The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 883: A New History of Lewis and Clark

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with author Craig Fehrman. Topics discussed: Craig's new book, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark; York, Ordway, Black Buffalo, Sacajawea, and other key players on the expedition; Sacajawea's sense of humor; diplomacy and discovery; medical care; views of slavery and Lewis and Clark's different views on it; the abundance of species; and more. Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Check out Phelps' new bear cub distress call. Springtime is the right time to use a bear cub in distress sound when bear hunting. Male bears will kill cubs in order to get females to cycle into another breeding opportunity. And the sound of a cub in distress also signals to other male bears that a meal is close and even a possible mate. A bear cub in distress will also get the attention of a female bear to come and investigate to defend a cub. dragging any male suitors she has in tow.

Not to mention a cub in distress will also call other predators in as they're looking for an easy meal too. Get your own bear cub in distress at Phelps game calls.com. This is the Me Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten and in my case, underwearless. We hunt. The meat eater podcast. You can't predict anything.

Brought to you by first light. When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds, no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. Welcome, everybody. Today we're going to dig way in on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which comes up all the time on this show.

I don't know if you know. Of all the interviews you're going to do, how many interviews have you done so far? Too many to count. Okay. But we'll get into it here for sure. Okay. This is going to be the one. Remember how I was just saying to turn those off?

It's all good. This is going to be the one. This is actually important, but not as important as Lewis and Clark, not as pressing. Of all the interviews you did, this is going to be the one where the audience knows most about what you're talking about. I love it. That's a guarantee. I believe it. Unless you go to like the Lewis and Clark Remembrance Association or something.

Well, see, I have talked to them. So it'll be a good time. Next to those suckers, this is going to be the most informed audience you're going to talk about. But you got a brand new book out, this vast enterprise. And we're joined by Craig Furman, who wrote a book prior that I would be way less inclined to read. But still interesting. Author, his previous book, Author and Chief, the untold story of our presidents and the books they wrote. But how many books have they written?

Again, too many to count. Yeah. I mean, Roosevelt. How'd you pick which ones you wanted to talk about? I picked the ones that were interesting. So with Teddy Roosevelt, you know, would focus on his outdoor writing, his great nature writing, and then focus on when he wrote about the War of 1812 from like a naval perspective. Because that book is still important to historians today, even though Teddy Roosevelt wrote it what he is at Harvard as a student. So I would just pick the presidents that were most interesting, pick the books that were most interesting. And then that book sort of also told the history of communication. Like when I was writing about Reagan, I was also writing about the rise of like, Walden books and how bookstores and malls change the kinds of books people wrote. And so Jimmy Carter wrote a bunch of books. But unfortunately, he's only like a couple paragraphs in my book because he was operating in the same world as Reagan. So like with Carter, he was one of the first people to use a word processor. You know, he would have like these floppy discs that could hold 12 pages on it and he had to pay thousands of dollars to bring this giant microwave size word processor into his house. So unfortunately for Mr. Carter, I only focused

on the word processor, not the books, but I wanted it to be a good story. favorite president? Lincoln. Lincoln? Yeah, I'm from Indiana. What else am I going to say? Oh, man. I thought he's like land of Lincoln's Illinois. Well, there's a, the Midwest fights over him quite tenaciously. Oh, was he born in Indiana? He was born in Kentucky. So I'm telling you, it's, it's tough stuff. Yeah, I'm good. But, so why, why do you say Indiana? Well, because he, he has formative years were there. And so, like, a lot of the stories we think about with Lincoln, like, trading in some ears of corn to get a copy of a book. And then the book gets waterlog and he has to work even more to pay off the book. that all happened in Indiana.

So, the big stuff, I mean, it's, it's big to me. Yeah, no, that's great.

That's great. I like those people that get, I like those people that get claimed by a lot of places. Right. There's a lot of them all through time, you know, like, like Aldo Leopold.

Sure. He's, he's claimed, like a lot of ways claimed by New Mexico. He's claimed by Wisconsin. Jim Harrison's claimed by Montana, Key West, you know what I mean?

Michigan, yeah. Hemingway is claimed. claimed by Cuba, Michigan, Illinois, Idaho. Idaho. Yeah, like these people that really a lot of people want to draw them in. Daniel Boone claimed by Missouri and Kentucky. Yeah. Probably somewhat by North Carolina. Yeah. Yeah, definitely by North Carolina.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's Saka Joia is the same way. There's different Native nations that claim are. And to me, that just speaks to any of these historical figures. Like, their story is so inspiring and so exciting that it makes sense that a lot of people would see themselves in it. How long did you work on your Lewis and Clark book? Five years.

Okay. Tell me why it's different than other Lewis and Clark books. Well, that's a fair question. And when I started out, I wanted to write an adventure story. Like I had done the first book about presidents and the books they wrote, and I think that's a good book. But I just, I think any good writer, when they tackle a new book, they want a new challenge. So I was like, let's get outside. Let's do an adventure story.

And so the best adventure story in American history is Lewis and Clark. Of course, the counterpoint here is that there have been a lot of good books written about Lewis and Clark. So I didn't have a deep familiarity with the topic. Like, I remember when my dad went on a big motorcycle trip to the West, I bought him a copy of the Lewis and Clark journals because I knew, you know, and I was like, And so he was like sleeping outside and reading it. And I was reading it. We'd talk about it. So I had like some familiarity, but not a deep familiarity.

But I just thought, well, let me look at their journals. And we'll talk about the journals a lot today because they're more than a million words. There is no record like this for any other. It's true. It's insane. Just for people's point of reference. How many pages is your book? It's about 400 pages for the main story.

Yeah, but how many words? Oh, yeah. No. Main part of the story is about 140,000 words. So that's, that's just for people's perspective. That's a heavy book. Yeah. Like you've probably like, like listeners, you've probably read a lot of books that are 80, 90,000 words.

Sure. So here we're talking about the journals are a million words. Yeah. I never thought about them in a word count sense. Yeah. No, but it's, I mean, that I think conveys just how detailed they were. And you also have them from different perspectives. So something will happen. You'll see what Lewis and Clark are seeing.

But then one of the enlisted soldiers might notice something different. And so that's why it's such an incredible resource. So I read all million words. And what I noticed was that like I only knew half this story. Even as somebody who's a historian who's like pretty well informed on these topics, I kept noticing these human details again and again that I didn't realize. So at that point, I was like, well, this is worth spending a couple years on. But then I found more new stuff in the archives.

I really thought there's nothing new to find on Lewis and Clark. Oh, I would imagine that there's no thing. Because so many historians and writers and just old dudes with a lot of spare time have just dug and dug and dug. I'm telling you, man, I found so much. I found new stuff about Lewis and Clark to say nothing of all the other people I read about. I found a lot of new stuff. New stuff that you haven't seen in other books. That's right.

You want to, you want an example? Wolfcaf. Wolfcaf, that's probably the biggest one. This is an interview with a blackfoot man named Wolfcalf and one of the two big interactions between Lewis and Clark and native people. One was with the Lakota and the other was with the black foot on the way back. It was just Lewis. And so we've always had Lewis's journal. And then there's been a letter of a guy named George Bird Grinnell, who your listeners probably know, because you all are so well informed, where George Berg-Grenel was like, I interviewed this guy who met Lewis and Clark. But in that letter, George Burd-Grenel is like, I might have more from my interview with this guy in my notebook. books, I'll go, let me check, and he never checked. But his notebooks are just sitting there at a library. So I went to his notebooks. Not only did I find the three pages of transcripts from the interview, Grinnell remembered wrong. So Grinnell's version of this guy's interview in the letter is completely different than the actual interview. So in my book, in the back, I just print the whole interview because that's a big document for historians. But I also hope readers read it too. And they can kind of see, like, to get Wolfcaf's perspective versus Lewis's perspective. And I

print Lewis's journal entries too. So like side by side, you have Lewis's journal entry, you have Wolfcaf's interview, you can see the two different accounts of this episode. Did one, do they contradict on factual matters? They do in some ways, but I really found while working on this book that it was rarely about opposition, it was about conversation. So like Wolfcaf says, we tried to steal the American horses. But everybody else who was written about this said that the Blackfoot people tried to steal the American guns. So there's like a long tradition of horse raids on the planes, that that was kind of a, that's a different thing. But going for guns, obviously that's an escrow.

escalation. And so Lewis and his journal entry says they went for our guns. But once I read Wolfcaf saying, well, actually all we wanted were the horses. And once I read a bunch of scholarship by people like John Ewers who like dedicated their whole lives while he worked at the Smithsonian to studying these horse raids, the horse raids were almost never violent. They were focused on horses. So then I went back to Lewis's journal entry and I noticed something that nobody had seen before. And this is like, this is not a discovery because that journal's been there for anybody to find, but you can read things differently. And what was interesting is that Lewis was asleep when things went sideways. So like when they either went for the horses or guns, Lewis, by his own admission, was in a deep sleep.

So what you have here is not Lewis's word versus Wolfcalf's word. You have this one enlisted soldier who was probably asleep while on watch, which was a capital crime. You have his word against Wolfcaf's word. And the American soldier had every reason to play up the violence of the native people because he screwed up. He's the one who fell asleep. He let this happen. He's the one who his brother ended up killing one of the native people in the battle that followed. So for the American guy, like these two brothers are the ones who tell the story to Lewis after the fact.

And they have every incentive to make it seem as scary as possible because they're the ones who let it happen. And so in my book, I try to hedge here carefully. And I try to say, you know, I think Wolf Kaff was right. I think his version makes more sense. But I'm not going to say that his version is completely right because we'll never know. But I think what's cool in my book is you can get both versions and kind of lay him side by side. Do me a favor real quick. Yeah.

Or however long you want to do it for. For people that I was just talking up, how people know this story well, let's just say they don't. Sure. Do you mind laying out in a way that entertains me and Randall? What do we mean when we say the Lewis and Clark expedition? Sure. So you could start it in Washington, D.C. with like Thomas Jefferson's political stuff. That's all new in my book, too.

But I'll try to keep it more entertaining. So let's start near St. Louis. So spring of 1804, they leave near St. Louis. They go up the Missouri River. Jefferson thinks that the Missouri River and the Columbia River basically touch. That was sort of the default idea in this time period. So the idea is they're going to go up the Missouri River, hop over this a mountain or two because the Rockies aren't that much to deal with, then go down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean.

And so they want to find this water route because it's good for traders, but it's also good. Jefferson is already thinking about the future because Jefferson always thought about the future. So he's thinking about traders today, farmers tomorrow. And so Lewis and Clark go up to Missouri in 1804. They make their first winter quarters in what's now North Dakota at Fort Mandon. And then in 1805, they keep going along the Missouri. They find out that the Rocky Mountains are the Rocky Mountains. And so they get through that, go down the tributaries and the Columbia River and get to the Pacific Ocean,

spend another winter there on the Pacific coast. And then in the last year, 1806, come back to St. Louis and then to Washington. Okay. 8,000 miles. And just to go back one step, previous to that, or like sort of an initiating, Sure. Instance is kind of lay out the national picture with the Louisiana purchase and manifest destiny and all that kind of good stuff.

People love to bring up the Louisiana purchase and it does become important. But Jefferson had been working on the expedition way before the Louisiana purchase. Is that right? He had gone and done it anyway. He was trying to do it in 1783. He asked William Clark's older brother, George Rogers Clark, to lead this expedition. That guy was a badass. He was.

He was. But he would not do it because he thought he's like, America screwed me over. They haven't paid me enough for all the fighting I did. So no, I'm not leading your expedition. So 30 years later, Jefferson works it out with Lewis. Lewis brings on George Rogers' baby brother, William. But yeah, Jefferson was always thinking about land. And that's one thing that's new in my book is I found all these small details where you can see Lewis and Clark are talking in political terms. Like there's this idea of the right of soil, like native people. What, like, do they, who claims the land and who do we negotiate with to buy it? And when Lewis deals with a grizzly bear, he says that the grizzly bear was, quote, tenacious of the right of soil.

