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

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  Speaker 1: dot com. That's f I R S T l I
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  Speaker 2: Welcome everybody. Today, we're gonna dig up.
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  Speaker 1: We're gonna dig way in on the Lewis and Clark expedition,
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  Speaker 1: which comes up all the time on this show.
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  Speaker 2: I don't know if you know. Of all the interviews
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  Speaker 2: you're gonna do, how many interviews have you done so far?
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  Speaker 3: Too many to count. Okay, but but well we'll get
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  Speaker 3: into it here for sure. Okay, this is gonna be
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  Speaker 3: the one. Remember how I was just saying, turn those off,
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  Speaker 3: it's all good.
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  Speaker 2: This is gonna be the one.
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  Speaker 1: This is actually important, but not as important as Lewis
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  Speaker 1: and Clark, not as pressing. Of all the interviews you did,
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  Speaker 1: this is gonna be the one where the audience knows
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  Speaker 1: most about what you're talking about.
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  Speaker 4: I love it.
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  Speaker 1: That's a guarantee unless you go to like the Lewis
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  Speaker 1: and Clark Remembrance Association or something.
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  Speaker 3: Let's see, I have to talk to them, so so'll
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  Speaker 3: it'll be a good time.
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  Speaker 1: Next to those suckers. This is gonna be the most
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  Speaker 1: informed audience you're going to talk about. But you got
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  Speaker 1: a brand new book out, this vast enterprise. And we're
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  Speaker 1: joined by Craig Furman, who wrote a book prior that
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  Speaker 1: I would be way less inclined to read, but still interesting.
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  Speaker 1: Author is a previous book author in chief, the untold
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  Speaker 1: story of our presidents in the.
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  Speaker 2: Books they wrote. But how many books have they written?
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  Speaker 4: Again?
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  Speaker 3: Too many to count. Yeah, I mean to pick which
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  Speaker 3: ones you wanted to talk about. I picked the ones
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  Speaker 3: that were interesting. So with Teddy Roosevelt, you know, would
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  Speaker 3: focus on his outdoor writing, his great nature writing, and
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  Speaker 3: then focus on when he wrote about the War of
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  Speaker 3: eighteen twelve from like a naval perspective, because that book
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  Speaker 3: is still important to historians today even though Teddy Roosevelt
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  Speaker 3: wrote it what he is at Harvard as a student.
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  Speaker 3: So I would just pick the presidents that were most interesting,
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  Speaker 3: picked the books that were most interesting, and then that
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  Speaker 3: book sort of also told the history of communication. Like
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  Speaker 3: when I was writing about Reagan, I was also writing
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  Speaker 3: about the rise of like Walden books and how bookstores
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  Speaker 3: and malls changed the kinds of books people wrote.
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  Speaker 4: And so Jimmy Carter wrote a bunch of books, a
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  Speaker 4: lot of books.
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  Speaker 3: But unfortunately he's only like a couple paragraphs in my
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  Speaker 3: book because he was operating in the same world as Reagan.
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  Speaker 3: So like with Carter, he was one of the first
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  Speaker 3: people to use a word processor.
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  Speaker 2: You know.
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  Speaker 3: He would have like these floppy disks that could hold
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  Speaker 3: twelve pages on it, and he had to pay thousands
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  Speaker 3: of dollars to bring this giant microwave size word processor
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  Speaker 3: into his house. So unfortunately for mister Carter, I only
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  Speaker 3: focused on the word processor, not the books. But I
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  Speaker 3: wanted it to be a good story. Who's your favorite
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  Speaker 3: President Lincoln?
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  Speaker 2: Lincoln?
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  Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm from Indiana. What else am I going to say? Man?
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  Speaker 2: I thought he's like land of Lincoln's Illinois.
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  Speaker 3: Well, there's the Midwest fights over him quite tenaciously. It
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  Speaker 3: was born Indiana, he was born in Kentucky. So I'm
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  Speaker 3: telling you it's it's it's tough stuff.
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  Speaker 2: Good. But so why why do you say Indiana?
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  Speaker 3: Well, because he has formative years were there, and so
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  Speaker 3: like a lot of the stories we think about with Lincoln,
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  Speaker 3: like trading in some ears of corn to get a
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  Speaker 3: copy of a book, and then the book gets waterlogged
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  Speaker 3: and he has to work even more to pay off
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  Speaker 3: the book. That all happened in Indiana. So that's the
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  Speaker 3: bigges stuff. I mean, it's it's big to me.
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  Speaker 2: I Yeah, no, that's great, that's great.
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  Speaker 1: I like those people that get I like those people
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  Speaker 1: to get claimed by a lot of places, right, there's
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  Speaker 1: a lot of them all through time, you know, like
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  Speaker 1: like Elder Leopold. Sure he's he's claiming like a lot
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  Speaker 1: of ways. Claimed by New Mexico. He's claimed by Wisconsin.
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  Speaker 1: Jim Harrison's claimed by Montana, Key West, you know, Michigan. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: Hemingway is claimed by Cuba, Michigan, Illinois, Idaho, Idaho.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Like these people that really a lot of people want
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  Speaker 1: to draw them in. Yeah, Daniel Boone claimed by Missouri
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  Speaker 1: and Kentucky. Yeah, probably somewhat by North Yeah, definitely by
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  Speaker 1: North Carolina.
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  Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, yeah, no, it's saka Juwia's the same way
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  Speaker 3: there's different native nations that claim here, and to me,
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  Speaker 3: that just speaks to any of these historical figures. Like
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  Speaker 3: their story is so inspiring and so exciting that it
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  Speaker 3: makes sense that a lot of people would see themselves
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  Speaker 3: in it.
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  Speaker 2: How long did you work on your Lewis Clark book?
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  Speaker 4: Five years?
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  Speaker 2: Okay, tell me why it's different than other Lewis and
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  Speaker 2: Clark books.
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  Speaker 3: Well, that's a fair question. And when I started out,
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  Speaker 3: I wanted to write an adventure story like I had
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  Speaker 3: done the first book about presidents and the books they wrote,
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  Speaker 3: and I think that's a good book. But I just
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  Speaker 3: I think any good writer when they tackle a new book,
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  Speaker 3: they want a new challenge. So it's like, let's get outside,
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  Speaker 3: Let's do an adventure story. And so the best adventure
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  Speaker 3: story in American history is Lewis and Clark. Of course,
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  Speaker 3: the counterpoint here is that there have been a lot
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  Speaker 3: of good books written about Lewis and Clark, so I
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  Speaker 3: didn't have a deep familiarity with the topic. Like I
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  Speaker 3: remember when my dad went on a big motors cycle
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  Speaker 3: trip to the West, I bought him a copy of
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  Speaker 3: the Lewis and Clark journals because I knew, you know,
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  Speaker 3: and so he was like sleeping outside and reading it,
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  Speaker 3: and I was reading it. We'd talk about so I
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  Speaker 3: had like some familiarity, but not a deep familiarity. But
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  Speaker 3: I just thought, let me look at their journals and
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  Speaker 3: we'll talk about the journals a lot today. Because they're
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  Speaker 3: more than a million words. There is no record like
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  Speaker 3: this for in.
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  Speaker 2: Is that right?
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  Speaker 4: It's true, it's insane.
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  Speaker 2: Just for people's point of reference. How many pages is
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  Speaker 2: your book?
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  Speaker 3: It's about four hundred pages for the main story.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, but how many words? Sorry?
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, no, main part of the story is about one
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  Speaker 3: hundred forty thousand words.
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  Speaker 1: So that's that's just for people's perspective. That's a heavy book.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, like you've probably, like like listeners, you've probably read
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  Speaker 3: a lot of books that are eighty ninety thousand words.
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  Speaker 1: So you were talking about the journals or a million words. Yeah,
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  Speaker 1: I never thought about them in a word count sence.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah no, but it's I mean that I think conveys
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  Speaker 3: just how detailed they were, and you also have them
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  Speaker 3: from different perspectives. So something will happen. You'll see what
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  Speaker 3: Lewis and Clark are seeing. But then one of the
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  Speaker 3: enlisted soldiers might notice something different, and so that's why
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  Speaker 3: it's such an incredible resource. So I read all a
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  Speaker 3: million words, and what I noticed was that, like I
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  Speaker 3: only knew how the story even as somebody who's a historian,
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  Speaker 3: who's like pretty well informed on these topics, I kept
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  Speaker 3: noticing these human details again and again that I didn't realize.
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  Speaker 3: So at that point I was like, well, this is
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  Speaker 3: this is worth spending a couple of years on. But
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  Speaker 3: then I found more new stuff in the archives. I
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  Speaker 3: really thought there's nothing new to find on Louis Oh.
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  Speaker 1: I would imagine that there's no thing because so many
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  Speaker 1: historians and writers and just old dudes with a lot
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  Speaker 1: of spare time.
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  Speaker 3: Right have just dug in dug telling you man, I
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  Speaker 3: found so much. I found new stuff about Lewis and Clark,
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  Speaker 3: to say nothing of all the other people I wrote about.
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  Speaker 3: I found a lot of new.
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  Speaker 2: Stuff, new stuff you haven't seen in other books.
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  Speaker 4: That's right.
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  Speaker 3: You want to you want an example, Wolfcaff, Wolfcff. That's
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  Speaker 3: probably the biggest one. This is an interview with a
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  Speaker 3: blackfoot man named WOLFCLF and one of the two big
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  Speaker 3: interactions between Lewis and Clark and Native people. One was
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  Speaker 3: with the Lakota, and the other was with the Blackfoot
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  Speaker 3: on the way back. It was just Lewis. And so
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  Speaker 3: we've always had Lewis's journal. And then there's been a
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  Speaker 3: letter of a guy named George Bird Garnell, who your
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  Speaker 3: listeners probably know because you all are so well informed.
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  Speaker 3: Where George Burd Grenell was like, I interviewed this guy
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  Speaker 3: who met Lewis and Clark. But in that letter, George
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  Speaker 3: Bird Grannell is like, I might have more from my
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  Speaker 3: interview with this guy in my notebooks. I'll let me check,
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  Speaker 3: and he never checked, but his notebooks are just sitting
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  Speaker 3: there at a library. So I went to his notebooks.
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  Speaker 3: Not only do I find the three pages of transcripts
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  Speaker 3: from the interview Grenell remembered wrong. So Grenell's version of
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  Speaker 3: this guy's interview in the letter is completely different than
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  Speaker 3: the actual interview. So in my book in the back,
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  Speaker 3: I just print the whole interview because that's a big
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  Speaker 3: document for historians, but I also hope readers read it too,
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  Speaker 3: and they can kind of see, like to get Wolfcaff's
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  Speaker 3: perspective versus Lewis's perspective, And I print Lewis's journal entry too,
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  Speaker 3: So like side by side, you have Lewis's journal entry,
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  Speaker 3: you have Wolfcaff's interview. You can see the two different
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  Speaker 3: accounts of this episode.
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  Speaker 2: Did one do they contradict on factual matters?
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  Speaker 3: They do in some ways. But I really found while
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  Speaker 3: working on this book that it was rarely about opposition.
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  Speaker 3: It was about conversation. So like Wolfcaff says, we tried
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  Speaker 3: to steal the American horses, but everybody else who's written
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  Speaker 3: about this said that the Blackfoot people tried to steal
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  Speaker 3: the American guns. So there's like a long tradition of
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  Speaker 3: horse raids on the planes that that was kind of
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  Speaker 3: a that's a different thing. But going for guns obviously
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  Speaker 3: that's an escalation. And so Lewis and his journal entry
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  Speaker 3: says they went for our guns. But once I read
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  Speaker 3: Wolfclfs saying, well, actually all we wanted were the horses.
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  Speaker 3: And once I read a bunch of scholarship by people
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  Speaker 3: like John Ewers, who like dedicated their whole lives while
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  Speaker 3: he worked at the Smithsonian to studying these horse raids.
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  Speaker 3: The horse raids were almost never violent, they were focused
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  Speaker 3: on horses. So then I went back to Lewis's journal entry,
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  Speaker 3: and I noticed something that nobody had seen before. And
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  Speaker 3: this is like, this is not a discovery, because that
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  Speaker 3: journal has been there for anybody to find. But you
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  Speaker 3: can read things differently. And what was interesting is that
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  Speaker 3: Louis was asleep when things went sideways, So like when
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  Speaker 3: they either went for the horses or guns, Lewis, by
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  Speaker 3: his own admission, was in a deep sleep. So what
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  Speaker 3: you have here is not Louis's word versus Wolfcaf's word.
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  Speaker 3: You have this one enlisted soldier who was probably asleep
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  Speaker 3: while on watch, which was a capital crime. You have
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  Speaker 3: his word against Wolfcaff's word. And the American soldier had
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  Speaker 3: every reason to play up the violence of the Native
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  Speaker 3: people because he screwed up. He's the one who fell asleep,
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  Speaker 3: he let this happen. He's the one who his brother
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  Speaker 3: ended up killing one of the Native people in the
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  Speaker 3: in the battle that followed. So for the American guy,
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  Speaker 3: like these two brothers are the ones who tell the
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  Speaker 3: story to Lewis after the fact, and they have every
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  Speaker 3: incentive to make it seem as scary as possible because
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  Speaker 3: they're the ones who let it happen, and they you know,
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  Speaker 3: and so in my book, I try to hedge here carefully,
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  Speaker 3: and I try to say, you know, I think wolf
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  Speaker 3: Calf was right. I think his version makes more sense.
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  Speaker 3: But I'm not going to say that his version is
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  Speaker 3: completely right, because we'll never know. But I think what's
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  Speaker 3: cool in my book is you can get both versions
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  Speaker 3: and kind of lay inside by side. Do me a favorite,
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  Speaker 3: real quick, yeah, or however long you want to do
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  Speaker 3: it for. For people that I was just talking up.
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  Speaker 3: People know this story, well, let's just say they don't. Sure,
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  Speaker 3: do you mind laying out in a way that entertains me?
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  Speaker 2: And Randall?
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  Speaker 1: What do we mean when we say the Lewis and
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  Speaker 1: Clark expedition?
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  Speaker 4: Sure?
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  Speaker 3: So let's you could start it in Washington, d C.
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  Speaker 3: With like Thomas Jefferson's political stuff. That's all new in
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  Speaker 3: my book too, but I'll try to keep it more entertaining.
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  Speaker 3: So let's start near Saint Louis. So spring of A
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  Speaker 3: eighteen oh four, they leave near Saint Louis, they go
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  Speaker 3: up the Missouri River. They Jefferson thinks that the Missouri
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  Speaker 3: River and the Columbia River basically touch. That was sort
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  Speaker 3: of the like default idea in this time period. So
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  Speaker 3: the idea is they're going to go up the Missouri River,
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  Speaker 3: hop over this a mountain or two because the Rockies
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  Speaker 3: aren't that much to deal with, then go down the
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  Speaker 3: Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. And so they want
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  Speaker 3: to find this water route because it's good for traders,
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  Speaker 3: but it's also good Jefferson is already thinking about the future,
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  Speaker 3: because Jefferson always thought about the future. So he's thinking
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  Speaker 3: about like traders today, farmers tomorrow. And so Lewis and
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  Speaker 3: Clark go up to the Missouri in eighteen oh four. They
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  Speaker 3: make their first winter quarters in what's now North Dakota
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  Speaker 3: at Fort Mandon, and then in eighteen oh five they
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  Speaker 3: keep going along the Missouri. They find out that the
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  Speaker 3: Rocky mountains are the Rocky Mountains, and so they get
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  Speaker 3: through that, go down the tributaries and the Columbia River,
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  Speaker 3: and get to the Pacific Ocean, spend another winter there
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  Speaker 3: on the Pacific coast, and then in last year eighteen
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  Speaker 3: oh six, come back to Saint Louis and then to Washington,
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  Speaker 3: Okay eight thousand miles.
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  Speaker 1: And just to go back one step previous to that,
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  Speaker 1: like sort of an initiating sure instance is kind of
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  Speaker 1: lay out the national picture with the Louisiana Purchase and
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  Speaker 1: manifest Destiny.
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  Speaker 4: Sure, all that kind of good stuff.
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  Speaker 3: People love to bring up the Louisiana purchase, and it
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  Speaker 3: does become important. But Jefferson had been working on the
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  Speaker 3: expedition way before the Louisiana purchases.
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  Speaker 2: He would have gone and done it anyway.
