The Journals of Lewis and Clark with Craig Fehrman

We treat the Lewis and Clark journals as a true American classic, reading them for voice, humour, and human detail rather than just as a schoolbook summary. With historian Craig Furman, we follow the expedition through science, hardship, Native diplomacy, and the moral complexity that the journals preserve in plain sight.

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Transcript

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Mir Orthodoxy has a brand new website. We've completely redesigned our website with readers in mind. From the layout to dark mode, downloadable PDFs and audio articles, a new dashboard for members that lets you bookmark articles, save quotes to a commonplace book, access your full reading history, get digital editions of all the past journals, site themes based on the church calendar, and much more. There has never been a better time to become a member of Mir Orthodoxy than right now. Through the end of June, get 20% off your first year of an annual membership or three months of a monthly membership. Not only will you get access to an incredible online experience, you'll support the ongoing work of Mir Orthodoxy, Mir Fidelity, and much more to come. Mere Orthodoxy is a reader-supported publication. We can do this work because of readers and listeners like you. Go to Mereorthodoxy.com today to see the new site and get 20% off your first year of an annual membership or three months of a monthly membership. That's Mereorthodoxy.com to see the new site and get 20% off membership today. Arrived at Bruno's Island, three miles below, halted a few minutes, went on shore, and being invited on by some of the gentlemen present to try my air gun, which I had purchased, brought it on shore, charged it, and fired myself seven times 55 yards with pretty good success. After which, a Mr. Blaze Kennas, being unacquainted with the management of the gun, suffered her to discharge herself accidentally. The ball passed through the hat of a woman about 40 yards distance, cutting her temple about the fourth of the diameter of the ball. She fell instantly, the blood gushing from her temple. We were all in the greatest consternation. Suppose she was dead. But in a minute she revived to our inexpressible satisfaction, and by examination we found the wound by no means mortal or even dangerous, called the hands aboard, and proceeded to a ripple of McKee's Rock, where we were obliged to get out all hands and lift the boat over about 30 yards. The river is extremely low, said to be more so than it has been known for four years. There's an erasure in this spot. Passed another bear of ripple with more difficulty than either of the others. Halted for the night, much fatigued after laboring with my men all day. The water being sufficiently temperate was much in our favor. Gave my men some whiskey and retired to rest at eight o'clock.

A Shocking First Journal Entry

3:17

So wrote Meriwether Lewis in the first entry of the journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition. You've probably heard at least about this expedition and perhaps learned about it in detail in middle school and high school history classes. But have you ever considered that the journals themselves may be an American classic in their own right? Welcome to the Christians Reading Classics podcast from Muir Orthodoxy. I'm Nadia Williams, books editor for Muir Orthodoxy. And today it is an absolute delight to talk about the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition as an American classic with Craig Furman. He is the author of the new book, This Vast Enterprise, A New History of Lewis and Clark, newly on the New York Times bestseller list as of this week. He is also the author of Author in Chief, The Untold Story of the Presidents and the Books They Wrote. In addition to his books, he has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and more. Craig, thank you for taking the time to talk today. Oh, thanks for having me. And you did a wonderful job reading that entry. It's it's such a such a great window into the expedition. That's just the first day, and things are already going wrong. Talk to us about this first day before we dive into other things. Sure. Well, it's at this point, it's just the Lewis expedition. Clark is Clark is still a few hundred miles down the Ohio River. And so Lewis is taking this giant barge, which is like the size of a semi-truck down the river. But but the Ohio River is not what we think of the Ohio River today. I grew up really near the really close to the Ohio River. And I sort of had to unlearn my images because there weren't modern dams yet. So there were places, as the as the entry describes, where the water was so shallow you could just walk across the river. And so they've got this giant semi-truck size barge full of cargo and you know 10 or 12 men. And they have to sometimes unload it just so they can lift it over the shallow spots and the the riffles. Um that that word Lewis means basically like a sandbar, like a like an obstruction. And so even on that first day, they it's hard to get the boat to move at all. But then when Lewis shows off his air rifle, which is such a famous part of the expedition, um, you know, things go really, really badly. And so I started the first chapter of my book with this because people who love the expedition like to talk about the air rifle and how amazing it was to Native people and how Native people are often impressed because it didn't need gunpowder. And, you know, this is not an air rifle like a BB gun. This is a very powerful weapon and cutting edge technology. But I wanted to remind people that, you know, Americans were astonished by the air rifle too. They also saw this air rifle and were like, how does this work? And also, despite Lewis's very careful plans, things could go awry. They they almost accidentally murdered an American citizen um while showing off this, uh showing off this weapon. So it's it's an example of how much technology they had and how much courage they had, but also how things could go wrong and that and that mix of uncertainty and excitement. I feel like that's one of the reasons the expedition is such a great story. Yeah, and reading this uh chapter in your book, I was thinking, like, we think of it as this professional operation. Like, here are all these experts who have researched things thoroughly. I mean, Thomas Jefferson knew his stuff, did his research, and handpicking people. Anyway, and then you read this, and it's like, this is a bunch of middle schoolers just like messing around on a road trip. Like you're reminded of actual like school trips where all sorts of crazy stuff happens, and you're like, what is this? Yeah, it's the the the the human beings are always my favorite parts of history, and there are just so many in this story. And and definitely one of the first sets of human beings you have to think about are is the the core of Discovery, the expedition itself, because they they had, you know, a couple days later, two of the people who are supposed to be helping with the boat get so drunk that Lewis has to physically hoist them into the boat because they can't climb back into the boat. So you hopefully middle schoolers aren't indulging in those kinds of behaviors, but still, you know, they might get a little a little hecy or or a or a capri-sun or something and get a little hyper. So you can you can see that you've got these like just these people who have a lot of energy and they're gonna need that energy, but corralling that energy and focusing that energy was a constant struggle for the captains. And it seems like Lewis and Clark perhaps did not expect so much of the expedition to be like parent chaperones, essentially. Yeah, I don't I mean, it's it it's interesting because in this time period, I I read a lot of uh what the military was like in this time period. And today, you know, the vast majority of Americans respect soldiers and and really revere the military and and the sacrifices people made, but it was not like that in 1804. Soldiers were were looked down on, and part of the reason was that the kind of people who would become soldiers were troublemakers who didn't have a lot of other options. And so I read a lot about the military culture in this period, and and most officers would, you know, if if somebody, this is an actual example that happened to one of the companies that one of the soldiers on the expedition came from, and they were in a town in in New England, and the shop owner came and said, I think some some of your soldiers stole some of my stuff. And the captain just grabbed his cat of ninetales and started beating a soldier, just like, you know, he wasn't like, Did you do it? He was like, I'll beat the confession out of him. And so that was that was kind of the status quo. But Lewis and Clark made a different choice where they they they were they did punish their men, but much less so. And they also let their men vote a lot. And sometimes their men would even pick the punishment for other men. And I think they did this partly because they knew they were going to be so far out there that they needed to keep everybody on the same page and and working together. But I also think they sort of knew that things would happen that they didn't expect and they wanted the men to be able to respond quickly and and and think for themselves. And so it was a very unique way to run a military unit. But I mean, the proof's in the pudding 8,000 miles there and back, they did it. It's astonishing.