Which, A, that's just a great joke. Like, Lewis is a funny guy. But that's also, like, a term that could have been used in the White House. So you can see that Lewis and Clark are always thinking about land, who owns it, where America's going to go next. And this is, this all started before the Louisiana Purchase. The Louisiana Purchase was like a happy accident that supercharged it. So what, like, what was his, what was his deal?

If they hadn't had done the, if they hadn't had to bought the land, he was just going to send guys out and have him duke it out with the, have him duke it out with the Spanish or what? Well, first of all, the Louisiana Purchase didn't cover the whole route. So the Pacific Northwest, like, I mean, kind of the big chunk of it. Well, but I mean, they were really interested in the Pacific Northwest. Like out there, you had like Russian ships, British ships, Spanish ships, French ships, American ships, all circling on that coast. So a part of it was getting out there. Like different ships had gone there, but going the route by land offered you a different claim.

All these empires had this, there's this idea called the law of nations. And so there are all these rules and sort of theoretical debates. The native people were just like, we don't really care about your theoretical debates. there are more of us than there are of you in this time period. But Jefferson was thinking about how do we like advance America's legal claims. And so Cindy and Lewis and Clark would help in the Pacific Northwest. And they were already high in the Louisiana, the area that would come to Louisiana purchased. Like Jefferson's Secretary of Treasury, Gallatin, whose name we see all over the place here,

Gallatin said in a, when they were planning out the expedition, he's like, the Missouri country is a particular interest to us because that's the first place Americans are going to go. So there's no question that Gallatin, Jefferson, Lewis, Clark, they were thinking in these terms. Huh. That's something I hadn't realized that he would have gone ahead and done that anyway. Oh, yeah. They would have just, like, the Spanish were not intimidating. So, like, British traders had been sneaking past them for decades.

And so Jefferson thought the American, like, he tried to get passports and, like, dot his eyes and cross his T's. But he knew at the end of the day, Lewis and Clark could just sneak by them and keep going. Yeah. Like, so hard to find somebody. Exactly. Although the Spanish did almost find them. That's another thing that's in the book is the Spanish sent four different missions,

more than a thousand soldiers to try to track down Lewis and Clark because they were pissed off. Even after the Louisiana purchase, Spain was still trying to stop American expansion. And so at one point, this is a new thing in the book. I used native maps and compared them to like Jefferson's documents. The Spanish were within 100 miles of them. So like when we're talking the scope of the Great Plains, like to get within 100 miles, that's as close as you can come and still miss. You know, there could have been an international war breaking out on the banks of the Missouri.

Well, what, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but sure. What part after the purchase, what part were they, what were they, what were the Spanish imagining as the line? Like, what were they imagining that they don't want the Americans to do what? Right. Well, the thing is the lines were up for debate. Okay. Like the Louisiana purchase happened, but nobody knew what the Louisiana purchase meant. That's one reason Lewis and Clark were important because they were going to get latitude and longitude readings and bring back enlightenment science.

to adjudicate this. But like one of the reasons that Lewis ends up meeting with the Blackfoot people is that Jefferson was like, no side missions. Just focus on the rivers, just get there and back. But once Lewis realized the Rocky Mountains are here, I'm not going to be able to find this river route that the president wants, because Lewis and Jefferson were very close. And so this is not just about doing a good job. There was something personal to this relationship. And so on the way back, Lewis is like, I'm going to do a side mission. I'm going to disobey the president because if I can go, if I can find that this river goes far enough north, then the Louisiana purchase is actually going to be hundreds of thousands. of miles bigger. And so he goes up there trying to get that reading. The clouds don't cooperate, so he can't get the reading. Then he runs into the Blackfoot people and has this huge blowup that impacts relations between the Blackfoot and the Americans for decades to come, which

that's how history works, right? Like you think you're going to do something and then something else happens. Sometimes it's amazing. Sometimes it's a battle where a person dies. You, you, in the book, you kind of take a perspective of, you set out a mission to really get into these personalities. Right. You know, like sort of set, you know the national motivation or Jefferson's motivation,

but you sort of get into what are like the people motivated by. Right. Which, which is like, uh, if, if anybody sits and imagines a, uh, if you imagine a world war,

how like generally World War II movies work. Mm-hmm. Right, about a squad or whatever, you know, platoon, whatever it is. Right. It's like, you know all the like geopolitical things going on, but in time, the, you know, the object of the movie is, well, what made Captain Thompson join and what are his fears and anxieties, you know, like people are very familiar with this format, but no one's taking that approach here.

Right. Exactly. So, like, in my book, you've got, you know, Jefferson is like the Churchill, right? That's the national motivation for going to do the World War II analogy. But my book is almost all at the platoon level. What I always tell people is I tried as a writer to put you in the canoe. But I think it's really important to put you in different canoes because even Lewis and Clark, best friends, both grew up in the same state, both in the Army.

They had really different views about some issues. And so I felt like my job was to really show what each person saw. So the book, if anybody's read Game of Thrones, you know how like the chapters rotate in points of view, like one chapter you're going to get a king's point of view and the next chapter you're going to get like a knight's point of view that kind of thing not familiar by believe you yeah thank i appreciate it well i've got your back correct all right all right i could have cited as i lay dying maybe that would have been the better move um a lot of books do this rotating point of view but not many history books do and so that that's what you're talking about that kind of platoon perspective so chapter one is from

louis's point of view chapter two moves to the perspective of york who is the enslaved guy who Clark brought along. He was on this entire expedition too. And so I still try to hit like the greatest hits. Like we've still got the rapids. We've still got the Rockies. We've still got the 8,000 miles. But I really wanted to show what this felt like to individual people. Because I think human beings are always the most interesting subject. And so I just really tried to capture for Lewis, for Clark. One of my favorite people in this book is a guy named John Ordway. It was like a working class sergeant. And you want to talk about platoon level dynamics. You've got Lewis and Clark like trying to keep Jefferson happy. You've got these enlisted soldiers who can kind of be a pain in

the ass and you've got Ordway stuck in the middle trying to navigate all this stuff. So when I'm writing his chapters, I'm really trying to dig into those kind of soldierly dynamics. And I do that in all the chapters that kind of rotate points of view. And I just hope it makes the book feel more human. And, you know, when I said, why write this? Like, this is this reason I wrote this, because I felt like I could tell, like, the other half of the story. I think the one of the chapters that I read is the chapter on the, the winter on the Oregon coast. Sure. And it's told from the perspective of co-boy and he's he's a clatsup leader and i feel like i've read a lot of lewis and clark stuff that that um moment in the story is sort of like a downtime right in a lot of these

narratives and it's kind of like they waded out the winter it was pretty miserable whatever but i gained a totally new perspective on that moment because it's The story's told from the perspective of someone who sort of these guys have showed up. It's like a, he's an older guy. Right. This is kind of a blip on his radar of his whole life. Right.

And he's thinking about how to make it advantageous for his people. But these guys just keep shooting elk. They overhunt. Yeah, they keep shooting elk. And he's like noticing little details like they're, they've been picking away at some of the boards, the roof boards from the klatsip lodges. And it's like all of a sudden that winter isn't just this gray dull waiting period.

It's like really active and there's all these maneuverings and even the trade like they're disinterest in trade. So I don't, if you want to tell that story better than I can. That was one example for me where it was just like, oh, this is this could have, I would skip over that part in my read in my like. elevator pitch retelling of Lewis and Clark, but all of a sudden it became very interesting to me. Well, I really appreciate you saying that because I definitely, as a writer, I'm always thinking about keeping the pages turning, right? So like if I had just done Lewis and Clark's perspective

or even York's perspective or Orway's perspective, that's like the third winter quarters they built at that point. So I'm like, how many ways can I talk about them chopping down logs and building huts, you know? So that's why that was the perfect spot to move to the native guy's point of view. And so I did a lot of research on these native people's points of view and what mattered to them. And Kobo way and the Klatsup, they were incredible traders. Like when I think of Koboay, I think he should have been on Shark Tank. And I don't mean as like one of the people pitching the show, I mean as one of the sharks. Because he was a brilliant trader because we mentioned all those ships coming in.

They wanted otter skins. But Koboey also had, he was right on the mouth of the Columbia River. So he also had all these native people to the east who would have, you know, starchy grains or different vegetables to offer. And he was kind of the middleman. So he would buy, you know, whale meat from one person, sell the whale meat to somebody else, make a little more money, buy some opato from them, sell it to somebody else, get some otter skins. And he was always kind of facilitating all these trades, which meant he was very powerful, but he was also very knowledgeable. And so when you think about his point of view, it helps you reframe so many episodes too. Like one of the most famous examples from Lewis and Clark is when they vote, right? Like they're on the Pacific Coast and they're going to have this vote about, well, you know, where are we going to put our winter quarters? And they famously let York vote. in this, which is is amazing. People say they let Saka Jua vote, but that's not quite true. What happened is Sackaduia spoke up. Because like if you look at Clark's journals, you can see that he didn't leave a space for Saka Jua. And then she just like blurted out. Here's what I think we should do. So

he had to kind of add her at the bottom, which is, it's a cool detail. But like this for for people that aren't as familiar, York is a slave. Right. Yeah. The only slave on the trip. That's right. That's right. And there had been lots of votes previous to this. And he, they did not let him have a say. But by the time they got out there, he had done so much work, you know, dealing with rapids, hunting, um, helping build forts that they were like, we're going to give you a say as well. Is he also the only, I want to keep going on this, but is he also the only person not on payroll? Well, here's what, or did they put him on payroll?

Here's what's screwed up. He's on payroll, but not in the way you think because the army would compensate officers if they brought their slaves. So the person who got paid for all York's work was Clark. Clark would get seven bucks a month for the like, like, the like wear and tear on his property, but his property was York. Did he kick it back to York or does there's no one know? You know, you know the answer to that. He did not kick it back to York. Because when they got back, York said to Clark, look at all the stuff I've done. I've earned my freedom. And Clark said,

no, you have it. And so he kept York enslaved for another 10 years after the expedition. That was a son of a bitch, man, you know? There's a lot of things I like about William Clark, but that is not one of them. So, so yeah, this famous vote on the coast where, again, things to like about William Clark. He and Lewis let York have a vote. there, there was foreign interference in that election because the Klatsup and Kobowai wanted the Americans to set up camp on their side of the Columbia River because they're like, we can trade with these people. So if you read the journals closely and the journals, those million words, they're always a great source not just for what the Americans are doing, but for

what Native people are doing too. You just have to pay attention to the native stuff. Like three times before the vote, clats of people go over to the Americans camp and are like, hey, you know where there's a lot of elk? There's a lot of elk on our side of the river. And they were right. But also that persuasive. the Americans to go to their side of the river where things went sideways, as you said, is that the Americans killed more than 150 elk that winter. And so the elk would normally, I tracked all this stuff really carefully. The elk would normally, like, spin the winter down by the river and then go back up into the mountains. They would normally stay by the river until

May. But by March 1st, the elk were gone because the Americans had hunted them so aggressively. And from the American point of view, they needed elk skins to make moccasins. They needed elk brains to mash into pace to soften the elk skins. And they needed to eat. But they, they hunted. so aggressively that they overhunted and that just like only made the dynamics more tense between them and the clotsum. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart. IR. Radio. Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists like back in the day pride. Come together, celebrate love. Take pride with you anytime, anywhere. speaker to play iHeart pride Canada.

Stream us on your phone. Listen now at iHeartRadio.ca. Hunting demands preparation, persistence, and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear First Light. This isn't about hype. It's about no compromise gear. Built to perform, built to last. Whether it's their industry leading merino wool,

keeping me comfortable through the cold and the hot, or their durable outerwear shrugging off the elements. First Light is built to help you go farther and stay longer. Designed by hunters, four hunters, with a deep commitment to conservation and land access. No shortcuts, no excuses. Just gear you can count on. Head to firstlight.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com.