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  Speaker 3: He was trying to do it. In seventeen eighty three,
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  Speaker 3: he asked William Clark's older brother, George Rogers Clark to
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  Speaker 3: lead this expedition. I was a badass, he was, he was,
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  Speaker 3: but he would not do it because he thought, he's like,
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  Speaker 3: America screwed me over. They haven't paid me enough for
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  Speaker 3: all the fighting I did. So no, I'm not leading
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  Speaker 3: your expedition.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 3: So thirty years later Jefferson works it out with Lewis.
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  Speaker 3: Lewis brings on George Rogers's baby brother William. But yeah,
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  Speaker 3: Jefferson was always thinking about land. And that's one thing
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  Speaker 3: that's doing in my book is I found all these
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  Speaker 3: small details where you can see Lewis and Clark are
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  Speaker 3: talking in political terms, like there's this idea of the
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  Speaker 3: right of soil, like Native people, like do they who
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  Speaker 3: claims the land? And who do we negotiate with to
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  Speaker 3: buy it? And when Lewis deals with the Grizzly Bear,
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  Speaker 3: he says that the grizzly bear was quote tenacious of
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  Speaker 3: the right of soil, which, ay, that's just a great joke,
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  Speaker 3: like Lewis is a funny guy, but that's also like
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  Speaker 3: a term that could have been used in the White House.
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  Speaker 3: So you can see that Lewis and Clark are always
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  Speaker 3: thinking about land, who owns it, where America is going
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  Speaker 3: to go next? And this is this all started before
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  Speaker 3: the Louisiana purchase. The Louisiana purchase was like a happy
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: accident that supercharged it.
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  Speaker 1: So what like what was his what was his deal
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  Speaker 1: if they hadn't have done the if they hadn't have
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  Speaker 1: bought the land, he was just gonna send guys out
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  Speaker 1: and have him duke it out with this, have him
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  Speaker 1: duke it out with the Spanish or what.
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  Speaker 3: Well, first of all, the Louisiana purchase didn't cover the
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  Speaker 3: whole route, so the Pacific Northwest, like.
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  Speaker 2: Well, I mean the kind of the big chunk of it.
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  Speaker 3: Well, but I mean they were really interested in the
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  Speaker 3: Pacific Northwest, Like out there you had like Russian ships,
• 12:38
  Speaker 3: British ships, Spanish ships, French ships, American ships, all circling
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  Speaker 3: on that coast. So part of it was getting out there,
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  Speaker 3: like different ships had gone there, but having but going
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  Speaker 3: the route by land offered you a different claim. All
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  Speaker 3: these empires had this. There's this idea called the law
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  Speaker 3: of Nations, and so there are all these rules and
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  Speaker 3: and sort of theoretical debates. The native people were just like,
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  Speaker 3: we don't really care about theoretical debates. There are more
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  Speaker 3: of us than there are of you in this time period.
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  Speaker 3: But Jefferson was thinking about how do we like advance
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  Speaker 3: America's legal claims, and so sending Lewis and Clark would
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  Speaker 3: help in the Pacific Northwest, and they were already i
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  Speaker 3: in the Louisiana the area that would come the Louisiana purchase.
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  Speaker 3: Like Jefferson's secretary of Treasuredy Gallaton, whose name we see
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  Speaker 3: all over the place here. Gallaton said, and when they
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  Speaker 3: were planning out the expedition, He's like, the Missouri country
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  Speaker 3: is a particular interest to us because that's the first
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  Speaker 3: place Americans are going to go. So there's no question
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  Speaker 3: that Gallaton, Jefferson, Lewis Clark, they were thinking in these terms.
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  Speaker 1: Huh, that's something I had. That's something I hadn't realized
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  Speaker 1: that he would have gone ahead and done that anyway.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, they would have, just like the Spanish were not intimidating,
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  Speaker 3: so like British traders have been sneaking past them for decades,
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  Speaker 3: and so Jefferson thought the America like he tried to
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  Speaker 3: get passports and like dot his eyes and cross his teas,
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  Speaker 3: but he knew at the end of the day Lewis
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  Speaker 3: and Clark could just sneak by them and keep going.
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like so hard to find somebody.
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: Exactly, although the Spanish did almost fine. And that's another
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: thing that's in the book is that the Spanish sent
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: four different missions, more than a thousand soldiers to try
• 13:58
  Speaker 3: to track down Lewis and Clark because they were pissed off.
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: Even after the Louisiana purchase, Spain was still trying to
• 14:03
  Speaker 3: stop American expansion. And so at one point, this is
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: a new thing in the book. I used native maps
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: and compared them to like Jefferson's documents, the Spanish were
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: within one hundred miles of them. So like when we're
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: talking the scope of the Great Plains, like to get
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: with one hundred miles, that's as close as you can
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: come to and still miss You know that there could
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: have been an international war breaking out on the banks
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: of the Missouri.
• 14:23
  Speaker 2: Well what uh?
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: I don't want to spend too much time on this,
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: but sure, what uh? What part after the purchase? What
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: part were they? What were they?
• 14:34
  Speaker 2: What were the Spanish imagining as the line?
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: Like?
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: What were they imagining that they don't want the Americans
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: to do?
• 14:44
  Speaker 3: What?
• 14:45
  Speaker 4: Right?
• 14:45
  Speaker 3: Well, the thing is the lines were up for debate,
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: like the Louisiana purchase happened, but nobody knew what the
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: Louisiana purchase meant. That's one reason Lewis and Clark were important,
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: because they were going to get latitude and longitude readings
• 14:55
  Speaker 3: and bring back Enlightenment science to adjudicate this. But like
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: one of the reasons that Wis ends up meeting with
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: the Blackfoot people is that Jefferson was like, no side missions,
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: just focus on the rivers. Just get there and back.
• 15:06
  Speaker 3: But once Lewis realized the rocky mountains are here, I'm
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: not gonna be able to find this river route that
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: the president wants. Because Lewis and Jefferson were very close
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: and so this was not just about doing a good job.
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: There was something personal to this relationship. And so on
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: the way back, Lewis is like, I'm going to do
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: a side mission. I'm going to disobey the president because
• 15:21
  Speaker 3: if I can go, if I can find that this
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: river goes far enough north, then the Louisiana purchase is
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: actually gonna be hundreds of thousands of miles bigger. And
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: so he goes up there trying to get that reading.
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: The clouds don't cooperate, so he can't get the reading.
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: Then he runs into the Blackfoot people and has this
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: huge blow up that impacts relations between the Blackfoot and
• 15:38
  Speaker 3: the Americans for decades to come. Which that's how history works, right,
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: Like you think you're going to do something, and then
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: something else happens. Sometimes it's amazing. Sometimes it's a battle
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: where a person dies.
• 15:47
  Speaker 5: You.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: In the book, you kind of take a perspective of
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: you set out a mission to really get into these personalities, right,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: you know, like sort of set you know, the national
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: motivation or Jefferson's motivation, but you sort of get into
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: what are like the people motivated by right, which which
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: is like, uh, if if anybody sits and imagines a uh,
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: if you imagine a World War how like generally World
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: War two movies work right about a squad or whatever,
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: you know, platoon, whatever it is. It's like, you know,
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: all the like geopolitical things going on, but in time
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: they's you know, the object of the movie is what
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: made right Captain Thompson join? And what are his fears
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: and anxieties? You know, Like people are very familiar with
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: this format, but right, no one's taken that approach here.
• 16:49
  Speaker 4: Right exactly.
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: So I like, in my book, You've got you know,
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: Jefferson is like the Churchill right, Like that's the national
• 16:55
  Speaker 3: motivation if we're going to do the World War two analogy.
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: But my book is almost all at the platoon level.
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: Like what I always tell people is I tried as
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: a writer to put you in the canoe, but I
• 17:03
  Speaker 3: think it's really important to put you in different canoes
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: because like even Lewis and Clark best friends, both grew
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: up in the same state, both in the army, they
• 17:12
  Speaker 3: had really different views about some issues, and so I
• 17:14
  Speaker 3: felt like my job was to really show what each
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: person saw. So the book, if anybody has read Game
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: of Thrones, you know, how like the chapter's rotating points
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: of view, Like one chapter you're going to get a
• 17:23
  Speaker 3: king's point of view, and the next chapter you're going
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: to get like a knight's point of view.
• 17:25
  Speaker 4: That kind of thing.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: Not familiar, but yeah, thank you, I appreciate it.
• 17:31
  Speaker 4: Well, I've got you all right, all right.
• 17:34
  Speaker 3: I could have cided as I lay dying, Maybe that
• 17:36
  Speaker 3: would have been the better move. A lot of books
• 17:39
  Speaker 3: do this rotating point of view, but not many history
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: books do. And so that's what you're talking about, that
• 17:43
  Speaker 3: kind of platoon perspective. So chapter one is from Lewis's
• 17:46
  Speaker 3: point of view. Chapter two moves to the perspective of York,
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: who was the enslaved guy who Clark brought along. He
• 17:52
  Speaker 3: was on this entire expedition too, And so I still
• 17:54
  Speaker 3: try to hit like the greatest hits, like we've still
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: got the Rapids, We've still got the Rockies, we've still
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: got the eight thousand miles. But I really wanted to
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: show what this felt like to individual people, because I
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: think human beings are always the most interesting subject, and
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: so I just really tried to capture for Lewis, for Clark,
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: one of my favorite people in this book, is a
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: guy named John Ordway was like a working class sergeant.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: And you want to talk about platoon level dynamics, You've
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: got Lewis and Clark like trying to keep Jefferson happy.
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: You've got these enlisted soldiers who can kind of be
• 18:20
  Speaker 3: a pain in the ass, and you've got Ordway stuck
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: in the middle trying to navigate all this stuff. So
• 18:25
  Speaker 3: when I'm writing his chapters, I'm really trying to dig
• 18:27
  Speaker 3: into those kind of soldierly dynamics. And I do that
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: in all the chapters that kind of wrotate points of view,
• 18:32
  Speaker 3: and I just hope it makes the book feel more human.
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: And you know when I said why I write this,
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: like this is this reason? I wrote this because I
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: felt like I could tell like the other half of
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: the story.
• 18:43
  Speaker 6: I think the one of the chapters that I read
• 18:46
  Speaker 6: is the chapter on the the winter on the Oregon Coast, sure,
• 18:51
  Speaker 6: and it's told from the perspective of go Boy, and he's.
• 18:56
  Speaker 5: A class of leader.
• 18:59
  Speaker 6: And I feel like I've read a lot of Lewis
• 19:02
  Speaker 6: and Clark stuff that that moment in the story is
• 19:09
  Speaker 6: sort of like a downtime and a lot of these
• 19:11
  Speaker 6: narratives and it's kind of like they waited out the winter.
• 19:14
  Speaker 5: It was pretty miserable whatever.
• 19:15
  Speaker 6: But I gained a totally new perspective on that moment
• 19:21
  Speaker 6: because it's the story is told from the perspective of
• 19:24
  Speaker 6: someone who sort of these guys have showed up. It's like,
• 19:29
  Speaker 6: a he's a he's an older guy. This is kind
• 19:32
  Speaker 6: of a blip on his radar of his whole life, right,
• 19:34
  Speaker 6: and he's thinking about how to make it advantageous for
• 19:37
  Speaker 6: his people. But these guys just keep shooting elk. They
• 19:43
  Speaker 6: keep shooting elk, and he's like noticing little details, like
• 19:46
  Speaker 6: they're there. They've been picking away at some of the boards,
• 19:51
  Speaker 6: the roof boards from the class of lodges, and it's like,
• 19:55
  Speaker 6: all of a sudden that winter isn't just this gray,
• 19:59
  Speaker 6: dull waiting period. It's like really active and there's all
• 20:06
  Speaker 6: these maneuverings and even the trade, like they're their disinterest
• 20:09
  Speaker 6: in trade. So I don't if you want to tell
• 20:11
  Speaker 6: that story better than I can. Like that was one
• 20:13
  Speaker 6: example for me where it was just like, oh, this
• 20:15
  Speaker 6: is this could have I would skip over that right
• 20:19
  Speaker 6: in my read in my like elevator pitch retelling of
• 20:22
  Speaker 6: Lewis and Clark right, all of a sudden, it became
• 20:24
  Speaker 6: very interesting to me.
• 20:25
  Speaker 3: Well, I really appreciate you saying that, because I I
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: definitely as a writer, I'm always thinking about like keeping this,
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: keeping the pages turning right. So like if I had
• 20:33
  Speaker 3: just done Lewis and Clark's perspective, or even York's perspective
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: or Orway's perspective, that's like the third winter quarters they
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: built at that point. So I'm like, how many ways
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: can I talk about them chopping down logs and building huts?
• 20:42
  Speaker 4: You know.
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: So that's why that was the perfect spot to move
• 20:44
  Speaker 3: to the native guy's point of view. And so I
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: did a lot of research on these native people's points
• 20:49
  Speaker 3: of view and what mattered to them. And Koboway and
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: the clats Up they were incredible traders. Like when I
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: think of kobo Wa, I think he should have been
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: on Shark Tank. And I don't mean it's like one
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: of the people pitching the show. I mean as one
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: of the sharks, because he was a brilliant trader. Because
• 21:01
  Speaker 3: we mentioned all those ships coming in they wanted otter skins,
• 21:04
  Speaker 3: but Koboy also had he was right on the mouth
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: of the Columbia river. So he also had all these
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: native people to the east who would have, you know,
• 21:10
  Speaker 3: starchy grains or different vegetables to offer, and he was
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: kind of the middleman, so he would buy you know,
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: whale stuff, whale meat from one person, sell the whale
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: meet to somebody else, make a little more money, buy
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: some apoto from them, sell it somebody else, get some
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: otter skins. And he was always kind of facilitating all
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: these trades, which meant he was very powerful, but he
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: was also very knowledgeable, and so when you think about
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: his point of view, it helps you reframe so many
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: episodes too. Like one of the most famous time examples
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: from Lewis and Clark is when they vote right like
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: they're on the Pacific coast and they're going to have
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: this vote about well, you know, where are we going
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: to put our winter quarters And they famously let York
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: vote in this, which is is amazing. People say they
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: let Sacajuia vote, but that's not quite true. What happened
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: is Saka Juya spoke up, because like if you look
• 21:51
  Speaker 3: at Clark's journals, you can see that he didn't leave
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: a space for Saka Jueia, and then she just like
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: blurted out, here's what I think we should do. So
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: he had to kind of add her at the bottom,
• 21:59
  Speaker 3: which is it's a cool detail.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: But like for people that are as familiar York as
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: a York is a slave right now, the only slave
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: on the trip.
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: That's right, that's right. And and there have been lots
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: of votes previous to this, and he they did not
• 22:12
  Speaker 3: let him have his say, but by the time they
• 22:14
  Speaker 3: got out there, he had done so much work, you know,
• 22:16
  Speaker 3: dealing with rapids, hunting, helping build forts, that they were like,
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: we're going to give you a say as well.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: Which see also the only I wanted to keep going
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: on this, but he also the only person not on payroll.
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: Well, here's what did they put him on payroll? Here's
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: what's screwed up. He's on payroll, but not in the
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: way you think, because the army would compensate officers if
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: they brought their slaves. So the person who got paid
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: for all York's work was Clark. Clark would get seven
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: bucks a month for the like, the like, wear and
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: tear on his property, but his property was York.
• 22:44
  Speaker 2: Did he kick it back to York or does no
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: one know? You know?
• 22:47
  Speaker 4: You know the answer to that. He answer, he.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: Did not kick it back to York because when they
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: got back York said to Clark, I've looked at all
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: the stuff I've done. I've earned my freedom and and
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: Clark said, no, you haven't. And so he kept York
• 22:58
  Speaker 3: enslaved for another ten year after that a bit. There's
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: a lot of things I like about William Clark, but
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: that is not one of them. So yeah, this famous
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: vote on the coast where again things to like about
• 23:10
  Speaker 3: William clarky and Lewis let York have a vote there.
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: There was foreign interference in that election because the clats
• 23:17
  Speaker 3: up and Kobowe wanted the Americans to set up camp
• 23:20
  Speaker 3: on their side of the Columbia River because they're like,
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: we can trade with these people. So if you read
• 23:23
  Speaker 3: the journals closely, and the journals those million words, they're
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: always a great source not just for what the Americans
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: are doing, but for what Native people are doing too.
• 23:30
  Speaker 3: You just have to pay attention to the native stuff.
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: Like three times before the vote, clats of people go
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: over to the Americans camp and I'm like, hey, you
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: know where there's a lot of elk. There's a lot
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: of elk on our side of the river, and they
• 23:40
  Speaker 3: were right, but also that persuaded the Americans to go
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: to their side of the river where things went sideways.