What Makes A Book A Classic

8:59

Now, before we jump further into the expedition, I want to take a step back and ask you a question I always ask on this podcast. How do you define a classic? And in this case, how do the journals of the expedition fit this definition? Sure. Um I always think of a line that somebody said to Thomas Jefferson after the White House when he was kind of back in retirement in Monticello, and they were talking about his notes on the state of Virginia. And so this is a bookseller, and the bookseller told Jefferson that your book has become one of the standing stock books at the booksellers, you know? And this was decades after Notes on the State of Virginia had first come out. So I think that's the first part of a classic, that it needs to be still a vibrant and living part of the culture where people are still engaging with it. And Notes on the State of Virginia is a great example of that. The the expedition journals are too. But the other thing is I think a classic needs to be rich enough that it can mean different things at different times. Like we can go back to it and find different meanings. And that's one of the reasons I love Lewis and Clark, because there have been a lot of great books written about the expedition. But when you read them, and I definitely know I spent five years on this, so I tried to read everything I could find. And you notice that at different time periods, different historians will find very different stories. Um, probably my favorite example is Bernard De Voto, who was writing during the Cold War, and he emphasized the kind of imperial nature of Lewis and Clark more than just about anybody else. But I mean, I think that makes sense because if you wake up every day worried about the Soviet Union, of course, you're gonna find imperialism in the classic that you're reading. So the journals are more than a million words. Lewis and Clark wrote the majority of them, but there are plenty of other perspectives in there. Some of the regular soldiers wrote them too. And I think they're a classic because they've been a part of America's cultural conversation for so long, but also they can you can find new things. Like when I went back, I I found a lot of new stuff in archives, and I'm proud of that. But sometimes I think the best stuff I found was just going back to this classic text and reading it with a different perspective and then finding new moments of humanity uh in them. So I I think that's why what a classic is, and I think the expedition definitely clears that bar. I love that. And it's a it's a hefty classic. Uh, usually for this podcast, I make sure to read the entire book before discussing it with someone. I did not do it this time, but I read excerpts, and they are um they're spicy. Yeah, they're and and the not only is it hefty, but it's repetitive. I really tried in my book, you know, like how in the first excerpt you had with them running into the sandbars, with you know, they just do that again and again and again, which speaks to their endurance. But yeah, it's uh there it it that it's very human. It's it's it's a in this time period, I feel like things weren't, you know, this is not the Victorian age yet. So people aren't quite as buttoned up and and people are willing to be spicy, especially if it's in the service of science. So Notes on the State of Virginia has some pretty frank passages in it about, you know, human beings and and the and the journals do too. But to Lewis and Clark, that was just they would they would not have been doing their jobs if they didn't record the men acting out or or various behaviors by the native people or things like that. They were they were trying to be scientists and uh, you know, by the standards of their time, they succeeded.

Lewis And Clark In One Clear Map

12:14

So just in brief, for those who have not had an American history class since, you know, high school or college, what is the Lewis and Clark expedition in a nutshell before we keep talking more about it? Sure. So it started in started around Pittsburgh, like you said, that was where Lewis was kind of gathering people and supplies. But but the but the simplest way to define it is once they are in St. Louis and then kind of the whole band is together. So in 1804, they left from a a fort they'd built near St. Louis and they went up the Missouri River, almost the entire river. Then they in what is now Montana, they crossed through the Rockies and and also what is now Idaho. So they made it through the Rockies on land, which was very, very difficult. Then they got on the a tributary of the Columbia River and took that and another tributary and the Columbia River itself until they reached the Pacific Ocean in what is now Oregon or Washington State. So St. Louis, up the Missouri, across the Rockies to the Pacific Ocean. That was in 1804 and 1805. And then in 1806, they just go back and mostly follow the same routes that they did to get back to St. Louis and then to Washington to meet Jefferson. Um, that was the journey as far as what they wanted to accomplish. It's almost easier to say what they didn't want to accomplish than what they did. This was such an ambitious mission, um, befitting Jefferson, such an ambitious president. But their empire was always on their mind. They were thinking about, you know, land, trying to understand the land, trying to think where Americans might go next. They were interested in science. They were very interested in commerce because they were trying to find good routes for fur traders. But but in this time period, these things were all connected. Like the better your science, the better your imperial claims. The the faster your commerce got there, the faster farmers would get there. And so for Jefferson, it was kind of an all of the above situation. And that put a lot of pressure on Lewis and Clark, but you know, they were up for it. Amazing. So,

