gonna say they were trying to sneak in to watch a race and found the kennewick man so a skull run eroding out uh but then you know the the cultural significance of these remains the the tribes are like well somebody buried this person

that is most probably related to us it's more than just uh a crime it's a sacrilegious act yeah well that's i talk about stories that make their own gravy. Yeah. That story makes its own gravy. They find the skull. Okay. And they think they're looking at like a murder victim. They don't know it's old. Someone comes out and realizes it's very old, eroding out of the river. Winds up, it's like a 9,000.

It's a very old skull. It's like a 9,000 year old skull. There's this thing called, I can't remember what the hell it is. Like, what's that discipline? It's a much discredited discipline. Forensic or not? Forensic craniology.

Craniology. What is it? People used to think you could look at a skull and like make all these deductions about intelligence and all that. So anyways, the guy takes a gander at it. A semi-qualified individual takes a gander at it

and says, Hey man, that's a caucasian male skull that's 9 000 years old so then it introduces this whole crisis about like someone trying to say that this thing like that native americans weren't the like right that somehow there had been europeans had made it here and predated whatever. It brought into like, it brought into it opened up a question like, who are the real Native Americans? How could this Caucasian person

be there? It was so offensive. What he was saying was so offensive to a tribe that was there. I can't remember what tribe it was that occupied that land at the time of European contact that they said no one will ever look at this skull again and put it away.

Later, it was allowed to be looked at. They put it away. And they didn't want anybody to view it because they didn't want this conversation to take hold. An interesting wrinkle in this that people pointed out but it never got taken seriously is 9,000 years ago, no one knows, like whatever tribe is there now surely hadn't even taken form like people moved so much yeah and every square inch of the country was won and fought over by native american tribes it wasn't like this like it wasn't

like this monolithic group was like people that moved around and waged war with one another and conquered lands but when they they went through and did the the dna analysis to what they could right that's that's exactly what it showed like several different tribes were like oh yeah the this person is a part of now a much broader community because the, the genetic, uh, traits that this person has are distributed through this, this much wider group. And, uh, the idea that it was a cock, like the, the idea that it was a European or Caucasian thing was put to rest.

Yeah. Yeah. So the trip over a skull when you're trying to sneak into a boat race. Yeah. You. So you trip over a skull when you're trying to sneak into a boat race. Yeah. You may not mean knowing what you're tripping over. Exactly.

But this does have, uh, some good bearing on what we hopefully get into later with, um, the, the question of whether or not to exhume Meriwether Lewis, right? Oh, I would dig them up right now, but I got, I got one last thing to add that we're going to get into that. I got one last thing to add. I was telling you how I was going to become a metal detecting enthusiast

because my kids are real interested in metal detectors. We got a metal detector. And we're up at the little property where we camp a lot. And metal detecting around. The kids were hoping to find a, I don't know why, a horseshoe, which they found buried quite a bit,

quite a ways down, which was interesting. Now, my daughter, Rosemary gets a hit on the metal detector and I start digging and I get down about a spade height down and turn the ground up and turn up a beautiful half, kind of like a broken, but very worked piece of gorgeous black obsidian. Whoa.

10 inches underground. Makes you wonder what's hiding out there. Oh, yeah. You know what it was that she hit with the metal detector struck off of? It was an old can lid. But like just having to be. That was just covering a chunk of obsidian.

Yeah, so like you're out there, it's like never ending, right? And you take a shovel and stick it down the ground and turn it over like, oh, there's a part of a projectile point. And how many like chunks of nail and you take a shovel and stick it down the ground and turn it over like oh there's a part of a projectile point and how many like chunks of nail and screw and stuff did you i feel like we found a penny that's not that old but i'm like that penny is 42 years old they're like oh my god i feel like the next time we go up there there's just gonna be holes all over that valley i started freaking out after a while i I'm like, man, you guys got to fill these holes.

And they had holes everywhere. And then someone literally tripped in the hole. Yep. No, you guys got to go back and fill damn holes in, man. Yeah, they had just placed pocked with holes. It was funny because there's like an old piece of fencing that they must have found that same string of fencing. I'm like, if you notice, everywhere you're digging is in a line. Like you keep digging the same hunk of fence out move right or left or whatever to get away from that fence i had i had lost two arrows the year

before and they found both sorry i had lost three and they found two so far which is great yeah oh yeah totally fine totally fine all right ready brad i'm ready we're gonna dig into lewis clark okay hit me with a hit me with a brief summation of what it was, but here's the trick. You have to include with it how Thomas Jefferson was saying, and if you run into a woolly mammoth, let me know. Like what set up, like why? Why do we, what was Lewis and Clark supposed to be doing? You know, for Thomas Jefferson, first of all,

I'll just preface this with the comment that, you know, he'd been planning this for 20 years. You know, it wasn't a situation where a lot of times people think, okay, we had Louisiana purchase 1803 and then sent Lewis and Clark out 1804 to investigate this new territory that the United States had just acquired. Jefferson had been thinking about this. He talked to George Rogers Clark back in 1783, William Clark's older brother, about doing an expedition across the American West. George Rogers Clark declined for

personal reasons more than anything else. 1786, Jefferson is over in Paris. He meets a man from Connecticut by the name of John Ledyard. Ledyard says, I'll do this. I'll go from France and Western Europe. I'll go across Eastern Europe and go across Asia, come up on the Western side of North America, and then go back to the United States. I'm losing this. You know, so he's going all the way around by himself. Where was he going to cross the Pacific? He was going to cross the Bering Strait area and then land on the west side of North America and then come into the United States from the west. Come down through Alaska, BC. He made it as far as Russia and the Zarina at that time.

Catherine said, no, no, you're not going to go through. So that was the end of that expedition. Did not make it very far. Oh, so he even like did part of it. He made it into Russia. Are you kidding me? He made it into Russia. Who's this guy?

John Ledyard is his name. That guy had a badass, man. Was he by himself? He was going to do this by himself. The story is that he was going to take his dog and him and venture across. He was going to cross the Bering Sea, land in Alaska, and then work his way back to the eastern United States. And what stopped him again? The Tsarina at that time,

Catherine, she refused to give him permission to cross the border. Tsarina instead of a Tsar. We have the Empress, Catherine. Seriously. So she was the one who said, no, we're not going to grant you permission to come through Russia. It seems like in that time he could have said like,

oh, okay. And then just left and kept going. One day I'm coming down between, I'm traveling south into Missoula. What's that highway, 93? I pick up a hitchhiker, okay? And he gets in the car and he's like, man, I just got out of jail. And that made me nervous.

I said, what were you in jail for? He goes, hitchhiking. They let him out of jail. He walked out on his hitchhike again. So you'd think think he would have been like oh okay i understand but then this went about because like russia's a big place i know it's like what like who would know right i just wonder wandering through i do it just also sounds exactly like um they're being like yeah so this is what we want and here's the path and this guy was thinking about doing this other trip the entire other time and he was like oh yeah yeah i'll do that but this is the way i think it's gonna work out the best the trip that i already had planned

what was he gonna do if he got to i just don't think he should have asked permission i mean we can litigate this some other time it just seems like the weirdest move on his part. And part of the funding, of course, is coming from Jefferson and the American Philosophical Society to help fund his trip. But, you know, you talked about big government and Lewis and Clark earlier. I'll go along with that, too, here in a little bit. But in 1793. But one minute. I got one more question.

Sure. If Jefferson's thinking about this then, I mean, he's just outright defying whoever owned it. Right. So that's why the permission thing with the Russians seems a little funny to me because it's not like the Spanish, right? The Spanish in California. Was that who it was at that time? He'd had to get permission from the Spanish. He'd had to get permission from the Spanish. He'd had to get permission from the British. And actually when Jefferson started planning all this, he started pursuing getting visas, permissions.

Also, he was going to do it like formally. He was going to like do it the right way. But he knew that there would be resistance from not only people here in the United States wondering about the cost of this and then the whole purpose behind it because it was not the United States territory. Why was this so necessary? The other thing is, again, the question of who controls what territory. So that area of the Pacific Northwest, you had Russia, you had Britain, you had Spanish, and then, of course, the United States comes along and we're going to claim it for ourselves eventually too. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada.

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If Jefferson was already planning that, was he also already thinking about how to get his hands on it? I mean, was that? Not at that point. I mean, this is 1786 was the second time where he talked to John Ledyard. He just thought that this was something that was important for the sake of discovery. He was such an inquisitive person. He was so knowledgeable about so many different things.

He was interested in botany and zoology. He was interested in American Indians. He just had such a wide range of interests, and he thought this was something that was very significant. 1786, we're still a very young country. In 1793, he contacted, through the American Philosophical Society, with a French naturalist by the name of André Michaud. And he made it as far as the Ohio River Valley. And they found out that he was

actually going to be spying against Spanish posts. And so the United States said, no, we're not going to get involved with that. Everything you're saying so far too is decades before Jefferson even becomes president. So what were his credentials at this point to like send people out on these adventures? His interests. I mean, you have to keep in mind that he was a person who was a product of the Age of Enlightenment. He was just interested in learning

as much as he possibly could, whether it was about religion or plant life or animal life or native cultures or whatever it might have been, geography, geology. I mean, he was just such a well-rounded person from that product of the Age of Enlightenment that, president or not, I mean, he just thought that this was very important to do. And so when he became the third president, I'd say he was actually in that position to

do something about it. And that's when we started seeing everything falling into place, I might say. Was there ever a scenario where he's like, I'm just going to do it myself? Or did he not think he was like qualified or had the time? Or why, why wasn't he the one doing it? I don't know. Jefferson never, ever considered himself being in a position or a person who would undertake such a thing.

He, uh, that was always something that he would find somebody else. He had to curate wine, tobacco. He had, he was a Francophile. He had books to read. Right. Right. He was, he was a person that well read, but not, not the adventuresome type that was going to go out

and undertake an expedition like this. There's no way. You said John Ledyard's, uh, he just took off with his dog, which really, really interests me because I think people love the story of dogs and they don't get told very well. So I was going to tell Spencer, we got to write this down for a future series.

And, uh, one of the first hits on the, on the Google machine here is the making of John Ledyard, time to eat the dogs. Oh no. Oh. Which you can kind of infer as to what happened on that trip. Yeah.

But. And of course, Lewis ended up taking his dog with him. Uh, Newfoundland, uh, Seaman was the dog's name and made it all the way out to the Pacific as to what happened on that trip. And of course, Lewis ended up taking his dog with him. Newfoundland Seaman was the dog's name. And made it all the way out to the Pacific Northwest and back. And at the same time, I think one historian figured out that they probably ate over 200 dogs during the expedition. Hmm.

I have all these pictures of eating dogs in Vietnam, and I'm always afraid to put them on social media, but maybe that'd be my end. As I could mention that in honor of Lewis and Clark. Yeah. Okay. What's next? Well, I think we're up to the point now where like Lewis gets tapped for this adventure, right?