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: As you said, is that the Americans killed more than
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: one hundred and fifty elk that winter, and so the
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: elk would normally I tracked all this stuff really carefully.
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: Elk would normally like spin the winter down by the
• 23:54
  Speaker 3: river and then go back up into the mountains. They
• 23:56
  Speaker 3: would normally stay by the river until May. But by
• 23:58
  Speaker 3: March first the elk gone because the Americans that hunted
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: them so aggressively, and from the American point of view,
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: they needed elk skins to make moccasins, they needed elk
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: brains to mash into pace to soften the elk skins,
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: and they needed to eat. But they hunted so aggressively
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: that they overhunted, and that just like only made the
• 24:16
  Speaker 3: dynamics more tense between them and the class them.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: Have you found in looking at this this thing, I
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: feel like is well, I don't know if I think
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: it's true or not. Just then observation I've had if
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: you went and talked to how do I put this?
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: Have you found that as you go along the Lewis
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: and Clark Trail today that people that the people that
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: live along those places currently tend to pay most attention
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: to what happened near them, meaning in Oregon, are they
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: way into the part of the Lewis and Clark story
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: that occurred there, Because it seems to me that the
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: stuff that happened along east of the Rockies, out on
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: the Great Plains has always seemed to get much more
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: attention public attention. But maybe just feels that way because
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: I live here. But I remember another person that doesn't
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: live here that was writing about this.
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: Was saying, no, I think it's true.
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: I think that most national attention focuses on the Great Plains.
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: And his theory on it was because it's the place
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: you can go and you can look and you can
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: be like, I can picture it. Sure, you can go
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: and be like, I can picture what it looked like.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: Significant changes have happened, but I can picture it. And
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: so that's why he feels it that's the way it is.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: But did you find that to be truer? Do you
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: find that like residents today, you know, out in a
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: story or wherever or whatever, you know, are very fixated
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: on those parts of the narrative.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: I mean, we were just talking about Lincoln and how
• 26:02
  Speaker 3: different places have claim to them, and I think Lewis
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: and Clark are absolutely at that level where different people
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: have claimed to it. So people who don't live anywhere
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: near the trail, I do think they picture the great
• 26:11
  Speaker 3: planes and the bison and that kind of stuff. There's
• 26:15
  Speaker 3: no question about that, because then a lot of the
• 26:17
  Speaker 3: Limb high Pass still looks pretty much.
• 26:19
  Speaker 4: What it looked like lo Lewis and Clark saw it.
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: But I think if you talk to people who live
• 26:24
  Speaker 3: in any of these I mean, if you talk to
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: people in Saint Louis, like they just want to talk
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: about Lewis and Clark and Saint Louis. I just did
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: a book of it there and it was amazing, and
• 26:29
  Speaker 3: there were so many people who could really get into
• 26:32
  Speaker 3: the nitty gritty about there.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: What they did there, uh huh, just like buying shit
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: and getting all ready to be exactly or like.
• 26:37
  Speaker 3: The near mutinies where the men would get pissed off
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: and the ord way that sergeant I was mentioning like
• 26:41
  Speaker 3: had to like calm everybody down. So like the Saint
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: Louis people, they love the whole story but they really
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: love their connection to it, And that makes sense to me.
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: I mean, who doesn't look like it. This is our
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: national epic. This is such a great adventure story. So
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: who doesn't love to have some kind of personal connection
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: to it. I think that's great. That's one of the
• 26:55
  Speaker 3: reasons I was excited and a little terrified to write
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: this book.
• 26:58
  Speaker 7: I can kind of speak to that too, because I
• 26:59
  Speaker 7: grew up in vancer Over, Washington, and Lewis and Clark
• 27:01
  Speaker 7: was a massive part of our middle school and high
• 27:03
  Speaker 7: school curriculum, and it was all west of the Rockies.
• 27:05
  Speaker 7: It was heavy on Fort clats Up. We took multiple
• 27:08
  Speaker 7: field trips to Fort clats Up seaside, Oregon. Uh And,
• 27:11
  Speaker 7: and I know I can tell you almost nothing about
• 27:14
  Speaker 7: the planes.
• 27:16
  Speaker 4: In your in your school version. Did Kobo wait, come up? Nope?
• 27:20
  Speaker 4: Well there you go. That's what's new about the book.
• 27:23
  Speaker 6: Before before we started recording, Phil, I'm sorry that I
• 27:26
  Speaker 6: said that was a boring chapter of the story.
• 27:28
  Speaker 4: Well that's what.
• 27:30
  Speaker 7: Eve.
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: Until today, I always thought it was a boring part
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: of the story. Yeah, but how did I not know
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: about this whole elk hunting deal? Yeah, that's interesting.
• 27:37
  Speaker 4: It's all in the journals. You just got to know because.
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: I just you know, people have their myopia and and whatever.
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: I don't know.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: In the work we've done, we're always talking about them
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: hanging out on the planes, buffalo running every which way,
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: wolves all running around, grizzly bears tracking everybody.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: Like that's in my mind. It was just a.
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: Bunch of boring shit. And then they got out there
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: and kicked and kicked it head.
• 28:04
  Speaker 4: They kicked ass the entire time, is what I would say.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: But you know, for a while I toyed with this
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: idea that that I didn't like him because it was
• 28:12
  Speaker 1: big government do I mean, because you have all these
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: schwash buckling dudes right kind of like doing all this
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: crazy stuff and no one pays attention to him. Then
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: like the government goes out there and then everybody's all into.
• 28:25
  Speaker 4: It, right.
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: But I gave up on that.
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: Well, but for a while I was kicking around not
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: liking it because it was because it was it wasn't
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: these kind of freelance crazy dudes right right, Like who
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: would turn up in these places ahead of them?
• 28:40
  Speaker 4: Right?
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: And people don't talk about that that much.
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: Well, I think it's important to see it as like
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: a two part story, and if you're interested in an
• 28:45
  Speaker 3: American and as an American story, you have to start
• 28:47
  Speaker 3: with them. Because all those free, free buckling, swashbuckling kind
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: of guys were mostly French or Spanish or British. But
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: Jefferson is kind of contradictory like many politicians in that
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: you know, he's he's a small government guy. But I
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: do think Lewis and Clark was big government. One of
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: the things I did was really crunch the numbers on
• 29:03
  Speaker 3: how much it cost, and that the official the official
• 29:06
  Speaker 3: price tag was like thirty eight thousand dollars, which is
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: a crazy number today doesn't seem like anything, but back
• 29:10
  Speaker 3: there was a lot of money. And but that number
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: is wrong. Like once I went back and like actually
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: checked the numbers and did the work, it was closer
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: to one hundred thousand dollars. So then to try to
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: like understand what that means.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: The same accountant was just running numbers on the Iran War.
• 29:22
  Speaker 4: I think you might be for that.
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, we can talk about the Missouri River as the
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: news straight or the old straight of hormones if you
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: can do that too. But but yeah, so like the
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: one hundred thousand dollars. If you look at that as
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: like a percentage of federal spending, Jefferson spent as much
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: on Lewis and Clark as we spent on NASA today.
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: So that's that's absolutely true. So that's the scope we're
• 29:43
  Speaker 3: talking about. Like when I called the book this vast enterprise,
• 29:46
  Speaker 3: it's not just vast in terms of the territory they covered,
• 29:48
  Speaker 3: it's it's vast in terms of like the conception how
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: many people.
• 29:51
  Speaker 4: Are involving me. I'm serious.
• 29:53
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I also think it'll go.
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: Back to not liking it because it's the government.
• 29:57
  Speaker 4: Well, give me the rest of the episode. Maybe I
• 29:59
  Speaker 4: can have suage you.
• 30:00
  Speaker 6: I also liked the one of the I guess one
• 30:04
  Speaker 6: of the things that always spins around in my mind
• 30:06
  Speaker 6: when we're talking about the Lewis and Clark expedition is
• 30:09
  Speaker 6: there's obviously two guys and they have a lot of words,
• 30:13
  Speaker 6: but it's a group of like forty people.
• 30:17
  Speaker 4: It fluctuates thirty to forty, thirty to forty.
• 30:19
  Speaker 6: And they're encountering all these different nations and it's such
• 30:24
  Speaker 6: a sprawling If you were to make no One's done,
• 30:28
  Speaker 6: No One's pulled off. The HBO mini series yet. But
• 30:33
  Speaker 6: if you were to make a Lewis and Clark HBO
• 30:36
  Speaker 6: mini series, you'd need a huge cast of characters, right,
• 30:41
  Speaker 6: And so I think that like one of the ways
• 30:45
  Speaker 6: in which your book helps kind of reshape how people
• 30:50
  Speaker 6: think about the story is the emphasis on how many
• 30:55
  Speaker 6: individual lives are intersecting along this trail.
• 30:59
  Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, and that's it was always an ensemble. Like
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: the signs on the Lewis and Clark trail, it's just
• 31:04
  Speaker 3: two guys, right, and there's brown and white signs on
• 31:07
  Speaker 3: the side of the road, and they're wearing the wrong
• 31:08
  Speaker 3: kind of hats.
• 31:09
  Speaker 4: They're wearing like Revolutionary War era hats.
• 31:11
  Speaker 3: If you want to get mad at big government, there's
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: the National Park Service should maybe do a rework on
• 31:16
  Speaker 3: those signs. But if they get the right hats on them,
• 31:18
  Speaker 3: they should also like there should be more people in
• 31:20
  Speaker 3: the sign too, Because you're exactly right, this was always
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: and Lewis and Clark knew this. Like this does not
• 31:24
  Speaker 3: take away from Lewis and Clark. This fast enterprise is
• 31:27
  Speaker 3: a quote from Clark's letters, So like they always knew
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: they needed lots of help. I'm just trying to remind
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: people to like see the story the way the captain
• 31:34
  Speaker 3: saw the story themselves.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: You know, It's it's interesting that two things that have
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: flummixed filmmakers will be Cormick McCarthy's Blood Meridian and the
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark story. Yep, everybody tries, but no one
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: can do it. I know people start and then they quit.
• 31:55
  Speaker 4: Yep.
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: But here's here's my question for you. I've kind of
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: teen us up early. I didn't get there before we
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: started recording. You were telling me how sack of juey.
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: It was funny, and I'm like, come on, but let
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: me let me teet us up a little bit better.
• 32:12
  Speaker 4: Take your time.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: Do you have do you ever read.
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: When Larry Larry McMurtry, so the author of Loansome Dove,
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: Loansome Dove, Larry Murtry, he wrote, all my friends are
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: going to be strangers lonesome Dove, I mean millions of things.
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: He wrote a biography of crazy horse. Okay, many people
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: have done that. Guess how thick Larry McMurtry's biography of
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: Crazy Horses. It's about like a as thick as this
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: this laptop screen. You know why because he admits, I
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: mean right in the beginning of the book, he admits
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: he's like, really, honestly, we don't know much, Like we
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: don't know much. I've read somemations here and there. I've
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: read summations of like what actually is known about Sackage?
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: Wea and the thing we ran on I call this
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: in some of our American history works is we do this,
• 33:15
  Speaker 1: We do this bit of how do.
• 33:19
  Speaker 2: We know what we know?
• 33:20
  Speaker 4: Sure?
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: Meaning everybody knows that blank, right, but how do we
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: know what we know? And then you kind of dissac
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: where does it come from? And in the process of
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: how do we know what we know? You often find
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: this thing where like we don't really know that. Yeah,
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: and we don't know that sure it someone wrote a
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: history that history informs other historians, and then you build
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: up this mythology.
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: Sure, okay, so.
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: I've read I can't even remember where or when, but
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: I read it, like what is actually like when historians
• 33:53
  Speaker 3: look at sackage we as narrative?
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: What are the sources? What are the actual sentences?
• 34:01
  Speaker 4: Sure?
• 34:01
  Speaker 2: And it's not much. Sure, I haven't read it in
• 34:04
  Speaker 2: a long time.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: But we were talking about the writer Jack Hit, who's
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: a very funny writer.
• 34:10
  Speaker 3: Jack Hit wrote a piece, and I wish I had
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: reread it ahead of our interview, But.
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: He wrote a piece where he tracks our understanding of
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: Sakagui and it's sort of like what we think about
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: Sakaguia says a lot about where we're at in time. Sure, right,
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: So during those years of putting a heavy emphasis on
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: cultural inclusion, she elevated when when there's geographical features all
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: around the American West Squaw River, Squaw Peak, when they
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: were renaming one of the squaw peaks in Montana at
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: the squaw being a derogatory term for a Native American woman,
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: Sure one of those peaks became you guessed it, Sackagewea Peak, Right.
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: So she.
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: Has she's utilized like a tool sort of the understanding.
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: So when you said she's funny, I don't think we're
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: an era of great comics, and so you're trying to
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: make her fit the times.
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: But like, how can you say that? Where are her
• 35:19
  Speaker 2: jokes compiled?
• 35:20
  Speaker 4: Sure?
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: No, I'm really glad you asked this because this is
• 35:23
  Speaker 3: a very good question. And just as an aside, the
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: idea of using her as a tool, that's not new either,
• 35:28
  Speaker 3: Like there are more statues of Sakagulia than any other
• 35:30
  Speaker 3: woman in North America. And the reason there are some, Yeah,
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: the reason there are is because suffragettes used her as
• 35:35
  Speaker 3: a tool. So way back in the early twentieth century.
• 35:38
  Speaker 3: They were like, oh, a native woman who was strong
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: and empowered, we can help use her to help us
• 35:41
  Speaker 3: get the right to vote. So like, this is there,
• 35:43
  Speaker 3: this has always been happening.
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: More more than the fictional Rosie Derivet right is fiction,
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: more than Betsy Ross.
• 35:51
  Speaker 3: I mean, it was all of the above. It there's
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: a lot of work to get women the right to vote.
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: But yeah, Sakagula was one of the tools that they used.
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: But let me answer you in two ways.
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: Oh no, I was I wasn't referring to the suffrages tool.
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: I was referring to like statue figures, right, But yes,
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: oh yeah, yeah she was right.
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: She was.
• 36:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, there's more than National Park Service as that staff.
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: How do I know she was funny because there's a
• 36:15
  Speaker 3: story in the journals from Lewis and from Clark that
• 36:16
  Speaker 3: show that she was funny. Like story, Okay, I'm sorry
• 36:19
  Speaker 3: that we're going back to Fort class I. We're gonna
• 36:21
  Speaker 3: spend this whole podcast.
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: The exactly on Phil's dumb boring part.
• 36:26
  Speaker 4: I know, I promised.
• 36:28
  Speaker 3: The Lakota have a huge part of the book, like,
• 36:30
  Speaker 3: like there's so many bies that like the rest of
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: the stories.
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: And Phil the episode from back there behind his warped
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: uh work bench.
• 36:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, hats off, very strategic. But when they get out there,
• 36:43
  Speaker 3: they like, they can't go see the ocean first because
• 36:46
  Speaker 3: the waves in that part of the Columbia River are
• 36:48
  Speaker 3: so big. Their canoes keep getting swamped, so they like
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: it's hard for them even to find a place to
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: stay dry. Their clothes are rotting, their tepees are rotting.
• 36:55
  Speaker 3: It's just it's it's a disaster. So they finally figure
• 36:59
  Speaker 3: out what side of the river they're going to go
• 37:00
  Speaker 3: on with the Clatsup sort of guide them there because
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: the elk and all that, And so then the clats
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: Up come back and say, hey, there's this huge beached
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: whale that washed up on the shore, and so everybody's like, cool,
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: let's go see that. And a lot of them haven't
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: even gone to see the ocean yet, even though they're
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: only a few miles from the ocean. The conditions are
• 37:16
  Speaker 3: so tough that they've just been kind of pinned in
• 37:17
  Speaker 3: this camp, and so they're getting ready to go, and
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: everybody is, you know, like the guy who owns Sackageia
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: or is her husband, depending on how you want to
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: frame it, like he's getting ready to go. A lot
• 37:28
  Speaker 3: of the soldiers are getting ready to go, and Sackaguia
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: like nobody says she can go, and so she speaks
• 37:33
  Speaker 3: up like she's like the phrase from the journals is
• 37:36
  Speaker 3: it would be very hard if she does not get
• 37:39
  Speaker 3: to go. She's come all this way, and so for
• 37:41
  Speaker 3: her not to get to see the whale and the ocean,
• 37:43
  Speaker 3: that would be very hard. And so I think that's funny.
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: I mean I think she's like funny. Yeah, you don't
• 37:47
  Speaker 3: think it's funny if she's like if they're like you
• 37:49
  Speaker 3: got to stay back here at the camp, and she's like,
• 37:51
  Speaker 3: that's fucked up.