Have you found in looking at this, this thing I feel like is, well, I don't know if I think it's true or not. observation I've had. If you went and talked to, how do I put this? Have you found that as you go along the Lewis and Clark Trail today, that people tend to, that the people that live along those places currently tend to pay most attention to what happened near them,

meaning in Oregon, are they way into the part of the Lewis and Clark story that occurred there, because it seems to me that the stuff that happened along east of the Rockies out on the Great Plains has always seemed to get much more attention, public attention. But maybe just feels that way because I live here. But I remember another person that doesn't live here that was writing about this was saying, no, I think it's true.

I think that most national attention focuses on the Great Plains. planes and his theory on it was because it's the place you can go and you can look and you can be like I can picture it sure you can go and be like I can picture what it looked like right significant changes have happened but I can picture it and so that's why he feels that that's the way it is but did you find that to be true or do you find that like residents today you know out in a story or whatever or whatever you know are very fixated on those parts of the narrative yeah I mean, we were just talking about Lincoln and how different places have claimed to them. And I think Lewis and Clark are absolutely at that level where different people have claimed to it.

So people who don't live anywhere near the trail, I do think they picture the Great Plains and the bison and that kind of stuff. There's no question about that. Because in a lot of the Lim High Pass still looks pretty much what it looked like when Lewis and Clark saw it. But I think if you talk to people who live in any of these, I mean, if you talk to people in St. Louis, like they just want to talk about Lewis and Clark in St. Louis. I just did a book event there. And it was amazing. And there were so many people who could really get into the nitty gritty about there. Oh, like what they did there?

Uh-huh. Just like buying shit and getting all ready to go. Exactly. Or like the near mutinies where the men would get pissed off. And the Ordway, that sergeant I was mentioning, like had to like calm everybody down. So like the St. Louis people, they love the whole story, but they really love their connection to it. And that makes sense to me. I mean, who doesn't love, like it?

This is our national epic. This is such a great adventure story. So who doesn't love to have some kind of personal connection to it? I think that's great. That's one of the reasons I was excited and a little terrified to write this book. I can kind of speak to that, too. because I grew up in Vancouver, Washington, and Lewis and Clark was a massive part of our middle school and high school curriculum. And it was all west of the Rockies. It was heavy on Fort Clatsup. We took multiple field trips to Fort Clatsup, Ciside, Oregon.

And I know I can tell you almost nothing about the planes. Oh, okay. In your school version, did Kobe come up? Nope. Well, there you go. That's what's new about the book. Before we started recording. Phil, I'm sorry that I said that was a boring chapter of the story earlier. That's what I was, I'm not fuming over here. Up until today, I always thought it was a boring part of the story. Yeah. But I'm like, how did I not know about this whole elk hunting deal?

Yeah. That's interesting. It's all in the journals. You just got to look. I know, I just, you know, people have their myopia. And whenever, I don't know, in the work we've done, we're always talking about them hanging out on the planes. Sure. Buffalo running every which way.

Wolves all running around. Grizzly bears. That's right. That's right. Like that's in my mind. mind it was just a bunch of boring shit and then they got out there and it kicked it kicked ass. They kicked ass the entire time is what I would say. But you know, for a while I toyed with this idea that I didn't like them because it was big government.

Do I mean, because you have all these swashbuckling dudes, right? Kind of like doing all this crazy stuff and no one pays attention to them. Then like the government goes out there and then everybody's all into it. Right. But I gave up on that. Well. But for a while, I was kicking around. not liking it because it was because it was a it wasn't these kind of freelance crazy dudes right

right right like who would turn up in these places ahead of them right been people don't talk about that that much well i think it's important to see it as like a two-part story and if you're interested in an american as an american story you have to start with them because all those free buckling swashbuckling kind of guys were mostly french or spanish or british but jefferson is kind of contradictory like many politicians in that you know he's he's a small government guy. But I do think Lewis and Clark was big government. One of the things I did was really crunch the numbers on how much it cost. And the official's the official price tag was like $38,000, which is a crazy number today. It doesn't seem like anything. But back then was a lot of

money. But that number's wrong. Like once I went back and like actually checked the numbers and did the work, it was closer to $100,000. So then to try to like understand what that meant. That same accountant was just running numbers on the Iran War. I think you might be correct. Yeah. We can talk about the Missouri River as the new straight or the old straight of Hormuz if you can do that too. But yeah, so like the $100,000, if you look at that as like a percentage of federal spending, Jefferson spent as much on Lewis and Clark as we spend on NASA today. So that's absolutely true. So that's the scope we're talking about. Like when I call the book this vast enterprise, it's not just vast in terms of the territory they cover.

It's vast in terms of like the conception. How many people are involved? I'm serious. Yeah. I also think it's... I'm going to go back to not liking it because it's the government. Well, give me the rest of the episode. Maybe I can persuade you.

I also like the one of the, I guess one of the things that always spins around in my mind when we're talking about the Lewis and Clark expedition is there's obviously two guys and they have a lot of words. Mm-hmm. But it's a group of like 40 people. It fluctuates 30 to 40. 30 to 40. And they're encountering all these different nations. Mm-hmm. And it's such a.

sprawling if you were to if you were to make no one's done no one's pulled off the hbo miniseries yeah but if you were to make a lewis and clark HBO miniseries you'd need a huge cast of characters right and so i think that like one of the ways in which your book helps kind of reshape how people think about the story is the emphasis on how many individual lives are intersecting along this trail. Right. Yeah, and it was always an ensemble. Like the signs on the Lewis and Clark Trail, it's just two guys, right? And there's brown and white signs on the side of the road. And they're wearing the wrong kind of hats. They're wearing like Revolutionary War era hats. If you want to get mad at big government, there's the National Park Service should maybe do a rework on those signs.

But if they get the right hats on them, they should also like there should be more people in the sign too because you're exactly right this was always and lewis and clark knew this like this does not take away from lewis and clark this fast enterprise is a quote from clark's letters so like they always knew they needed lots of help i'm just trying to remind people to like see the story the way the captain saw the story themselves you know it's it's interesting that two things that have flummoxed filmmakers would be cormick mccarthy's blood meridian in the lewis and clark's story yep everybody tries, but no one can do it. I know.

People start and then they quit. Yep. But here's my question for you. I kind of teeing us up earlier, but I didn't get there. Before we started recording, you were telling me how Sack of Juwea was funny. Sure. And I'm like, come on. But let me tee this up a little bit better.

Take your time. Do you ever read when Larry McMurtry? so the author of Lonesome Dove Lonesome Dove Larry McMurtry He wrote all my friends are going to be strangers Lonesome Dove I mean millions of things

He wrote a biography of Crazy Horse Okay Many people have done that Guess how thick Larry McMurtry's biography A Crazy Horse is It's about like as thick as this This laptop Yeah screen

Yeah You know why? Because he admits, I mean, right in the beginning of the book, he admits he's like, really? Honestly, we don't know much. Like, we don't know much. I've read summations here and there. I've read summations of like what actually is known about Sacagawea. And the thing we, Randall and I call this in some of our American history works is we do this.

we do this bit of how do we know what we know. Sure. Meaning everybody knows that blank, right? But how do we know what we know? Right. And then you kind of dissect where does it come from? And in the process of how do we know what we know, you often find this thing we're like, we don't really know that. Yeah.

And we don't know that. Sure. It's like someone wrote a history. that history informs other historians and then you build up this mythology. Sure. Okay. So I've read,

I can't remember where or when, but I read a like, what is actually like when historians look at Saka Jua's narrative, what are the sources, what are the actual sentences? Sure. And it's not much.

Sure. I haven't read it in a long time, but we were talking about the writer Jack Hitt, who's a very funny writer. Jack Hitt wrote a piece, and I wish I had reread it ahead of our interview, but he wrote a piece where he tracks our understanding of Sackajui, and it's sort of like what we think about Sackaduia says a lot about where we're at in time.

Sure. Right. So during those years of putting a heavy emphasis on cultural inclusion, she elevated when there's geographical features. all around the American West, Squaw River, Squaw Peak. When they were renaming

one of the squaw peaks in Montana, the squaw being a derogatory term for a Native American woman, one of those peaks became, you guessed it, Sacagawea Peak. Right?

So she has, she's utilized like a tool, sort of, the understanding. So when you said she's funny, I don't think we're in an era of great comics. And so you're trying to make her fit the times.

But like, how can you say that? Where are her jokes compiled? Sure. No, I'm really glad you asked us because this is a very good question. And just as an aside, the idea of using her as a tool, that's not new either. Like, there are more statues of Sacaga Jua than any other woman in North America. And the reason there are so, yeah, the reason there are is because suffragettes used her as a tool. So way back in the early 20th century, they were like, oh, a native woman who was strong and empowered,

we can help use her to help us get the right to vote. So, like, this is there, this has always been happening. More than Rosie, more than the fictional Rosie the Riveter. Right. Semi-fictional Rosie to Riveter. Right, right. More than Betsy Ross. I mean, it was all of the above.

There's a lot of work to get women the right to vote. But yeah, Sagina Julia was one of the tools that they used. But let me answer you in two ways. Oh, no. I wasn't referring to the suffragist tool. I was referring to, like, statue figures. Right. But yes.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. She was, right. She was, yeah, there's more. The National Park Service has that stat. How do I know she was funny? Because there's a story in the journals from Lewis and from Clark that show that she was funny. Tell me the story.

Okay. I'm sorry that we're going back to Fort Clats. I'm going to spend this whole podcast. On the boring part. Exactly. On Phil's dumb. On Phil's dumb boring party. I know.

I promise the Lakota have a huge part of the book. Like there's so many bites it. Like the rest of the stories. You start with the Lakota. It's like Phil hijacked the episode from back there behind his warped work bench. I mean, yeah. Hats off. Very strategic.

Thank you. But when they get out there, they can't go see the ocean first because the waves in that part of the Columbia River are so big. Their canoes keep getting swamped. So it's hard for them even to find a place to stay dry. Their clothes are rotting. Their teepees are rotting. It's just, it's a disaster. So they finally figure out what side of the river they're going to go on.

The Klatsup sort of guide them there because the elk and all that. And so then the Klatsup come back and say, hey, there's this huge beached whale that washed up on the shore. Okay. And so everybody's like, cool, let's go see that. And a lot of them haven't even gone to see the ocean yet. Even though they're only a few miles from the ocean, the conditions are so tough that they've just been kind of pinned in this camp. And so they're getting ready to go. And everybody is, you know, like the guy who owns Sackagiaiaia or is her husband, depending on how you want to frame it.

Like, he's getting ready to go. A lot of the soldiers are getting ready to go. And Sackagia, like, nobody says she can go. And so she speaks up. Like she's like, the phrase from the journals is it would be very hard if she does not. get to go. She's come all this way. And so for her not to get to see the whale and the ocean, that would be very hard. And so I think that's funny. I mean, I think she's like, yeah, you don't think it's funny if she's like, if they're like, you got to stay back here at the camp, but she's like,

that's fucked up. I've come all this way too. I'm going to go see the ocean too. You don't think that's funny. Are you married? Yes. If you're, so when your wife gets mad of you, you think it's funny? Maybe not in the moment, but later on, like the next day when we're good again. when you realize that you hadn't seen her perspective. My wife or Sagga Julia. Your wife. Yeah. I mean, in hindsight, okay.

It's not back to being, okay, I see what. Yeah. Okay. That's somebody who has a sense of humor. That's a stretch. You don't think that's a funny story. You don't think her like, I mean, she's 16. Hey, we're going to go check out this whale.

She's like, bullshit, dude. Like, I'm coming. That's not funny, do you? No. Okay. I'd put that under, um, uh, forceful admirable. Stick them up for your, I mean, unless you had a funny joke. Okay.