Right. He was appointed by Jefferson to be his personal secretary with the intent that he was going to start learning whatever he might need to know as far as plant life, medicine, zoology, and prepare for this expedition. What did that role mean then? Being a personal secretary? Yeah, yeah. Being a right-hand person. Like a record keeper? And not so much as far as being a secretary as we think maybe in today's context, but a person who was an assistant who would help Jefferson with other plans, help him prepare for this expedition. And when the whole idea of the Louisiana Purchase came about later that year, everything just fell into place very perfectly. You know, it was just, you couldn't ask for a better situation. So, but the interesting thing is that it was on January 18th, 1803, that Jefferson delivers

his confidential message to Congress asking for an appropriation of $2,500. Confidential, because he knew that there would be a lot of people here in the United States that would also say $2,500 to explore some unknown territory at what a government waste, right? And of course, that was an initial appropriation. That was the amount. That's pretty funny. When you look at it overall, by the time they came back and how the men were paid per month and how they received land allotments, you're looking at this expedition costing maybe closer

to $40,000 or $50,000 back at that time. So it'd be quite a bit more substantial today. So it certainly wasn't a situation really for $2,500. They funded this entire expedition. That was just simply an initial appropriation. They spent, the government spent a lot more money in the end. You know, with the, with the Louisiana purchase, there's a thing that I've never been totally clear on is they ended up selling it to us as sort of a, like as a strategic move, right?

Around, it was around like that they were going to lose it anyway. Well, you know, the whole idea of the Louisiana Territory, it became known as Louisiana Territory all the way back to 1682 with Robert de La Salle, who claimed the area for King Louis XIV of France. And then after the French and Indian War ended in 1763, the western part, that area west of the Mississippi River, that became Spanish-controlled. And then it went from Spain back to France right around 1800 with the Treaty of San Delfonso. And that's when the United States really started becoming more concerned, more about having access to the river and getting through the area of New Orleans.

And so Jefferson sent Robert Livingston and James Monroe, two very notable figures in American history, of course, and to negotiate with Napoleon's representatives. And so they went over to Paris, negotiated. Napoleon had other issues. I mean, he was thinking about Europe. His project in the Caribbean had fallen flat because of disease, and he really didn't want that area of Louisiana anymore. And so the whole idea was that Jefferson told Monroe and Livingston, go up as high as $10 million for New Orleans, just for New Orleans. And it was Napoleon's representatives who came back and said, what about Louisiana territory for what turned out to be about $15 million? Now, here are two individuals who can't just get on the phone and contact Jefferson and say, hey, what are we supposed to do? So they went ahead and they signed the Louisiana agreement on April 30th,

1803. And keep in mind that Jefferson had delivered that confidential message to Congress in January of 1803. So he was already planning this, but the fact that the Louisiana Purchase was signed in April, and then you have Jefferson's really well-known instructions to Jefferson on June 20th, 1803, saying, hey, this is what I want you to do. I want you to study this and this and this and this, all these very specific directions. It wasn't until around the 4th of July, 1803, when news of Louisiana Purchase arrived in Washington, D.C. And even at that, Jefferson can't make that kind of agreement. He's the president. Treaties have to be ratified

by the Senate. And it wasn't until October of 1803 that the Senate finally ratified the Louisiana Treaty. Well, now it all makes a lot more sense. You know, we have, you know, we've doubled

the size of the United States. And so it makes more sense to go out and explore it, certainly. But it's just the idea that so many people think that we bought it and then we decided to explore it. Oh, I totally thought that. Yeah.

He's like, well, I bought it. Now I need to put together some. By October, by the time the treaty was ratified, Lewis and Clark were already making all kinds of plans. And they were, you know, like I said, they met at the Ohio Falls and went down to the Wood River area. And they're going to spend the winter of 1803 to 1804 recruiting soldiers to go along with them. You know, when Lewis was first thinking about this, Jefferson thought, well, you know, if you take 10 or 12 men with you, you know, from the time they left Missouri up until the Hidats and the Mandan and the Arikraw villages in North Dakota, it was closer to four dozen.

Because you had the two captains, actually Captain Meriwether Lewis, Lieutenant William Clark, although they both went by captains. You had three sergeants initially. The one sergeant, Charles Floyd, was the only member of the expedition to die along the way. He was replaced by a vote of the men, and he was replaced by Patrick Gass. You had about two dozen privates. Wasn't Pryor, was Pryor an officer? He was one of the sergeants, Nathaniel Pryor. You had initially John Wardway, who was really the third in command,

or you want to look at Lewis and Clark as being the co-commanders, certainly. John Wardway, Sergeant John Wardway would have been the next in command. And then you have Charles Floyd, the one who died of a penicillin attack, is what they believed down by Sioux City. And then you had Nathaniel Pryor, and then Patrick Ass was the one who replaced Charles Floyd later by vote of the men. And when they were doing this recruiting, they were strategically this recruiting, they

were strategically trying to get unmarried men with no families, right? That was, that was a big part of it. And these are people from, you know, look at George Shannon, for example, he was in his late teens, you know, he was very young. He has the notorious reputation of being the guy who got lost more often than anybody else.

But you have George Shannon, then you have Lewis and Clark who are in their late 20s, early 30s. You have Lewis celebrating his 31st birthday in August of 1805. God, it's like Seth and Chester. They're young. They're young. How old are you, Spencer? 30.

Oh, it's like him. Now, what did a $15 million transaction look like then? Were we like shipping them a literal boatload of money or was there some assets? How does that happen? No, it's just basically through the funding over a period of time. So it wasn't one big lump sum or anything like that. The other thing that I think is really important to point out, for $15 million, what did the United States actually acquire? Political authority.

We did not buy any land. A lot of times people think, well, $15 million, we doubled the size, physically doubled the size of the United States. If that had been the case, then there would never have been a need for any other treaties with Indian nations to acquire land, like the Laramie Treaty of 1868 or anything like that. But we spent way more than $15 million when you look at the 19th century and all the different treaties for land that the United States entered into with different Indian nations.

It's so funny. We were told, you know, every year by a new teacher in Montana growing up that we acquired the Louisiana Purchase for a penny an acre. Anytime you can get land for a penny an acre, it doesn't matter if it's the most godforsaken swamp, pick it up. That's a direct quote. Yeah, when you look at it overall, it was the political authority because it had gone from the French to the Spanish, back to the French, and now the United States had the political authority. And that was one of the things that Lewis and Clark were supposed to do when they engaged with

these different Indian nations. They were supposed to say, you are now under American authority. Don't trade with the British. Don't trade with the Spanish. Don't trade with anybody else. You trade only with American traders from now on. You are now under United States authority. They're like, you guys all look the same to us. Yeah. You can imagine if someone sold you a political authority over the Northwest region of, of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Okay. So someone sells you the political authority

over it. There's still a bit of work to be done there. Right. I mean, like there's a lot of people who are going to be like, what, what now? You know. This is going like way beyond the expedition now, but did we ever consider selling it back

or selling it to someone else? No. It was ours and we were keeping it. Right. Absolutely. And in fact, now the incentive was to keep going, you know, to claim that territory, the Pacific Northwest, and eventually look at the

American Southwest and acquiring that too, which we did by the 1840s, the late 1840s. It was just one big step as far as American expansion westward, certainly. So when Lewis was tapped to do this, he had to be a botanist and an archaeologist and a hunter and a politician and a fisherman and an artist and a doctor. Did he have those skills before he was chosen for this job or did he like gain those qualifications after it was decided? He gained those because a lot of people were very critical of why Lewis? Now, Lewis is not a trained naturalist. He doesn't know anything about plants or animals. You know, why?

Why choose him to lead this expedition? But when he was chosen and the expedition started to be planned, one of the things that Jefferson did is arrange for him to go to Philadelphia and to be basically tutored with a number of individuals to learn about, for example, Benjamin Smith Barton. He was the one who tutored Jefferson on how to preserve different specimens, whether it's plant specimens or animal specimens, anything like that. So he was very important about it. You have Caspar Wistar, who was very interested in paleontology. So to bring out questions like, okay, now if you find animals that we think are extinct back here,

we want you to be especially on the lookout for those. Are there still mammoths or mastodons out there or anything like that? Not that he knew or fully expected that there was, but that was one of the things that if you're out there, this is what we also want you to look for. Any signs of animals that might be extinct by now. You have Dr. Benjamin Rush, who, again, a very well-known person from the American Revolutionary period. And he was considered to be the preeminent physician at the time. And one of the things that, of course, you think of with Rush and the Lewis and Clark expedition is that Lewis arranged to take 50 dozen of Rush's pills with them. Now, these Rush's pills, these were kind of Lewis's cure-all.

You know, he did learn some medical things from Rush, certainly, but the whole idea is that, oh, you're not feeling well, you have loose bowel movements, here, take Rush's pills. What were the pills? They were loaded with a lot of mercury. They were super powerful laxatives. They called them Rush's thunderbolts. And in many cases, if you're dealing with something like dysentery, absolutely the worst thing that you should possibly be taking is Russia's thunderbolts. You know, the thunderbolts, thunderclappers. They were just these really powerful laxatives.

But that's what Lewis did. Oh, you're not feeling well? Here, take these. Take some of these. And they think it would clear out that and bloodletting were two of his main medical practices. Was that with leeches or just with cutting you? The cutting. They had the actual basins that you'd rest your arm on and they would cut your wrist and let it bleed out and try to get some of that bad blood out of your system. And again, two medical practices that were probably the most common. And yet they were probably medical practices that you're probably surprised, wow, we didn't kill some of our own men.

I had often read that you'll see where they say the only physical evidence left of the expedition is where Clark carved his name into Pompe pompey's pillar okay east of billings montana right then someone said no because at the at the campsite at the where lolo creek flows into the bitter root travelers rest travelers rest they found traces of that mercury. Is that true? That's one of the things that archaeologists look for. You know, depending where you are on the Lewis and Clark Trail, I mean, through South Dakota, we know that they went to Spirit Mound down in the very southeast part of the state.

But other than that, we have four dams along the Missouri River in South Dakota now that have created these huge lakes. And so things like Arikara villages are now inundated by Lake Owyhee, for example. But when archaeologists looked to find a possible campsite, and keep in mind, this was a military expedition. And so even when they set up camp, it had to be set up a certain way, which meant that even the latrine area was a certain distance from the main camp. And because they took so many of these Russia's pills and even the salve that they used for treating the men who had syphilis

had so much mercury in it that when archaeologists start looking into the ground, if they can find a heavy concentration of mercury, they can say, oh, this might be one of the latrine areas of the Lewis and Clark expedition. So that use of mercury back then was very common, and they used it a lot. Okay. Back to when they picked their guys. They went up with some rascals. They did.

They had some really good qualified individuals, certainly. But because it was a military expedition, they had at least seven different court-martials along the way. And, you know, some of it varied from sleeping on duty, which was a serious offense. Some of it was just a few days after the expedition began, two of the men went back and got drunk. And so they had to pay the price. You have Moses Reed, who was a deserter, who was finally caught, and he was punished accordingly. He had to run the gauntlet four times

with a cat of nine tails. Every man had one of those, and he had to run that gauntlet four times. That means getting lashed? Getting lashed, yep. He ran right through them, and every person had to strike him, and they did that four times

to him. And the thing that. What were they striking him with? Whips? Yeah. It's got a nine tails. So the whips with the nine different strings on the end.

And so it's not being struck just by one whip. It's really being struck by nine at the same time. And he had to do that. What was that item used for other than this gauntlet? It was a military expedition. That was, that was, that's.

And they packed it long for whooping people. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's such a bizarre thing, a trip like that. Yeah. Why would you want somebody there who doesn't want to be there? It's like, all right, see ya. Yeah.