• 37:52
  Speaker 4: I've come all this way too. I want to go
• 37:53
  Speaker 4: see the ocean too. You don't think that's funny.
• 37:54
  Speaker 2: Are you married?
• 37:55
  Speaker 4: Yes?
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: If you're so, when your wife gets mad at you,
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: you think it's funny.
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: Maybe not in the moment, but later on, like the
• 38:04
  Speaker 3: next day when we're good again.
• 38:07
  Speaker 5: Huh, when you realize that you hadn't seen her.
• 38:10
  Speaker 6: Perspective my wife or saga your wife, your wife, I
• 38:15
  Speaker 6: mean in hindsight, okay to being Okay, I see it.
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: Well, uh okay, okay, she that's I mean, that's.
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: Somebody who has a sense of humor to stretch. You
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: don't think that's a funny story. You don't think her like, I.
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: Mean, like, go check out this whale. She's like bullshit, dude,
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: like I'm coming.
• 38:36
  Speaker 4: That's not funny to you.
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: No, okay, that'd be I'd put that under.
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: Forceful, admirable, sticking with for your I mean, unless she
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: had a funny joke.
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: Okay, Well, I I feel like at least it's very
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: human and lively.
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, three people go to look at a whale? Says
• 38:55
  Speaker 2: we're called the aristocrats.
• 38:59
  Speaker 3: Okay, okay, yeah, Well, at the very least we can
• 39:02
  Speaker 3: disagree on whether or not that's funny. I think when
• 39:04
  Speaker 3: you remember that she's sixteen years old, that's impressive. When
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: you remember that her husband would beat her until Clark
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: would step in and say you can't do that here,
• 39:12
  Speaker 3: When you remember how tough her life was, I just
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: feel like there's a real crackling personality behind that.
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: For her to be like this is tell the story
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: of her Tell the story of her life, and I
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: know that it's increasingly controversial. Sure, not increasingly controversial, but
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: it is controversial. Tell the outline of her life. And
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: then if you don't mind, I wouldn't mind you touched
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: on some of the a little bit of the custody
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: battle that is underway about again people that get claimed
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: by many places. Okay, but first layout just the known
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: understanding of her remarkable life.
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: Well, I can do that while also answering your bigger question,
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: which is like, how do we even know any of
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: the stuff. So maybe she wasn't funny, maybe she was
• 39:54
  Speaker 3: just spunky. I don't like pick your adjective. But we
• 39:57
  Speaker 3: know things about her personality because they're in those million
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: words of the journals, like her saying I want to
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: go see the whale, like Lewis and Clark wrote that down,
• 40:03
  Speaker 3: so we know that that happened. And then we can
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: infer as interpreters, as writers, as lovers of history like
• 40:09
  Speaker 3: what those details mean. But in terms of her life story,
• 40:12
  Speaker 3: the reason we know that is because it's in the
• 40:14
  Speaker 3: journals too. And this is also something that's new in
• 40:16
  Speaker 3: my book that it's not like The outlines of her
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: life story have always been well known, although now they
• 40:21
  Speaker 3: are getting more contentious. She grew up, you know, on
• 40:25
  Speaker 3: the sort of between what is now Idaho and what
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: is now Montana, in that rocky region. Her people it
• 40:30
  Speaker 3: had to move there because other nations like the Blackfoot,
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: had more horses and especially more guns, so it wasn't
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: safe for the Shoshone to be out on the planes
• 40:37
  Speaker 3: where the bison were. So they kind of stayed in
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: the mountains most of the year, but then once a
• 40:42
  Speaker 3: year they would go. They needed the skins, like to
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: stay warm, they needed the fat, they needed stuff that
• 40:47
  Speaker 3: only they could get from the bison. So once a
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: year they would go out to three forks and then
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: they would go a little bit past that sometimes and
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: they would hunt buffalo quickly as they could get all
• 40:56
  Speaker 3: the buffalo products they could bison.
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: Sorry, no, no, well, I'm a buffalo guy, right, Brandon sits
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: on the fence about it, if I may, he's an
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: old Bison guy.
• 41:05
  Speaker 6: To get you guys back on the same page. After
• 41:08
  Speaker 6: the sackage, we have funny not funny controversy, you say
• 41:12
  Speaker 6: in the bus.
• 41:12
  Speaker 4: It was like a real split to me and I
• 41:14
  Speaker 4: guess you.
• 41:14
  Speaker 6: Make you make a point to say in the book,
• 41:18
  Speaker 6: all the characters in this book are going to encounter buffalo,
• 41:21
  Speaker 6: not bison, right, because that's what they encountered, That's what
• 41:25
  Speaker 6: they called it in their time.
• 41:27
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I thought you'd appreciate that's good.
• 41:29
  Speaker 3: I mean, this is this is not a book that
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: was twenty twenty six. It's a book about eighteen oh four.
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: So I really tried.
• 41:34
  Speaker 5: You know, nobody saw a bison on the Lewis and Clark.
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: Right, And the Americans called the Lakota the sue. So
• 41:39
  Speaker 3: when I'm writing from the American point of view, I
• 41:41
  Speaker 3: use the sue. When I'm writing for the Lakota point
• 41:42
  Speaker 3: of view, I use the word Lakota. Like it's important
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: to me to give each person's perspective as they saw
• 41:47
  Speaker 3: it and not to let our modern concerns kind of
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: worm their way in there. But anyway, so like the
• 41:54
  Speaker 3: Shoshone would have to go out and get buffalo slash bison.
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: Try to keep both of you happy each each time
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: in the fall. And so in eighteen hundred, when Saka
• 42:03
  Speaker 3: Julia was like thirteen or fourteen, her people go out
• 42:05
  Speaker 3: there and so they set up camp at three forks,
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: and the men are off hunting buffalo and the women
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: and the kids are sort of you know, back at
• 42:13
  Speaker 3: the camp. And so then one day some armed raiders
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: with rifles which the Shashwoni do not have at this point,
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: from the Hidatsa nation show up, and you know they're
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: coming on horseback. So the Shoshoni scatter. Most of them
• 42:26
  Speaker 3: get on their horses, which they are famous for their
• 42:29
  Speaker 3: wonderful horses, and escape. But Sakajulia, for whatever reason, can't
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: get to a horse, so she starts running up the
• 42:34
  Speaker 3: Jefferson River. And so she is running. There is smoke,
• 42:37
  Speaker 3: there is screaming, there are people being clubbed to death.
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: It's a very intense and violent situation. She makes it
• 42:43
  Speaker 3: a couple miles. Maybe she thinks, I'm going to actually
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: be able to escape here. But then she hears a
• 42:48
  Speaker 3: horse coming up behind her. There's a Hidatsa man. She
• 42:50
  Speaker 3: tries to cross through the river, gets caught in the middle.
• 42:53
  Speaker 3: He scoops her up brings her back to the camp.
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: So at this point we know that there are a
• 42:58
  Speaker 3: couple like a number of Shoshoni people have been killed,
• 43:01
  Speaker 3: and then some of the young Shoshone women have been
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: captured by the Hidatza people. They take Sakaguia and some
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: other young Shoshone women, including one of her friends, all
• 43:10
  Speaker 3: the way back to their towns, which are in what's
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: now in North Dakota. This is like the Mandon and
• 43:14
  Speaker 3: Dadotza towns where Fort Manden will be built a few
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: years later. So that's where she ends up living for
• 43:19
  Speaker 3: a while. Then Lewis and Clark show up in the
• 43:20
  Speaker 3: Winner of eighteen oh four. Her husband slash her owner Sharbono,
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: who's a real creep. He just tries to like figure out.
• 43:28
  Speaker 3: He sees that Lewis and Clark are big government and
• 43:29
  Speaker 3: he's like, how can I get some of that government
• 43:31
  Speaker 3: money for myself?
• 43:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, this guy's kind of in general, it's just the worst. Yeah.
• 43:35
  Speaker 3: And so he tries to get hired, and Lewis and
• 43:38
  Speaker 3: Clark maybe are on the fence, and so he's like,
• 43:39
  Speaker 3: I have Shashoni wives, And Lewis and Clark know that
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: they're gonna need to meet the Shoshone and maybe need
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: some of those Shoshoni horses. So they agree to hire
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: him and bring one of his wives with him. Now,
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: how do we know all this? We know this because
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: in the journals, Lewis and Clark write down Sackagewy a
• 43:53
  Speaker 3: story like when they make it back to three Forks,
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: they ask her like, what did you see here? What
• 43:58
  Speaker 3: do you like? Like, what what happened to you here?
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: And she tells them this story, and so it's recorded
• 44:03
  Speaker 3: in multiple journals. But one thing that I did that
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: was new because I was trying to think about, like
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: what did Saka Julia see? What was her perspective, not
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: just Lewis and Clark's. Is I tried to be really
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: forensic when I was reading the journals. And so the
• 44:14
  Speaker 3: first time her story shows up, it's not from Lewis
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: and Clark, it's from this regular working class soldier named
• 44:19
  Speaker 3: John Ordway. He writes about her a day before anybody
• 44:22
  Speaker 3: else does, and it's when they first get back to
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: three Fourks. So Clark isn't even in the camp. Sharbono
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: isn't easy, so they have not mentioned her till now.
• 44:29
  Speaker 3: They have mentioned her, but they have not mentioned her
• 44:31
  Speaker 3: life story. So she's often just shows up as like
• 44:33
  Speaker 3: the Indian woman.
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: Yep.
• 44:35
  Speaker 3: And so Clark and Sharbono and some other people are
• 44:38
  Speaker 3: off on a scout party. Lewis is like doing his
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: astronomy readings and like thinking about empire, and so Ordway
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: and the other men are doing the actual hard work
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: like unloading the canoes, airing out the gear, putting up
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: the tents and sacka. Julia is doing that hard work too,
• 44:51
  Speaker 3: And so if you look at it, the only like
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: the story comes up with her first, and I think
• 44:55
  Speaker 3: it makes a lot of sense. Again, I use careful
• 44:57
  Speaker 3: language at this part in the book, like probably and
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: and almost certainly, because we'll never know for sure, even
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: though we have the journals about this. But the fact
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: that she told the story to Ordway the day before
• 45:07
  Speaker 3: the captain's ever mentioned the story, it makes a lot
• 45:09
  Speaker 3: of sense because they were all working at three fourths
• 45:12
  Speaker 3: on this physical site, the river where she was captured.
• 45:14
  Speaker 3: They're all setting up the camp together. And also how
• 45:17
  Speaker 3: did they communicate well through sign language? Previous historians have
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: not given enough credit to sign language in this time period,
• 45:23
  Speaker 3: And we know from other journal entries that John Ordway
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: was fluent in sign language. We know from Clark's entries
• 45:28
  Speaker 3: that Sakajuwella is fluent in sign language. So I believe she.
• 45:31
  Speaker 2: Was kind of like the Esperanto of its time.
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: You know, like people write different tribes on the planes
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: that couldn't communicate them were from different language groups, will
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: be able to use this elaborate sign language and you
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: could convey some complex messages.
• 45:44
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, absolutely yeah, And especially when you think about these
• 45:47
  Speaker 3: are just like human beings who want to be understood
• 45:49
  Speaker 3: by each other. They could really cover almost everything they
• 45:51
  Speaker 3: needed to with sign language. So I can't say this
• 45:55
  Speaker 3: for sure, but I can say this ninety eight percent
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: for sure that Sakaguilla used sign language to tell her
• 46:00
  Speaker 3: life story to John Ordway the first day, and then
• 46:02
  Speaker 3: the second day when Clark comes back, when Sharbono's there,
• 46:05
  Speaker 3: when Lewis is there, she tells the story again. And
• 46:08
  Speaker 3: so her story shows up a couple times in the journals,
• 46:10
  Speaker 3: and each time her story is a little different, like
• 46:12
  Speaker 3: what year was she captured. So this is even the
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: stuff we know for sure. We don't know for sure
• 46:16
  Speaker 3: because like with Sackagia captured in eighteen hundred or seventeen
• 46:19
  Speaker 3: ninety nine, I don't know. But all this to say
• 46:24
  Speaker 3: that it's important to read the journals carefully because then
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: what you're getting is Sackaguia is telling her story herself
• 46:30
  Speaker 3: like if she is using sign language to do this,
• 46:32
  Speaker 3: this is not her husband's slash owner saying here's here's
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: Sackaguia's story. And I think this is so important for
• 46:39
  Speaker 3: the current discussion because right now, like like in the journals,
• 46:43
  Speaker 3: Lewis and Clark say Sackaguya is Shoshone. Most historians have
• 46:47
  Speaker 3: agreed with that.
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: But yeah, there's this famous narrative that they get to.
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: I mean, you drive by the rock all the time
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: around here, but they get to that that head rock
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: on the big hole right.
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: What's the name of that rockhead?
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a there's a prominent, unmistakable feature, for sure.
• 47:07
  Speaker 3: And they get there and she's like, I know that rock.
• 47:10
  Speaker 3: I'm almost home, Yeah, for sure. And that's that's again,
• 47:13
  Speaker 3: how do we know these things about Sakaguya Because Lewis
• 47:15
  Speaker 3: and Clark wrote it down, we just have to read
• 47:16
  Speaker 3: it from her point of view and understand that's not
• 47:19
  Speaker 3: just an important landmark for Lewis and Clark, that's a
• 47:21
  Speaker 3: way to understand Sakaguya's life and like what the landscape
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: meant to her. So so the debate right now is
• 47:27
  Speaker 3: is Sakaguya Shoshone or was she Hidatsa. The Hidatsa people
• 47:31
  Speaker 3: have put together a book, and it's a really valuable
• 47:33
  Speaker 3: book because remember, there are a few years after she
• 47:35
  Speaker 3: gets captured or enslaved where she's living with the Hidatsa.
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: So I relied on in the book to understand those years,
• 47:42
  Speaker 3: because that's like, how did the Hidatsa people see her?
• 47:44
  Speaker 3: What kind of oral traditions have they preserved about her?
• 47:46
  Speaker 3: Now in my book, I'm always very careful if something's
• 47:49
  Speaker 3: coming from oral tradition to signpost that and say, you know,
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: according to Hidatsa tradition. But still that the book has
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: real value, and it also the book talks about the
• 47:57
  Speaker 3: debate about what happened to Sacaguay after the expedition. When
• 47:59
  Speaker 3: did she die? We honestly do not know when she died,
• 48:02
  Speaker 3: Like I don't have an opinion on that question, but
• 48:06
  Speaker 3: where was she born? Who did she identify with? I
• 48:09
  Speaker 3: think the evidence is still overwhelming that it was Shashoni.
• 48:12
  Speaker 3: And the reason that the new kind of angle that
• 48:14
  Speaker 3: I have it in my book is like when we
• 48:15
  Speaker 3: ignore this, when we try to say maybe she wasn't Shoshoni,
• 48:18
  Speaker 3: we're not just silencing Lewis and Clark. We're silencing her,
• 48:21
  Speaker 3: because I think the evidence, if you read it carefully,
• 48:23
  Speaker 3: is very clear that she told her story herself through
• 48:25
  Speaker 3: sign language to the other enlisted soldiers. And so that
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: story of being born Shoshoni and being captured, like, it's
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: a really dramatic and traumatic story, but I also think
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: it's her story and she was explaining it.
• 48:37
  Speaker 2: Well, what is the argument that she was hidatsa?
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: How do they explain her familiarity with Turf so far
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: away right?
• 48:44
  Speaker 3: Well, what they say is that she maybe had some
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: family ties and so she took trips back there. But
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: the key argument, the key part of their argument is
• 48:51
  Speaker 3: that Sharbono created this cover story. And I defer to
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: no one in my disdain for Sharbono, but the idea
• 48:59
  Speaker 3: that he and this cover story, he said she was
• 49:01
  Speaker 3: just showing it even when she wasn't because that would
• 49:03
  Speaker 3: make him be able to get this job. But that's
• 49:05
  Speaker 3: why the moment about her telling the story herself is
• 49:07
  Speaker 3: so important, because Sharbono literally wasn't in the camp the
• 49:10
  Speaker 3: day she told the story the first time. So if
• 49:12
  Speaker 3: he's not even there, how's it going to be his
• 49:14
  Speaker 3: cover story?
• 49:15
  Speaker 2: Dots to sell her to Sharbono.
• 49:19
  Speaker 3: They either sold her or traded her. And this is
• 49:21
  Speaker 3: another thing that you're like, how do we know these things?