Well, I, I, I feel like at least it's very human and lively. Yeah, three people go to look at a whale. One of them says. We're called the aristocrats. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Well, at the very least, we can disagree on whether or not that's funny.

I think when you remember that she's 16 years old, That's impressive. When you remember that her husband would beat her until Clark would step in and say, you can't do that here. When you remember how tough her life was, I just feel like there's a real crackling personality behind that for her to be like, this is not fair. Tell the story of her. Tell the story of her life. And I know that it's increasingly controversial. Sure.

Not increasingly controversial, but it is controversial. Tell the outline of her life. And then if you don't mind, I wouldn't mind you touching on a little bit of the custody battle that is underway. about who, again, people that get claimed by many places, right? But first, lay out just the known, the known understanding of her remarkable life. Well, I can do that while also answering your bigger question, which is like, how do we even know any of the stuff? So maybe she wasn't funny. Maybe she was just spunky.

I don't like, pick your adjective. But we know things about her personality because they're in those million words of the journals. Like her saying, I want to go see the whale, like Lewis and Clark wrote that down. So we know that that happened. And then we can infer as interpreters, as writers, as lovers of history, like what those details mean. But in terms of her life story, the reason we know that is because it's in the journals, too. And this is also something that's new in my book. It's not like the outlines of her life story have always been well known, although now they are getting more contentious.

She grew up, you know, on the sort of between what is now Idaho and what is now Montana in that rocky region. Her people had had to move there because other nations like the Blackfoot had more horses and especially more guns. so it wasn't safe for the Shoshone to be out on the plains where the bison were. So they kind of stayed in the mountains most of the year. But then once a year, they would go, they needed the skins to stay warm. They needed the fat. They needed stuff that only they could get from the bison. So once a year, they would go out to three forks.

And then they would go a little bit past that sometimes. And they would hunt buffalo quickly as they could get all the buffalo products they could. Bison. Sorry. No, no, no. I'm a buffalo guy. Randall kind of sits on the fence about it. If I may.

He's an old bison guy. To get you guys back on the same page after the saccage, we have funny, not funny, controversy. Sure. You say in the book. Because there's like a real split between me and the guest, you make a point to say in the book, all the characters in this book are going to encounter Buffalo, not bison. Right.

Because that's what they encountered. That's what they called it. In their time. Yeah. I thought you'd appreciate that. That's good. I mean, this is not a book about 2026. It's a book about 1804.

So I really tried. know yeah nobody saw bison on the lewis and clark right and the americans called the lakota the so when i'm writing from the american point of view i use the sue when i'm writing for the lakota point of view i use the word lakota like it's important to me to give each person's perspective as they saw it and not to let our modern concerns kind of worm their way in there but anyway um so like the shoshone would have to go out and get buffalo slash bison try to keep both of you happy um each each time in the fall and so in 1800 when sackadjua was like 13 or 14, her people go out there. And so they set up camp at three forks and the men are off hunting

Buffalo and the women and the kids are sort of, you know, back at the camp. And so then one day, some armed raiders with rifles, which the Shoshone do not have at this point from the Hedottsination, show up and, you know, they're coming on horseback. So the Shoshone scatter. Most of them get on their horses, which they are famous for their wonderful horses and escape. But Sackaglia, for whatever reason can't get to a horse. So she starts running up the Jefferson River. And so she is running, there's smoke, there is screaming, there are people being clubbed to death. It's a very intense and violent situation. She makes it a couple miles. Maybe she thinks I'm going to actually be able to escape here. But then she hears a horse coming up behind her. There's a Hidotza man. She tries to

cross through the river, gets caught in the middle. He scoops her up, brings her back to the camp. So at this point, we know that there are a couple, like a number of Shoshone people have been killed, and then some of the young Shoshone women have been captured by the Hidatsa people. They take Saka Jua and some other young Shoshone women, including one of her friends, all the way back to their towns, which are in what's now North Dakota. This is like the Mandan and Hidotza towns where Fort Mandon will be built a few years later. So that's where she ends up living for a while. Then Lewis and Clark show up in the winter of 1804. her husband slash her owner, Charbano, who's a real creep, he just tries to, like, figure out he sees that Lewis and Clark are big government. He's like, how can I get some of that government money for myself?

Yeah, this guy's kind of a sleaze in general, too. He's just the worst. Yeah. And so he tries to get hired, and Lewis and Clark maybe are on the fence and something's like, I have Shoshone wives. And Lewis and Clark know that they're going to need to meet the Shoshone and maybe need some of those Shoshone horses. So they agree to hire him and bring one of his wives with him. Now, how do we know all this? We know this because in the journals, Lewis and Clark write down Sackagia's story.

Like when they make it back to three forks, they ask her. Like, what did you see here? What do you? Like, what happened to you here? And she tells them this story. And so it's recorded in multiple journals. But one thing that I did that was new because I was trying to think about like, what did Sackaduia see?

What was her perspective, not just Lewis and Clark's, is I tried to be really forensic when I was reading the journals. And so the first time her story shows up, it's not from Lewis and Clark. It's from this regular working class soldier named John. Ordeway. He writes about her a day before anybody else does. And it's when they first get back to Three Forks. So Clark isn't even in the camp. Charbano isn't even... So they have not mentioned her till now. They have mentioned her, but they've not mentioned her life story. Okay. So she's often just shows up as like the Indian woman. Yep. And so Clark and Charbano and some other people are off on a scout party.

Lewis is like doing his astronomy readings and like thinking about Empire. And so Ordway and the other men are doing the actual hard work of like unloading the canoes, airing out the gear, putting up the tents. and Saka Julia is doing that hard work too. And so if you look at it, the only, like, the story comes up with her first. And I think it makes a lot of sense. Again, I use careful language at this part in the book, like probably and almost certainly, because we'll never know for sure, even though we have the journals about this. But the fact that she told the story to Ordway the day before the captain's ever mentioned the story,

it makes a lot of sense because they were all working at three forks on this physical site, the river where she was captured. They're all setting up the camp together. And also, how did they communicate? Well, through sign language. Previous historians have not given enough credit to sign language in this time period. And we know from other journal entries that John Ordway was fluent in sign language. We know from Clark's entries that Saka Joia was fluent in sign language.

So I believe she told it. Yeah, it was kind of like the Esperanto of its time, you know, like people, right. Different tribes on the plains that couldn't communicate that were from different language groups would be able to use this elaborate sign language. And you could convey some complex messages with that shit, man. Absolutely. Yeah. And especially when you think about, these are just like human beings who, want to be understood by each other, they could really cover almost everything they needed to

with sign language. So I can't say this for sure, but I can say this 98% for sure that Sackagia used sign language to tell her life story to John Ordway the first day. And then the second day, when Clark comes back, when Charbano's there, when Lewis is there, she tells the story again. And so her story shows up a couple times in the journals. And each time her story's a little different, like what year was she captured? So this is even the stuff we know for sure, we don't know for sure. because like was Sackaduia captured in 1800 or 1799? I don't know. But all this to say that it's important to read the journals carefully because then what

you're getting is Saka Jua is telling her story herself. Like if she is using sign language to do this, this is not her husband slash owner saying here's, here's Sackaduia's story. And I think this is so important for the current discussion. Because right now, like in the journals, Lewis and Clark say Sackaduia is Shoshone. Most historians have agreed with that. Yeah, and there's this famous narrative that they get to, I mean, you drive by the rock all the time around here, but they get to that rock on the big hole, right? What's the name of that rock?

Beaverhead rock, right? Beaverhead, yeah. There's a prominent, unmistakable feature. For sure. And they get there and she's like, I know that rock. I'm almost home, yeah. For sure. And that's, again, how do we know these things about Sagittoria?

Because Lewis and Clark wrote it down. We just have to read it from her point of view. And understand that's not just an important landmark for Lewis and Clark. That's a way to understand Saka Jua's life and what the landscape meant to her. So the debate right now is, is Saka Jua Shoshone or was she Hidata? The Hidotza people have put together a book. And it's a really valuable book because remember, there are a few years after she gets captured or enslaved where she's living with the Hidotza.

So I relied on in the book to understand those years because that's like how did the Hidotza people see her, what kind of oral traditions have they preserved about her. Now, in my book, I'm always very careful if something's coming from oral tradition to signpost that and say, you know, according to Hadata tradition. But still, the book has real value. And it also, the book talks about the debate about what happened to Sacchia after the expedition. When did she die? I honestly do not know when she died. Like, I don't have an opinion on that question. But where was she born? Who did she identify with? I think the evidence is still overwhelming that it was Shoshone. And the reason that the new kind of angle that I have it in my book is like when we ignore this when we try to say maybe she wasn't

Shoshone we're not just silencing Lewis and Clark we're silencing her because I think the evidence if you read it carefully is very clear that she told her story herself through sign language to the other enlisted soldiers and so that story of being born Shoshone and being captured like it's a really dramatic and traumatic story but I also think it's her story and she was explaining it what is the argument that she was Hadatsa how do they explain her familiarity with turf so far away Right. Well, what they say is that she maybe had some family ties, and so she took trips back there. But the key part of their argument is that Charbano created this cover story. And I defer to no one in my disdain for Charbano. But the idea that he invented this cover story, he said she was Shoshone even when she wasn't, because that would make him be able to get this job. But that's why the moment about her telling the story herself is so important. Because Charbano literally wasn't in the camp the day she told the story the first time. So if he's not even there, How's it going to be his cover story? Did the Haddazus sell her to Charbono?

They either sold her or traded her. And this is another thing that you're like, how do we know these things? There have been, I read a lot of academic research. And so there's been a really good academic research in the last few years about native enslavement, about slavery, not just being something that Americans did or British did, but native people did it too. And there are differences, of course, but still, like the term slavery, I think is the best way to understand it.

And as an aside, Lewis and Clark used this word, too. like Clark in an interview after the expedition called Sackagia a slave. So again, this is not 2026 leaching into the past. This is just paying attention to the past. I have this conversation with my kids all the time, man, because the way like, I'm not hacking on school because you get, you know, you get like so many hours in a day and you're trying to gloss over a lot of stuff. Right. But it's funny, American kids today seem to, small sample set, my kids and their friends. Right.

seemed to carry this idea that slavery was somehow this kind of like American invention rather than a ubiquitous global occurrence. Right. And that's just not true. The class up who we were talking about. I find myself all the time, like, hold on it. No, no. Like, this is something that happens everywhere all the time. That's true. And then it starts to fade out. Right. Yeah. No. Right. And so that's absolutely true. And so when I, you know, the clatsup who we've been talking about, they enslaved people. The Shoshone enslaved people when they were at their kind of most powerful, the Hadatsa enslaved people, too. So there are lots of good scholarship and then stories in the journals of talking about how native

people would enslave women. But slavery can also be different in different circumstances. And so where things get really ugly is when somebody like Charbono gets involved. Because these academics have written about how native people would enslave young women from other nations and then sell them to fur traders. So I went back and looked at documents where fur traders are like trying to provide collateral for new, new merchandise to then trade for fur. And like a fur trader will write, you know, my collateral is the little girl I own. It really fucked up stuff. And, and like, let's remember, Saka Jua is 13, 14, 15. She is owned by this guy. He beats her. We know that from the journal. She has his child, right? She's impregnated by him. Yeah, it's a really

dark story. And so when I was writing about it, using that kind of scholarship to see her not just as sort of the plucky tour guide who's in all these statues, but also seeing her as somebody who had a really tough life. But then that also, I think, makes her more inspiring that she had to go through all this. She was taken away from her people. She had to deal with all this. But she still found a way to get back to her people. And the other thing that I think makes my account different is I try to look at the choices she made. Because like when she's telling Lewis and Clark, hey, there's this important feature. We're almost back to where we need to be. Like she's doing that because she's excited, I'm sure. But that's also smart. Like she has seen Lewis and Clark protect Native women the entire winter they've

been together. And so when Clark steps in and tells Charbano, you can't beat her here, like, let's give Clark some credit for that. But let's give Sacaga Joia some credit, too, because she's smart enough to know, like, if I make myself valuable to them, they'll protect me. So with this book, I really tried to say, like, this is what Lewis and Clark wanted, but Sacadio wanted things too. Kobo way wanted things too. And so trying to kind of move the camera around so we can understand each person as a human being, you can do that because of those million word journals. Like, where does this come from? A lot of it comes from the journals and just paying attention to stuff that other people have glossed over.

Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart. IR. Radio, Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists like back in the day pride. Come together, celebrate love. Take pride with you anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHart Pride Canada. Stream us on your phone. Listen now at iHeartRadio.ca. Hunting demands preparation, persistence, and gear that will not quit on you.

That is why I wear First Light. This isn't about hype. It's about no compromise gear. Built to perform, built to last, whether it's their industry leading merino wool, keeping me comfortable through the cold and the hot, or their durable outerwear shrugging off the elements. First Light is built to help.

you go farther and stay longer designed by hunters four hunters with a deep commitment to conservation and land access no shortcuts no excuses just gear you can count on head to first light dot com that's f i r s t l i t e dot com i like when you're describing the the scene in three forks where she's signing to ordway and then the next day tells the story to the captains. To me, and I saw this in different parts of the book, but it makes the most sense if you just sort of have a gut instinct

about social situations and group dynamics, that she would be unloading it, unloading the boats with Ordway and kind of tell him something. And then maybe the next day, Ordway says to the captains, you should listen to this girl. Like, she's actually kind of got an interesting story. Right.

You know, like that sort of stuff happens all the time in like workplaces or or whatever sort of group dynamic where there's a bunch of people working together. One way you can elevate yourself, the person you're most likely to share something with is someone working side by side. You also has that serves as sort of a middleman to the group leader. It'd be like later today I'd say, hey, did you hear that vultures killed Randall's chickens? Yeah. And then that would get. You should ask and play it up. Right.

Yeah. Valuable information. But it's just, you know, like there's some, like it, you know, when you hear these stories about Sacca Jua being this like very clear-eyed, brave sort of tour guide, that comes across as somewhat artificial. Right. Or a projection. Yeah.

But when you understand her as sort of a, uh, a social creature like all of us. Exactly. and making these different connections with different members of the expedition and sort of leveraging her her influence that way. All of a sudden, you see these people as more three-dimensional humans. Yeah. I mean, what was the expedition, if not a workplace, right? Sometimes it's a workplace comedy or not a comedy if we disagree about what's funny.

More drama. Right, exactly. Very serious, very somber. But it was a workplace just made up of human beings. And I tried so hard to get that in the book. like another place of where we know what stuff comes from. I really wanted to show Saka Jua as a mother. And this probably came because I have little kids.

And like, I changed diapers. But even more than that, I saw my wife changing diapers and breastfeeding the kids. So I found Shoshone people and just interviewed them. And we're like, in your culture, and especially in this time period, what was the diaper? And so, like, we know this carrier that Sackaduia famously had. Like a lot of the statues will have that that she had the baby strapped on her back in a carrier. But the bottom of the carrier was lined with either fur or some kind of soft vegetable material or something like that. And so each morning she would wake up. She would unlace the carrier. She would change

out the lining, put in fresh lining. She would give her son a bath. So she didn't just put cold water on him. She probably warmed the water up by putting it in her mouth and letting her body temperature bring it up to heat. Then she would wash him. She would breastfeed him. And so not just for her, for everybody, I really tried to get those like tactile everyday details and then pay attention to just like how one human being and another human being kind of interact. That's why this is such a great story. Like the Rocky Mountains are great. The grizzly bears are great. But mostly because of these journals, we get to see these amazing human beings under the most intense pressure any human being could face. And they do it. They make it. They make it back. It's just such a great story. And it was like

the thrill of my career to get to write about it. On the making it back deal, what's your take on, is there any controversy anymore about whether Lewis killed himself? I'm sure that some, people believe that he may have been murdered. I don't see it. You know, it's so funny. I kind of forgot about this. You remember a long time ago? We used to have that little plastic hot.

Anyways, one of our buddies that we work with Spencer, he was telling, he was talking about Lewis killing himself. He described that he killed himself at a bed and breakfast. Oh, yeah, yeah. Not just called like what was it called butcher station Yeah, yeah, grinders Crossing Yeah, a bed and breakfast

It was like a melancholy, Victorian Yeah, they brought out scones for everybody Yeah, loose like no scones for me. I got to kill myself. Yeah, no. Yeah, so, yeah, so get into that, because you talk about he's like a sad dude, you know. Right.

And then has, and then has behaves weird when he gets home. And you kind of can't really, can't really settle in on what is next gig is going to be. Right. Probably in some way it was haunted by it's a hard thing to come home from. Right. Well, and this is, this is where I found something new that I think is really important. When I wrote about Lewis, I tried really hard not to be like he has bipolar disorder or he has PTSD. Because like those were not ideas back then.

Yeah. I'm not saying the neurochemical processes didn't exist, but I don't think it's helpful to understand somebody in the past with ideas that were not necessarily available in the past. So, like, Jefferson and Lewis lived together for years, and Jefferson was like, he suffers with addiction, and he has Jefferson's quote with sensible depressions of mind. So to me, I was like, that's enough. What kind of addiction? Mostly drinking, but also opians because he had malaria. And so... Where do you pick up malaria?

Who knows? Where wouldn't you pick up malaria in 1804, right? Like, it was a real problem back then. So it could have been any number. It might have been on the expedition, but it was probably before. Did it go that far north? It was a huge problem. especially in the army, because they would often, like, build their forts in pretty swampy, damp areas.

So, like, if you go back and read military documents for this time period, like malaria and the various things, they would have worked. I don't know, like in the, well, it doesn't matter. Yeah, but, I mean, you could, you could definitely get malaria along the Ohio River. Like John Ordway's unit had a huge malaria problem on the Ohio River at this time period. But anyway, like, I just was like, you know, depression and struggles with addiction, like, that's enough. Like, we don't, we don't need any modern categories to understand them. So I, when I was reading the journals, again, reading the journals, closely, Lewis was very self-aware.

He would write about, you know, like, I'm so stressed out about the future or I can't stop thinking about something bad that happened to me in the past. But then it's important to say, like, he tried to stand up to those things. Then he would remind himself, I don't want to, like, you know, it's going to be okay, or we're going to keep working, or the only thing we can do is go forward. So he was very self-aware about this kind of stuff. But there's no question that on the way back, like the expedition just wore him down. He ends up getting shot in a hunting accident, which we could.

We could talk about that. I didn't know that. Tell me that story. Okay. Well, yeah, okay. So they're on their way back and Lewis is still trying to make Jefferson happy. So he's still trying to do astronomy readings and get all the data that Jefferson, like, wants them to do.

And so they come to this stop and they stop like 20 minutes too late. Like to do astronomy readings in this time period, you need the sun at a certain height and things like that. So they get there like 20 minutes too late, which sucks. So they're just going to have to kill time until the sun is at the right position to do the readings. So they always need more food. they always need more animal skin. So Lewis and this other guy named Pierre Cruzat go out to hunt for elk.

And it's important to know two things. And where are they at right now? They're on the way back in the Dakota's. Right, in the Dakotas, yeah, on the Missouri. And so the two things to know are that A. Cruzat only has one eye. So you can't see the best. And second, they're all dressed in animal skins at this point because they're uniforms and their fatigue clothes have all rotted through because they're in the third year of this expedition.

him. So Lewis is dressed in elk skin. They're hunting in some willow trees where it's very thick and hard to see. And so from about 100 feet away, Cruzat shoots him and shoots Lewis right in the ass. And so the bullet goes through, exits. It's just like it doesn't hit any bone or nerve or anything like that, but it's still a really bad wound. And so on the way back, Lewis has to lay in the bottom of the boat. Even when it's raining, there's nothing they can do about him, but he just lays on his stomach in the bottom of the boat for the way back. And they try to, like, Clark takes care of him while he's trying to tend to Lewis. Lewis passes out sometimes. And so they have little, like, they try to keep the wounds open so they can drain. But one thing I pointed out in my book is that just a couple months before this, Lewis had castrated all their horses. And his favorite horse had died. It had the castration wounds had gotten infected. So, like, Lewis, like, had to clean the maggots out and try to keep it alive, but eventually he had to put the horse down. And I think that really bothered Lewis because he just clearly loved animals. Like, he brought a dog with him, semen, and everything Lewis writes about animals. You can just see how much he connects with animals. But I think,

I feel like Lewis, he's not just shot and just stuck in the bottom of the boat. They didn't have germ theory. He wasn't thinking, you know, in the way we would. But he still knew that, like, if you have a big wound, bad things can happen. You get a fever and he writes in the journal, like, I have a small fever. So there's just a ton of pressure on him on the way back from this hunting accident. And then he does heal. He gets better.

He makes it to Washington, D.C., and he's a celebrity. Like, everywhere he goes. I found these journals at the Library of Congress where he, like, goes to a play. And people come out and just ask him question after question. Like nobody cares about the play. Intermission, let's just fire him. Like, what does a buffalo taste back? Are the native people cannibals?

Like, they just keep firing question after question him because he's like a national hero. Yeah. And so one of the new things I found was a letter from John Quincy Adams that nobody had seen before. And this is in this Washington, D.C. period, when Lewis is finally back. And so John Quincy Adams was a senator at this point. Like, he had had dinner at the White House with Lewis before. Like, they knew each other a little bit.

And Adam says that he sat down to have dinner with Lewis again after the expedition and Adams is writing to his wife. And Adam says, I didn't even recognize this guy. Like I knew who I was supposed to meet for dinner and I could not recognize him. And then Adam says he looks like he's aged 15 years. And so, you know, previous accounts have sort of theorized like what did the expedition do to Lewis. But like thanks to John Quincy Adams, we know what the expedition did to Lewis. Like that letter, I think, is the linchpin for my entire interpretation of him and why I believe the suicide is just the overwhelming life. likelihood because, you know, if somebody, if you can't even recognize somebody, if they look

15 years older, and again, in terms of human nature, it just makes sense to go through all this stuff, to come back then and then to like, in a sense, the expedition wore him down, but it also gave him something to live for, and he doesn't have that anymore. As a human being, it makes a lot of sense. And when you compare it with that new letter from John Quincy Adams about like the physical cost, I don't think there's any question that it just kind of broke Lewis down. Okay. So where, so tell about where he was when this, when this happened. So this is on the Natchez Trace. Kind of he was on the way he he he Jefferson had made him the governor of the Louisiana territory and I'm not sure why Jefferson did that because Lewis was supposed to write a book

And like in this time period exploration was the first step the book was the second step like the whole point was to share this information And the whole world was waiting to read this book like like there you know when it finally did come out when somebody else finished it after Lewis died There are reviews in England there reviews in Germany like this was this was global news it's like the way we all talked about Artemis too like that's how people talk about Lewis and Clark in this time period. And so Lewis has his hands full with this book that he has to write. But Jefferson sends him to be the governor of the Louisiana territory. I think he kind of, Jefferson wanted to use Lewis's celebrity and his reputation to sort of try to control this pretty crazy, chaotic territory at this point after Louisiana purchase. And so Lewis is just overwhelmed. He starts drinking more. We know from people who knew him who talked about how much he was drinking in this time

period. Wonder what he drank. I mean, they drank all kinds of stuff back then. Most of what they drank on the expedition was like cheap corn whiskey because that you just got your soldiers drunk as cheaply as possible. So that was mostly what they had. But Lewis Jefferson is no longer present at this point. Madison is. And Lewis sends some receipts back to get reimbursed for this big mission up the Missouri River, which is related to Lewis and Clark's expedition actually. And the people in Washington, D.C. are like, we're not covering this. Like you have asked for more money than you are entitled to in your government position. And so Lewis is. freaks out because he has such a strong sense of honor he's such a patriotic guy like in his letters about the expedition he's always like this is honorable for me but it's also honorable for my country like he loved america so much and so now to have americans being like you're trying to like defrage your government yeah he freaked out i mean he wasn't in a good place anyway but he freaked out so he starts heading from st louis back to washington and on the natchez trace and in what is now tennessee he uh he he killed himself and they're like the detail that always

sticks out for me about this is like he's writing and he's got a person who's writing with him he's got his dog seaman with him and lewis just starts talking to clark like clark's not even there like clark had just met with lewis before he left and clark even writes in a letter like i'm really worried about lewis like something's not right okay but now they're hundreds of miles apart and like lewis is just saying things like i always knew you'd come for me clark i always knew you'd save me when i needed it oh really yeah and this is this is this is the way we know this is because the person who is riding with Lewis later told this to Clark. Yeah.