And, uh, you know, the last one was John Newman, who was accused of mutinous expressions when they meet, uh, when they reached the Arikara villages in, on October, they spent October 8th through the 12th with the Arikara in the north-central part of South Dakota. And John Newman was, at any time they had these court-martials, it was a trial of your peers. Lewis and Clark were not involved. The sergeants, one of the sergeants presided. You had the men, some of the men who served as a jury,

and they determined if a person was guilty or not. And John Newman was found guilty, and he was given 75 lashes on the bare back. And the thing that is. With the cat and nine tails. Cat and nine tails, exactly. And there was a Rick Brown. I'd love to get one of them. No, I mean, just to have one.

Just for your crew or. No, it's whatever. I'm pretty sure there was one in a shop down here on Main Street. Were you at Adam and Eve's? No, not that shop. Little thrift store. Little thrift store down there on Main Street. Were you at Adam and Eve's? No, not that shop. Little thrift store. Little thrift store down there on Main Street yesterday. A cat and nine tails.

I'm pretty sure that's what that was down there in the bottom of a case. I didn't inspect it thoroughly. You can hang it on the wall. I don't think that's what Tommy was shopping for. I don't think that's what Tommy was shopping for. You can hang it on the wall above the punt gun. Same place I bought the books. Yeah.

Yeah. They had these leather swimsuits with the little studs and stuff on them. Right can hang it on the wall above the same place I bought the books. Yeah. Yeah. They had these, uh, these, the leather swimsuits with the little studs and stuff on them. And that's right next to the matching collar. Right next to that. Yeah.

Well, that even, even at that, when they were punished, uh, you know, the, the one, a Rick Rowe leader, uh, Eagle feather, he, he started wailing because he couldn't imagine why are you punishing one of your own people like this? Really? It's one thing when you punish the enemy because they're the enemy, but to punish one of your own

people like that, he just could not understand why they would even do such a thing. And the thing of it is that whenever these men received 25 lashes, 50 lashes, 100 lashes, a new one received 75 lashes, it's not like, okay, well, you have a couple of a couple days to recover no you're back to work you know you're not gonna get a few days off from manual labor because you did something wrong what was his mutinous expression uh it doesn't really say in the journals it says that he was mutinous expressions uh so he said something like you know we ought to do is just head back home you know something that he was uh told to do something he disobeyed and this is stupid he was very for newman he was very apologetic.

Because he was dismissed from the expedition. He was sent back in April of 1805, and he really did work extra hard to try to make amends and everything. But they said, no, no, it's too late. So whatever he said, whatever he did that qualified as mutinous expressions, it was enough for them to say. And maybe it was just the fact that they were setting an example that no, when you're told to do something, you have, you have to do something.

I mean, it was a military expedition. I don't want to flog this to continue flogging about the flogging, but like, do they, are there reports of like how bad the, uh, the wounds were from getting something like 75? They would have to be pretty severe. Yeah. I mean.

Like open. Like open wounds. Something that we might even stitch up today. And then of course, having somebody like Lewis provide salve to try to speed the healing and everything. Maybe a little mercury. Yeah.

Yeah. A lot of the salves had mercury, like I said, for when they treated the men with syphilis, a lot of that salve had, had a lot of mercury in it as well. But yeah, it was a military expedition first and foremost. How many of the guys that went were in the military prior to getting enlisted?

Like Coulter wasn't a military guy. No. Most of them were. Like I said, there were at least two dozen privates that were already in the military. So they were recruiting from within the military. But then you have other people like George Drurier, who was noted for being the best hunter of the group. And he was brought along for not only for his hunting proficiency, but also the fact that he could do sign language.

And so knowing that they would meet dozens of different groups of people, having that ability to have sign language was considered to be very important. Dreuer was French-Canadian on his father's side and Shawnee on his mother's side. There was a universal sign language? It was very common, yeah. Actually, a lot of the mountain men had this universal sign language. But at the same time, you have to think how well did this really convey what they were saying?

I mean, you start talking about the white father in Washington, D.C. I mean, that's all foreign. And how do you actually put that into a sign language? So the whole idea of using gestures was used, but there was a lot of confusion with it. And they were fortunate that they did have interpreters along the way, people whom they met along the way who served as interpreters. And so in some cases that proved to be very important. In other cases, when you talk about Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea, and I'll say Sacagawea because there will be other people who will say Sacagawea, but in the case

of Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea, you have it going from English to French to Hadassah, eventually to Shoshone. And then if you're going to have a reply, now it has to go from Shoshone to Hadassah to French to English. And you have to wonder how much is lost in that communication when you're trying to translate it that many times. Yeah, or new things added in. Absolutely. Absolutely. Can we narrow in on Sacajawea? Sure.

And her husband for a minute? Sure. My kids brought home from the library, they brought home a book that was kind of like highlighting different Western figures. I can't remember what the hell the book was. I just remember this chapter and it talked about not only how little is known about her but it talked about how she became like the individuals throughout american history who elevated her to the position that she is and it laid out in very simple short form like here is what is actually known about this person i was shocked how little

is known about her absolutely they don't know if she lived to be old age it's like she was a teen right she's a teen bride right well like lay out like what is like i couldn't believe how little is known about her and then what people have extrapolated from that. Exactly. There, there's a lot of controversy. When I, when I was growing up, it was Sacagawea with a J and now most historians will say Sacagawea. Now. I'm going to stick with Sacagawea. Out of this area. I mean, a whole damn lifetime of that, right?

Out in this area, it's going to be Sacagawea. I mean, she, she was born in the area of Salmon, Idaho. And, and, you know, so I just, I, twice I've been to the Wind River Indian Reservation where they have the Sacagawea Cemetery. And they talk about how she was very significant to the Lewis and Clark expedition. She was a guide. She was an interpreter. Her presence was important. All those different things.

Most historians, again, will say that it was probably Sacagawea, which means something completely different. Sacagawea is a Shoshone word, which she was Shoshone. She was probably 11 or 12 years old when she was taken by the Hadatsas. Like she was kidnapped in the act of war, right? Yeah. Right. She was kidnapped. And then sold to a.

The story is that Toussaint won her in gaming. Like won her in a card game or whatever. Well, yeah, they had different games of gambling, of risk, like which hand is it in and things like that. And that's very simple. It's not like he fell in love with her. He won her through gambling. Let's back up a minute. Sure.

We now know that she was born in salmon, around salmon. Right. A raiding party of Hadassah. Right. Kidnapped her. Kidnapped her. And she ended up eventually with the Mandan and the Hadassah villages when Lewis and Clark came across her, actually through to St. Charbonneau again. She was probably 11 or 12.

And he had won her gambling. Right. And he had two wives with her at that time. And that was the thing. Which one is buried on the Wind River Indian Reservation and which one died in north central South Dakota at Fort Manawaleesa? Let's not get ahead of ourselves. Okay.

Okay. And she's pregnant when they encounter her. Right. She was pregnant. She was probably 17 or 18 years old at that time. And, uh, on, she was having a very difficult time with the delivery of the child. And, uh, one of the interpreters or one of the Frenchmen who were at the camp at the time, Renee just saw him. He said, well, he's seen it happen where you take the rattle of a snake and you grind it up into powder and you dilute it with water and have the woman drink that. They did that. And shortly thereafter, she gave birth. So whether it, whether it worked or not, I mean, it's hard to say, but that was February

11th, 1805 that Jean Baptiste Charbonneau was born then. But they wanted, Lewis and Clark wanted Charbonneau to accompany them because he was fluent in a couple languages, correct? He was fluent in a couple languages, but the fact that his wife, Congawea, was Shoshone, they knew that that was probably going to be the next nation whom they would meet.

And they knew that the farther west they would go, the more likely they were to come into contact with Indians who had horses. And so they realized that, yeah, it's nice to have Charbonneau along, but it's really nice to have his wife come along too, to have Sakaka Wig along. And they knew this, they knew about the Shoshone because of just the knowledge of trade networks. Especially with those village cultures, the Arikara, the Hidatsa, and the Mandan, those were centers, trade centers. And there would be groups from a wide area that would eventually come in and they would trade in those areas.

And then they'd go back to their locations. And so, yeah, they knew about the Shoshone. They knew about the Cheyenne. They knew about all the other different groups. They traded extensively. And so they knew that, yeah, different groups. They traded extensively. And so they knew that, yeah, here's their bit of advice. You know, the farther west you go, you will come in contact with tribes that will have horses, and the Shoshone will be one of those. And that proved to be one of the most fascinating stories, I guess, is when the Lewis and Clark expedition met with the Shoshone. After they left April 7th, they went April, May, June, July.

It wasn't until August before they finally saw another human being, and that was the Shoshone Nation. And that's when. Not another human being. Right. Nobody. There was one story where they said that Lewis and three of the men were going to advance, and they saw a person on horseback. And so Lewis was pretty excited. And he had asked

Sacagawea before, how do you say white man in Shoshone? And of course, through the translations, it came out tababone. And so as Lewis is approaching this person on horseback, he rolls up his shirt sleeve and he yells out tababone, tababone, trying to indicate that he's a white person. Well, the person takes off and on his horse in a different direction. And I've come to find out that, you know what, if you've never seen a white man, there probably isn't a word for white man. Top of bone was a Shoshone word meaning stranger. So here he is approaching this person yelling, I'm a stranger, I'm a stranger.

And the person takes off, which makes sense. Later, others joined, came in and confronted Lewis. But hold on, what area were they passing through where they went that many months without encountering anyone? All on the Missouri at this point. I mean, they left, like I said, April 7th. After leaving the Mandan villages.

Right. It was months. Going up the Missouri River and. That's like my dream hunting or fishing trip. Like when you leave and you're like, God, there's still nobody here. Cause smallpox was ripping out ahead of them. Back in the 1790s, there was a huge smallpox epidemic.

And that had really decimated the Arikara people quite a bit. I mean, at one point there were probably 32 Arikara villages when Lewis and Clark meet them. There's three. Okay. You know, so a lot of those populations that had uh died because of smallpox the next big smallpox epidemic would be in the 1830s

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Sacagawea real quick. Sure. In your mind, no one really knows the answer to this, but she's kidnapped as a child. Okay. Which was a child. Okay. Which was common practice.

Yeah. And then gets some semblance of freedom when she gets won by Charbonneau. What would have prevented someone from saying, I am going to go back home? Is it just, it's so far? I think part of it being so young when she was. Or was she in some way a captive of this guy? And I think part of it too is that this is the social expectations that she is now property of this particular person. I hate to use the term married because she was really more, more of the property than anything else.

So when they, when they take off and they eventually get to the shoshone lewis and his men are there first a day or two later clark shows up and sakaka we is with them and they're excited because you know she's going to be able to speak language and as they sit down to negotiate and they're going to you know go through their whole spiel as far as you're now under american authority and everything but they're also interested in acquiring horses to get over the mountains. And all of a sudden, Sakagawiya leaps up and she gives out this exclamation. And she goes over and she realizes that the Shoshone leader is her brother, whom she has not seen since she was kidnapped at the age of 11 or 12. So her brother Kamehameha was the leader of the Shoshone.