Writing A New History From Journals

14:05

how and when did you decide to write a book about this expedition? And what role did the journals play in your work? I mean, you alluded to that already already. Yeah, yeah. Well, my first book, Author in Chief, I'm I'm really proud of it. And I think listeners on your podcast would really like it because it's a book about books. And it was a book where I spent a lot of time in libraries, both while doing the research, but also, you know, metaphorically, because I was just trying to capture it's sort of a stealth history of American literary culture. So, you know, I tried to describe what did a bookstore looked like in Abraham Lincoln's time? What was the first bookstore Lincoln would have ever gone into? So I I love all that stuff. I'm I'm a books guy as much as a history guy. And so that was a lot of fun, but I did want a new challenge with a new book. And so I was thinking, you know, let's get outside. Let's try to do an adventure. And I, you know, when I think of big epic adventure stories in America, the first one that came to mind was Lewis and Clark. The only reservation I had was I didn't want to rehash some of the other great books that have been written on the expedition. So I started rereading the journals. Um, just because, you know, I'm a historian, so that's that's where I'm gonna start with the text. And I realized almost immediately that I only knew half the story, even as a historian. I can give you an example from the journals, and this is again another this speaks to sort of that rich classic text neck nature of the text, which is when they're in St. Louis before they even leave, Clark just has one line where he says, he's talking about York, who's the black man he enslaved. He says, York commenced sawing with a whipsaw. And that's the only time York shows up in the journals in this first part of the expedition. But I just started sort of like pulling at this thread. Well, what's a whipsaw? My dad's a carpenter, so I probably should have known that. I probably shouldn't have had to Google that. But uh, but a whipsaw is how they make planks, and so it's really important to have planks to put the roofs on a fort or to build beds. So, you know, it's sleeting, it's snowing, winter is bearing down. It's essential to be able to get all this stuff done. It's also a very skilled tool, though. So there were dozens of soldiers already at the fort. The fact that they chose York to do this tells us that York was really skilled. This was not menial labor, this was an essential task. And so finding one detail here, one detail like there, like that, and really trying to put pressure on them and figure out what those details meant. That was where the journals showed me that there was a lot more story to tell here, a story that that had more points of view, but also just had more humanity in it, too. I love that. And I appreciated how you did that in your book, that it really is about the people, that each chapter is a different perspective. That's that's the kind of history I like to read. And that's that's the only kind of history I know how to write. That the people are always our most interesting subject. And the expedition brings so many different people together. Um, so so when I structured the book, this was actually the second time I read the journals because like I had to do it once for proof of concept and make sure, okay, we have a new enough new stuff to do here. And then the second time, I was like, well, could I do this kind of rotating points of view? So chapter one is a Lewis chapter. It starts with the the scene that you did you read so well about Pittsburgh and all that. And then chapter two switches to York's point of view. And I only had one line in the journals, which was the the whipsaw. So I knew that that was going to be in there. And then a little bit later on, we know that York went to a ball in St. Louis with Clark. But by really paying attention to the people, by reading lots of slave narratives from other people who'd been enslaved in Kentucky, by taking what we do about Clark's life and sort of Clark and York grew up together in many ways. So instead of sort of rehashing Clark's life story, which everybody knows who reads these kinds of books or knows the rough outlines of, I sort of made that York story. And so, you know, when the Clark family moves from Virginia to Kentucky, well, what did that feel like to York, who didn't really have a choice? And so using those different rotating points of view hopefully made the story feel fresh in some places, but it also just made me notice things, like the whipsaw and like a bunch of other examples where when you, you know, when you're writing from Sakawe's point of view, you're going to notice things that you wouldn't necessarily. Um, and and I think that just allowed me to get at that human perspective as best I could. You know, sometimes with political history, especially, we almost forget that there are people on the ground, like real people living these stories day to day. And with something like the Lewis and Clark expedition, a lot of times uh what I see is sort of the big political aims of it. Like, here we go. This is a big thing for this new country and all of that. And that is certainly true. But what I appreciate is your on the ground perspective of how difficult it was and just very humanizing for all of these individuals. Well, I I really appreciate appreciate you saying that. And probably the best example of this is a guy named John Ordway. He I don't I don't think I could pick a favorite out of the 10 people whose points of view I write from, because I I've found things to love about all of them. But I guess if I had to, it would be Ordway. And he was a working class soldier, he was one of those people who really had no options in life, so he's gonna end up as a soldier because he doesn't have better options. But his experience of the expedition was so different than Lewis and Clark's. Lewis and Clark sacrificed a lot, but they were wealthy landowners and military officers. Ordway had nothing, and so when it was time to get in that cold river and push and pull, he was the one doing it. But since he was a sergeant, he was also having to kind of control these rowdy middle school-like men. And so he his his version of the expedition was a lot different than Lewis's and Clark's, but also he, you know, he was somebody who didn't have land. So going up the Missouri, seeing this rich farmland all around him, knowing that part of the reward, if they made it back, promised by the president would be some of that land for himself. His understanding of the expedition was also really different, too. So I tried to get all these different perspectives and like you said, just kind of keep the human beings front and center. I love it. Well, let's uh now go through some examples from the journals. We can go in chronological order if you want, or we can go sure. Um, well, so uh you sent them to me, not quite in chronological order, but perhaps it's more of a thematic order. Yeah, well, the first example I sent you was the whipsaw one with with just to see with York, and we kind of talked about that. Um, so we could we could talk Lewis in nature writing, but if you want like the best representative one, it would be the the Clark one there on July 12th. So we can do whatever order you want. Um either either way is fine.