• 49:24
  Speaker 3: There have been I read a lot of academic research
• 49:26
  Speaker 3: and so there's been a really good academic research in
• 49:28
  Speaker 3: the last few years about native enslavement, about slavery not
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: just being something that Americans did or British did, but
• 49:34
  Speaker 3: Native people did it too. And there are differences, of course,
• 49:37
  Speaker 3: but still like the term slavery I think is the
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: best way to understand it. And as an aside, Lewis
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: and Clark used this word too, like Clark in an
• 49:43
  Speaker 3: interview after the expedition called Sakaguia a slave. So again,
• 49:47
  Speaker 3: this is not twenty twenty six leeching into the past.
• 49:50
  Speaker 3: This is just paying attention to the past.
• 49:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I.
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: Just I have this conversation with my kids all the time, man,
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: because the way like I'm not hacking on school, because yes,
• 50:00
  Speaker 1: you know, you get like so many hours in a
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: day and you're trying to gloss over a lot of stuff.
• 50:03
  Speaker 1: But it's funny, American kids today seem to small sample
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: set my kids and their friends right seem to carry
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: this idea that slavery was somehow this kind of like
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: American invention rather than a ubiquitous global occurrence.
• 50:25
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and that's just not true. The class I.
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: Found myself all the time home.
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: No, no, like this is something that happens everywhere all
• 50:35
  Speaker 1: the time.
• 50:36
  Speaker 4: That's true.
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: And then it starts to fade out, you know, right,
• 50:40
  Speaker 3: And so that's that's absolutely true. And so when I
• 50:42
  Speaker 3: know the class up who we've been talking about, they
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: enslaved people. The Shoshone enslaved people when they were at
• 50:48
  Speaker 3: their kind of most powerful. The Hedatsa enslaved people too.
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: So there are lots of good scholarship and then stories
• 50:54
  Speaker 3: in the journals of talking about how Native people would
• 50:56
  Speaker 3: enslave women. But slavery can also be different in different circumstance.
• 51:00
  Speaker 3: And so where things get really ugly is when somebody
• 51:02
  Speaker 3: like Sharbono gets involved. Because these academics have written about
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: how Native people would enslave young women from other nations
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: and then sell them to fur traders. So I went
• 51:11
  Speaker 3: back and looked at documents where fur traders are like
• 51:13
  Speaker 3: trying to provide collateral for new new merchandise to then
• 51:16
  Speaker 3: trade for fur, and like a fur trader will right,
• 51:18
  Speaker 3: you know, my collateral is the little girl I own
• 51:20
  Speaker 3: and really fucked that stuff. And like, let's remember Sakaguwia
• 51:25
  Speaker 3: is thirteen, fourteen fifteen. She is owned by this guy.
• 51:30
  Speaker 3: He beats her. We know that from the job as child, right,
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: she's impregnated by him. Yeah, it's a really dark story.
• 51:37
  Speaker 3: And so when I was writing about it, using that
• 51:39
  Speaker 3: kind of scholarship to see her not just as sort
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: of the plucky tour guide who's in all these statues,
• 51:44
  Speaker 3: but also seeing her as somebody who had a really
• 51:45
  Speaker 3: tough life. But then that also I think makes her
• 51:48
  Speaker 3: more inspiring that she had to go through all this,
• 51:50
  Speaker 3: She was taken away from her people, she had to
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: deal with all this, but she still found a way
• 51:53
  Speaker 3: to get back to her people. And the other thing
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: that I think makes my account different is I try
• 51:58
  Speaker 3: to look at the choices she made, because like when
• 52:00
  Speaker 3: she's when she's telling Lewis and Clark, hey, there's this
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: important feature. We're almost back to where we need to be.
• 52:06
  Speaker 3: Like she's doing that because she's excited, I'm sure, but
• 52:08
  Speaker 3: that's also smart, Like she has seen Lewis and Clark
• 52:11
  Speaker 3: protect Native women the entire winter they've been together, and
• 52:14
  Speaker 3: so when Clark steps in and tells Sharbono, you can't
• 52:16
  Speaker 3: beat her here, Like let's give Clark some credit for that,
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: but let's give sackage Weia some credit too, because she's
• 52:22
  Speaker 3: smart enough to know, like if I make myself valuable
• 52:24
  Speaker 3: to them, they'll protect me. So with this book, I
• 52:27
  Speaker 3: really tried to say, like, this is what Lewis and
• 52:29
  Speaker 3: Clark wanted, but Sakaguea wanted things too, Koba Way wanted
• 52:32
  Speaker 3: things too, and so trying to kind of move the
• 52:34
  Speaker 3: camera around so we can understand each person as a
• 52:37
  Speaker 3: human being. You can do that because of those million
• 52:40
  Speaker 3: word journals, like where does this come from? A lot
• 52:42
  Speaker 3: of it comes from the journals and just paying attention
• 52:44
  Speaker 3: to stuff that other people have glossed over.
• 52:47
  Speaker 6: I like when you're describing the scene in three foks
• 52:53
  Speaker 6: where she's signing to Ordway and then the next day
• 52:56
  Speaker 6: tells the story to the captains to me and I
• 53:00
  Speaker 6: saw this in different parts of the book, but it
• 53:02
  Speaker 6: it makes the most sense if you just sort of
• 53:06
  Speaker 6: have a gut instinct about social situations and group dynamics,
• 53:12
  Speaker 6: that she would be unloading it, unloading the boats with
• 53:15
  Speaker 6: Ordway and kind of tell him something and then maybe
• 53:18
  Speaker 6: the next day Ordway says to the Captain's, hey, you
• 53:21
  Speaker 6: should listen to this girl, like she's actually kind of
• 53:23
  Speaker 6: got an interesting story, right, you know, like that that
• 53:26
  Speaker 6: sort of stuff happens all the time in like workplaces
• 53:29
  Speaker 6: or or whatever sort of group dynamic where there's a
• 53:33
  Speaker 6: bunch of people working together. One way you can elevate yourself.
• 53:38
  Speaker 6: The person you're most likely to share something with is
• 53:40
  Speaker 6: someone working side by side you who also has that
• 53:43
  Speaker 6: serves as sort of a middleman to the group leader.
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: So it'd be like later today, I'd say, hey, did.
• 53:49
  Speaker 4: You hear that vultures killed Randall's chickens?
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah?
• 53:53
  Speaker 5: And then that would get you should ask him play
• 53:55
  Speaker 5: it up right?
• 53:55
  Speaker 4: Yeah, valuable information.
• 53:57
  Speaker 5: But it's just, you know, like there's some like it.
• 54:00
  Speaker 6: You know, when you hear these stories about Saka Julia
• 54:03
  Speaker 6: being this like very clear eyed, brave sort of tour
• 54:08
  Speaker 6: guide that comes across as somewhat artificial or a projection,
• 54:16
  Speaker 6: but when you understand her as sort of a social
• 54:21
  Speaker 6: creature like all of us, and making these different connections
• 54:25
  Speaker 6: with different members of the expedition and sort of leveraging
• 54:28
  Speaker 6: her or her influence that way, like it all of
• 54:31
  Speaker 6: a sudden you see these people as more three dimensional humans.
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, what was the expedition if not a workplace? Right,
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: Sometimes it's a workplace comedy or not a comedy if
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: we disagree about what's funny, but more drama, right, exactly,
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: very serious, very somber. But it was a workplace just
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: made up of human beings. And I tried so hard
• 54:51
  Speaker 3: to get that in the book, like another place of
• 54:52
  Speaker 3: where we know what stuff comes from. I really wanted
• 54:55
  Speaker 3: to show Saka Julia as a mother, and this probably
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: came because I have little kids and like I changed,
• 55:00
  Speaker 3: but even more than that, I saw my wife changing
• 55:02
  Speaker 3: diapers and breastfeeding the kids. So I found she show
• 55:04
  Speaker 3: any people and just interviewed them and were like, in
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: your culture and especially in this time period, what was
• 55:09
  Speaker 3: the diaper? And so like we know this carrier, that
• 55:12
  Speaker 3: sackage we have famously had, like a lot of the
• 55:13
  Speaker 3: statues will have that she had the baby strapped on
• 55:15
  Speaker 3: her back and a carrier, but the bottom of the
• 55:17
  Speaker 3: carrier was aligned with either fur or some kind of
• 55:20
  Speaker 3: soft vegetable material or something like that. And so each
• 55:23
  Speaker 3: morning she would wake up, she would unlace the carrier,
• 55:25
  Speaker 3: she would change out the lining, put in fresh lining.
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: She would give her son a bath, so she didn't
• 55:30
  Speaker 3: just put cold water on him. She probably warmed the
• 55:32
  Speaker 3: water up by putting it in her mouth and letting
• 55:34
  Speaker 3: her body temperature bring it up to heat. Then she
• 55:36
  Speaker 3: would wash him, she would breastfeed him, and so not
• 55:39
  Speaker 3: just for her, for everybody. I really tried to get
• 55:41
  Speaker 3: those like tactile, everyday details and then pay attention to
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: just like how one human being and another human being
• 55:47
  Speaker 3: kind of interact. That's why this is such a great story.
• 55:50
  Speaker 3: Like the Rocky Mountains are great, the Grizzly bears are great,
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: but mostly because of these journals, we get to see
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: these amazing human beings under the most intense pressure any
• 55:58
  Speaker 3: human being could face, and they do it. They make it,
• 56:01
  Speaker 3: they make it back. It's just such a great story,
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: and it was like the thrill of my career to
• 56:06
  Speaker 3: get to write about it.
• 56:07
  Speaker 2: On the Making It Back Deal. What's your take on on.
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: Is there any controversy anymore about whether uh Lewis killed himself.
• 56:18
  Speaker 3: I'm sure that some people believe that he may have
• 56:22
  Speaker 3: been murdered. I don't see it, you know, it's so funny.
• 56:26
  Speaker 3: I kind of forgot about this. You remember a long
• 56:27
  Speaker 3: time ago, we.
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: Used to have that little plastic hot Anyways, one of
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: our one of our bodies that we work with, Spencer,
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: he was telling he was talking about Lewis killing himself.
• 56:37
  Speaker 2: He described that he.
• 56:39
  Speaker 8: Killed himself at at a bed and breakfast. Oh yeah,
• 56:48
  Speaker 8: not just call like butcher station, grind grinders station, yeah, breakfast.
• 56:56
  Speaker 5: It was like a melancholy Victorian.
• 56:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: They brought for everybody like, no sconce for me, I
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: gotta kill myself. Yeah no yeah.
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: So yeah, so get into that because you talk about
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: he's like a sad dude, you know, right, and it
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: has and then has behaves weird when he gets home
• 57:13
  Speaker 1: and he kind of can't really can't really settle in
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: what his next gig is going to be. And right
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: probably in some way was haunted by it's a hard
• 57:21
  Speaker 1: thing to come home from.
• 57:22
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 57:22
  Speaker 3: Well, And this is this is where I found something
• 57:25
  Speaker 3: new that I think is really important. When I wrote
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: about Lewis, I I tried really hard not to be
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: like he has bipolar disorder or he has PTSD, because
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: like those were not ideas back then. I'm not saying
• 57:35
  Speaker 3: the neurochemical processes didn't exist but I don't think it's
• 57:38
  Speaker 3: helpful to understand somebody in the past with ideas that
• 57:40
  Speaker 3: were not necessarily available in the past. So like Jefferson
• 57:43
  Speaker 3: and Lewis lived together for years, and Jefferson was like,
• 57:46
  Speaker 3: he suffers with addiction and he has Jefferson's quote with
• 57:50
  Speaker 3: sensible depressions of mind. So to me, I was like,
• 57:52
  Speaker 3: that's enough, Like what kind of addiction? Mostly drinking but
• 57:55
  Speaker 3: also opiums. Yeah, because he had malaria, and so where
• 58:00
  Speaker 3: do you pick up malaria? Who knows where wouldn't you
• 58:03
  Speaker 3: pick up malaria in eighteen o four, right, Like it was.
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: It was a real problem back then, So it could
• 58:07
  Speaker 3: have been any number. It might have been on the expedition,
• 58:08
  Speaker 3: but it's probably.
• 58:09
  Speaker 2: I don't think did it go that far north?
• 58:11
  Speaker 4: It was, it was.
• 58:11
  Speaker 3: It was a huge problem, especially in the army because
• 58:13
  Speaker 3: they would often like build their forts in pretty swampy
• 58:17
  Speaker 3: damp areas. So like if you go back and read
• 58:18
  Speaker 3: military documents for this time period, like malaria and the various.
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: Down like in the well, it doesn't matter, yeah, but.
• 58:24
  Speaker 3: I mean you could you could definitely get malaria along
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: the Ohio River. Like John Ordway's unit had a huge
• 58:28
  Speaker 3: malaria problem on the Audio River at.
• 58:30
  Speaker 4: This time period.
• 58:31
  Speaker 3: But anyway, like I just was like, you know, depression
• 58:34
  Speaker 3: and struggles with addiction, like that's enough, Like we don't
• 58:36
  Speaker 3: we don't need any modern categories to understand them. So
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: I when I was reading the journals again, reading the
• 58:41
  Speaker 3: journals closely, Lewis was very self aware. He would write about,
• 58:48
  Speaker 3: you know, like I'm so stressed out about the future,
• 58:50
  Speaker 3: or I can't stop thinking about something bad that happened
• 58:53
  Speaker 3: to me in the past. But then it's important to
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: say like he tried to stand up to those things.
• 58:56
  Speaker 3: Then he would remind himself, I don't want to like,
• 58:59
  Speaker 3: you know, it's good to be okay, or we're going
• 59:01
  Speaker 3: to keep working, or the only thing we can do
• 59:02
  Speaker 3: is go forward. So he was very self aware about
• 59:05
  Speaker 3: this kind of stuff. But there's no question that that
• 59:08
  Speaker 3: on the way back, like the expedition just wore him down.
• 59:10
  Speaker 3: He ends up getting shot in a hunting accident, which
• 59:12
  Speaker 3: we could talk. I didn't know that tell me that, okay,
• 59:16
  Speaker 3: Well yeah, okay. So they're on their way back and
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: Lewis is still trying to make Jefferson happy, so he's
• 59:23
  Speaker 3: still trying to do astronomy readings and get all the
• 59:25
  Speaker 3: data that Jefferson like wants them to do. And so
• 59:27
  Speaker 3: they come to this stop and they stop like twenty
• 59:30
  Speaker 3: minutes too late. Like to do astronomy readings in this
• 59:32
  Speaker 3: time period, you need the sun at a certain height
• 59:33
  Speaker 3: and things like that. So they get there like twenty
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: minutes too late, which sucks. So they're just gonna have
• 59:37
  Speaker 3: to kill time until the sun is at the right
• 59:39
  Speaker 3: position to do the readings. So they always need more food,
• 59:42
  Speaker 3: they always need more animal skins. So Lewis and this
• 59:44
  Speaker 3: other guy named Pierre Cruzatt go out to hunt for
• 59:46
  Speaker 3: elk and it's important to know two things.
• 59:49
  Speaker 4: They're on the way.
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: Back in the Dakota's right, in the Dakota's yeah, on
• 59:54
  Speaker 3: the Missouri and soda yeah. So the two things to
• 59:58
  Speaker 3: know are that a Cruizatte only has one eye, so
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 3: he can't see the best And second, they're all dressed
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 3: in animal skins at this point because their uniforms and
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 3: they're fatigue clothes of all rotted through because they are
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 3: in the third year the sexpedition. So Lewis is dressed
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 3: in elkskin. They're hunting in some willow trees where it's
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 3: very thick and hard to see, and so from about
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 3: one hundred feet away, Cruzatt shoots him and shoots Lewis
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 3: right in the ass, and so the bullet goes through exits.
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 3: It's just like it doesn't hit any bone or nerve
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 3: or anything like that, but it's still a really bad wound.
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 3: And so on the way back, Lewis has to lay
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 3: in the bottom of the boat even when it's raining.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 3: There's nothing they can do about him, but he just
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 3: lays on his stomach in the bottom of the boat
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 3: for the way back, and they try to like Clark
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: takes care of him while he's trying to attend to Lewis.
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 3: Lewis passes out sometimes and so they have a little
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 3: like they try to keep the wounds open so they
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 3: can drain. But one thing I pointed out in my
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: book is that just a couple months before this, Lewis
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 3: had castrated all their horses, and his favorite horse had died.
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: It had gotten the castration wounds had gotten infected, so
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: like Lewis like had to clean the maggots out and
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 3: try to keep it alive, but eventually had to put
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 3: the horse down. And I think that really bothered Lewis
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: because he just clearly loved animals, like he brought a
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 3: dog with him, semen and everything Lewis writes about animals.