And again, you could write a novel better for that. The fact that now they know, okay, we're going to get our horses. We're going to be okay. We'll get people to guide us over the mountains and everything else because of this connection between Sakagawea and Kamehameha. The thing I read about what's actually known about her, it got into that and it got into this other very telling, this very telling thing about her that sort of like helped form the mythology around her is that when they get close to the pacific there's some reason why they're gonna go look at it but

she's not invited to go look at it but he even points out in his journal she wanted so badly to see the ocean and he's like she came all this way how could we deny her exactly and so that is where stem this like explorer curiosity right that he like because they're so sparse with what they talk about with personnel the fact that he like took note of it suggests that there was this right this intense curiosity in her right yeah you're right there's actually when you read through the journals there's very few references to her or they might just refer to sharbana as a woman they might refer to the snake woman the shoshone woman um at one point they did call a river bird woman's river which in the hidatsa language that would be sakagawiya and

that's the only time in the journals that i know of where they actually tried to spell it phonetically with a hard G sound, Sakagawea. And then, of course, in North Dakota, they use the K, Sakagawea. But with what you're talking about, as far as a guide, when they started getting into her homeland area, she started to recognize certain places like Beaverhead Rock, for example. And it's one of those that when you come around the curve, you think, oh, that must be Beaverhead Rock because it looks just like a beaver's head.

So she knew some of those places where she grew up. Had she ever been to the Pacific? No, she'd never been to Pacific before. And so when she gets out to the Pacific, there's a couple very notable things. One that you're talking about is that there is a whale that's washed up on the shore. She wants to go see this. You know, she's heard them talking about this. And so she wants to go and actually look at this huge fish, the whale that had washed up on the shoreline. And she was pretty demanding that this is what she wanted to do.

And so they allowed her to go and see it the other thing that was very interesting and this is where she really develops her legacy is that there's not a whole lot about her in the journals per se but it's in the late 19th century when she really becomes kind of the the heroine of the women's suffrage movement because in november of 1805 when they get out to the Pacific Northwest to try and decide, okay, we're going to put our winter quarters. And Lewis and Clark, even though it was a military expedition,

they could have just simply said, okay, this is the way it's going to be. They went around and some people call it a vote. Some people say, no, they just took a poll, semantics, but they went around, they asked all the members of the expedition, except for the child, of course, where they thought the winter quarters should be, which meant that they asked all the members of the exhibition, except for the child, of course, where they thought the winter quarter should be.

Which meant that they asked Sacagawea, a young, teenage, American Indian woman, what she thought. Not even married. But it's pointed out that they did ask her or surmised that they asked her? No, that they conducted a poll or vote, however you want to say it, and asked all the members. And the two most notable was Sacagawea because American Indians, of course, weren't collectively considered American citizens until 1924. So this is long before that. This is 1805. And the other one is that, of course, women not having the right to vote until the Ninth Amendment in 1920.

So this is years and years beyond the opportunity for women to actually vote. But I got to re-ask my question. Sure. Do they say that they specifically included her in the voting? Yes. Okay. That's what I was curious about. Because they might have said, we asked everybody, but then in fact didn't even ask her because she was a woman.

Because it's also noted that York gets input as well, which ends up being like the first time a black person got to vote in America. Exactly. 1805. And again, you look at it, slavery wasn't abolished until the 13th Amendment in 1865. So this is 60 years before slavery is abolished. And then you look at the 15th Amendment that granted African-American men the right to vote. Well, that wasn't until 1870.

So this is 65 years before black men could vote. We better hit on this real quick now that we're putting Sacagawea behind us in the story for a minute. They had a slave. Was his workload different than everybody else's workload? No. He was actually a childhood friend of Clark's. They grew up together.

When Clark was asked to go along with this expedition, it just only seemed natural that his servant, York, would come with him. But he's not on payroll. He's not on payroll, but in a way, he becomes one of the guys. I mean, he's allowed to go hunting. Slaves aren't allowed to carry weapons, but he's allowed to go hunting. He becomes one of the guys. He becomes a very notable member of the expedition. And at the same time, when they return, he goes back to being part of slave life.

Clark even at one point said that he had to punish York to keep him the same reference that he was nothing but a slave. But I thought he didn't free him? No. I thought he freed nothing but a slave. But, um, was there, I thought he, uh, he didn't free him? No. I thought he freed him after the expedition. No. Uh, there, there's several different stories. Uh, one is that he, uh, York married and that he actually moved out West, settled down with a American Indian tribe.

Uh, others that he, uh, he stayed with, uh, with Clark for a period of time and then eventually left, but there really is not a whole lot known about what happens to York afterwards. I mean, we know that he returns with, with Clark in 1806 and he reverts to the, the slave life again, but. He didn't free him. No, no. Why the hell did I think that? In fact, a lot of people really want him. Because you want to.

Yeah. You really want him to be freed. I feel like a lot of the like middle school history books, the story of York ends after the expedition. You don't realize that York asked for his freedom, even. And I think, didn't he have a wife in Tennessee, maybe, that he asked to go live with? And he was still told no. Right. And I think one version of it is that he became a wagon master.

He would haul freight with wagons. So there's several different stories as far as what happened to York, but there's really nothing definitive. Now, you asked about his workload. One place I think his workload was different was having sex with tribeswomen. And you feel like that was part of the workload.

Well, I've heard these references. They were impressed by him. They had never seen a person with black skin before. And they would do this practice of spiritual power passing. And York was unique in that sense, right? Right. And not just York. I mean, even the other members of the expedition, because they were white. That was something that was part of this, this mystique. It sounds pretty risque, sounds, you know, like

it was just inappropriate behavior, but it was a, it was a culturally accepted situation where when Lewis and Clark met with the, the Tietuan Lakota, they were, were offered women, but apparently nobody, according to the journals, nobody accepted those offers. When they according to the journals, nobody accepted those offers. When they get to the Erechera, that's when they.

Does he specifically say no one accepted? Yes. Clark had a quote. He said something that he, he can't remember, he waved or he wavered. I think he said he wavered. Now people wondered now, you know, like he wavered, you hesitated, then you accepted,

or do you wavered and just say, no, no, thank you. And so, there's nothing in the journals that indicate at any time that Lewis or Clark engage in these kind of relationships. But when they get to the Rickeraw, they're fascinated with York. In the Rickeraw language, he was referred to as big medicine. Now, big medicine in the sense that what you're talking about, Spencer, is that there was a belief among some of these different tribes that certain medicine, certain spiritual powers could be transferred from one person to the next. For example, when they were with the Mandan Indians, the Mandan had what was called a medicine dance or a buffalo calling dance. And the way it works, they're very explicit. They go into a lot of detail as far as what men were engaging in these relations, who was suffering from a venereal disease, who was being treated for what. Nothing again about Lewis or Clark specifically. But in the case of the journals on January 5th, 1805, we sent one of our men to the medicine

dance last night. They offered him four women. The way it was supposed to work is that you would have a group of elders, men, who would be in the lodge and then younger men with their wives would come in and the younger men would offer their wives to the elders. And they describe it as the elders would go off and do their business. And then the woman would return and then she would have relations with her husband. It was more of a generational type of transfer of power, if you will, or spiritual power, medicine. But now that you have whites, it's also the same thing, to transfer power from a white man to one of the members of the tribe. Or in the case of York, a special fascination, the fact that he was dark skinned.

And there's a very well-known painting by Charles Russell where they're in a lodge and you see these people coming up and touching his skin and the texture of his hair. And because they're just completely mystified. They'd never seen a person of this kind of stature. And like I said, the color of his skin and everything about him was something that they considered to be very spiritual, very much big medicine. And so, yeah, he was offered a lot of women. Yeah.

And the Arikara specifically, there was a warrior that was so set on York having sex with his wife or whatever, that the warrior offered to stand guard outside the lodge while York was inside just to give him privacy. Right. Huh. Right. Yeah. And it was commonplace. Now, I think a big part of that is, too, about the knowing, you know, the fact that this arrangement has been made. There were other situations in which some of the mountain men, especially when you think of the Ashley Party in 1823, where two of the men sneaked into the Arikara villages to have these relationships, and they were caught. And that's what really triggers the whole situation

between the Arikara attacking the Ashley Party, because that was something that was not arranged. But in this case, the arranged situations between the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition and the various tribes, that was, that was just that it was arranged. You know, there's a fun anecdote about the vulnerabilities of, of, or sort of the, the hazards of journal reading in, in Evan S. Connell's book, son of the morning star, where he describes there's this doctor who is among the party that finds

Custer's command after it's slaughtered. And he describes in great detail, everything he saw, everything he did, right? Everything everybody did. But the doctor makes a debut in someone else's journal where someone else describes how the doctor tried to pull had found a body of an indian had tried to

pull it's very hot the car the carcasses were starting to rot had tried to pull the shoes off of indian and his skin slipped and the doctor vom, and has pointed out that that's the one thing that doctor seemed to omit from his own journal that day, right? So there's a little bit of, right, no one's business. Exactly, especially when you're with commanders. I mean, it's easy to talk about this person and this person and how they engage in these relations and how they're suffering from venereal disease, but when you're the commanders, do you put that in there?

Nobody did. And there were at least eight individuals who kept journals. But nobody in any of the journals recorded anything about Lewis or Clark specifically engaging in these relations. there were individuals later on in the 19th century who, uh, who claimed that, uh, they were fathered by either Merigwether Lewis or by William Clark. Yeah. Lay that out. Yeah.

That was going to be my next question. There's gotta, there's gotta be descendants from these relations. From multiple tribes too. Yeah. And, and they talked about individuals who would have a certain African-American characteristics, you know, the, the broad nose,

uh, the texture of the hair, things like that. And they think, well, that's York. In the case of the Nez Perce, there was one by the name of Daytime Smoker who had a reddish tint to his hair. And according to their family's tradition, William Clark was a father. Well, then again, there might've been other red-haired individuals on the expedition, but we do know that Clark had red hair, but that was always their tradition. In South Dakota, there is a family who for over 200 years, I mean, going back to when the Lewis and Clark expedition met the Tietawang Lakota in the Pier Fort Pier area, their claim is that Lewis fathered a child there. Now, Lewis probably had no idea that that might have been the case. If he did, Lewis never married. He never had any children that we know

of. But this family's oral tradition is that he fathered a child and that when that person became in his late 60s, he was actually baptized. And he took the name Joseph DeSmit Lewis. His grave site is on the St. Alban Cemetery in Lower Brule Reservation in South Dakota. And when you go there, you see the huge grave marker and then it says, son of Meriwether Lewis of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition. His baptismal records are at the Center for Western Studies at Augustana University in Sioux Falls. but that's the question so what it says on the certificate that the father was mary weather lewis how are you going to prove that and this has been part of the family's oral history for for well ever since you know back he

would have been born in 1805 but the thing of it is this family has tried and spent a fair amount of money trying to make the DNA connections. Now, because Lewis did not have any known children, but there are other Lewis members of the family that are out there. And so they have tried extensively to try to say, let's find out. If our oral history is right, well, then we should be noted for that, that Meriwether Lewis was the father of such and such person way back, our great, great, great, great grandfather and so on. If not, well, then we know. So the family just really wants to know and is trying to make that connection to do the DNA studies. They've spent a fair amount of money investing in this, going through different DNA groups,

and they really just want to know. And this is kind of why I brought up the Kennewick man and the controversies around that, right, and that word sacrilege, right? So Meriwether Lewis is buried, and we can't exhume him just for the sake of science. We need a living relative to say, you know what? It's okay with us if you exhume him.

And then they've actually taken this to court. And, uh, it's just the, the policy of the National Park Service that when those requests were made, denied. And it said, no, the National Park Service does not allow anybody to be exhumed and to be studied. Of course, with the Lewis situation, was it murder? Was it suicide? People who knew him best at that time they thought suicide they could see that you know he had these bouts of what Stephen Ambrose referred to as melancholy and depression he had other health problems he was dealing with some very serious political issues at the time that's why he was heading back to Washington DC but then super large doses of mercury can mess with the person's brain or nervous system.