And I just, I find that so heartbreaking. Like everything Lewis gave for his country, for his men, everything he tried to do. And now he's just crumbling. And he's like imagining he can hear the horse what Clark is riding on coming up, even though there's nobody else around. Like he was clearly somebody who was just falling apart. And I mean, I think it makes sense, but that doesn't make it any less sad. Well, what clouds the suicide narrative.

So he checks, he gets a booking at the bed and breakfast. Right, right, right. They're like scones at 11, yeah. He's up in his room and witnesses here two gunshots. Right. So that has always brought up speculation that it was some kind of highway gang or the grinders, the bed and breakfast owners, the people that ran Grinders Station. He left them a bad Yelp review and they're like, this can't stand. They offed him or robbed him, you know, because of this two.

I think that without the two gunshot, it. it probably wouldn't be a thing people debate about, right? Well, I mean, in that time period, you carried more than one gun with you. And the accounts were that... I'm not in any way arguing that you didn't, but I'm just trying to go like, why was it a thing for a long, you know, why was it a story for a long time that it was a sort of an asterisk next to that he'd killed himself? I think Lewis's family was very invested in this theory. Is that right?

Yeah, because in this time period, suicide, we didn't understand suicide the way we understand suicide today. So today we would talk about suicide as like somebody with a, with a disease who is making a choice that feels rational to them, even if it's heartbreaking to everybody else. But obviously in that time period, it was a huge stain on your reputation. Yeah, you're condemned to hell. Right, exactly. So I think that that's the reason. Like nobody wanted to believe that this national hero would do this to himself. So they were, they were people that at least like to try to save his reputation.

Right. Or make, make their own guilt less. or whatever. Yeah, I don't know what their motives were. We're sort of like putting out this idea, well, you never know, or this could be possible because he had, because in his suicide attempt,

he had to shoot himself two times. Right. And he also carved his wrists up too, to bleed out. Like he definitely, there's a quote from, from one of the people who ran the bed and breakfast, where she says that he said,

why is it so hard for me to die? Like, and I mean, that speaks to his toughness. Like he, he was, there is nobody who could endure more than him on. Even on, I'm not just talking. about like compared to us today i'm talking about on the expedition nobody was tougher than lewis like he was just an unbelievably uh just just he just had perseverance he was just he had grit um so even at the end

you could see that but i think there's no question that his family and the people around him um were trying to protect his reputation it's worth saying clark and jefferson never questioned it they thought he killed himself exactly they know him better than anybody else but then also i think there's a lot of people who like to look for conspiracy theories in history. That's never been my relationship to history, but I, you know, I understand that that can be a fun way to think about history. But I just don't think, you know, even if you compare this to some of the other great conspiracy theories or possible ones in history, the evidence just isn't there. The people who want to talk about the murder, they try to undermine the evidence that he killed himself, but they never have any affirmative evidence.

They're never like, well, why would somebody kill him? Like bad Yelp reviews about the best they can come up with. They try to connect it to James Wilkinson and these political conspiracies. And it just just doesn't make any sense. Like sometimes the simplest explanation is the best one. Yeah. What's that? There's a name for that. Occam's Razor.

Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor. I need to get that tattooed on me, so I don't forget that. So Alckham's Razor. Um, do you, how much time do you spend on Colter, John Colter? He's kind of my favorite dude from the whole thing. Unfortunately, there's not a ton of Colter in there because I did the rotating points of

view. So I had Ordway's point of view. So I really tried to talk about Ordway's life. but Colter is amazing and there are their whole book certain about him. I don't begrudge your affection for Colter at all. He was a he was kind of a little rascally, but once he kind of got himself worked out, he was one of their most important soldiers. Yeah, he liked to pull a cork. He got in little trouble. Yeah. And there's this, this is one of the new things I found about him. One of the times he shows up in the book is when they're in St. Louis, shout out to my St. Louis people who love Lewis and Clark's relationship to St. Louis. But when they when they have their first winter quarters there, they're like it's a boot camp basically. Because like they have. half regular soldiers, people like John Ordway, and then they have half people who are just civilians from Kentucky who are really good shots or really good hunters or things like that. And so they got to make these two groups cohere, but they've also got to teach the non-soldiers how to be soldiers. And so Colter is kind of one of the troublemakers in this period. And at one point, Lewis and Clark

had to St. Louis to like have a nice dinner and do diplomatic stuff. And Ordeway, they leave Ordway in charge. And the men rebel. And like Colter is like, we don't know exactly what happened, but the most likely thing is that Ordway was like, it's your turn to stand guard, something like that, like some kind of like, go do your soldier task. And so Colter and Shields and a couple other people from Kentucky were like, we're going to kill you. We don't give a fuck what you say. And, you know, people from Kentucky in this time period were ordinary people. And so Ordway showed remarkable self-control.

Like, you know, I think if somebody had done this to Lewis, Lewis probably would have been like, let's have a duel. Like, you just challenged my honor. I'll kill you. But Ordway was able to maintain calm. And so he waited to Lewis. Clark came back and Lewis and Clark put in some new disciplinary measures. And he had told on Coulter.

I mean, if you want to call it that, you can. But here's what's cool, because I don't think Coulter would have said it that way. Because Lewis and Clark ultimately asked the men, like, who do you want to be your sergeants? This is very unusual in the military at this time. But it wasn't just the vote on the Pacific Coast that we already talked about. Lewis and Clark again and again let their men have input. And I think that's just like the leadership. They basically take a vote about in the end, they take a vote about Coulter's fate.

And if he can go on, yeah, for sure. And so one of the... Can I real quick just remind people who this guy is? Yeah, go for it. Okay, so Colter is it, when I said he's my favorite guy, he's an interesting figure. He was hired on to the expedition. He was a woodsman. Hired onto the expedition and had a role as sort of a scout and hunter.

What's cool about him is when the expedition is coming to a close and they're descending the Missouri, they run into some trader trappers who are going up river. Right. And they're going upriver to engage in the beaver trapping and trade and enterprise up there. And rather than going home, Colter wants to go with them and ask permission and does the thing that I think would be great for a parenting technique. Lewis and Clark say to the guys, the rest of the guys, they say, we will let him go. We will cut Colter loose and let him go up to trap. if everyone here promises not to ask the same thing.

Right? Yep. And everybody's like, I won't ask. Right. And then they cut them loose. And he goes on to have some crazy adventures. No doubt about it. Yeah.

His life after the expedition is wild. But at the beginning of the expedition, before he's kind of proven himself as this beloved soldier, because he was enlisted too. He was a soldier, not just like, he started. Oh, I thought he was hired on as a, I mean, he was hired on as a not soldier. I mean, he was, but they didn't hire him on and were like, you can still be a frontiersman. Like they ran military, like they had to practice their drills every night. Like John Ordway was like, put on your uniform. We're going to go learn how to counter march and march and all this stuff. So all those guys had to like had to conform to military standards.

That's right. I see. Yeah, it was a military mission. Got it. And so, but that like people like Colter hated that at first. So when Lewis and Clark are in St. Louis, Ordeway's in St. Louis, Ordway's in charge. Like Lewis and Clark are famous enough and good enough leaders that Colter's not going to do this to them. But when it's just Ordway and Orway's like, it's time to go to watch. Colter's like, no. And so they end up. yelling at each other, Coulter is literally loading his rifle, like, next to Ordewe. Like, you can hear the ramrod scraping on the barrel. And so Ordway diffuses the situation, Tadletails slash follows military protocol. But here's the cool thing. They have, like Lewis and Clark, a couple weeks after,

there's only a couple weeks after, they let them in vote, who do you want to be your sergeant? And guess who Colter picks? He picks John Ordway. He respected him. Yes, exactly. And so to go from saying, I'm going to kill you to saying, I want my life to be in your hands. That is such an amazing detail. I think it tells you something about Coulter. I think it tells you something about Ordway. I think it tells you something about Lewis Clark. Nobody's ever pieced that together about the voting stuff.

But that's because I was so interested in the human dynamics that we were talking about, I figured out that they voted on it. And I figured out, wow, Colter wanted Ordway. And I think that's one of the most human details in the whole book. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. That's the thing I didn't know. one of the things you point out in the book that was kind of an interesting takeaway for me was

when we talk about Lewis and Clark when we talk about this expedition we talk about it as this multifaceted you know they're they're establishing diplomatic relations they're taking stock of resources they're they're maybe staking claims to territory and it's this big hybrid of sort of diplomacy, economic speculation, scientific understanding or learning. And you make the point that Jefferson, when he thinks of native people wandering the West, he thinks of them as just being curious and just going from place to place. But you make the point that what Lewis and Clark are doing is a very familiar concept to all of the native people that they encounter along the way, because when they are moving across the landscape,

they're doing the same thing. They're interested in land. They're interested in what's there, and they're interested in who they can meet and what those people can give them. Right. And so it's, I don't know, it's not like a mind-blowing concept, but it drew an interesting connection for me that I don't think I'd appreciate it yet. It was like you were saying with slavery, like human beings have always practiced some form of

slavery until today. Well, human beings have always explored, too. These are kind of universal ideas that sort of constitute what it means to be a human. And one of my favorite point of view chapters in the book is this guy named Biahito, who was he was a leader for the Ericorah in what is now South Dakota. And Jefferson, like the most big government thing of Lewis and Clark is that Jefferson said, if you meet important leaders, send them to meet me in Washington, D.C. Well, taxpayers will fund it.

But like, I want to negotiate and meet with them in the White House, and I want to show them our power and string. Which was extraordinarily expensive. Yeah, that's a lot of the problems. Christ tag came from this because dozens of native people, like this does not show up in the normal stories about Lewis and Clark. But while Lewis and Clark are heading west, dozens of native leaders authorized by Lewis and Clark are heading east. So instead of just like telling everybody's story, I zoomed in on this one guy, Beahito. So he goes from what's now South Dakota all the way down the Missouri River to St. Louis, then makes it all the way to Washington, D.C. How do we know this?

Because there are newspaper accounts recording this at all the time. Like he would, he would show up in towns and the towns would be like, this is a big deal. Let's write about this. And then once he makes it to Washington, D.C., people in Washington, D.C. are writing about him in their journals. But the coolest thing, and this was only discovered a couple years ago, I didn't find this, another scholar found this. But in France, they found a map that Biahito had made of the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. And on that map, he records not just how many nations there were there, but also where he met with Lewis and Clark. And so Biahito, we know from Jefferson's papers that he met with Jefferson at least twice in the White House. And so he probably brought this map with it and

showed it to Jefferson. And so it was, I think that would have been such a cool meeting to send in because Jefferson's this older guy who's like interested in everything. But Biahito was an older guy who was interested in everything too. And so in my book, you know, the front end papers are Clark's famous map of the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains. But the back end papers are Biahito's map too. Because I really think to get the full story, you don't just need Clark's point of view. You need Beahitos too. Pride is like love. You feel it in your heart. IR. Radio. Canada's number one streaming app for radio and podcasts, including IHart Pride Canada, your favorite hits and must have party bangers, plus personalized and curated playlists, like back in the day pride.