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 3: You can just see how much he connects with animals.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 3: But you know, I feel like Lewis, he's not just
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 3: shot and just stuck in the bottom of the boat.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: You know, they didn't have germ theory. He wasn't thinking,
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 3: you know, in the way we would, but he still
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 3: knew that like if you have a big wound, bad
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 3: things can happen. You get a fever, and he writes
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: in the journal like I have a small fever. So
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: there's just a ton of pressure on him on the
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 3: way back from this hunting accident. And then he does, heal,
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 3: he gets better, he makes it to Washington, d C.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 3: And he's he's a celebrity, like everywhere he goes. I
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 3: found these journals at the Library of Congress where where
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 3: he like goes to a play and people come out
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 3: and just ask him question after question, like nobody cares
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 3: about the play intermission, Let's just firebund Like what does
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 3: a buffalo taste? Back?
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 4: Are the tastes?
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 3: Like are the native people cannibals, like they just keep
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 3: firing question after question in him because he's like a
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 3: national hero. Yeah, and so one of the new things
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 3: I found was a letter from John Quincy Adams that
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 3: nobody had seen before. And this is in this Washington
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 3: DC period when Lewis is finally back, and so John
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 3: Quincy Adams is a senator at this point, like he
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 3: had had dinner at the White House with Lewis before,
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 3: like they knew each other a little bit. And Adam
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 3: says that he sat down to have dinner with Lewis
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: again after the expedition, and Adams is writing to his
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 3: wife and Adam says, I didn't even recognize this guy,
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: Like I knew who I was supposed to meet for dinner,
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 3: and I could not recognize him. And then Adam says,
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 3: he looks like he's aged fifteen years. And so, you know,
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 3: previous accounts have sort of theorized like what did the
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 3: expedition do to Lewis? But like, thanks to John Quincy Adams,
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 3: we know what the expedition did to Lewis. Like that letter,
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 3: I think is the lynchpin for my entire interpretation of
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 3: him and why I believe the suicide is just the
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: overwhelming likelihood because you know, if somebody, if you can't
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 3: even recognize somebody if they look fifteen years older. And again,
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 3: in terms of human nature, it just makes sense to
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 3: go through all this stuff to come back then and
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 3: then to like, in a sense, the expedition wore him down,
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: but it also gave him something to live for and
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 3: he doesn't have that anymore as a human being. It
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: makes a lot of sense. And when you compare it
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 3: with that new letter from John Quincy Adams about like
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 3: the physical cost, I don't think there's any question that
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 3: it just kind of broke Lewis down.
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: Okay, So where so tell about where he was when
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: this when this happened.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: So this is on the Natchez trace kind of he
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 3: was on the way he Jefferson had made him the
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 3: governor of the Louisiana Territory. And I'm not sure why
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 3: Jefferson did that because Louis was supposed to write a
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 3: book and like in this time period, exploration was the
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 3: first step. The book was the second step. Like the
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 3: whole point was to share this information and the whole
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 3: world was waiting to read this book, like like there
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 3: you know, when it finally did come out, when somebody
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 3: else finished it after Lewis died. There are reviews in England,
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 3: their reviews in Germany like this was this was global news.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 3: It's like the way we all talked about Artemis two,
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 3: like that's how people talked about Lewis and Clark in
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: this time period. And so Lewis has his hands full
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: with this book that he has to write, but Jefferson
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 3: sends him to be the governor of the Louisiana territory.
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 3: I think he kind of Jefferson wanted to use Louis's celebrity,
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 3: celebrity and his reputation to sort of try to control
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: this this pretty crazy chaotic territory at this point after
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 3: Louisiana purchase, and so Lewis is just overwhelmed. He starts
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 3: drinking more. We know from people who knew him, who
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 3: talked about how much he was drinking in this time period.
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 2: Wonder what he drank.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 3: I mean, they drank all kinds of stuff back then.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 3: Most of what they drank on the expedition was like
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 3: cheap corn whiskey, because that you just got your soldiers
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 3: drunk as cheaply as possible, so that was mostly what
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 3: they had, but Lewis Jefferson is no longer president at
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 3: this point, Madison is and Lewis sends some receipts back
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 3: to get reimbursed for this big mission up the Missouri River,
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 3: which is related to Lewis and Clark's expedition actually, and
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 3: the people in Washington, d c. Are like, we're not
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 3: covering this, like you have asked for more money than
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 3: you are entitled to in your government position. And so
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 3: Lewis freaks out because he has such a strong sense
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 3: of honor. He's such a patriotic guy, Like in his
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 3: letters about the expedition, he's always like, this is honorable
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 3: for me, but it's also honorable for my country. Like
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 3: he loved America so much and so now to have
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 3: Americans being like you're trying to like defraud your government,
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 3: he freaked out. I mean, he wasn't in a good
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 3: place anyway, but he freaked out. So he starts heading
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 3: from Saint Louis back to Washington and on the Natchez
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 3: Trace and in what is now Tennessee, he killed himself.
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 3: And they're like the detail that always sticks out for
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: me about this is like he's writing and he's got
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 3: a person who's riding with him, he's got his dog,
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 3: Seamen with him, and Lewis just starts talking to Clark
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 3: like Clark's not even there, like Clark had just met
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 3: with Lewis before he left. And Clark even writes in
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 3: a letter like I'm really worried about Lewis, like something's
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 3: not right. But now they are hundreds of miles apart,
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 3: and like Lewis is just saying things like I always
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 3: knew you'd come for me, Clark. I always knew you'd
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 3: save me when I needed it.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 2: Oh really yeah?
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 3: And this is the way we know this is because
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 3: the person who is riding with Lewis later told this
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 3: to Clark, and I just I find that so heartbreaking,
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 3: like that, like everything Lewis gave for his country, for
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 3: his men, everything he tried to do, and now he's
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 3: just crumbling and he's like imagining he can hear the
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 3: horse what Clark is riding on coming up, even though
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 3: there's nobody else around, like he was clearly somebody who
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 3: was just falling apart. And I mean, I think it
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 3: makes sense, but that doesn't make it any less sad.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: Well, what clouds what clouds the suicide narrative. So he checks,
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: he gets a booking at the Bed and Breakfast, right right,
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: they're like scones at eleven. Yeah, he's up at his
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: He's up in his room and witnesses here two gun shots.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: So that has always brought up speculation that it was
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: some kind of highway gang or the Grinders, the Bed
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: and Breakfast owners, the people that ran Grinders station.
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 3: He left them a bad Yelp review and they're like, yes,
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 3: can't stay.
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: They offed him or robbed him, you know, because of
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: his two I think that without the two gun shot,
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: it probably wouldn't be a thing people debate about.
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 3: Right Well, I mean, in that time period, you carried
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 3: more than one gun with you, and the accounts were that.
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 2: I'm not in any way arguing that you didn't.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: I'm just trag like, why was it a thing for
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: a long you know, why was it a story for
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: a long time that it was a sort of an
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: asterisk next to that he'd killed himself.
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 3: I think Lewis's family was very invested in this theory,
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 3: is that right?
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 4: Yeah?
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 3: Because in this time period suicide, we didn't understand suicide
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 3: the way we understand suicide today. So today we would
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 3: talk about suicide as like somebody with a with a
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 3: disease who is making a choice that feels rational to them,
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 3: even if it's heartbreaking to everybody else. But obviously at
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 3: that in that time period, it was it was a
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 3: huge stain on your reputation. Yeah, like you're condemned to hell,
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 3: right exactly. So I think that that's the read. Like
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 3: nobody wanted to believe that this national hero would do
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 3: this to himself.
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: So they were they were people that like to try
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 1: to save his reputation or make make their own guilt
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: less or whatever.
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know what their motives were, sort of.
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: Like yeah, putting out this idea, will you never know?
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: Or this could be possible because he had because in
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: his suicide attempt, he had to shoot himself two times.
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 3: Right, and he also carved his wrists up to to
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 3: bleed out like he definitely there's a quote from from
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 3: one of the people who ran the Bed and Breakfast
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: where she says that he said, why is it so
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 3: hard for me to die? Like and I mean that
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 3: speaks to his toughness, like he he was there's nobody
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 3: who could endure more than him. Even I'm not just
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 3: talking about like compared us today. I'm talking about on
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 3: the expedition, nobody was tougher than Lewis, Like he was
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 3: just an unbelievably just he just had perseverance, he was
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 3: just he had grit. So even at the end you
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 3: could see that. But I think there's no question that
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 3: his family and the people around him were trying to
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 3: protect his reputation. It's we're saying Clark and Jefferson never
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 3: questioned it. They thought he killed himself, so did they
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 3: know him better than anybody else. But then also, I
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 3: think there's a lot of people who like to look
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 3: for conspiracy theories in history. That's never been my relationship
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 3: to history, but I you know, I understand that can
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 3: be a fun way to think about history. But I
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 3: just don't think, you know, even if you compare this
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 3: to some of the other great conspiracy theory theories are
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 3: possible ones in history, the evidence just isn't there. The
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 3: people who want to talk about the murder, they try
• 1:08:48
  Speaker 3: to undermine the evidence that he killed himself, but they
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 3: never have any affirmative evidence. They're never like, well, why
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 3: would somebody kill him? Like bad Yelp reviews about the
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 3: best they can come up with. They they try to
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 3: connect it to James Wilkinson and theseolitical conspiracies, and it
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 3: just just doesn't make any sense. Like sometimes the simplest
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 3: explanation is the best one.
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, what's that call? There's a name for that, Lockham's raised,
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: Oukham's Raising. I need to get that tattooed on me.
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: So I don't forget that so often Oham's Raising. Do
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: you how much time he spent on Colter? John Colton.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: He's kind of my favorite dude from the whole thing.
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 3: Unfortunately, there's not a ton of culture in there because
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 3: I did the rotating points of view, so I had
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 3: Ordway's point of view, so I really tried to talk
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 3: about Ordway's life. But but Coulter is amazing, and there
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 3: there are whole books certain about him. I don't begrudge
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 3: your affection for culture at all. He was a he
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 3: was kind of a little rascally, but once he kind
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 3: of got himself worked out, he was one of the
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 3: most important soldiers.
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he liked to pull a cork. He got a
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 2: little trouble in Yeah.
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and there there's this. This is one of the
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 3: new things I found about him. One of the times
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 3: he shows up in the book is when they're in
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 3: Saint Louis, shout out to my Saint Louis. People who
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 3: love Lewis and Clark's relationship to Saint Louis. But when
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 3: they when they have their first winter quarters there, they're like,
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 3: it's it's a boot camp basically, like they have half
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 3: regular soldiers, people like John Ordway, and then they have
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 3: half people who are just civilians from Kentucky who are
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 3: really good shots or really good hunters or things like that.
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 3: And so they got to make these two groups cohere.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 3: But they've also got to teach the non soldiers how
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 3: to be soldiers. And so Colter is kind of one
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 3: of the troublemakers in this period. And at one point
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 3: Lewis and Clark head to Saint Louis to like have
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 3: a nice dinner and do diplomatic stuff and Ordway. They
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 3: leave Ordway in charge, and the men rebel, and like
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 3: Colter is like, we don't know exactly what happened, but
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 3: the most likely thing is that Ordway was like, it's
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 3: your turn to stand guard something like that, like some
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 3: kind of like go do your soldier task, and so
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 3: Colter and Shields and a couple other people from Kentucky
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 3: were like, we're going to kill you. We don't give
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 3: a fuck what you say. And you know, people from
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 3: Kentucky in this time period were ordinary people, and so
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 3: Ordway showed remarkable self control. Like you know, I think
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 3: if somebody had done this to Lewis, Lewis probably would
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 3: have been like, let's have a duel, Like you just
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 3: challenge my honor, I'll kill you. But Ordway was able
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 3: to maintain calm, and so he waited till Lewis and
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 3: Clark came back. Lewis and Clark put in some some
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 3: new disciplinary measures, and tatle told on cold. I mean,
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 3: if you want to call it that, you can. But
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 3: here's what's cool, because I don't think Colter would have
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 3: said it that way. Because Lewis and Clark ultimately asked
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 3: the men, like, who do you want to be your sergeants?
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 3: This is very unusual in the military at this time,
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 3: But it wasn't just the vote on the Pacific Coast
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 3: that we already talked about. Lewis and Clark again and
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 3: again let their men have input. And I think that's
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 3: just like they.
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: Basically take a vote about in the end, they take
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: a vote about Colter state.
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 4: And if he can go on, yeah for sure and
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 4: so on.
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 2: Then I real quick just remind people who this guy is.
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 4: Yeah, go for it, Okay.
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: So Colter's when I said he's my favorite guys. Interesting
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: figure he was. He was hired onto the expedition.
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 2: He was.
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: He was a woodsman, hired onto the expedition and had
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: a role as sort of a scout and hunter. What's
• 1:11:45
  Speaker 1: cool about him is when the expedition is coming to
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: a close and they're descending the Missouri, they run into
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: some trader trappers who are going up river, right, and
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: they're going upriver to engage in the the beaver trapping
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: and trade and enterprise up there, And rather than going home,
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: Colter wants to go with him ye and ask permission
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: and does the thing that I think would be great
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 1: for a parenting technique. Lewis and Clark say to the guys,
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: the rest of the guys, they say, we will let
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: him go. We will cut Colter loose and let him
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: go up to trap if everyone here promises not to
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: ask the same thing, right yep. And everybody's like I
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: won't ask, And then they cut him loose and he goes.
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 3: On and has some crazy adventures, no doubt about it. Yeah,
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 3: his life after the expedition is wild. But at the
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 3: beginning of the expedition before he's kind of proven himself
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 3: as this beloved soldier because he was enlisted to he
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 3: was a soldier, not just like, oh sorry.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 2: He was hired on as a I thought he was.
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 2: I thought he was hired on as an.
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 3: I mean he was, but they didn't hire him on,
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 3: and like, you can still be a frontiersman. Like they
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 3: they ran a military, like they had to practice their
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 3: drills every night, Like John Ordway was like, put on
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 3: your uniform, we're gonna go learn how to counter march
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 3: and march.
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: And also all those guys had to like had to
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: conform to military standards.
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 3: I see, Yeah, it was. It was a military mission,
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 3: got it. And so but that like people like Colter
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 3: hated that at first. So when Lewis and Clark are
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 3: and Saint Louis Ordway's in charge, like Lewis and Clark
• 1:13:19
  Speaker 3: are famous enough and good enough leaders that Culter's not
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 3: gonna do this to them. But when it's just Ordway
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 3: and Orway's like it's time to go do watch. Colter's
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 3: like no, And so they end up yelling at each other,
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 3: Colters literally loading his rifle like next to Ordway, like
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 3: you can hear the ramrods scraping on the barrel. And
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 3: so Ordway diffuses the situation. Tattletales slash follows military protocol.
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 3: But here's the cool thing they have. Like Lewis and
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 3: Clark a couple of weeks after, it's only a couple
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 3: weeks after they let them in, vote who do you
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 3: want to be your sergeant? And guess who Culter picks.
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 3: He picks John Ordway. He respected them, yes, exactly. And
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 3: so to go from saying I'm gonna kill you to
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 3: saying I want my life to be in your hands,
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 3: like that is such an amazing detail. I think it
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 3: tells you something about Culter. I think it tells you
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 3: something about Ordway. I think it tells you something about
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 3: Lewis Clark. Nobody's ever pieced that together about the voting stuff,
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 3: but that's because I was so interested in the human
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 3: dynamics that we were talking about. Like I figured out
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 3: that they voted on it, and I figured out, Wow,
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 3: Culter wanted Ordway, and I think that's one of the
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 3: most human details in the whole book.
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, that's the thing I didn't know.
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 6: One of the things you point out in the book
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 6: that was kind of an interesting takeaway for me was
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 6: when we talk about Lewis and Clark, when we talk
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 6: about this expedition, we talk about it as this multifaceted
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 6: you know, they're they're establishing diplomatic relations, they're taking stock
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 6: of resources there, they're maybe staking claims to territory, and
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 6: it's this big hybrid of sort of diplomacy, economic speculation,
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 6: scientific understanding or learning. And you make the point that Jefferson,
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 6: when he thinks of Native people wandering the West, he
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 6: thinks of them as just being curious and just going from.
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 5: Place to place.
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 6: But you make the point that what Lewis and Clark
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 6: are doing is a very familiar concept to all of
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 6: the Native people that they encounter along the way, because
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 6: when they are moving across the landscape, they're doing the
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 6: same thing. They're interested in land, they're interested in what's there,
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 6: and they're interested in who they can meet and what
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 6: those people can give them.