Right. Right. So what might have, you know, if it was something physical, was it something psychological? Was that a combination? But even a couple of weeks before his death, they said that he had to be restrained because he was threatening to injure himself. So the timeline leads a lot of people to say that he was having issues and that he took his own life. The other thing is he was shot twice. Once he grazed his head, grazed, and then he had one in the stomach area, in the abdomen. And he did not die immediately. He did live until the morning, the next morning, and that's when he died.

So what other people say is that Lewis, no, no, no, not Mary Weathers Lewis. He would never take his own life, never do that. He was too great of a person and so on. And so they want to exhume the body, do the forensics, and determine at what angles were these shots made. Was this something that he could have inflicted himself, or was this a situation where it was more likely somebody shot at him? But at this point, the National Park Service has no indication that they're willing to allow for an exhumation of the body. If he was assassinated, walk us through like the potential killers.

Yeah. There are some who say that it might've been politically motivated. There are others who simply say that he was, he was robbed, you know? So if it was a situation where somebody did shoot him, again, it depends on, on which story you want to go with, because there are those who say

that, that people back in the territory, that they wanted Lewis gone. There were people that felt that he was not doing a very good job as the governor of the territory. Then there were other people who just simply said that, well, he was probably just robbed. There was a Natchez Trace in Tennessee, and it was a place that was known for people to rob others along the way and

that might have been the case as well so it's hard to say who might have and there's a lot of different theories there's a lot of different books that are out there as far as who might have done it and and the motive is motives behind it and this took place in like a bed and breakfast that he wow like a roadhouse yeah, like he like randomly stopped at... But one of the suspects that people threw out there is like the woman who ran the place because she had some conflicting stories

about she like heard the first gunshot and she saw him kind of crawling around or something, right? And so there's suspicion around her. Yeah, she was saying that he was tripping out so bad and making so much racket that they didn't even go in there when they heard the gunshot. Yeah. Yeah.

A grinder stand is what it was called. And you'll see. Yeah. The old bed and breakfast called grinder stand. Either grinder or just G-R-I-N-E-R. But a story that she heard him pacing and mumbling to himself and throughout the night. And then she heard the gunshot.

And so it's one of those stories, again, where what she had to say about the incident was pretty brief and not all. I mean, it's not like she was taken in and given a full interview or anything like that. She just basically simply stated that he was up all night and he was talking and mumbling to himself, and then she heard the gunshotshot and then it goes from there. Are there historians you really respect that believe that he was assassinated?

Or are most of the folks that know Lewis and Clark well convinced it was suicide? Most historians will go with the suicide. But there are others who are adamant that no, no, he just would not have done that. And they're the ones who have really pushed for the exhuming of the body. And a lot of them are just people who want to be supportive of the Lewis story. Others are people who want to make sure that we're telling the right side of history, that his reputation as far as committing suicide versus being assassinated, that that gets recorded in the history books. I can't believe he's buried on park service land.

Right. But does that, how does that give the park service sort of like domain over the body? Their policy overall, from what I gather, is that they just simply do not allow the exhumation of any bodies. Now, we were talking about archaeological sites earlier. What happens when- But hear me out.

Let's say I get buried, okay, whatever. My body gets buried on Park Service land, right? And then later a family- That's not going to happen. But no, no, I'm saying later a family, like my family's like, I want the body back. Is it really the park services place to say no?

Well, at this point, there's really no family that is that insistent that they want to have the body exhumed and reburied. I guess because he didn't have his own kids, right? So there's no like person with a real. No direct. Yeah, like not his parents, not his kids. One part of this calculus is that where he's buried, there's like 20 other people buried as well. Right. That they could potentially not even hit Lewis if they were to go in. And his, his remains, I think were reburied once, you know, so it's just, I can't remember the situation as far as why they were being exposed, but a reburial.

And then of course he had the, uh, the more notable marker identifying Lewis, but, uh, yeah. Oh, so it's a little bit of a crap shoot anyway. Yeah. Man,

I think they ought to dig it up anyway, though, man. I don't really see what the big deal about it is. I'll dig it up and have a look. I think we got to get to, I'm not trying to be crass. I'm just saying,

I don't really see the big deal about it. It's like the guy's dead. Who cares? Then there's people say, well, the band's dead. Let him rest. Listen, man, he can go back to rest. He's been resting all this time. It's just a brief interruption in his rest.

He can go back and rest some more after they take a look. Clark, Jefferson, those who really knew him well, they didn't question it. They thought, yeah, they could see him doing something like that, that he'd be that drastic. Jefferson knew his family well and said that his father and I think his mother and like aunts and uncles had depression and like had manic episodes as well. You'd also be to assume he was assassinated, ignore the evidence. But you said he tried to commit suicide like a month earlier at four something i don't remember where and then he'd even written in his journal when he turned 31 like a tremendously sad entry that was like i reflected that i had yet done but little very little indeed to further the happiness of the human race or to

advance the information of the succeeding generation and And from there he goes on and he's like, uh, talks about how lazy he's been and like, uh, just a waste of space. He sounds like a guy with syphilis. He's real excited about how he's going to stay at a cute little bed and breakfast this weekend though. Grinder station.

Yeah. Spencer, that, that particular journal entry is, is one that's noted quite often. That says. Is it legit? Yeah. It's, it's, it's in his journal. Yeah. that's noted quite often. Is it legit? Yeah, it's in his journal. It's his writing and everything. But it was the fact that at this point, he's 31 years old.

They finally met the people whom they've been looking for for the last four months or whatever during the summer. It was really a situation where things should have been much more upbeat. Instead, he's saying, man, I haven't done anything. I'm such a loser. It's like you get that impression from what he writes, and people see that. That's, again, where Stephen Ambrose in Undaunted Courage keeps talking about these bouts of melancholy, that he just simply went through these periods where he just really seems depressed. I think a lot of people just get aside with that story then. Yeah, and it was also likely that most of those fellas

ended the expedition with malaria, which can cause dementia, which would also like add to the case that this was suicide. I didn't know they were suffering from malaria. Yeah, I never heard malaria. That's interesting. I think they just assume that most of those folks got it at some point anyway, right? Right. I mean, the variety of different diseases that they suffered from.

But the interesting thing is that Clark, in the middle part, maybe 1826, 1828, somewhere in there, he made a list of all the members of the expedition, the permanent expedition members that headed from the Mandan village out the Pacific coast. And out of those 33, 16 of them were dead by 1825 or so he noted, including Sacagawea. You know, he said, no, Sacagawea died December 20th, 1812. She probably would have been in her mid-20s. So again, the controversy as far as how long did she live, Where is she buried? I mean, there's a lot of controversy surrounding that. But a lot of the members of the expedition, you talked about John Coulter turning around, going right back. There were probably 10 members of the expedition who did just that. They went right back. They come back after over two years and four months, and they turn around, they go right back, and they're going to look into either trading and then later trapping.

You know, why trade when you can cut out the middle person and then go ahead and just trap yourself? And, you know, you get into that whole period of time between John Potts and George Dreuer and John Colter. I mean, there were probably 10 of them, I think. Oh, hold on a minute. Potts, the guy that got killed at Three Forks and got his genitals cut off and everything. I didn't know he was an expedition member. John Potts was an expedition member.

Oh, so they knew each other well. Oh, yeah. A lot of these, in fact, there was one time. I didn't know him and Colter had that much history together. John Coulter, he goes, he joins the two trappers or traders that are heading up the river. He's the only member to be dismissed early from the expedition. And then he goes on his ventures and then he goes back and he meets up with a couple of the other former members of the expedition. He joins them.

He turns around. He goes right back to the west. You know, there's a little bit of – there's kind of an interesting bit of deal-making that shows you the leadership style of Lewis and Clark around when Coulter wants to go back with the trappers and traitors. And everybody's supportive. And whoever, Lewis or Clark, whoever says,

we'll let him go if everyone promises that no one else will ask. It's like an interesting deal, right? It's like, we're not home yet, you know, so we can't have everybody just disbanding. And I don't know how many other members would have been interested in leaving, but I always think it's interesting that really after all that period of time, John Coulter was ready to go right back. Oh, I love it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, so I'm, I'm kind of interested in, uh, because these, like the Mandan village again is, is like this social hub, right? Lots of trading coming in and with that trading comes news. Do we know what was said about the expedition in other parts of the world, like folks who didn't come in direct contact with the expedition, like what it was regarded as from a native perspective or a trapping perspective out there? There is a book, I can't remember the author, but it's called Through Indian Eyes. And even during the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the National Park Service

really had a strong emphasis on the native perspective. Because you're talking about a situation where Lewis and Clark come along, and I don't think they would have been able to survive had it not been for the different Indian nations with whom they encountered. But at the same time, things are never going to be the same. You know, by the time they're coming back down the Missouri River, they said that they met probably 150 different traders and trappers going up the river. And had it not been Lewis and Clark, it would have been somebody else. It's just a matter of time. They were already, I mean, when they came to the different villages, there were already a lot of Frenchmen who were among these populations. There were people coming from British Canada coming down.

So for a large part of it, it's not like they were the first non-Indians to visit that area. But when they head West and go across the mountains to the Pacific Northwest, that's, that's really the area that nobody else had really ventured in. Yeah. That's, I think it's poor. Like Elliot West writes about, the historian Elliot West writes about this is like, at the

time of the Lewis and Clark expedition, there were native Americans living on the great plains who had been to Europe, met the king of France and came back to the Great Plains. Right? Like, that's the Southern Plains. But it was like, it wasn't like, a lot had been going on out there for a long time.

And then you get into, they get into areas where they were making first contact. But it was like, there was deep European history. Oh, absolutely. What year did Cabeza de Vaca go like across the south coast of Texas? Like 200 years earlier. Yeah. And then the, I always say the Vrandres, but the Varendra brothers and the family who came down 1738, 1742, 1743. We know that they were at least as far as the pier, Fort Pier area.

They left a marker there, a lead plate with their, the names on it and the date. I know. So that's, that's back in the 1700s, a fair amount of time before Lewis and Clark came along. And, and like I said, you come across the, the Mandan and they have Rene Jassome who serves as a translator.

When they're with the Erechera, it's Joseph Graveline. When they're with the, the Angton Sioux, it's, it's Pierre Dorian, you know, so. Like guys that have been there long enough to know the language. Right. Know the language.

They had families. They had lived among these people for, for a number of, number of years. Yeah. So yeah, that case, it wasn't all known, unknown, I should say. In fact, they did have journals that they could look at and, in anticipation of who they

were going to meet and where they might meet them, all those different aspects of it. But with the Mandan and some of the other tribes, the Mandan chief, Sheheka, white coyote, he actually, on the way down the river, he actually went with them to St. Louis and eventually went out to the east and then met with Jefferson. Eagle feather, I mentioned him earlier, the one who was wailing when he couldn't understand why they were punishing John Newman like that. He goes all the way out to Washington, D.C., becomes sick, and he dies. And that does not go over well with the Iriqorah. From that point on, the Iriqorah become very anti-american and it really affects the fur trade certainly because that's when instead of a fur traders going up the missouri river now suddenly start looking more at the south pass be thinking that

yeah this would be a better way to go you avoiding both the uh the ericara and and the and the black feet so not that all the tribes are were pro looseewis and Clark and friendly, but they did provide a great deal of assistance for them, certainly. And I really don't think that they would have survived had it not been for the different nations with whom they came in contact. Hey, folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada.