Clark’s Landscape Writing And The Mounds

20:19

Okay. Do you want me to read the the Clark one? Read a little bit at least, yes. Yeah, sure. Um, let me find a good spot here. Okay. Um, so he's gonna talk about a perot, which is one of the smaller boats they had in addition to the barge. This is from the first year. Here I got out of the perot after going to several small mounds in a level plain. I ascended a hill on the lower side. On this hill, several artificial mounds were raised. From the top of the highest of these mounds, I had an extensive view of the surrounding plains, which afforded one of the most beautiful prospects I ever beheld. Under me, a beautiful river of clear water of about 80 yards wide, meandering through, a level and extensive meadow as far as I could see, the prospect much enlivened by fine trees and shrubs, which were bordering the bank of the river, and the creek and runs falling into it. So then he goes on and talks about some of the fruits, the wild cherries, all the different things that he sees, and then he comes back to these mounds, which this is Clark again, and he's talking they they see these native mounds um throughout. We can talk about that more in a second, but here his is his kind of final observation. I observed artificial mounds, or as I may most justly term graves, which to me is a strong indication of this country being once thickly settled. The Indians in the Missouri keep still keep up the custom of burying the dead on high ground. After a ramber ramble of about two miles, I returned to the Perot and descended down the river. So this is sort of Clark going on a side mission and describing the scenery, and we're not quite fully in the kind of Great Plains, but but it's starting to start to be a lot more open, let fewer trees, fewer bushes, and so they the men are constantly. Astonished by what they see. Um, on the way back, once Lewis had sort of seen the Pacific Ocean, he uh he on obviously or sorry, he often describes this landscape as looking like an ocean, just with like the plains opening up. But I I love this passage, first of all, just because that this is the journals at their best. Just great nature writing, great descriptions, great. Um you can sort of see what they see and feel what they feel and that sort of natural beauty. And in a lot of these places, you can still go visit it yourselves, which is I think one reason so many Americans love the expedition, that you can sort of see it and then read their writing and sort of it feels like time travel in the best way. But it's also cool to focus in on that idea of the artificial mounds. Um, and this takes a little bit of context, but during this time period, you know, uh Americans and Europeans were aware of these artificial mounds. There would be sketches of them reproduced and things like that. But a lot of intellectuals believed that they they revealed that there was some kind of lost race of people that had built them because they didn't think native people were sophisticated enough to build these huge earthworks. So that was sort of the default view. But Clark didn't agree with that. And and Clark worked very much in the Enlightenment Jefferson notes in the state of Virginia tradition, where he was just going to go out there, make observations, and then try to make sense of those observations. And so by talking to Native people and observing their practices and also seeing their kind of um state capacity, I guess would be the phrase we'd use today, their ability to construct things and do things, Clark believed that those were built by the native people who still live there. And that was that was an idea that, you know, a lot of elites would not have agreed with. But Clark based it on his research, and today we know that Clark was right. Um, so I just think it's it's cool to see that in one entry, you have both these beautiful natural descriptions, but then you also have Clark as sort of ethnographer and scientist. And um, it's all just filtered through one consciousness. You're just getting one person's perspective and one person's attempt to sort of make sense of all this beautiful stuff that in many cases he was the first American ever to see it. That is striking.

Native Power Politics And Humor

23:58

And of course, it brings us into the whole baggage of um interactions that they had throughout the expedition with Native Americans. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. This is definitely, I think, when when I talked about we only know half the story, this is largely what I mean. Um, so in in my book, I have the different perspectives, and there's 10 people who get at least one chapter from their perspective. Half those people are native. And I think this is really the biggest takeaway from the book for me is that the Lewis and Clark expedition was never just an American story. It was also a native story. And it's really important to understand that two-way dynamic. That's honestly true for much of American history. And scholars have been doing a good job of sort of reevaluating this and understanding not just that America shaped Native people, but also that Native people shaped Americans too. Um, a great example is a historian named Ned Blackhawk who's talked about how Native people and their demands helped shape the Constitution as it was being written and framed. So that dynamic is we're getting a better grasp of that. But sometimes in this sort of page-turning popular history, that's the last thing to catch up. So I really tried in my book to show that Native people were just as strategic, just as interesting. You know, we talk about human beings and how interesting they are. That's definitely true of Sacagawea or Black Buffalo, who was a Lakota leader who's an important part of my book. And so I tried to capture their perspective. And Jefferson told Lewis and Clark, I want you to make a friendly impression. And that was partly because that fit with Jefferson's Enlightenment ideas, but it was also just kind of the reality of power on the ground, because, you know, when Lewis and Clark spent their first winter during the expedition at Fort Mandon in what is now North Dakota, the native towns around them had a population of about 5,000 people. So St. Louis was only about a thousand people. Even Washington, D.C. was only about 3,000 people. So it on the Missouri River in 1804, native people held held the power. They were the ones in charge. And so Jefferson wanted to make friendly impressions on them, but he also wanted to learn about them. And Jefferson was always looking to the future and thinking, you know, how how are we going to acquire land someday? I hope Americans will live here. And so that's the Jefferson point of view, which I do think we know. But, you know, the Native people already lived there. They loved the Missouri River too. They loved their lands, they had their own preexisting concerns. And so when Lewis and Clark show up, it's it's unusual. It's they've never met a party of white people this large before. But it's not like the Native people just acted out of fear. They had no reason to be afraid because they had the power. Instead, they thought, well, how can this benefit us? How can we negotiate with these people, play the Americans off the Spanish, or or use the Americans to settle an internal rivalry among the Lakota? And so I really tried to capture that dynamic because in this time period, the Native people really did have the upper hand, and Lewis and Clark and Jefferson knew that. And it almost brings comic relief to this when they show up and almost immediately they always tell people, it's like, come to come to Washington. The president would love to meet you. It's basically like issue and these party invitations. Um Yeah, no, it's it's amazing. It's it's you know, if Lewis and Clark are a great road trip, as you have written, I mean, the a lot of these native people went on great road trips too. And and one of the chapters, I talk about this guy named Biahito, who was an Erica leader, and he traveled from his town, which was in what's now South Dakota, all the way to Washington, DC to meet with Jefferson. So that's more than 2,500 miles. And Jefferson was, you know, he when he talked to the native people at the White House, he would say, you know, we're exploring your land. We want you to explore our our land too. This is a way for us all to learn about each other. And Bi Hito was such a smart guy. He, by some accounts, he could speak 12 or 13 languages and he was very funny. You can just tell his sense of humor. One of my one of my favorite things in the journals, and and I'm gonna add this to my definition of a classic. I feel like classics need to be funny because it just like oftentimes they're so serious, which is important and so dark. But if you can't leaven that with some humor, I think they just don't work as a reading experience. So the Lewis and Clark journals are very funny, but often the humor comes from the native people. And so when Lewis and Clark are trying to convince the Erica to go on these sort of big X uh delegations that you're talking about, um, all of the leaders are like, Yeah, we'll go we'll go to Washington. That sounds great. But Biojito was the only one who actually went. And when he was talking to Lewis and Clark, he was talking about the other leaders saying, Oh, yeah, we'll go, we'll go. And Bihito said, you know, maybe they're telling you the truth, he said to Lewis and Clark, the way you tell the truth to a child. And it was very much that idea of, like, you know, you you tell a child what they need to hear sometimes, but you understand that like reality will will persuade them. And so that sort of idea of the native people kind of, oh, these captains are so earnest and cute. We'll we'll tell them that we see their ideas are great, but we all know what's really going to happen. Bihito saw that and and was willing to tease Lewis and Clark about that a little bit. So yeah, the the delegations are fascinating and and we can know a lot about them because newspapers were reporting on this constantly. These delegations were sort of viral news at the time. But Biogito even made this beautiful map. It's one of the end papers in my book to capture his his map of the Missouri and his meetings with Lewis and Clark. So we have a lot of documentation of this too. You just have to take the time to look. Beeson Divinity School, an evangelical seminary at Sanford University in Birmingham, Alabama, offers a robust Master of Divinity, forming students in person in a community-oriented model of theological education. Thanks to a generous gift, Beeson continues to offer full tuition scholarships for students beginning their studies in fall 2026, making its flagship degree more affordable than ever before. These scholarships cover the costs of tuition and fees for three years, the average time it takes to finish the MDiv. Apply today at BiesonDivinity.com. I love it. So