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 5: And so it's it I don't know.
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 6: It's not like a mind blowing concept, but it drew
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 6: an interesting connection for me that I don't think i'd
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 6: appreciate it yet.
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 3: It was like you were saying, with slavery, like human
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 3: beings have always practiced some form of slavery until today. Well,
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 3: human beings have always explored too, like these are kind
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 3: of universal ideas that sort of constitute what it means
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 3: to be a human. And one of my favorite point
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 3: of view chapters in the book is this guy named
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 3: Bahito who was He was a leader for the Auricra
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 3: in what is now South Dakota and Jefferson like the
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 3: most big government thing of Lewis and Clark is that
• 1:16:08
  Speaker 3: Jefferson said, if you meet important leaders, send them to
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 3: meet me in Washington, d C. Well, taxpayers will fund it,
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 3: but like I want to negotiate and meet with them
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 3: in the White House, and I want to show them
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 3: our power, at.
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 5: Which rings extraordinarily expensive.
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a lot of the price tag came from
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 3: this because dozens of Native people like this does not
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 3: show up in the normal stories about Lewis and Clark.
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 3: But while Lewis and Clark are heading west, dozens of
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 3: Native leaders authorized by Lewis and Clark, are heading east.
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 3: So instead of just like telling everybody's story, I zoomed
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 3: in on this one guy Bahito. So he goes from
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 3: what's now South Dakota all the way down the Missouri
• 1:16:40
  Speaker 3: River to Saint Louis, then makes it all the way
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 3: to Washington, d C. How do we know this because
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 3: there are newspaper accounts recording this at all the time,
• 1:16:46
  Speaker 3: Like he would show up in towns and the towns
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 3: will be like, this is a big deal, let's write
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 3: about this. And then once he makes it to Washington DC,
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 3: people in Washington, d C. Are writing about him in
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 3: their journals. But the coolest thing, and this is only
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 3: discovered a couple of years ago. I didn't find this.
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 3: Another school a scholar found this. But in France they
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 3: found a map that Beahito had made of the Missouri
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 3: River and the Rocky Mountains. And on that map he
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 3: records not just how many nations there were there, but
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 3: also where he met with Lewis and Clark. And so
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 3: Beahito we know from Jefferson's papers that he met with
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 3: Jefferson at least twice in the White House, and so
• 1:17:18
  Speaker 3: he probably brought this map with it and showed it
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 3: to Jefferson, and so it was I think that would
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 3: have been such a cool meeting to sit in because
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 3: Jefferson's this older guy who's like interested in everything, but
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 3: Bihito was an older guy who was interested in everything too.
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 3: And so in my book, you know, the front end
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 3: papers are Clark's famous map of the Missouri and the
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 3: Rocky Mountains, but the back end papers are be Ahito's
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 3: map too, because I really think to get the full story,
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 3: you don't just need Clark's point of view, you need
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 3: Behito's two.
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: I was trying to tell my kids about this observation
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 1: that I was reading about there a few months ago. Now,
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: is this astrophysicist was, you know, they're looking at some guy.
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: I think it's kind of going on currently. They're looking
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: at some things out in outer space whatever, and it's
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: coloration defies their understanding a little bit. And so there's
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: this this astrophysicist was ranking the.
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 2: Likelihood that it was a.
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 1: Basically a I don't want to say man made because
• 1:18:23
  Speaker 1: that wouldn't mean human, but a not natural object, okay,
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 1: And he was giving some per you know whatever, five
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: percent chance it's a not natural object. And he was
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: talking about why we need to take more seriously the idea.
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 1: I don't take it seriously at all, just personally, but
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 1: why he feels why we need you to take more
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: seriously the idea that some extraterrestrial life form would show
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: up here and we should be talking about this more.
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 1: Sure an observation this guy has that's really interesting, says
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: if it happens, they are not going to be interested.
• 1:19:07
  Speaker 1: And how we have divided up the Earth, which among
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: many other things, is like, of course they won't. Like
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: they show up, aliens come down and you're like, oh no, no, no,
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: you need to talk to the shield, need to talk
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 1: to the governor of Idaho about that. So like it's
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: just like such a funny concept. But it would be
• 1:19:35
  Speaker 1: like the degree to which when you think of Jefferson, whoever,
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: any people's okay, if you think of the Second Americans,
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: the Second America, the second band of Americans to come
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: down from the bearing straight, how interested were they in
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: how the First Americans had conceptualized and divided up the territory.
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: It's interesting about Jefferson's like, ultimately the Americans don't care.
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: Ultimately they kind of they don't care, but they're they're
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: they're interested in it. Maybe they're interested in it because
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: they need to know that to manipulate other things. But
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: they're like they're at least initially in some cases, interested
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: about how it was divided up. Yeah, though ultimately that
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: would all be disregarded.
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 3: Right, Well, I mean, Jefferson thought he was doing the
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 3: right thing. Jefferson was trying to act in a moral
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 3: and honorable way, and they're like, they would dissolve.
• 1:20:34
  Speaker 2: Well, of course it would dissolve those like what I mean,
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 2: of course those boundaries right did not endure.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 3: No, absolutely not, No, there's no question about that. But
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 3: I'm just saying, like, if we're looking at it from
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 3: how Jefferson saw the world in eighteen oh three, and
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 3: there was like a big international context too, because America
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 3: is still pretty new on the scene and so they
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 3: want to maintain their reputation with the French and with
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 3: the British and there. So there's there's this like international
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 3: rule book, you know from the philosophers about like you
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 3: have to respect who owns it. Like let's use the
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 3: Louisiana purchase as an example. What do you always hear
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 3: in school. We're really bagging on school teachers today. I'm
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 3: sorry about that.
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 2: I mean, no, no, no, no, I'm not bagging out no.
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 3: Okay, Well, I guess there's a lot of cover down, right,
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 3: there's a lot of cover downs.
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 2: Well.
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 3: One thing that they might want to tweak slightly in
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 3: coming years is the Louisiana purchase, because like, what do
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 3: you hear in school? You hear that it's like the
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 3: best real estate deal ever. Right, it doubled the size
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 3: of America. None of that's true, Nikola and Aker, none
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 3: of that's true because the Louisiana purchase was not about land.
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 3: It was about this this like extra layer of rights
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 3: called preemption rights. So what France owned was not the land.
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 3: France owned the right to buy the land from Native people,
• 1:21:42
  Speaker 3: and so that's what they sold to the Americans. But
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 3: Jefferson would never say we now own all this. He
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 3: would say we will one day own this. And so
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 3: a historian has gone back and calculated all the treaties
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 3: that turned like that before and after map we see
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 3: in school into actually American land. And most of those
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 3: treaties were negotiated by William Clark, by the way, later
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 3: in his life, but America spent another four hundred million dollars.
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 3: So the Louisiana purchase costs fifteen million dollars. But that's
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 3: just this like this theoretical, right, there was another like
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 3: decades of negotiation, also wars, also, you know, very poor
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 3: treatment of Native people. It's a messy and complicated story.
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 3: But like nobody in eighteen oh four would be like
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 3: we doubled the size of the country because they didn't.
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 3: And so that's why, like you really got to try
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 3: to understand what Jefferson thought or what Lewis thought instead
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 3: of what Andrew Jackson thought or something.
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I understand.
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 3: And there's probably you mentioned earlier there were far more
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 3: at that time, there were far.
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: More Native people on the landscape. Yes, and it would
• 1:22:39
  Speaker 1: have it would appear in that time to be that
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: that would be the case for a long time. Right,
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: So it could have been whether however you felt about
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: native claim to land, even if you ultimately intellectually didn't.
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 2: Accept it, right, you would have needed to accept the.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: On the ground reality, right that like it, you know,
• 1:22:58
  Speaker 1: maybe you don't like it. Maybe that hasn't been how
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 1: your government was operating. Right on the other half of
• 1:23:03
  Speaker 1: the country. But at the time you're acknowledging that these
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: things are going to be negotiated and purchased. But it's
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 1: coming from you know, the same Like if you imagine
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: government as a continuity, it's coming from the same organization.
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 2: Uncle Sam right, who was also in.
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: The practice of buying land from tribes that didn't own it,
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 1: and also really struggling to understand like.
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 3: Who exactly do I talk to? Who's the guy that
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 3: makes the deals? Two people that don't have a guy
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 3: that makes those deals, And one of Lewis and Clark's
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 3: jobs was finding the guy, like again and again. If
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 3: this isn't in the journals, these are in like some
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 3: borin reports that they put together later on. But I
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 3: went back and read those reports and you can see
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 3: that again and again Clark is asking the Lakota like okay,
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 3: like how much land do you claim? Where do your
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 3: boundaries stop? And so like that shows you that Lewis
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 3: and Clark and Jefferson were imagining that continuity that you're
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 3: talking about.
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 4: Yeah, it was on their minds.
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 6: Can you talk about what the process was like for
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 6: the oral history that you did for this, because.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 5: I think that was something also that.
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 6: I you talk about oral history with and you visited
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 6: contemporary travel groups and talk to them about their relationship
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 6: to this story.
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's not something that.
• 1:24:27
  Speaker 6: I when going through the rolodex of Lewis and Clark stuff,
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 6: I've encountered that you often get included.
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 4: Well.
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 3: I always started with the journals because like, I'm a historian,
• 1:24:38
  Speaker 3: so like what I know to do is go to
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 3: the written texts, So like that's what I would start with.
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 3: But then I would also do these interviews. I would
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 3: read lots of academic scholarship and these different points of view.
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 3: I almost felt like I wrote like ten biographies because
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 3: I'm trying to understand the world the way each person did.
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 3: So that's why it took five years. But once I
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 3: had like the academic scholarship and the journals themselves, I
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 3: would often interview native people and sorry, we're headed back
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 3: to the Pacific Northwest, but the clats Up were a
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 3: really good example. I zoomed with them, some people from
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 3: what's now called the Chinook Indian Nation because they have
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 3: kind of subsumed the class Up and some other people.
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 3: And one of the people I talked to was a
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 3: direct descendant of Koboys, and so when I talked to them,
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 3: like they were interviewing me as much as I was
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 3: interviewing them. Because this one guy named Tony, who was
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 3: sort of the head of the Shanek Indian nation, he
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 3: said something to me that I thought about every day
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 3: I worked on the book, where he was like, you know,
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 3: what we have left is our history and our stories,
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 3: and we have shared that with people and that's been
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 3: exploited too, and so like it was not like they
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 3: were like Lewis and Clark, sweet, let's talk about it.
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 3: They had to interview me first, and they wanted to
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 3: understand that. I was like willing to do the work
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 3: and listen to them and sort of have that kind
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 3: of conversation. But they helped me so many ways, like
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 3: that there would be specific details and again in the
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 3: book I would say, you know, according to clats of tradition,
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 3: but they would also point me in different directions, like
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 3: there's this famous anthropologist named Frank Boaz and he recorded
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 3: these stories way back in the nineteenth century of kind
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 3: of like the tales the literature of the of the
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 3: Shinook and the clats Up people. And they were like,
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 3: if you want to understand Kobowet and like how he
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 3: saw the world. Read those stories. Don't read them for
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 3: the plot, read them for the values. And I mean
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 3: we do the same thing, like you know, George Washington
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 3: and the Cherry Tree. There's a lot of American values
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 3: in that story too. So they would help me understand things,
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 3: and they would help they would direct me to sources
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 3: and from that interview even like they would give me lines.
• 1:26:28
  Speaker 3: But because I was writing from Koboay's point of view,
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 3: I could put right into the interview. Like I asked
• 1:26:33
  Speaker 3: them about the elk and then the over hunting we
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 3: were talking about, and I was like, well, you know,
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 3: the clats Up asked Lewis and Clark to be there,
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 3: like was that like you know, was that an issue
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 3: or something like that? That there's a famous moment where
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 3: Lewis and Clark, not them, but some of the men
• 1:26:47
  Speaker 3: kill some elk and go home and they're like, we'll
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 3: come back and get it tomorrow. And they go back
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 3: tomorrow and the clats Up have taken some of the
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 3: elk and some of the skins, and so that creates
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 3: a lot of friction there. But you know, I asked
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 3: them about that and I'm like, you know, we're the
• 1:27:00
  Speaker 3: clats of stealing from Lewis and Clark there, and the
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 3: class of people that I was zooming with were like,
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 3: it's not stealing if it's yours in the first place.
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 3: And so I put that line in the book, not
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 3: because I personally endorsed that line or that interpretation, but
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 3: because that chapter is written from Koboy's point of view,
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 3: and so I'm trying, like, how did he see the world?
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 3: How did Lewis see the world and Clark see the world?
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 4: And so on?
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 3: So what those interviews with the oral history did. They
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 3: gave me some details that I tried to very clearly
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 3: show where those details came from, but they also helped
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 3: me just kind of take on perspectives and be able
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 3: to understand the values. And the other thing is academics
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 3: have done a lot of research to vet oral sources,
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 3: Like they're in the Pacific Northwest, there have been oral
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 3: traditions for a long time about these giant tsunamis that
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 3: came hundreds of years ago before any white traders showed up.
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 3: Those have been recorded for more than a century, but
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 3: it's only like in the last thirty forty years that
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 3: geologists have been able to prove there were giant tsunamis
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 3: in this region that came in this time period and
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 3: did this much damage. So like the geologists have sort
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 3: of proven that the oral traditions at least and broad
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 3: strokes are correct. So I tried to have an open
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 3: mind to all these sources, and like we were talking
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 3: about with Wolf Calf and the Blackfoot interview, I would
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 3: take the oral sources. I would take the journals, I
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 3: would take the scholarship. I would take my own understanding
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 3: of human beings, kind of throw it in a blender
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 3: and then offer the best interpretation I could. Yeah, they
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 3: get hard. Oral stories get hard. There's a there's a
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 3: there's an expiration here.
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: We're already talking about We're already talking about two hundred
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: and twenty years. You know, I can't I can't tell you.
• 1:28:31
  Speaker 1: I can't tell you anything about my great grandparents. Sure, right, Like.
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 3: It's I I accept and agree with the cultural it's
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 3: a there's a cultural gesture that you have to acknowledge.
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 3: Is there there's a it's it's it's in some ways
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 3: in some cases, in some ways is performative. But there's
• 1:28:59
  Speaker 3: just like there's a limit.
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, tell me about Okay, give me the oral tradition
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: of your family two hundred and twenty five years ago.
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 2: You cannot do it.
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 3: But here's what I can do. I can tell you
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 3: what my great grandparents' values were. They were hard working people, because.
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 2: That's been a hundred and twenty five years ago, huh no.
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 3: But you can tell family values and how those get
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 3: passed on. So the first thing I would say is,
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 3: when we're talking about family stuff, I'm not saying that
• 1:29:23
  Speaker 3: I said, what did Koboe eat for breakfast on the
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 3: day Lewis and Clark showed up? But you can still
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 3: learn those values which are not my values. And the
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 3: other thing.
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 1: But check me out though, Okay, what was your what
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: was your great I have to do the math. How
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: many greats ago is two hundred and twenty five years
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: I mean, tell me about the values of.
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 2: Your great, great great great grandfather. What were his values?
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 3: This is an impossible question for me to answer because
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 3: I've read history about this time period too, So anything
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 3: I would tell you would be shaped by my understanding
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 3: of what people live in Indiana. But there's one other
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 3: thing I would say.
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 1: I'm not down. I'm not like I don't I think
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 1: historians shouldn't do it. I know, I just when I
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: hear it. When I hear it, I often feel and
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: you can contradict me, because you're in this situation when
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: I hear historians doing it about stuff and I don't
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: know the date, I don't know that. I don't know
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: the time that the life the lifespan. Okay, oral tradition
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: about something five hundred years ago, about five hundred years ago,
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 1: very very skeptical. Sure, oral tradition about something one hundred
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 1: and fifty years ago about I'm like, Okay, Somewhere between those,
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: I start to get a little bit like, I feel
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: that the traditions can be more informed by contemporary conflict,
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 1: contemporary understandings, contemporary issues, contemporary social concerns can outweigh the
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: parts of it that are coming from My great great
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: great great grandfather told my great great great great grandfather this,
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 1: and he passed it to my great great great great grandfather,
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: who passed it to my great great grandf.
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 4: Like, yeah, do you know what I'm saying? I do.
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: It becomes that it becomes more of a commentary about
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: the present right, not saying you shouldn't do it. I
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 1: hear it, and I always I just I hear it,
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: and I have a there's a feeling that washes over me.