The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the Meat Eater Podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service.

That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Yanni, what were you saying we never got into? Oh, just hunting and fishing and eating on the expedition?

I got one more question and we'll talk about that. Sure. Because you just mentioned the Blackfeet. They only killed one guy, right? They lost one guy from, what do you call it when your appendix ruptures? Appendicitis, right. And they killed a guy, right?

I mean, they killed a Blackfeet. When Lewis... Lewis, like, didn't... The expedition members, didn't they kill a Blackfeet man? Right, there were two that were killed. Oh, two black feet men right and uh when and like forever earned the enmity of the exactly blackfeet nation when they were returning lewis and three of the other men had broken off clark was taking the yellowstone the main part of the of the expedition and uh when lewis and these three other men met the uh the group of about 10 or so Blackfoot, they ended up spending the evening with them.

The next morning they awake and it appears that they're stealing their horses, Lewis's horses and his men. And they pointed out that one person stabbed, killed one of the Blackfoot and Lewis shot and killed another one. Oh, Lewis did? Yeah. And to add insult to injury, when they left, they placed Jefferson Peace Medals around them. So there was no question as to who did this, you know, that this was, these were Americans who did this. And so from that point on. They placed Jefferson Peace Medals around the.

Around their neck. Around the dead guys. Around the two men whom they just killed. Right. You're shitting me. piece metals around the around their neck around the dead guys around the two men whom they just killed right you shouldn't so from that point on like i said the rick raw and the uh and the blackfoot they uh they were the two groups that really did not support american that's what's crazy about is like is there any chance that the black feet who caught coulter and pots in the upper three forks region or the up you know the three forks in missouri is there any chance those dudes knew who those dudes were i don't know that so much they knew that they were members of the lewis and clark expedition from before it's just that

they were americans yeah and that was if you were making a movie about it, dude, if I made a movie about it, I'd have it be that whoever was standing next to the guy that they killed would be like, oh, I remember you boys. Yeah. Fancy seeing you here. And then the other like close brush to death with that, that the crew had was Lewis got shot by one of his own men in the,

but in like a very national lampoon way by somebody who thought they spotted an elk walking through the woods. Pierre Corzat, he was one of the more notable members. He was not a military person, but he was known as a good boatsman. He was the one who would often play the fiddle whenever they were celebrating the 4th of July or Christmas or something like that. So he's noted quite often, but he also is said to have had poor eyesight.

And so on this situation, when they're coming back, Cruzot shoots what he thinks is an elk and it turns out to be Lewis. And it's just one of those situations where, again, he could have gone this whole way and then been shot by one of his own men. But it was a flesh wound in the upper thigh, in the buttock area. And so he stayed in the boat for the next several days. When they reach back to the Arikara villages, Clark goes in and meets with the new Arikara leader, Gray Eyes. There's nothing about Lewis.

Well, because Lewis is on the boat. He's not going to get up and walk around. And even at that, towards the end of August, they point out that Lewis finally got up and walked along the shoreline a little bit. Well, it was notable because he'd been shot and he was recovering from that injury. But yeah, it was interesting that he ends up suffering an injury that could have been a very fatal injury, certainly, by one of his own men. Before we. Yeah, and when it was all said and done, he'd been shot three times. When it was all said and done, he'd been shot three times. When it was all said and done, yes.

Twice by himself, supposedly. Coulter killed the first mule deer, was the first American to kill a mule deer, right? Isn't that what they say? I'm not sure if he was the first one, but. Oh, no, no, no. He killed the first mule deer that was scientifically described. Right. Of course he wasn't the first American to kill a mule deer. And that's the thing.

You know, Lewis, he was the one who was responsible for uh identifying the different animals and giving the detailed description so uh and when and when lewis wrote and there were certainly big gaps in his journals but when he wrote he wrote with such such detail and we talked about this before last last october but you know uh when he described a plant he would draw the leaves of the roots. He would, he would go into all the details. Uh, when he described an animal, he would go into incredible amount of detail.

And so, yeah, in that area of, well, uh, Paul Russell Cutright, who wrote Lewis and Clark Pioneering Naturalists, uh, for, for outdoors people, for hunters. So that's probably a book that I would really recommend because he talks about, you know, by today's standards, the different counties and what plants, what animals were identified by Lewis and Clark, and especially Lewis in that particular area, you know, so it puts things in perspective, but, but, uh, yeah, Lewis goes into so much detail. And, and what I was going to say is Paul Russell cut, right. He said the area between the Niagara river and the Bad River, that that was probably

one of the most significant areas in terms of plants and animals. For the native populations, they knew all about these plants and animals, but for science to record them, that was, that was something different. You know, so they said 178 plants, 122 different species and subspecies of animals that Lewis identified. That number has changed over the years because people start looking at it and say, oh, no, actually that was already recorded. But it was a situation where he had so much detail when he talked about, I always think of the jackrabbit, for example, because when they killed their first jackrabbit, Lewis had been watching this, and he goes out and he says, okay, the the jackrabbit about two and a half feet long

six and a half pounds uh the ears are about six inches long three inches wide and then he goes out and he measures because he's been watching this leaping from place to place and especially when it was fleeing and he said that from the point where it took off and where it landed was approximately 21 feet i mean it's those kind of details that those used when he talked about different different plants and animals it's it's like astonishing how much they got right without prior knowledge but talk about some of the things that they got wrong because it's like pretty comical some of the the stuff like calling a bighorn sheep in ibex. Or you mentioned to me last October something about they thought they saw a tiger, but we don't know what that was.

Right, right. You know, there was a lot of times where, because they, I mean, Lewis did go through his tutoring. And so he worked with people like Benjamin Smith Barton and how to do preserving the specimens of plants and animals, and looking at books. And a lot of times I think it was based on the fact that they knew that this type of animal existed. And so when they see something similar out here, they kind of go by a similar name. Yeah, it wouldn't be so much getting it wrong. It's just basing what they're seeing on what someone else saw and described. Right, something similar to what they're seeing.

What was the tiger story though? The tiger cat, it goes back to the point where I think it was in July of 1805. And Lewis would do this quite often where he'd go off by himself and he was out exploring. He shoots at a buffalo and he does not reload right away. And all of a sudden he realized that there's a

grizzly bear very close to him. So his action was. Where was he when this happened? It was somewhere here in Montana. I'm not sure exact point. It would have been July. So I'd have to look at the journals and see exactly where they were at that particular point.

But it was, it was here in Montana and he ends up going into a nearby river, getting in deep enough so that if the grizzly bear follows him, that he'd have to start paddling. He wouldn't be able to actually attack him. And Lewis and Clark, they both had what were called espantoons, basically lances. They used them for walking sticks. It was really kind of a symbol of officers. And they had a point on the end. And so he figured if he'd get into this river deep enough that if this grizzly bear did come in after him, he'd be able to defend himself a little bit better.

Well, eventually the grizzly bear takes off and as he's heading back towards the main camp, three buffalo start to chase him. And then he gets to another point where he sees an animal that he describes as a tiger cat. And what he actually meant as a tiger cat and uh what he actually meant by a tiger cat it's hard to say uh i shouldn't say most but it's been kind of divided a lot of people in the northwest they say well tiger cat they're talking about a lynx or bobcat something like that

uh for others uh they said no a tiger cat was a reference to a wolverine and so there was this wolverine that was looked looked like it was ready to pounce. And then he shot at it and then it went into its burrow and he went and he looked and he saw that the, uh, the marks that were left looked like the, the tracks of a, of a tiger, you know? So he gets that idea of the tiger cap, but

what exactly was that he saw? I like, I like the Wolverine idea, man. Yeah. And that, that seems. Doesn't sound like a marmot. No, that seems like the, the most popular story is that it's probably a Wolverine. Also, when they were in Montana, I think it was in the Great Falls area.

Multiple men talk about this in the journals where they hear some mysterious booms that sound like cannons. But it wouldn't make sense that it would be cannons. And I've heard people speculate that it was like an earthquake or a glacier. So tell us about that story, like what they heard and what people think it might have been. And of course, things echo so much, you know, and that was part of it. I think that the sounds that they were hearing were something that surprised them, something that they really were kind of wondering, what is that? Where is that coming from? But even to try to narrow it down, they had such a difficult time even doing so, you know, because again, it's just the loud sounds, crashes that make, uh, that are, are

made. So I. Big horn sheep. I can't tell you how many times I've been on the river. Yeah. Pretty good sheep. And then like, son of a bitch, somebody else

up there shooting at my geese. Who keeps shooting at 22? So, yeah. So, yeah. So I, I honestly, I don't have a whole lot more to add to that because it was such a mystery to them. They really didn't have a whole time or whatever. But in reality, they often split up with like, you know, groups of 20 and 25 or 10 and 30 and 15 or something like that.

And a lot of times when they came to different rivers, the Marias River, for example, which way to go? You know, all the men of the expedition, except for Lewis and Clark said, this is the way we need to go. Lewis and Clark said, no, we're going to go this way. But they took a lot of time going up. They split the group up, and some went this direction, some went that direction. They came back, they reported, and then the captains had to make that final decision which way we're going to go. But there were a lot of times like that. On the way back, when I said that Lewis and three men went to explore more of the northern part of Montana and Clark and the rest, they went down the Yellowstone.

That happened quite often. And a lot of times, even when they met the Shoshone, it was Lewis and that front party and Clark and the rest coming up behind. And a lot of times they would just simply leave a note on a tree limb, you know, and you think, well, how in the world did somebody catch that? Oh, they left us a note, you know, but they did. It was just remarkable that they could go in so many different directions and yet they would still meet up.

You know, it's just fascinating that they could do so and do it over and over and over again. I mentioned George Shannon. He was the youngster of the group. He was one who's often mentioned a lot in the Lewis and Clark circles for being lost the most often. There was one situation early in the expedition back in August and September. And he went out hunting and he thought that the expedition had passed him. So he's pushing forward, trying to catch up to the expedition.

For 16 days, he's pushing forward, trying to catch up to the expedition. For 16 days, he's pushing forward. He runs out of ammunition. He shoots a stick and kills a rabbit. He eats some berries along the way. And after 16 days, he's starving, he's tired, he sits down. And here comes the expedition behind him. The whole time they were trying to catch up to him, and he kept thinking that he had to catch up to them. So I always tell, you know, the parents, when you tell your children, you get lost, stay in one place, don't wander around. Well, that's exactly what George Shannon was doing.

He was wandering. He was trying to catch up to the expedition. They were actually behind him. When you say he shot a stick, you mean he crammed a stick down the muzzle? Right. Whoa. Shot it out. That's all he had.

I mean, he was last resort. Yeah. So 16 days he was, he was lost. To me, being lost just means you're finding stuff. You know, I mean, that's, that's the good part about being lost. You discover all sorts of stuff. He probably just didn't get credit because he. Didn't have his journal.

Didn't have his journal. Yeah, he was falling out of military, whatever structure there. You know, and people often, again, jokingly say that, you know, he died in a land of plenty because you have all this wildlife, you have all this around you, but you can't kill anything. You know, so for 16 days, you're eating a

few berries here and there and a rabbit. You know, that was it. That's all he'd come up with. Talk about how the whole time Lewis and Clark are doing this expedition, I think here and there and a rabbit. That was it. That's all he'd come up with. Talk about how the whole time Lewis and Clark are doing this expedition, I think they don't even realize that they're also being hunted by like some Spanish mercenaries. How close did the Spanish mercenaries like come to getting them or not come close to finding them? Not very close.