New Archives And How Historians Work

29:48

at the risk of getting sidetracked for a second, can you walk us through the kind of sources you were able to find? Because it seems like you found a lot of archival material, some of which no one has ever used. That's yeah, that's true. Um, so it it did always start with the journals, um, because they're just such a like I I'm not sure that there's a text that rich for something like this anywhere else in American history. It's I feel really fortunate to have that. But then I did have to supplement it, the same way somebody writing about Moby Dick is gonna supplement it with Melville's letters and things like that. And so I, you know, there have been a lot of books written about Lewis and Clark, and Lewis and Clark left behind papers, some of the soldiers left behind papers. You'll some of my favorite details came from a novelist named Emora Dye, who wrote a novel about Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark in the early 20th century. And so at this point, a lot of the grandchildren from the expedition were still alive, and so she wrote letters, and the grandchildren would write letters back. And those are all at the Oregon Historical Society, which thank goodness somebody saved them because there are so many human details, like uh one of the soldiers coming, you know, in his old age, seeing somebody drop a few grains on the ground and picking them up just because you still have that mindset of having been hungry and never knowing where your next meal is going to come from, that you're still gonna treat food like that, even when you're in old age and living a pretty bountiful life. So there were there were sort of supplementary archives like that. I found um Clark's College Notebook, and nobody else had even known that Clark went to college, but I I found this autobiography written by a Clark family friend that talked about Clark going to college, and then that helped me see this notebook that was sitting in an archive was actually his kind of college homework, basically. And that really helped with the with like the native mouths. Like uh people often focus on Lewis as the brainy one, and Lewis was a was a brilliant guy, but Clark was smart too, and Clark was kind of steeped in these same enlightenment ideas. Um, probably the biggest thing I found was an interview uh with Wolfkaf, who was a Blackfoot man, and he actually was there and met with Lewis during an encounter that turned into a battle. That was the word Wolkaf used. But we always had Lewis's point of view. We had the journals, but what I was able to find through this interview is we have Wolkaft's point of view too. And in the back of my book, I just printed these side by side because I know when my kids are in school, their teachers are always like, show your work. And I think that's a really admirable impulse. So I can't, I couldn't do that for every decision I made in this book because that then we would have had end notes that were longer than the book themselves. But I did on this this Blackfoot encounter because I had this new text, I just had an appendix where I'm like, you know, here's how I interpreted this moment. Here's Lewis's journal entry for you to read, here's Wolfcast's interview for you to read. And I tried to show readers exactly how I made my interpretations, but also hoping that they might make their own interpretations too. So I I found a lot of new stuff. I tried to share some of it and then cite all of it that I could because, you know, history is a is a conversation. And I'm I'm excited to see what people come up with about this uh this expedition next. That's exciting. The the thought of history is a conversation. And it's still, you know, when you think about how young America is, it's a conversation that's still pretty uh close to our own time. Yeah, it's um it's it's wild to think that, you know, 200 years feels so long, but if you if you map it out by generations, you know, it's not that far back. And especially if you look at, you know, Milton or Chaucer or something like that, the English literature I love, it's you know, we're we're still we're still babies over here. And that that's really exciting. It is exciting.