Come together, celebrate, love. Take pride with you anytime, anywhere. Just ask your smart speaker to play IHart Pride Canada. Stream us on your phone or listen now at iHartRadio.ca. Hunting demands preparation, persistence, and gear that will not quit on you. That is why I wear First Light. This isn't about hype. It's about no compromise gear.

Built to perform, built to last, whether it's their industry leading merino wool, keeping me comfortable through the cold and the hot, or their durable outerwear shrugging off the elements. First Light is built to help you go farther and stay longer. Designed by hunters, four hunters, with a deep commitment to conservation and land access. No shortcuts, no excuses. just gear you can count on.

Head to first light.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E.com. I was trying to tell my kids about this observation that I was reading about there a few months ago now. This astrophysicist was, you know, they're looking at some, I think it's kind of going on currently. They're looking at some thing out in office. outer space, whatever, and it's coloration defies their understanding a little bit.

And so there's this, this astrophysicist, uh, was ranking the likelihood that it was a, basically a, uh, I don't want to say man made, because that wouldn't mean human, but a not natural object. Okay. And he was giving some, you know, whatever, five percent chance it's a not natural object. and he was talking about why we need to take more seriously the idea. I don't take it seriously at all just personally, but why he feels why we need to take more seriously the idea that some extraterrestrial

life form would show up here. And we should be talking about this more. Sure. An observation this guy has is really interesting. He says, if it happens. They are not going to be interested in how we have divided up the earth, which among many other things is like, of course they won't. Right. Like they show up, aliens come down.

And you're like, oh, no, no, no. You need to talk to the, you'll need to talk to the governor of Idaho about that. So it's just like such a funny concept. But it would be the degree to which, when you think of Jefferson, whoever, any peoples, okay, if you think of the second Americans, the second band of Americans to come down from the Bering Strait. How interested were they in how the first Americans had conceptualized and divided up the territory? What's interesting about Jefferson is like, ultimately the Americans don't care. Ultimately, they don't care, but they're interested in it. Maybe they're interested in it because they need to know that to manipulate other things,

but they're like, they're at least initially in some cases interested about how it was divided up. Yeah. Though ultimately, that would all be disregarded. Right. Well, I mean, Jefferson thought he was doing the right thing. Jefferson was trying to act in a moral and honorable way. And they're like, but it would dissolve. Well, of course.

It would dissolve. Those like what, I mean, of course. Those boundaries. Right. Did not endure. No, absolutely not. No, there's no question about that. But I'm just saying like if we're looking at it from how Jefferson saw the world in 1803.

And there was like a big international context too because America's still pretty new on the scene. And so they want to maintain their reputation with the French and with the British. And so there's this, there's this like international rule book, you know, from these philosophers about like you have to respect who owns it. like, let's use the Louisiana purchase as an example. What do you always hear in school? We're really bagging on school teachers today. I'm sorry about that. Hey, man, no, no, no, I'm not bagging on.

No. Okay, well, I guess I am. There's a lot of cover down there. There's a lot of covered down in the schoolhouse. Well, one thing that they might want to tweak slightly in coming years is the Louisiana purchase. Because, like, what do you hear in school? You hear that it's like the best real estate deal ever, right?

It doubled the size of America. Yeah, like, none of that's true. Nickel an acre or whatever else. Yeah, none of that's true because the Louisiana purchase was not about land. It was about this, this like extra layer of rights called preemption rights. So what France owned was not the land. France owned the right to buy the land from native people.

And so that's what they sold to the Americans. But Jefferson would never say, we now own all this. He would say we will one day own this. And so a historian has gone back and calculated all the treaties that turned like that before and after map we see in school into actually American land. And most of those treaties were negotiated by William Clark, by the way,

later in his life. But America spent another 400, million dollars. So the Louisiana purchase cost $15 million, but that's just this like this theoretical right. There was another like decades of negotiation, also wars, also, you know, very poor treatment of native people. It's a messy and complicated story. But like nobody in 1804 would be like we doubled the size of the country because they didn't. And so that's why like you really got to try to understand what Jefferson thought or what Lewis thought instead of what Andrew Jackson thought or something like that. Yeah, no, I understand. And there's probably, you mentioned earlier. there were far more, at that time, there were far more native people on the landscape. Yes. And it would appear in that time to be that that would be the case for a long time. Right.

So it could have been whether, however you felt about native claim to land, even if you ultimately intellectually didn't accept it. Right. You would have needed to accept the on the ground reality. Right. That like it, you know, maybe you don't like it.

Maybe that hasn't been how your government was operating. Right. on the other half of the country, but at the time, you're acknowledging that these things are going to be negotiated and purchased. But it's coming from, you know, the same, like if you imagine government as a continuity, right. It's coming from the same organization, Uncle Sam, right, who was also in the practice of buying land from tribes that didn't own it. And also really struggling to understand, like, who exactly do. I talk to? Who's the guy that makes the deals to people that don't have a guy that makes those deals? And one of Lewis and Clark's jobs was finding the guy. Like again and again, this isn't in the journals. These are in like some boring reports that they put together later on. But I went back and read those reports. And you can see that again and again, Clark is asking the Lakota. Like, okay, like, how much land do you claim? Where do your boundaries stop? And so like that that shows you that Lewis and Clark and Jefferson were imagining that continuity that you're talking about. It was on their minds.

Can you talk about what the process was like for the oral history that you did for this? Because I think that was something also that I, you talk about oral history with, and you visited contemporary travel groups and talk to them about their relationship to this story. And that's not something that I, when going through the rolodex of Lewis and Clark stuff I've encountered that you all. often get included. Well, I always started with the journals because, like, I'm a historian. So, like, what I know to do is go to the written text. So, like, that's what I would start with. But then I would also do these interviews.

I would read lots of academic scholarship. And these different points of view, I almost felt like I wrote, like, 10 biographies because I'm trying to understand the world the way each person did. So that's why it took five years. But once I had, like, the academic scholarship and the journals themselves, I would often interview native people. And, sorry, we're headed back to the Pacific Northwest. But the classup were a really good example.

example. I zoomed with some people from what's now called the Chinook Indian Nation because they have kind of subsumed the clats up and some other people. And one of the people I talked to was a direct descendant of Koboys. And so when I talked to them, they were interviewing me as much as I was interviewing them. Because this one guy named Tony, who was sort of the head of the Shenok Indian Nation, he said something to me that I thought about every day I worked on the book where he was like, you know, what we have left is our history and our stories. And we have shared that with people. And that's been exploited to. And so, like, it was not like they were like, Lewis and Clark, sweet, let's talk about it. They had to interview me first, and they wanted to understand that I was, like, willing to do the work and

listen to them and sort of had that kind of conversation. But they helped me so many ways. Like, there would be specific details. And again, in the book, I would say, you know, according to clats of tradition. But they would also point me in different directions. Like, like there's this famous anthropologist named Frank Boaz, and he recorded these stories way back in the 19th century of kind of like the tales, the literature of the Chinook and the clats of people. And they were like, if you want to understand Koboway and like how he saw the world, read those stories. Don't read them for the plot.

Read them for the values. And I mean, we do the same thing. Like, you know, George Washington and the Cherry Tree. There's a lot of American values in that story, too. So they would help me understand things and they would direct me to sources. And from that interview even, like they would give me lines, because I was writing from Kobo way's point of view, I could put right into the interview. Like I asked them about the elk and then the overhunting we were talking about.

And I was like, well, you know, the Klatsup asked Lewis and Clark to be there. Like, was that like, you know, was that an issue or something like that? That there's a famous moment where Lewis and Clark, not them, but some of the men, kill some elk and go home and they're like, we'll come back and get it tomorrow. And they go back tomorrow and the Klatsup have taken some of the elk and some of the skins. And so that creates a lot of friction there. But, you know, I asked them about that. And I'm like, you know, were the clats up stealing from Lewis and Clark there?

And the clats of people that I was zooming with were like, it's not stealing if it's yours in the first place. And so I put that line in the book, not because I personally endorsed that line or that interpretation, but because that chapter is written from Kobay's point of view. And so I'm trying, like, how did he see the world? How did Lewis see the world and Clark see the world and so on? So what those interviews with the oral history did, they gave me some details that I tried to very clearly show where those details came from. but they also helped me just kind of take on perspectives and be able to understand the values. And the other thing is academics have done a lot of research to vet oral sources. Like, in the Pacific Northwest, there have been oral traditions for a long time about these giant tsunamis that came hundreds of years ago before any white traders showed up.

Those have been recorded for more than a century. But it's only like in the last 30, 40 years that geologists have been able to prove there were giant tsunamis in this region that came in this time period and did this much damage. So like the geologists have sort of proven that the oral traditions, at least in broad strokes, are correct. So I tried to have an open mind to all these sources. And like we were talking about with Wolfcalf and the Blackfoot interview, I would take the oral sources. I would take the journals. I would take the scholarship. I would take my own understanding of human beings, kind of throw it in a blender and then offer the best interpretation I could.

Yeah. They get hard. Oral stories get hard. There's an expiration. Here we're already talking about, we're already talking about 220 years. You know, I can't, I can't tell you, I can't tell anything about my great grandparents. Sure. Right.

Like, it's, I, I accept and agree with the cultural, it's a, there's a cultural gesture that you have to acknowledge is there. There's a, it's, it's, it's in some ways, in some cases, in some ways, it's performative. But there's just like there's a limit. Yeah. Tell me about, okay, give me the oral tradition of your family 225 years ago. You cannot do it. But here's what I can do. I can tell you what my great-grandparents values were.

They were hardworking people who lived in a year. Huh? No, but you can tell family values and how those get passed on. So the first thing I would say is when we're talking about family stuff, I'm not saying that I said, what did Kobo eat for breakfast on the day Lewis and Clark showed up? but you can still learn those values which are not my values and the other thing but check me out though okay what what was your what was your great i had to do the math how many greats ago is 225 years i mean tell me about the values of your great great great great great grandfather what were his

values this is an impossible question for me to answer because i've read history about this time period too so anything i would tell you would be shaped by my understanding of what people living in indiana But there's one other thing I would say. I'm not down. I'm not like, I don't think historians shouldn't do it. Yeah, I know. I just, when I hear it, when I hear it, I often feel, and you can contradict me because you're in the situation. Sure.

When I hear historians doing it about stuff, and I don't know the date, I don't know, I don't know the time, the life, the lifespan. Okay. Oral tradition about something 500 years ago. about 500 years ago, very, very skeptical. Sure. Oral tradition about something 150 years ago about, I'm like, okay, somewhere between those, I start to get a little bit like, I feel that the traditions can be more informed by contemporary conflict, contemporary understandings, contemporary issues,

contemporary social concerns, can outweigh. the parts of it that are coming from my my my great great great great great grandfather told my my great great great great grandfather this and he passed it to my great great great great great grandfather who passed it to my great great great grand like yeah do you know I'm saying I do it it becomes that it becomes a more of a commentary about the present right not saying you shouldn't do it I just I hear it and I always I just I hear it and I have a there's a feeling that washes over me I I understand. You know, that feeling is skepticism, and we should be skeptical.

Like, historians can't do their job unless they're skeptical. So I totally get what you're coming from. Though, I don't even disagree with you. The only things I would say is that, first of all, a lot of the traditions didn't come from 150 years ago. They came from 50 years after. So, like, there were native people who met Lewis and Clark who then talked to a white person and the white person wrote it down. So a lot of the stuff I'm drawing on is not the historical game of telephone you're talking about. Sure.

The other thing is that native cultures, because they were often primarily oral, they sort of select people. with good memories who are good storytellers. And so they're like, you know, my great, great, great grandfather probably wrote it in a journal and didn't remember it as well. Whereas native people, you know, one historian when he got older would sort of train the next native historian. So there is more of a tradition there that I think helps you better be able to access those things. But really for me, there are cases like, I don't want to beat some to the ground.