The Spaniard you're talking about is a man by the name of Pedro Vial. And he was commissioned by the Spanish. The Spanish had a lot of resentment when the French sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States. And it was a situation that once Lewis and Clark, I mean, you can say, well, yeah, but the United States bought Louisiana Territory. That only goes up to the Continental Divine. Anything west of the Rockies, that's claimed by, again, the Spanish, by the British, by the Russians. And so once they get beyond that area, they're kind of fair game, if you will.

And so the Spanish sent out Pedro Vial at least three times, and there were probably four different expeditions by the Spanish themselves to try to intercept Lewis and Clark. Each time they sent them out, they were way off. And they were hoping to have a gunfight with them. They were hoping to intercept them, take their records, certainly probably not just imprison them, but probably, yeah, do away with them because they saw them as a threat to the Spanish territory. How many guys did they have with them?

It varied. There were some situations where they had as many as 50 or 60 men. Wow. Yeah. So they were more down, you know, when Zebulon Pike, he was also in a situation similar to Lewis and Clark. Of course, he's going to the Southwest when they're going to the Northwest and Pike was, was captured by the Spanish. And so whether, you know, eventually they, they released him, but would they have done the same thing with Clark? Maybe a bigger question, would Lewis and Clark allow themselves to be caught? Yeah.

Or would they put up a fight to the end? I think they probably would have put up a fight to the end. Jed Smith got caught and detained by the Spanish when he crossed the Mojave into California. Right. Yeah. So that, I mean, the Spanish were very

concerned about what was going on. Did Lewis and Clark know that they were being hunted? No, no. Wow. No, they had no idea because they were so far removed from what the Spanish were doing that there was no communication, no indication that, oh yeah, the Spanish are trying to intercept you or anything like that. And you're looking at for, you know, two years and four months plus that they're off the face of the earth. Nobody knows where they are, what they're doing, if they're still alive, anything like that.

And so it's not until they start coming back that they start running into a lot of these people who are heading out west for the trade and for the trapping. And then, of course, people realize, oh, they're still here. They're still alive. They made it. And even at that, you talk about Lewis and his depression. When he gets back, he starts writing a letter to Jefferson. And he goes on to say that, oh, we accomplished all these great things.

We identified this and that. But then he goes on to say, however, we failed to find a good water route to the Pacific Northwest, which was really their big objective, to explore the waters of the Missouri River across the continent and try to use that for trade purposes. And it just didn't exist, you know. So in that case, all these great things, but sorry, we failed. We missed the number one objective that you had for us. When I read Undaunted Courage, I was, I was very frustrated, uh, as an armchair quarterback, 200 years later about how it seemed every interaction with a tribe that went poorly

could have been diffused by giving them what they wanted, which was usually like ammo or guns. And so was, was it like a strategic choice that we don't, they could be our enemy. So we don't want to give them ammo or guns or were they like really limited in supplies that that stuff was so valuable? Like why weren't they more willing to, to part with those things instead of always trying to negotiate with like beads and metals that the tribes didn't care about? I'll handle that one. No, go ahead.

I'm joking. I think it depended on the tribe because they had, when they met with the Yankton Sioux August 30th and 31st, things went really well. They were very agreeable to trading with American traders in the future. But there was a Yankton Sioux elder by the name of Halfman, and he said, now the next group you meet, the Teton or the Tietuan Sioux, their ears will not be as open as ours. They're not going to be as receptive. So, and of course they knew, they heard about the reputation of Lakota, even back East, you know, even before all this began. And when they're in St. Louis, certainly there's more people saying, oh, you know, watch out for the Tietuan. And so they get, and those four days, September 25th, 26th, 27th, and 28th, they're just up and down.

It's a roller coaster ride. They talk about how the 25th, they invited the three leaders, Black Buffalo, Buffalo Medicine, and the one who was referred to as the partisan out to the keelboat, offered them alcohol. And that when they went to return them to the shoreline, that the one who's referred to as the partisan, he started to feign drunkenness and he kind of brushed up against Clark. It gets to the point where Clark draws his sword and the men on board the boats, they start getting their weapons ready, the Lakota, they start getting their bow and arrows ready. And there's this very tense moment that if anybody would have fired a shot on either side, it probably would have been the end of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Fortunately, Black Buffalo, he was the one who stepped in and calmed things down.

But when they stayed on an island that night, they called it Bad Humored Island because it was not a good day. The next day, they talk about feasting. They talk about how Lewis and Clark were individually carried in on buffalo robes, that there was a night of dancing and, you know, completely different scenario than the day before. But it goes back and forth like that. And then they find out that through a couple of the men, Pierre Cousat, whom I mentioned before, the person who accidentally shot Lewis, he was a French and Omaha background. There was another person by the name of Francois Labiche, who was also French and Omaha background. There was another person by the name of Francois Labiche, who was also French and Omaha. And because of the Omaha side of their family,

they knew a little bit about the Lakota language. And from what they could gather, they thought that they're not going to let us leave. They're going to prevent us from going up the Missouri River. So eventually on that fourth day, when they're ready to take off, again, you have the partisans saying, come on, just give me some more tobacco. You know, just give us some more gifts.

We know you have a whole boatload of all these things. But it's one of those things that, one, they didn't want to be bullied into doing something like that. And, two, they certainly did not want to give them any weapons that they could use because they just had that reputation. When they meet with the Arikara, that went quite well with the Mandans. They spent the whole winter working with the Mandans. When they crossed the Lolo Pass, it took much longer than they anticipated. But when they met with the Nez Perce, they were so hungry that they gorged themselves on dried fish and camas roots, and they became very ill. I mean, they're lying around moaning and groaning. They're completely incapacitated.

And the Nez Perce thought about, boy, it'd be so easy to go around and just kill all these guys and take their weapons. They'd be the most powerful nation in that area. And there was a Nez Perce woman by the name of Watkuise, who, similar to Sakakawea, she had been taken by the Blackfeet, ended up being sold up in Canada, living with white men, and then eventually returned to her people. And she said that when she lived with the white men that they treated her very well. And so she was the one who acted on behalf of the Lewis and Clark expedition and said, don't do them any harm. You know, they're not bad people. But again, it would have been one of the situations where it could have gone either way.

So it really depended on. Yeah, she could have been saying, they're obviously going to die out here anyway. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those things where so many things are just so pivotal. It could have gone one way or the other. Yeah. It's fascinating gone one way or the other. Yeah.

It's fascinating to think about, man. If they'd all got dusted off, like everything, you know, you get into like this, like the butterfly, what's that thing called? Butterfly effect. The butterfly effect. So who knows? But like it probably would have been inevitable. Like what happened would have been inevitable. Even if they had all gotten killed right manifest destiny you know probably would have marched on man oh yeah absolutely yeah that's like saying you know well can you imagine

if columbus had not discovered uh the americas well it would have been somebody else and then had it not been lewis and clark it would have been somebody else you know but uh you know how much of a role do they play in history like i said it's not just a story it's a bunch of stories you have all these different individuals who involved in different different tribal nations uh you have all the accomplishments that they had with uh with the plant life and animal life and geography and geology and and uh just just all the things that they did over that period of time. And to think that only one person died, that's the fascinating part. And they always say that Charles Floyd. That was a fluke.

Yeah, Charles Floyd. He could have been in Philadelphia and he would have died of appendicitis. So the fact that he was out here in the wilderness, well, that was really not a big point, pivotal point, because it was something that was not treatable not a big point pivotal point because it was it was something that was not treatable back then oh uh one last thing i wish i'd asked you this earlier they had different tastes and fish than we have now like they like the stuff now like didn't they like uh gold not gold eyes moon eyes a lot well they call them salmon i think they call them like prairie salmon so that's just another like funny spot to think

of a gold eye now being a salmon. Yeah. But they liked them. And that's now regarded as like a bony ass trash fish. Right. That was like their favorite fish. They're good smoked.

Have you ever tried to eat one? Oh yeah. Smoked are great. Cause you can, you can peel the meat off the bones. I mean, they're a very good smoked fish. Cutthroats were named after Clark. Right.

The Linnaean name. Right. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. He had like a Lewis's woodpecker, Clark's, I'll try to think of it, a bird named after him as well.

Is the Clark's nuthatch that Clark? Yes. Okay. Yep. And then the cutthroat trout. Clark's nutcracker. That's a scientific name. There.

Is it nutcracker or nuthatch? Yep. Exactly. Okay. I feel like most people that are interested in Lewis and Clark pick up on Daunted Courage. But if you were going to suggest another book or another author, what would that be? Depends on your interests. In my case, because a lot of my research is with the Northern Plains.

And so I always like looking at James Rhonda's Lewis and Clark Among the Indians because it deals with each of the different tribal groups that they came in contact with. Overall, they would meet with nearly 50 different nations. A lot of people point out that, oh yeah, but they learned about a lot more. So some people say as many as 100

that they became knowledgeable about. And James Rhonda does a really good job approaching it from that perspective as far as the connection between Lewis and Clark and the different groups with whom they came in contact. So if that's your interest, if you're looking at wildlife, there's several that are out there, but I mentioned that one that I like, not very politically correct by today's standards, but Paul Russell Cutright's Lewis and Clark Pioneering Naturalists. I like that one because politically correct by today's standards, but Paul Russell Cutt writes,

Lewis and Clark, Pioneering Naturalists. I like that one because it does break it down, what they were seeing in terms of plant life and animal life throughout the expedition. And of course, Gary Moulton's 13 volumes of the Lewis and Clark journals with all the notations, that's always something that you have to look at, I guess, just because it does have the maps that includes, you know, where they were and how things have changed, like the Missouri River, how the course has changed so much. But he puts it into perspective, again, as far as where did this actually take place? You know, so that's important. Undaunted courage. I heard Stephen Ambrose speak several times before he passed

away. And he always talked about how when he first went to his publisher and said, well, I'd like to do something on Lewis and Clark. This was back in 1996. And so people were beginning to think of the bicentennial coming up in 2004, 2006. And his publisher said, well, very reluctantly, he said, well, how about if we start with 500,000 copies? And Ambrose said, 500,000 copies? I hope more gets sold than that. By 2001, 3 million copies had been sold. It still is one that people know, Stephen Ambrose and Undaunted Courage. It does have its critics as well because he makes a lot of assumptions.

You know, it's like, well, in the case of the Tietuan situation, he talks about, spends a whole page talking about, well, what if somebody would have fired a shot? You know, they probably would have, you know, focused on Lewis and Clark first and, you know, went through this whole scenario. And then the others would have drifted back down the river to escape. And it didn't happen. You know, Black Buffalo intervened and things calmed down and they made it through that whole situation. But he says, what if? You know, what if? I know, you cover that stuff on podcasts.

He stepped out of his role as a historian. Right, right. And then there's a lot of other times, too, where he'll spend, you know, half a page, three-fourths of a historian. Right, right. And then there's a lot of other times too where he'll spend, you know, half a page, three-fourths of a page, and he'll say, well, according to James Rhonda, well, then he'll quote James Rhonda for a half a page or three-fourths of a page. And then people start thinking, maybe I should

just read James Rhonda, you know, because that's what, you know, what made him, I think, a prolific writer is that he used other people's works extensively. And he did get into a little trouble with that and plagiarism issues towards the very end. But I think it was just the fact that he did rely on a lot of sources. And he was putting out books after books after books. Yeah, and he's on top.