Lewis’s Science Writing And His Mind

33:19

Well, let's get back to the journals now and talk about uh we can talk about the May 27, 1806 entry from Lewis. Yeah. Yeah. So this is we're talking about Lewis as the brainy one, and this is an ex an example of uh of him and his nature writing. He described um hundreds of new plants and animals that were were new to to science, new to the enlightenment kind of thinkers. And he he just wrote such vivid descriptions. And this one, I picked this one first of all, I think it's great. It's of a woodpecker, but also there's a wonderful picture of a of the woodpecker they brought back. Lewis would often taxidermy and preserve them, and this woodpecker is now at Harvard. So I was able to get an image of it. And so when we talk about the colors, you'll see how vividly Lewis writes about colors in my book. You can see a picture of the color. And and this was part of my research too. I I think even though I'm a words person, I think maps and images are often the best containers of information. So I really tried to pay attention to that. So this is Lewis talking about um a woodpecker, and I'm just gonna have to go part of it because Lewis can really he really stacks up the sentences on animals. The neck and as low as the croup in front is of an iron gray. The belly and breast is a curious mixture of white and blood red, which has much the appearance of having been artificially painted or stained of that color. And I just love that. Like it's this red is so vibrant that it looks like it's it's fake. It looks like it's man-made, but it's it's right there in nature. Um, the top of the head, backsides, upper surface of the wings, and tail are black with a gossy tint of green and a certain exposure to the light. The underside of the wings and tail are of a suity black. It has ten feathers in the tail, sharply pointed, and those in the center rather longest, being two and a half inches in length. The tongue is barbed, pointed, and of an elastic, cartilaginous uh substance. The eye is moderately large, purple black, and the iris of a dark yellowish brown. So from there he goes on to describe the bird in motion and in other parts of the bird. It's it's he really has a fanatical amount of detail. But, you know, I would stack this up with uh, you know, John McPhee and Andy Dillard and some of our great nature writers. And and I think it really tells you something about Lewis, too, because he was so good at paying attention. And I also think that that was sort of how he showed his love. He cared a lot about animals, he cared a lot about this expedition, and he could also be a very volatile person. We can we can talk about his personality if you want, but the moments where I feel like he is most calm and most himself is when he's describing a woodpecker or when he's describing a shrub or something like that. And you can see why Jefferson picked him. You know, Jefferson could have picked an actual scientist, um, but I think Jefferson knew that Lewis was a tough soldier, but he also saw in Lewis the sort of raw talent to do the science stuff. And I think Jefferson thought it was easier to make a soldier into a scientist than the other way around. He was probably right in making that call. I think you're right. But let's talk about his personality because he was a pretty complicated guy, and sometimes it seems like he got along better with the animals than the humans. I think so, and I I think he knew that. One person we should mention in terms of the the great great characters in this in this expedition is Siemen, Lewis's dog, who is in Newfoundland and um was there along the entire expedition, saved their lives a couple times, um, but was also just a great dog. So if you're a dog lover, that's another reason this is an American classic. Um, but it's Lewis is a difficult person to write about. And some people, when they write about him, will reach for modern diagnostic categories and say, oh, we had bipolar disorder or complex PTSD. I don't really like that approach as a historian. I think there are obviously neurochemical causes that have been constant throughout human history, but I also think once we understand something and name something, it changes the way we experience those neurochemical causes. So I tried really hard in this book to keep us in 1804. My goals writing this book were I want to put you in the canoe. I want it to feel really tactile and visceral, but I also want to keep our minds in this time period. And so try not to bring our present debates and understandings to the past, but try to understand the world the way these 10 people did. And of course, readers are going to notice connections. I noticed connections too. But my goal was not to not to lead with that or not to foreground that. So Jefferson, they spent a couple of years together in the White House when Lewis was his secretary, which is a really important position, kind of like a chief of staff. And Jefferson said that he saw Lewis experiencing sensible depressions of mind. And later on, he talked about Lewis having struggles with addiction and alcoholism, too. So so to me, that's enough. If that Jefferson was there. And if we understand Lewis's mind in terms of depression and and a tendency towards addiction, then that that gets us a lot of the way there to understanding the kind of challenges that he had. But one thing that I think is really cool about Lewis is that, you know, he the way he described that woodpecker, the way he was able to analyze natural things, he would try to analyze his own mind too. And so he didn't have a term like bipolar disorder, but in the journals, he would sometimes write about, you know, I'm really focused on the future and I can't stop worrying about what's what's coming next, or I'm beating myself about something that happened in the past and I can't let it go. Lewis would sort of diagnose those tendencies in himself and then he would remind himself to stand up to them. And he didn't always succeed. I mean, it he killed himself a couple years after the expedition, which is one of the many ways it sort of ended in tragedy. But he did try. And I think that's heroic. And I really tried to bring that out in my account, the fact that he understood that he had certain tendencies, but that he also wasn't just going to give up in the face of them. He was going to try to stand up to them and do the best that he could. And it's striking that Jefferson, even seeing these kind of what we would call red flags, thought he can pull it off. Yeah, I know. And it's it's also striking that when he gets back, Jefferson doesn't give him more support because, you know, the expedition had a mission and it was so physical that there probably wasn't, I mean, we've all had times in our life where we were so focused on something and feeling so much pressure that we kind of have to tamp down our emotions. But but when one of the new things I found was a letter from John Quincy Adams, who was a senator in this time period, and he knew Lewis, they'd had dinner at the White House. And when Lewis got back from the expedition, they sat down for dinner at the White House again. And John Quincy Adams, who's such a great observer, such a great writer, his his diaries could, we could, we could make that an American classic too. But John Quincy Adams in his diaries, and then in this letter I found, said that Lewis looked 15 years older. The expedition had only lasted about three years. John Quincy Adams in a in this letter to his wife said, I didn't even recognize this guy. Like I've had dinner with this guy before and I couldn't even recognize him. So I think that that was a big find for me because that really made concrete what the expedition cost Lewis. And I just don't understand why Jefferson didn't see that too. If John Quincy Adams could see that and understand that, why couldn't Jefferson realize, you know, my friend who's just given so much to his country, he needs more support. But Jefferson was was excited. He wanted to make Lewis the governor of the Louisiana territory. He wanted to use his fame to help America solidify its grip on the West. And so that's what Jefferson did. And I think, you know, the combination of Lewis being so worn down by the expedition, along with his own kind of personal struggles, and then this new job without any support, all those things sort of combined together in a way that's hard to understand for sure, but it certainly is understandable. And Lewis, um, you know, these are the things that led Lewis, I think ultimately to decide that he'd rather be dead than alive. It is really sad. And the expedition definitely had its share of tragedies. So, like, not to spoil the story for um readers completely, but read to the end. Yeah. It's uh it it it it it does, but I it it's sad to, you know, the epilogue of the book is kind of a bummer. I I remember telling my editor, like, this is this is such a bummer, and he's like, Well, what are you gonna do, man? That's what happened. But I I hope when people finish the whole book, they can sort of step back and realize these things ended badly, but these people also experienced something so amazing together. And I think, you know, Clark was somebody who lived a long life and he never stopped thinking about the expedition. He became a very important American uh official and somebody who did a lot to purchase native land. And by some counts, by some measures, Clark was responsible for a third of America's land that by the when he died, like the size of America, a third of it was land that little that William Clark had acquired. So he lived this long, amazing life, had a family, two wives. But there were still times in his life where he would just kind of zone out and think about this expedition because I think for a lot of them, this was, you know, this was the defining moment of their lives. And so even if it ended sadly, it is still beautiful and inspiring that a lot of them got to do this at all. Yeah. So