No, it's an important point. But there are cases where, like, I don't want to act like I'm dismissive of the enterprise. I don't think you are. I can't remember the guy's name. There was a guy that much later was talked to people, NesPers who were involved in the NesPers War. Sure. And the children of people involved in Nespers war.

Right. You could say in some way you could say some of that's firsthand account. Like he took NesPers warriors to battlefields and he'd be like, no, I was standing there. Right. He was standing there. That's that oral tradition. That's firsthand. Sure.

But huge value in talking to. their kids, which at that point, I guess, is oral, I don't know, is that oral tradition? What is that? I think, I mean, it's the different historians are going to classify a different way. But for the conversation we're having, you're absolutely right that every generation of what you get away, it becomes more tenuous and you need to have more skepticism. I will say, like, I think I maybe put us on the wrong foot by talking about like grandparents' values, though, because like, the better example is not what your grandparents or my grandparents' values were. It'd be like if I was writing about somebody in France, there, I don't France. France, France, France.

France's values are not my values. So you sort of need like that basic primer. So when I would talk to people today, it would be less like, what did your grandparents do? And it would be more like, how do your people see the world? What does land mean to your people? Did you have an understanding of sort of geographical rights and those kinds of things? So I think for me, at least as a writer, because I am not Klatsup, because I am not Lakota, it was very valuable for me to talk to those people who were generous with their time and said, like, these are our values. And I, and, you know, those values have of course shaped like there's no question I can think of examples from my interviews where people they would say something to me and I'd be like that feels like that's that's that kind of

modern life is impinging on on the tradition as much as it is the tradition itself that I mean that that happens with us and how we tell American stories too but I do think that that for me at least as an outsider those interviews really helped me sort of feel like I could write from those people's points of view and it was just important in the book like we have great biographies of Lewis or or Coulter or people like that. But I really, I didn't want the sections on Kobaway or Black Buffalo or Sacagaia to just be like, this is what Lewis and Clark did. I wanted you to feel like you were in the canoe with them because I wanted the storytelling to be equal, you know? Like I wanted you to know what Lewis cared about, but I wanted you to know what Black Buffalo

cared about too. And the reason we can know that is often not these oral traditions, but the journals. Like Lewis and Clark wrote down what Black Buffalo wanted. It's just my job as a historian to be like, that deserves like a scene that deserves some description he black buffalo is not a supporting character black buffalo is a main character yeah and that's the choice i made in this book yeah understood i got one last question but you got uh but you go ahead randall no you got it uh i don't i probably knew this and forgot maybe but i don't know york the slave he gets back he petitions for his he petitions for his freedom yeah freedom based on his meritorious conduct

is denied. Right. What comes to him? How old is he when the expedition ends? He's, we don't know exactly how old he is, but given how relation, like, he was what was called Clark's body servant. Like he was somebody who grew up alongside Clark and then took care of Clark. That's why Clark wanted to take him on the expedition, among other reasons.

Like, Clark really respected York as a outdoorsman too. But so he was roughly Clark's age. So he was probably, you know, late 20s, early 30s during the expedition. But he requests his first. freedom when he gets back. And we know that he directly linked it to his service on the expedition because Clark has this letter to his brother. And in this letter, Clark says, you know, I don't agree with York that his immense services have earned his freedom. And so for Clark, again, there's a lot of things about, he's like, I'd like to raise a counterpoint. Right.

You know, I feel like I still own you. Yeah, exactly. Right. Counterpoint. This is how America works at this time period. But it like, you know, you can hear Clark's voice in that, the kind of sarcasm. it. Here's why I feel I should be able to like make my own decisions about myself. I don't know. It's just throw this out there. Yeah, exactly. But you can, you can hear York side of the debate too, though, right? Like that's Clark's letter, but Clark is preserving York's, York's rationale. And so they had lived in Louisville, Kentucky, outside of Louisville, Kentucky. And so Clark becomes, like, the top diplomat with native people and he has to move to St. Louis. And he will make all these, like, when he died in 1838, a third of what was American land. Clark negotiated the treaties for.

Clark had a very important life after the expedition. So he has to be in St. Louis to do that. So he tells York, you're coming with me. But York's wife is in Kentucky. And we know that York cared a lot about his wife. He sent Buffalo skins back to his wife from the expedition for her to have. And so York doesn't want to go. And that's where this real friction and tension emerges, that York's like, I want to be free.

And also, I want to stay in Kentucky with my wife. And Clark says, I don't care. And so they have really, really tough interactions. There's one letter where Clark says, I, like, I. I'm ready to beat York, but Lewis talked me out of it. Wow. So you can again see, like, I don't think it makes sense to just talk about slavery in the abstract. You need to talk about, like, how did Clark see it?

How did Lewis see it? Because even though they're similar guys, they had very different views on slavery. And so Lewis was basically like, we don't know exactly why he thought this, but he definitely said, you know, you don't need to beat Clark or beat York right now. Let's, let's take it easier on him. But either way, Clark waited more than a decade to free York. York's wife ended up having to move further down south, so he was not able to reunite with her in the way that he wanted, and York ended up dying probably sometime in his 50s, probably of

cholera. We don't know for sure, but it seems pretty clear. His wife was enslaved. Yes. By a different owner. Different families, right, because the Clarks, the Clarks had 10 or 12 slaves, so often in plantations of that size, you would have to, you know, you would marry somebody from a different plantation. You say he did not reunite with his wife? He, I mean, he was, he was, once he was freed, he ended up having a wagon business. So maybe he rode the wagon down further south, but that that would be pretty precarious in 1820 to you know as a as a as a freed black person take your wagon further south that's not what most people would do so we don't know for sure because york couldn't read or write but he definitely saw less of his wife than he wanted to we know that man there's you almost think about like a like like like i don't i'm not a big play fan like plays you know i like him okay but i'm more i'm more into movies but a good play would be you know in the autumn of Boone's, Daniel Boone's life, he would go on these hunting trips with his slave.

Him and his slave. Yep. Would get and paddle up river. Right. And do these big hunting trips. And like, what, like, what are those conversations like? Yeah. It would be the two of them.

Right. That would be, that'd be like waiting for Godot, but plus slavery, it'd be wild. Yeah. Or York trying to explain, you know, you know, he, Here's why I think I shouldn't be a slave. Right. But I mean. Like how does that conversation play out?

Yeah. But I mean, York was reacting to different circumstances. Like on the expedition, he carried a rifle. He was the fifth named guy in the journals to bring down a buffalo. He was a great hunter. Yeah. He was big and strong. He could swim.

A lot of the people in the expedition could not swim, which that's a fact that I still can't wrap my head around. Like you're doing this river expedition. One of the first questions I would have asked. No. Am I recruiting? You would think so. Yeah, he could have taken that rifle.

swung it around, been like, you son of a bitch. Right, right. No, it's, I mean, it's a, it's a wild, it's a wild dynamic. So hard to understand. It's so hard to understand. I think one reason the journals are helpful is they help you see Clark's point of view on this too, because you can see how, for lack of a better word, possessive Clark is. Like, like York, the native people, once they get far enough to the north, the native people are obsessed with York because they've never met somebody with black skin before. So they, like, they come up and they'll spit on their hands and try to like rub york's skin to rub the paint off yeah and then when they realize it's not paint they're like

whoa this is this is something new and when you read clark's journal entries you can see that clark is just kind of like jealous in a weird way because he's so used to being the person above york that once york starts to get more attention that that makes their relationship get even stranger so they're it's just i think york could beat his ass too i mean Clark again and again talked about how big york was so i i think york was probably the largest guy on the on the whole expedition i can't matter we had a guess recently or someone turned to sign to this quote, um, the past is a strange country. Mm-hmm.

You know, because some of the stuff, you just, you just can't understand it. I know. You can't, the dynamics you'll never, ever understand. Yeah. I felt that tension again and again writing this book because it's like on, on one hand, Sackadwea's actions feel like it's at a workplace, right? Like she's, you know, she's, she's doing human interactions the same way we would. But on another hand, it's just a completely different word.

world. And so I don't think there's a way to resolve that as a historian. I think you just need to accept that like both things are true and then try to tell the story as honestly as you can. But it's like that that push-pull, I felt that again and again in this book. I feel like a lot of what you do in this book is you're sort of building the story out from this myopic understanding of a miraculous journey led by two incredible individuals. Right. And you're building it out. And I'm curious if there's still a blank spot in your canvas that you weren't able to fill in. Not to end on a downer. No. But what did you, was there something you wanted to build out in this book that just wasn't there? Yeah. I spent five years on this. I love all 10 of the people.

in this book, and I still have way more questions than answers. Like, is that a crazy thing to say? But that's, like, if you're trying to be an honest and accurate historian, I don't know what other response you would have. Like, I just wonder, what did Lewis think about York? Yeah. Because Lewis specifically told Clark recruit unmarried men, because they knew that, like, they wanted people without family ties, but they also knew that the men were going to have sex with lots of Native women. Like, they'd been in the army. They knew that they wanted young guys who were not attached. And so Lewis shows up, and Clark's like, York's coming. And York's married. York.

York's black he's enslaved so I like did they argue about that was Lewis like this is a terrible idea was Clark like I'm not coming unless York comes did Lewis just sort of roll his eyes and have some kind of resentment about it but they just worked through it probably that's what happened but we'll never know so like I feel like unlike William Clark's maps my map is still mostly blank spaces I just tried to fill in as much as I could with this book yeah you know I'd do the movie man is uh we're talking about the beginning of apocalypse now this morning. Randall was. You know, like the hotel scene.

Sure. I would probably open the movie, Grindr station. There's blood everywhere. You know what I'm saying? And he's like, oh. Like he's dying.

Right. And then you're like, what in the world is going on? Yeah. You know what I mean? The people downstairs are like, what's going on up there? Right.

And then he trips back, flashback. Yeah. It's a classic introductory device. Because it'd grab you by the boo-boo for sure. Yeah. Maybe that's the magic key that will unlock the successful HBO miniseries. They just couldn't think of a good opening scene. That was the problem all along.

It wasn't how do you tell a three-year-long story. I think of Christian Bale. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. Well, fingers crossed on the HBO series. That's all I'll say. Yeah, yeah.

Fingers crossed. That's a blank space on my map is I would really like somebody to make a TV show out of this. The undaunted courage, which we haven't brought up until now, I think that was always the, you know, if it was going to spin into a series, that was it. But like this is just such a more, you know, human tale that I see the, we'll keep our fingers crossed. I don't want to, I don't want to brag, but I got one in the oven right now that's going to be prime pickings for a movie. Okay. Which I've never had happened. I'm sure it's insane.

But again, he doesn't want to brag now. He just wants to tell us how great it feels. It feels so good, but other than that, I can't say anything. The only problem is I haven't written it yet either. Well, yeah. I hear that can be a tricky process. You did the work. It's just a step along the way, you know.

For sure, that's right. Well, good luck. I hope they do get it. We've been talking to Craig Furman, author of this vast enterprise, a new history of Lewis and Clark. So a new history of a old and fascinating, fascinating story. with endless threads to pull at. And it sounds to me like you pulled out some fresh ones. I did my best, man.

It's a big story. I gave it everything I had. Yeah, I'd check it out. Once again, this fast enterprise, a new history of Lewis and Clark by Craig Furman. Check out Phelps' new bear cub distress call. Springtime is the right time to use a bear cub in distress sound when bear hunting. Male bears will kill cubs in order to get females to cycle into another breeding opportunity.

And the sound of a cub in distress, also signals to other male bears that a meal is close and even a possible mate. A bear cub in distress will also get the attention of a female bear to come and investigate to defend a cub dragging any male suitors she has in tow. Not to mention, a cub in distress will also call other predators in, as they're looking for an easy meal too. Get your own bear cub in distress at Phelpsgamecauls.com. This is an iHeart podcast.

Guaranteed human.