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 3: I understand, you know, that feeling of skepticism, and we
• 1:31:26
  Speaker 3: should be skeptical, Like historians can't do their job unless
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 3: they're skeptical. So I totally get where you're coming from,
• 1:31:31
  Speaker 3: though I don't even disagree with you. The only things
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 3: I would say is that, first of all, a lot
• 1:31:35
  Speaker 3: of the traditions didn't come from one hundred and fifty
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 3: years ago. They came from fifty years after. So like
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 3: there there were Native people who met Lewis and Clark,
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 3: who then talked to a white person, and the white
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 3: person wrote it down. So a lot of the stuff
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 3: I'm drawing on is not the historical game of telephone
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 3: you're talking about. The Other thing is that Native cultures,
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 3: because they are often primarily oral, they sort of select
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 3: people with good memories, who are good storytellers, you know,
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 3: and so they're like, you know, my great great great
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 3: grandfather probably wrote it in a journal and didn't remember
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 3: it as well, whereas Native people, you know, one historian
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 3: when he got older would sort of train the next
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 3: Native historian. So there is more of a tradition there
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 3: that I think helps helps you better be able to
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 3: access those things.
• 1:32:14
  Speaker 4: But really, for me, then there are I.
• 1:32:16
  Speaker 2: Don't want to I don't want to beats into the ground.
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 4: But no, it's it's an important point.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: But but there are cases where like I don't want
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: to act like I'm dismissive of the enterprise because the
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 1: I can't remember the guy's name. There was a guy
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: that much later was talked to to the to people
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: Nez Perce who were involved in the Nez Perce.
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 2: War and the children to people involved in Nez pers War.
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: Right, you could say, in some way, you could say
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: some of that's first hand account, like like he took
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: nes Perce warriors to battlefields and they'd be like, no,
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: I was standing there, right, he was staying there.
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 4: That's that oral tradition. That's firsthand, sure, but.
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: Huge value and talking to their kids, which at that
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: point I guess is oral. I don't know, is that
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 1: oral tradition?
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 2: What is that?
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 4: I think?
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 3: I mean, different historians are going to classify a different way.
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 3: But for the conversation we're having, you're absolutely right that
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 3: every generation of what you get away, it becomes more
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 3: tenuous and you need to have more skepticism. I will say, like,
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 3: I think I maybe put us on the wrong foot
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 3: by talking about like grandparents' values though, because like the
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 3: better example is not what your grandparents or my grandparents
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 3: values were. It'd be like if I was writing about
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 3: somebody in France there, I don't fan France's values are
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 3: not my values. So they're like you sort of need
• 1:33:26
  Speaker 3: like that basic primer. So when I would talk to
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 3: people today, it would be less like what did your
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 3: grandparents do? And it would be more like, how do
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 3: your people see the world? What does land mean to
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 3: your people? Did you have an understanding of sort of
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 3: geographical rights and those kinds of things. So I think
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 3: for me, at least as a writer, because I am
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 3: not class up, because I am not Lakota, it was
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 3: very valuable for me to talk to those people who
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 3: were generous with their time and said like, these are
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 3: our values and I and you know, those values have
• 1:33:52
  Speaker 3: of course shaped like there's no question. I can think
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 3: of examples from my interviews where people they would say
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 3: something to me and I'd be like that it feels
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 3: like that kind of modern life is impinging on the
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 3: tradition as much as it is the tradition itself that
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 3: I mean that happens with us and how we tell
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 3: American stories too. But I do think that that for me,
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 3: at least as an outsider, those interviews really helped me
• 1:34:15
  Speaker 3: sort of feel like I could write from those people's
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 3: points of view, and it was just important in the book,
• 1:34:19
  Speaker 3: Like we have great biographies of Lewis or Culter or
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 3: people like that, but really I didn't want the sections
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 3: on Kobowah or Black Buffalo or Saka Juea to just
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 3: be like, this is what Lewis and Clark did. I
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 3: wanted you to feel like you were in the canoe
• 1:34:34
  Speaker 3: with them, because I wanted the storytelling to be equal,
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 3: you know, like I wanted you to know what Lewis
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 3: cared about, but I wanted you to know what Black
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 3: Buffalo cared about too. And the reason we can know
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 3: that is often not these oral traditions, but the journals
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 3: like Lewis and Clark wrote down what Black Buffalo wanted.
• 1:34:48
  Speaker 3: It's just my job as a historian to be like
• 1:34:51
  Speaker 3: that deserves like a scene that deserves some description. He
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 3: Black Buffalo is not a supporting character. Black Buffalo is
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 3: a main character. Yeah, and that's the choice I made
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 3: in this book.
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I got one last question. You got but you
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 2: go ahead, Randall, No, you got it.
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: Uh, I don't. I probably knew this and forgot maybe,
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: but I don't know. York the slave he gets back,
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: he petitions for his He petitions for his freedom. Yeah,
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: freedom based on his meritorious conduct. Right is denied? Right
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: what comes to him? How old is he when the
• 1:35:28
  Speaker 1: expedition ends.
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 3: He's We don't know exactly how old he is, but
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 3: given how relation, like he was what was called Clark's
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 3: body servant, Like he was somebody who grew up alongside
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 3: Clark and took care of Clark. That's why Clark wanted
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 3: to take him on the expedition, among other reasons, Like
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 3: Clark really respected York as a as an outdoorsman too.
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 3: But so he was roughly Clark's age, So he was probably,
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 3: you know, late twenties, early thirties during the expedition. But
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 3: he requests his freedom when he gets back, and we
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 3: know that he directly linked it to his service on
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 3: the expedition because Clark has this letter to his brother,
• 1:35:58
  Speaker 3: and in this letter, Clark says you know, I don't
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 3: agree with Yorke that his immense services have earned his freedom.
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 3: And so for Clark, again, there's a lot of things about.
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: He's like, I'd like to raise a counterpoint, right, you know,
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: I feel like I still own you.
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, right, counterpoint, this is how America works at
• 1:36:15
  Speaker 3: this time period. But it like, you know, you can
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 3: hear Clark's voice in that the kind of dark right.
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: Here's why I feel I should be able to like
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 1: make my own decisions about myself.
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 2: I don't know, it's just throw.
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 4: This out there, yeah, exactly.
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 3: But you can hear york side of the debate too though, right,
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 3: Like that's Clark's letter, but Clark is preserving York's York's rationale.
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 3: And so they had lived in Louisville, Kentucky. Outside of Louisville, Kentucky,
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 3: and so Clark becomes like the top diplomat with Native
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 3: people and he has to move to Saint Louis and
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 3: he will make all these like when he died in
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 3: eighteen thirty eight, a third of what was American land.
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 3: Clark negotiated the treaties. For Clark had a very important
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 3: life after the expedition. So he has to be in
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 3: Saint Louis to do that. So he tells York, You're
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 3: coming with me. But York's wife is in Kentucky, and
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 3: we know that York cared a lot about his wife.
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 3: He's sent flow skins back to his wife from the
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 3: expedition for her to have and so York doesn't want
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 3: to go, and that's where this real friction intention emerges.
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 3: That York's like, I want to be free, and also
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 3: I want to stay in Kentucky with my wife, and
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 3: Clark says, I don't care. And so they have really
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 3: really tough interactions. There's one letter where Clark says, I like,
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 3: I'm ready to beat York, but Lewis talked me out
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 3: of it.
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 4: Wow.
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 3: So you can again see like I don't think it
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 3: makes sense to just talk about slavery in the abstract.
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 3: You need to talk about like how did Clark see it?
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 3: How did Lewis see it? Because even though there's similar guys,
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 3: they had very different views on slavery, and so Lewis
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 3: was basically like, we don't know exactly why he thought this,
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 3: but he definitely said, you know, don't you don't need
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 3: to beat Clark or beat York. Right, now, let's let's
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 3: let's take it easier on him. But either way, Clark
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 3: waited more than a decade to free York. York's wife
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 3: ended up having to move further down south, so he
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 3: was not able to reunite with her in the way
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 3: that he wanted, and York ended up dying probably sometime
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 3: in his fifties, probably of cholera. We don't know for sure,
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 3: but that's it seems pretty clear though his wife was enslaved, yes,
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 3: by a different ownerferent families, right, because the Clarks, the
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 3: Clarks had ten or twelve slaves, so often in plantations
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 3: of that size, you would have to, you know, you
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 3: would marry somebody from a different plantation.
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 2: You say he did not reunite with his wife.
• 1:38:10
  Speaker 3: He I mean he was once he was freed. He
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 3: ended up having a wagon business. So maybe he rode
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 3: the wagon down further south, but that that would be
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 3: pretty precarious in eighteen twenty to, you know, as a
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 3: as a freed black person, take your wagon further south.
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 3: That's not what most people would do. So we don't
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 3: know for sure. Because York couldn't read or write, but
• 1:38:27
  Speaker 3: he definitely saw less of his wife than he wanted to.
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: We know that, man, there's you almost think about it
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: like a like like thing.
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 4: I don't.
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 2: I'm not a big play fan like plays. You know.
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 2: I like him, okay, but I'm more into movies. But
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 2: a good play would be you.
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: Know, in the Autumn of Boons Daniel Boone's life, uh huh,
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: he would go on these hunting trips with his slave.
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 4: Mm hm.
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 2: Him and his slave Yep would get in paddle up river, right.
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 1: And due these big hunting rips and like, like what
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: are those conversations?
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 2: Like, Yeah, it would be the two of.
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 3: Them, right, that would that would be like waiting for
• 1:39:08
  Speaker 3: good Oh but plus slavery, that'd be wild yeah, or
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 3: York trying to explain, you know, here's why I think
• 1:39:17
  Speaker 3: I shouldn't be a slave, right, But I mean like
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 3: like how like how does that conversation play out? Yeah,
• 1:39:23
  Speaker 3: but I mean York was reacting to different circumstances. Like
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 3: on the expedition he carried a rifle. He was the
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 3: fifth named guy in the journals to bring down a buffalo.
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 3: He was a great hunter. Yeah, he was big and strong.
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 3: He could swim a lot of people in the expedition
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 3: could not swim, which that's a fact that I still
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 3: can't wrap my head around, like you're doing this river.
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 6: One of the first questions I would have asked, you know,
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 6: in my recruiting you would.
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 4: Think so, but yeah, he could.
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 2: He could have taken that rifle and swung it around.
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 2: Been like your son of a bitch.
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 3: Right right, No, it's I mean, it's it's a it's
• 1:39:51
  Speaker 3: a wild it's a wild dynamic.
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 2: So hard to understand it. It's really hard to understand.
• 1:39:56
  Speaker 3: I think one reason the journals are helpful is they
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 3: help you see Clark's point of view on this too,
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 3: because you can see how, for lack of a better word, possessive,
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 3: Clark is like York. The native people once they get
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 3: far enough to the north, and the native people are
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 3: obsessed with York because they've never met somebody with black
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 3: skin before. So they like, they come up and they'll
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 3: spit on their hands and try to like rub York's
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 3: skin to rub the paint off, and then when they
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 3: realize it's not paint, they're like, whoa this is this
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 3: is something new. And when you read Clark's journal entries,
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 3: you can see that Clark is just kind of like
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 3: jealous in a weird way because he's so used to
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 3: being the person above York that once York starts to
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 3: get more attention, that that makes their relationship get even stranger.
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 3: So it's just I think York could beat his ass too.
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 3: I mean, Clark again and again talked about how big
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 3: York was, so I think York was probably the largest.
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 4: Guy on the on the whole expedition.
• 1:40:42
  Speaker 3: I can't remember we had a guest recently or someone
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 3: turned to sound to this quote. The past is a
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 3: strange country, you know, because some of the stuff you
• 1:40:53
  Speaker 3: just can't understand it.
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 2: I know you can't. The dynamics you'll never ever understand.
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I felt that tension again and again writing this book,
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 3: because it's like, on one hand, Sackage we as actions
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 3: feel like it's at a workplace, right, like she's you know,
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 3: she's she's doing human interactions the same way we would.
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 3: But on another hand, it's just a completely different world.
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 3: And so I don't think there's a way to resolve that.
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 3: As a historian, I think you just need to accept that,
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 3: like both things are true, and then try to tell
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 3: the story as honestly as you can But it's like
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 3: that that push pull. I felt that again and again
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 3: in this book.
• 1:41:28
  Speaker 5: I feel like.
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 6: A lot of what you do in this book is
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 6: you're sort of building the story out from this myopic
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 6: understanding of a miraculous journey led by two incredible individuals, right,
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 6: and you're building it out, And I'm curious if there's
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 6: still a blank spot in your canvas that you weren't
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 6: able to fill in. Not to end on a downer, no,
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 6: but what did you Was there something you wanted to
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 6: build out in this book that just wasn't there.
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 3: I spent five years on this. I love all ten
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 3: of the people in this book, and I still have
• 1:42:10
  Speaker 3: way more questions than answers, Like is that a crazy
• 1:42:13
  Speaker 3: thing to say? But that's like, if you're trying to
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 3: be an honest and accurate historian, I don't know what
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 3: other response you would have, Like I just wonder what
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 3: did Lewis think about York?
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 4: Because Lewis specifically.
• 1:42:23
  Speaker 3: Told Clark recruit unmarried men because they knew that like
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 3: they wanted people without family ties, but they also knew
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 3: that the men were going to have sex with lots
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 3: of Native women like they'd been in the army. They
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 3: knew that they wanted young guys who were not attached,
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 3: And so Lewis shows up and Clark's like, Yorke's coming
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 3: and York's married, York's black, He's enslaved. So I like,
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 3: did they argue about that? Was Lewis like this is
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 3: a terrible idea? Was Clark like, I'm not coming unless
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 3: York comes. Did Lewis just sort of roll his eyes
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 3: and have some kind of resentment about it? But they
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 3: just worked through it. Probably that's what happened, but we'll
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 3: never know. So like, I feel like, unlike William Clark's maps,
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 3: my map is still mostly blank spaces. I just tried
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 3: to fill in as much as I could with this book.
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know how I do.
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 3: The movie man is uh, we're talking about the beginning
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 3: of Apocalypse now.
• 1:43:08
  Speaker 1: This morning Randall was you know, like the hotel scene.
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: I would probably open the movie grinder station. There's a
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: lot everywhere, you know what I'm saying, and he's like, oh,
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: like he's dying, right, And then and then you'd like,
• 1:43:31
  Speaker 1: what in the world is going on?
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah? You know what I mean? The people downstairs like
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 2: what is going on up there?
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 4: Right?
• 1:43:36
  Speaker 6: And then he and then he trips back flashback. Yeah,
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 6: it's a classic introductory device.
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 2: Because it grab you by the boo boo for sure.
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 6: That scene, maybe that's the magic key that will unlock
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 6: the successful HBO mini.
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 2: I just couldn't think of a good opening scene. That's
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 2: the problem. That was the problem all along. It wasn't
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 2: how do you tell a three year long story?
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 3: Christian Bale perfect, Yeah, well fingers crossed on the HBO series.
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 4: That's that's all same. But yeah, yeah, fingers crossed.
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 3: I think that's a blank space because I would really
• 1:44:07
  Speaker 3: like somebody to make a TV show out.
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 6: Of Undaunted Courage, which we haven't brought up until now.
• 1:44:11
  Speaker 6: I think that was always the you know that if
• 1:44:14
  Speaker 6: it was going to spin into.
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 5: A series, that was it.
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 6: But like, this is just such a more human tale
• 1:44:22
  Speaker 6: that I see the we'll keep her fingers crossed.
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 2: I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 2: want to brag, but I got one in the oven
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 2: right now.
• 1:44:28
  Speaker 1: That's going to be prime pickings for movie, which I've
• 1:44:32
  Speaker 1: never had happen.
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 5: I'm sure again he doesn't want to brag now.
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 4: Howat so good? But other than that, I can't.
• 1:44:40
  Speaker 2: Say, the only problems. I haven'tritten it yet either.
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 4: Well, I hear that could be a tricky You did
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 4: the work.
• 1:44:47
  Speaker 3: It's just a step along the way, you know for sure. Right, Well,
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 3: good luck. I hope they do get it.
• 1:44:52
  Speaker 1: We've been we've been talking to Craig firm and author
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: of this vast Enterprise and New History of Lewis and Clark.
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: So a new history of a old and fascinating, fascinating
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: story with endless threads to pull out, and sounds to
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: me like you pulled out some fresh ones.
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 3: I did my best, man, it's a big story. I
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 3: gave it everything I had.
• 1:45:16
  Speaker 1: Check it out once again, This fast Enterprise, A New
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: History of Lewis and Clark by Craig Furman,