Portage Misery And Ordway’s Silent Edit

42:11

let's talk now about um one more entry from Clark. And it's really um, it's it's fun that for this particular date, June 30th, 1806, we have entries from both Clark and John Ordway, whom you've mentioned as well as perhaps your favorite character from this expedition. Yeah, so I'll give you a little bit of setup and then I'll read this entry. This is during um what people call the portage. So the Rockies were bad. They had to go across land for about 300 miles, but the portage might have been worse. It was only 20 miles, but they were they were now fully in the Great Plains. So there were no trees where they could make new boats or anything like that. But there were five waterfalls on the Missouri that they didn't really they knew one waterfall was going to be there, but they thought they could just kind of like sneak around it, no big deal. Instead, there were five. So they had to take five boats or they had to take their boats 20 miles around these five waterfalls. And they they built these little wagons with rickety wheels, but they couldn't even do a good job with that because there was no timber to build the wagons. So Ordway in his journal entries said that they were sailing by land. And this was just some of the most brutal work they had to do because they had these heavy canoes, the canoes were full of the cargo that they still needed, and then they would just have to push. They would they would make rope harnesses, put them around their bodies, tie the harnesses to the canoe, and then just kind of crawl and pull and do whatever they could to get these canoes the 20 miles. So this is an entry kind of from the middle of it. I'll read Clark's entry and then I'll talk to you a little bit about John Ordway's entry too. So in the middle of the portage here, Clark, who's not actively involved with the portage, he's kind of in an overseen role and making maps and doing the stuff he's supposed to do. A fair morning, Clark writes. I dispatched the party, except five for the remaining baggage scattered in the plains. Two hunt for meat, one cooks, and so on. So at 10 o'clock, the hunters came in loaded with fat meat, and those dispatched for the baggage. Returned. I set four men to make new wagons, basically, others to take a load across the creek. Um, men complain of being sore this day, dull and lolling about. So, first of all, this entry captures just how much granular detail there is, and that this was a fun thing for me as a writer. Like, you know, I could describe their hunting in detail every day if I wanted to. Now, that I don't think that would be a great book unless you were a hunter, so maybe there should be like a Lewis and Clark and hunting book that somebody does. But for me, I was still trying to tell this like beginning to end narrative and sort of cover everything. So, but but the journals give you that kind of detail every day, which is amazing. But the other thing is because different people are writing with their perspectives, you can kind of get different glimpses of these moments. And so Ordway writes on the same day. And because he's the one who's actually leading the portage, he's the one who's got that rope harness on and is just giving everything he has. He just copies Clark's entry for this day. And sometimes they do that. And and it made sense because you know, if there was a fire or if a canoe tipped over, you would want copies of the journals because that these journals were in some sense the most important part of the expedition itself. But when Ordway copied Clark's entry, he copied it almost verbatim, except this one sentence. Men complain of being sore this day, dull and lollying about. And so this was a chapter when I wrote about the portage, I wanted to write from Ordway's perspective. And I think even though that's a limitation, even though that meant there were some things I couldn't put in, I think it actually ended up being a strength for me because it forced me to really pay attention. You know, if I'm writing a Sacko Jawea chapter, I really need to think about breastfeeding and how she's taking care of her baby, in addition to everything else. With the Ordway chapter, I really wanted to pay attention to the to the men and what they were going through. And so when I noticed that Ordway decided not to copy that sentence from Clark, the men are dull and lulling about. I think that's that that's such an interesting clue to Ordway's mindset. Because, you know, you've got a captain who's not doing the hard work, who's kind of frustrated that the men are complaining. And then you have a sergeant who is doing the hard work, and he must have been, I mean, he must have been furious. You know, it's really easy for Clark to not be doing this work to say, man, the men are really complaining a lot. And the day before, they had been in a hail gotten caught in a hail storm that was so bad that their upper halves were were bloody and bruised. And Ordway thought that some of them were going to die in the hail storm. It was so bad. And so to go through that one day and then see that your officer is complaining, that must have made Ordway furious. But as far as we know from what survived, he didn't, you know, he didn't yell at Clark. He didn't try to lead an insurrection, but he did choose not to copy that sentence. And I think in that way, that's kind of a small sign of Ordway saying, you know, I don't agree with this. This is Clark's version, it is not my version. But at the same time, the men must have been furious too. And so Ordway had to be this buffer. He had to see the captain's point of view, the regular soldiers' point of view, and try to make peace between them. So even in a sentence that doesn't get copied, I think you can get a clue to that sort of human experience. And again, that's that's why the journals are a classic, because they have that kind of richness baked right into them. Yeah, that's uh that's really insightful and so subtle. Yeah, well, I I I if I had not been trying to write from Ordway's point of view, I probably would have missed that. I I don't think anybody else I've seen has ever written about that sentence being omitted. But once you're, you know, when you're trying to write about from somebody's point of view, you have to make every detail count. And so again, because I was because I knew this was a John Ordway chapter, I was I was thinking about John Ordway 24-7, and I think that's why I was able to notice it. That's why the rotating points of view sort of as an as an interpretive um stricture ended up being a strength. Yeah.