People want to knock him down. Yeah. And other people are doing a lot of the research for him and he's putting it all together. But when you read Stephen Ambrose's Undone and Courage, I mean, having listened to the person speak in person or if you watch them in some documentary, you can just hear his voice when you're reading his work. You know, it just sounds like Stephen Ambrose. You can just hear it so well. I've read references here and there that you know it's acknowledged that no one has gotten the movie right you know what i mean and it's like a it's like this thing you just can't it's too big to get a grip on but it haunts various filmmakers and i wonder what's like you

know like seems like like c CGI would help, right? It'd be like an epic thing. I just wonder if someone's ever going to be able to really take it on. I know that HBO was working on it for a long time. They were going to do kind of a mini series, and that fell by the wayside. I mean, that was probably 15 years ago. Were you thinking CGI for the tiger cat? Yeah, tiger cat.

But just making the, yeah. I mean, just, but think about it. You got to deal with, you're dealing with. Tugging rivers upstream. Yeah, and you're dealing with like 48 characters, whatever, what number? 48 characters encountering 50 groups. Right.

Like 50 indigenous groups. I mean, it's huge, right? And it like, it haunts people hot that you could ever really do it'd be good for uh i'd end it with that like uh you know big budget could do it big budget multi-season series the thing is that you're always gonna have the uh the drama part that's added to make it a good movie you know and and there's been a little love story a little love story about York and. Oh yeah.

And, and there was that movie that came out back in the 1950s, I think it was. Uh, Donna Reed played the part of, of, of, uh, Sacagawea, Sacagawea back then. Uh, he had Fred McMurray from My Three Sons. He, he was playing Lewis. Uh, Charlton Heston played Clark. Uh, there's, there's a knife fight where Clark and

Toussaint Charbonneau are going around the campfire fighting over Sacagawea, you know, which was not, not the case or anything like that. But, you know, and then there's one part where they can't help themselves, man. They're going over the, uh, the portage of the great falls and, and, you know, they're, they're pulling this keelboat with them, which the keelboat

had gone down river. There's no way you're going to pull that great big boat over the mountains or anything like that. But it's in there and it's just ridiculous. There was also one called, I can't think of the case right now, but Matthew Perry and Chris Farley. And that's where you see the spanish chasing them you know pedro veal well farley and matthew perry they're they're they're leading the expedition at the same time of lewis and clark so they're kind of racing lewis and clark you know i get it it makes for a funny movie and everything but there's a lot of yeah right uh but anytime you have a situation like this, uh, you're, you're going to have something thrown in there for special effects in South

Dakota. Quite honestly, we all laugh at, at the Revenant, the movie. Oh, dude, it was the greatest crime,

greatest crime against America. It happens in, in August, uh, up in the Northwestern part of South Dakota. Yeah. And you see the mountains. Okay.

We don't have mountains. There should be like a Nuremberg trial for the, for the people. There was, there was a lot of things in there that stopped no no no yeah shooting that shit in british columbia give me a break oh but man if you like huge if you like hours of grunting that's huge huge attack grunting and crawling and i think that's exactly what would happen if they did something with lewis and clark it there'd be so many things added to it just to liven up the story. Oh, yeah.

It'd be bad, man. Like one of the main things I want to do when I retire is take on Boone in film. You know? I think it'd be great to write a script. That would be. But man, I would never want to take this on because it's like, you know what I mean? Like Boone spent a lot of time with a couple other people. Yeah.

And then, as I mentioned at the very beginning, a lot of the things that I mentioned today, they're very controversial. I mean, there are going to be people that cringe at some of the things I said and there are going to be people that say, yeah, yeah. Oh, tell me the most controversial thing you said.

Sacagawea versus Sacagawea. Really? Lewis. Oh, give me some. Lewis, murder or suicide. Oh, okay. You know, those issues her the role of sakagawiya um lewis uh paternity you know did he actually father a child i mean those are all other people that really emotionally care about those answers yes yes they emotionally care yes they they get tied into it so much and when i give talks as a teacher a lot of times out, well, you know, there are people who believe this and there are people who believe that.

And I don't always say, well, I think that this is what happened to Lewis or I think that this is what happened. I have my personal leanings. But at the same time, I realize that there are people who are very adamant one way or the other. Yeah. And like I said, go to a Lewis and Clark conference. Nice thing is that they're all experts. The bad thing is they're all experts and they never agree. Do you go to a lot of those conferences?

Um, I, I used to, uh, in the last few years with COVID and everything, I haven't attended anything, but, um, I still do a lot with, uh, Lewis and Clark, uh, I've worked with this family whose oral tradition is that, uh, Lewis fathered a child, Joseph, to Spint Lewis. So. Oh, you worked with that family?

I've been working with them. I actually submitted an article for peer review. It was turned down because he said, no, it's too controversial. What? They didn't want to go into that. And all this family. We'll publish it on our website.

Oh yeah, send it to us, man. All this family wants to know is, you know, what is it, is it true or not? What was the article called? The other, it was Meriwether Lewis, Winona, and the story of Joseph DeSmit Lewis. So Lewis being the father, Winona being the mother, and Joseph DeSmit Lewis being the child.

Have you put it out anywhere? No. You still wait and try to get it in an academic journal? I might, I might. I mean, I'll have to make some revisions with it, but I. Why don't you just tease it with us and then, you know. In fact, even before I came out here, I checked with the person in the family and I said, I just want to know, is there any new advances or anything like that?

And he said, no, he said, we're, we're just trying to find somebody with the lewis connection and and like i said there's no known lewis descendants so it would have to be some other type of relation but with the dna if they could just do the dna work oh they gotta just go dig that body up man come on someone needs to go in there and do like an act of civil obedience do a little night rave. This fella from Missouri, 70 years old. Oh, yeah. What's that guy doing now? He's got nothing to lose. Carton dispenser.

He's got nothing to lose. Yeah. I'd be like, why don't you get that shovel and get that trowel. Yep. In your bucket, in your backpack. Get us some skulls. Man. I like them better now. I like them better. i like them better no it's fascinating man it's good stuff

this is a good time in history i would like to been with those guys i would have been the guy that got lost or eaten by a grizzly bear i would not have made it i'm telling you i have so much anxiety when i'm out on big trips of like, God, this is so awesome right now. But I know tomorrow or tonight I'm going to bump into another person. And just being in that zone of like, haven't seen anybody for a month. Yeah, not something. And we're still on the river. Right.

I mean, come on. I'd give a lot for that. I got to hit you with one more thing. Then we're going on the river. Right. I mean, come on. I'd give a lot for that. I got to hit you with one more thing, then we're going to quit. Sure. I'm friends with the historian Dan Flores. Do you know him? No. He's not a Lewis and Clark guy.

No. But he had a graduate student who did this work on, i believe it was a graduate student did his work on the places where they encountered most wildlife particularly like the big congregations of of buffalo were contested areas like inner like contested by various tribes okay and were these sort of like no man's lands um and he was kind of like overlaying territories with places where they'd be like holy shit there's a lot of buffalo around here it would turn out that those weren't places where where large groups of people would be safe and comfortable to camp and hunt and there was like sort of like back

country you know sort of like like the equivalent of like back country spots that people weren't getting to them in because of warfare. You familiar with that idea? Well, you know, for the Cheyenne and the Lakota, they, they had their rivalry, you know, and so, and both of them had very similar lifestyles in terms of their culture. A lot of it, depending on, on the bison, certainly. But, uh, both of them also traded with the Arikara.

Now, it was one of those things where the Arikara and the Lakota may not get along very well most of the year, but then certain times of the year, they would trade. And the Lakota would bring in buffalo meat, and the Arikara would have corn and beans and squash, and they would do that trade. Cheyenne and the Arikara, they were much more friendly towards one another, but there's that animosity that exists between the Cheyenne and the Lakota as far as territory. So that might be something along what you're

looking at as far as the Cheyenne area and then the Lakota area, how much of it overlapped, how much did it affect the numbers that were out there in terms of elk and bison? You know, it's always kind of amazing when people start thinking of South Dakota and they start talking about places like Elk Point where they recorded seeing hundreds and hundreds of elk, because you think of that maybe in the Black Hills, but not down in the southeastern part of South Dakota.

Or when you start thinking of the massive herds of bison, and at one point Lewis said something to the fact that from his vantage point, he could see maybe 3 massive herds of bison. And at one point Lewis, uh, said something to the fact that from his vantage point, he could see maybe 3000 head of bison, uh, or points where they'd be crossing over the river and they just have to wait because there's so many of them and they couldn't do anything about it until they were all done. Those things are always interesting because people don't see that, you know, now they see flat farmland and, and, and, uh, more of the lakes along the Missouri river. Um, but it's changed so much.

I heard a biologist speak several years ago. And the question of grizzly bears in South Dakota, how could that possibly? Well, there's a well-known photo of Lieutenant Colonel George Arnfield Custer. Oh, yeah, he killed one in the Black Hills. Yeah, back in 1874. And then, of course, you have the story of Hugh Glass being attacked in 1823 and surviving that grizzly bear attack. But the thing is that's so different is that back then, yeah, there were a lot of grizzlies that were out in the plains because that's where the food was. That's where you had thousands and thousands of bison.

That's where you had the elk. And it's only when those started getting killed off that you start seeing a change as far as thinking of grizzlies, you think of more of the, more of the mountainous areas, perhaps. So there's been a lot of changes that have taken place over a period of time that affected a lot of different groups. And I said for Lewis and Clark, there's no way they would have survived. I don't think that they would have survived without the assistance of the, of the native populations. But at the same time, it really marks the beginning of the end for native cultures. Things will never, ever be the same after Lewis and Clark.

Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on, man. Thank you for having me. You satisfied, Spencer? Oh, very satisfied. And I want to thank Brad and thank you other guys in the room, because that was a real ball hog, this podcast, because I wanted to bug him about all the questions I've had. You're tearing it up, man.

We got her done. Tommy, you feel primed for Trivia Showdown? I didn't come to take part. I came to take over. There you go. We might need to make up a little Tommy token. Maybe. He needs two wins, and then we'll get him a token.

I need a winner, too, first. All right. Brad, thanks, man. You going to stick around for Trivia? I'll stick around. Tommy token. Maybe. He needs two wins and then we'll get him a token. Brad, thanks, man. You gonna stick around for trivia? I'll stick around. I think you might be a formidable player because here's the other thing. You and Spencer got the whole South Dakota thing going. Spencer's gonna throw you multiple bones. And then Spencer throws a bone to guess. I don't know if he's gonna throw a bone to Tommy,

but I bet he's gonna throw a bone to you. But I'll tell you another thing to keep track of. The other day, Spencer was golfing with Yanni, which is like the stupidest thing in the world. I got two problems with it. We were golfing on passes that you gave us.

You still have those? Not anymore. Don't tell why I got them. That's a secret. Now listen, because I don't want to give away my situation. I know where that's coming from. That's a secret. Now listen, because I don't want to give away my whole situation. I know where that's coming from. But let me tell you the problem I have. I have a problem where I feel like you guys are sharing information.

And we're in cahoots. And it makes it that if Yanni beats me, then I have to have the shame of being beat by a golfer. Which is, you'll never live it down. You'll never live it down. Did you guys run through a bunch of beers playing golf the other day? Not Yanni. Did you guys?

Corey and I were on team straight edge, and Spencer and John were on team tall boy. Okay. And guess who won? Straight edge. Really? Clear and focused. Yeah, but we had way more beers and nicotine than you guys, so we win.

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