Sacagawea Beyond The Myth

47:45

So let's talk briefly about uh one more individual in the expedition who did not leave entries in the journal, and that is Sakagaway. Sure. She's the best. Yeah. She's she's the national parks likes to say that there are more statues of Sacagawea than any other woman in North America. So she she is fully ascended into the realm of myth, but she is also one of those people that the the reality lives up to the myth. So it was such a delight to write about her. Um, but there was some darkness to it too. Um I relied a lot on academic work. Um and it's it's sort of funny. Sometimes academics don't spend that much time on Lewis and Clark. I think they kind of see it as like high school stuff, but they they probably should because a lot of their best research illuminates the expedition and vice versa. So there have been academics who've done really great research on native women being enslaved. And so sometimes native people would enslave them, but often fur traders would do it. So they these would be white fur traders, French or Spanish or British, and they would own young native women. And so those women would have to provide their bodies and their care and their companionship. It was it was a very exploitative relationship. And and Sharbano, the man that owned Sacagawea, he did this entire his entire life. We have stories of him in his 80s owning native teenage girls. It's it's really, it's really gross stuff. And so that was Sacagawea's reality, too. Like uh, you know, if you read most books about Lewis and Clark, they'll talk about, oh, she's the wife of Sharbano. But I don't think that's the right word. I think she was his slave. And this is not me just projecting that scholarship backwards. Clark in an interview actually said, Yes, Sacagawea was a slave. So we know that this term was available and that people could see the world that way in that time period too. And so for a couple of years before the expedition gets here, and remember, these are the years when Sakajawea is 13, 14, 15, still a child essentially. Um, she is captured and and kidnapped from her people. She is enslaved by this man who's three times her age, who beats her, impregnates her. It's a really dark time. But I also think that that makes the myth stuff more inspiring. In a in a weird way, if you understand everything she had to overcome, then when you hear the stories about her being kind of like the plucky tour guide or finding the plants, which are all things that really happened, those are still great stories. But they also don't just reveal her humanity, they reveal her strategy because she realized, you know, I've had a I've had a tough life. I have to take care of not just myself, but an infant now. I would like, if it's possible, to get back to my people. These new captains have showed up there. I've seen them be kind to other Native people and to Native women, especially. So if I make myself indispensable to them, then they will look out for me. So I I believe that Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark liked each other. There's no question about that. But Sacagawea was a survivor and a very canny person and a very strong person. And so she was able to realize that, you know, if I help this expedition, this expedition will help me. And I I really I tried to capture, I interviewed a lot of Shoshone people and asked them details, just, you know, like Sakagewea didn't use diapers. How did she keep her baby clean? How did she give her baby a bath? How did she feed him? And that that was important to me because I don't just want her to be a myth, I want her to be a human being too, because she was. But I also tried to think really hard about her strategy and her ability to sort of see, you know, in this time period, in this place, I have a lot of things stacked against me, but I can still make some choices, I can still have some control. And I tried to show her doing that as much as I could. I appreciated that. To me, those were some of the uh most compelling parts of the book were just the vivid detail of her day-to-day life on this expedition, taking care of an infant. Um, but also taking care of other people. Right. Yeah. I mean, she was she was she was so good at taking care of other people, and in part she was taking care of herself. It was always like she she kind of had an all of the above approach. But I I just give a lot of credit to the Shoshone people I spoke with. You know, anthropologists have interviewed them for more than a hundred years at this point, so there were details there too. But I just, you know, I I my kids were a little older than this. My kids were two and four when I started writing this, but I still remembered, you know, that just the the the repetitiveness, but also the the fact that I got as much out of taking care of them as as you know they got out of being taken care of from that time period. And I remember my wife breastfeeding them, and so I was like, I, you know, human beings have changed a lot over the centuries, but some things have not changed. So I really wanted to get those moments of Sakagawea taking care of her son and taking care of herself. And so I I I had to ask those questions, but then the Shoshone people gave me so many answers, and it was a real honor to be able to put those in the book. Yeah. So there's a mom on a military expedition. I know. I I I often think about that. There's I I tried to put some jokes in the book too, because again, I think humor is important when you're writing about dark stuff. And one of my favorite lines is when I talk about her at Fort Mandon, and I said she made herself, you know, as invisible as a profoundly pregnant woman in a military fort with 45 men possibly could be. Because you know, there's only a couple of women there, and you you can imagine Sakawea, 15 or 16, eighth months pregnant, just sort of trying to stay out of everybody's way and not get in trouble. But you you can't stay out of everybody's way when you know it uh you're that far into your pregnancy, everything hurts, everything's hard, and she's obviously, you know, one of the only women there. It I I just find something kind of inspiring and funny about it. And I I tried to find those human moments wherever I could. Yeah.

The Classic He Wishes He Wrote

53:08

Well, our final question that I always ask what classic do you wish you had written and why? Um I think I'm gonna go with Melville. The question is just what Melville? And I think I will probably go with Bartleby the Scrivener. Um because it's funny and because it's human, and because I just do not have the ability to write fiction. Like I remember being 18 or 19 and loving these novels and wishing I could write something like that, and they're probably on a hard drive somewhere a couple attempts too, which let's let's hope that's been destroyed. Because I just couldn't do it. I don't know, like I I really feel like different human beings have different strengths, and I I I can do research, and if if I if I have the raw materials, I can fashion them into a story, but I can never just create the raw materials myself. So I most of what I read is not history, it's it's novels and fiction. And I wish I could do it, but I just I I have realized at this point I'm 41. That's not gonna happen for me. So that's okay. The nice thing is I get to read it, and so I've made my peace with it. But boy, I wish I could write something like Bartleby the Scriveter. I wish I could write something that's that funny and that captures the American character and and the American relationship to money in that way, and also just the just the kind of uh soft-spoken stubbornness of I prefer not to. I when we get our next cat, I'm gonna lobby really hard to name it Bartleby because I just feel like that that's that's just such a a cat, a cat approach to the world. But um, but yeah, I I just uh Moby Dick is obviously amazing, but Bartleby might be my favorite thing that Melville has written. And I just I wish I could conjure people in worlds like that. I can't. So I that's what I wish I could have written, just because I know that that's not in my skill set. Well, telling beautiful stories from history is in your skill set, though. Thank you. Well, thank you for saying that, and and thanks for having this conversation. To talk about the journals as a literary text is is a real dream for me. So this has been so much fun. Thank you so much.