Ep. 883: A New History of Lewis and Clark

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with author Craig Fehrman https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/This-Vast-Enterprise/Craig-Fehrman/9781982174248. Topics discussed: Craig's new book, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark This%20Vast%20Enterprise%20A%20New%20History%20of%20Lewis%20&%20Clark; York, Ordway, Black Buffalo, Sacajawea, and other key players on the expedition; Sacajawea's sense of humor; diplomacy and discovery; medical care; views of slavery and Lewis and Clark's different views on it; the abundance of species; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:24Steven Rinella?

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• 1:47Steven Rinella?

  Welcome, everybody. Today, we're going to dig, we're going to dig way in on the Lewis and Clark expedition, which comes up all the time on this show. I don't know if you know, of all the interviews you're going to do, how many interviews have you done so far?

• 1:59Speaker 06

  Too many to count.

• 2:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:00Speaker 06

  But, but we'll, we'll get into it here for sure.

• 2:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay, this is going to be the one. Remember how I was just saying to turn those off?

• 2:07Speaker 06

  It's all good.

• 2:08Steven Rinella?

  This is going to be the one. This is actually important, but I'm not, not as important as Lewis and Clark, not as pressing. The of all the interviews you did, this is gonna be the one where the audience knows most about what you're talking about.

• 2:19Speaker 06

  I love it.

• 2:19Steven Rinella?

  That's a guarantee.

• 2:20Speaker 06

  I believe it.

• 2:21Steven Rinella?

  You go to like the Lewis and Clark Remembrance Association or something.

• 2:26Speaker 06

  Well, see, I have talked to them, so so it'll it'll be a good time.

• 2:29Steven Rinella?

  Next to those suckers, this is gonna be the most informed audience you're gonna talk about. But you got a brand new book out, This Vast Enterprise, and we're joined by Craig Furman, who wrote a book prior that I would be way less inclined to read. But still interesting. Author, his a previous book, Author in Chief, The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote.

• 2:56Steven Rinella?

  But how many books have they written?

• 2:58Speaker 06

  Again, too many to count.

• 3:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 3:01Speaker 06

  I mean, Roosevelt.

• 3:01Steven Rinella?

  Pick which ones you wanted to talk about.

• 3:03Speaker 06

  I picked the ones that were interesting. So with Teddy Roosevelt, you know, would focus on his outdoor writing, his great nature writing, and then focus on when he wrote about the War of 1812 from like a naval perspective. Because that book is still important to historians today, even though Teddy Roosevelt wrote it when he was at Harvard as a student.

• 3:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 3:19Speaker 06

  So I would just pick the pick the presidents that were most interesting, pick the books that were most interesting. And then that book sort of also told the history of communication. Like when I was writing about Reagan, I was also writing about the rise of like Walden Books and how bookstores and malls changed the kinds of books people wrote. And so Jimmy Carter wrote a bunch of books, but.

• 3:35Steven Rinella?

  A lot of books.

• 3:36Speaker 06

  But unfortunately, he's only like a couple paragraphs in my book because he was operating in the same world as Reagan. So like with Carter, he was one of the first people to use a word processor. You know, he would have like these floppy disks that could hold 12 pages on it, and he had to pay thousands of dollars to bring this giant microwave sized word processor into his house. So unfortunately for Mr. Carter, I only focused on the word processor, not the books, but I wanted it to be a good story.

• 3:59Steven Rinella?

  Who's your favorite president?

• 4:00Speaker 06

  Lincoln.

• 4:01Steven Rinella?

  Lincoln?

• 4:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm from Indiana. What else am I gonna say?

• 4:04Steven Rinella?

  Oh, man. I thought he's like Landa Lincoln's Illinois.

• 4:07Speaker 06

  Well, there's the Midwest fights over him quite tenaciously.

• 4:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, was he born in Indiana?

• 4:12Speaker 06

  He was born in Kentucky, so I'm telling you, it's it's it's tough stuff.

• 4:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'm good. But so why, why do you say Indiana?

• 4:18Speaker 06

  Well, cause he, he has formative years were there. And so like a lot of the stories we think about with Lincoln, like trading in some years of corn to get a copy of a book. And then the book gets waterlogged and he has to work even more to pay off the book. That all happened in Indiana. So.

• 4:32Steven Rinella?

  The big, the big stuff.

• 4:33Speaker 06

  I mean, it's, it's big to me. I.

• 4:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no, that's great. That's great. I like those people that get, um, I like those people to get claimed by a lot of places.

• 4:42Speaker 06

  Right.

• 4:42Steven Rinella?

  There's a lot of them all through time, you know, like, like Aldo Leopold.

• 4:46Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 4:47Steven Rinella?

  He's, he's claimed, like a lot of ways claimed by New Mexico. He's claimed by Wisconsin, Jim Harrison's claimed by Montana, Key West.

• 4:57Speaker 06

  You know, Michigan. Yeah.

• 4:58Steven Rinella?

  Hemingway is claimed by Cuba, Michigan, Illinois.

• 5:04Speaker 06

  Idaho.

• 5:04Steven Rinella?

  Idaho. Yeah. Like these people that really a lot of people want to draw them in.

• 5:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:09Steven Rinella?

  Daniel Boone claimed by Missouri and Kentucky.

• 5:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 5:12Steven Rinella?

  Probably somewhat by North, yeah, some definitely by North Carolina.

• 5:15Speaker 06

  Right.

• 5:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 5:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, it's Sacagawea is the same way. There's different native nations that claim her. And to me, that just speaks to any of these historical figures, like their story is so inspiring and so exciting that it makes sense that a lot of people would see themselves in it.

• 5:29Steven Rinella?

  How long did you work on your Lewis and Clark book?

• 5:31Speaker 06

  Five years.

• 5:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 5:34Steven Rinella?

  Tell me why it's different than other Lewis and Clark books?

• 5:36Speaker 06

  Well, it's, that's a fair question. And when I started out, I wanted to write an adventure story. Like I had done the first book about presidents and the books they wrote, and I think that's a good book. But I just, I think any good writer, when they tackle a new book, they want a new challenge. So I was like, let's get outside. Let's do an adventure story. And so the best adventure story in American history is Lewis and Clark. Of course, the counterpoint here is that there have been a lot of good books written about Lewis and Clark. So I didn't have a deep familiarity with the topic. Like, I remember my dad went on a big motorcycle trip to the West. I bought him a copy of the Lewis and Clark journals because I knew, you know, and so he was like sleeping outside and reading it. And I was reading it. We'd talk about it. So I had like some familiarity, but not a deep familiarity. But I just thought, well, let me look at their journals and we'll, we'll talk about the journals a lot today because they're more than a million words. There is no record like this for any.

• 6:21Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 6:22Speaker 06

  It's, it's true. It's insane.

• 6:23Steven Rinella?

  Just for people's point of reference, how many pages is, is your book?

• 6:26Speaker 06

  It's about 400 pages for the main story.

• 6:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but how many words? Sorry.

• 6:29Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, no. Um, main part of the story is about 140,000 words.

• 6:33Steven Rinella?

  So that's, that's, that's just for people's perspective. That's, that's a heavy book.

• 6:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:38Steven Rinella?

  Like you've probably like, like listeners, you've probably read a lot of books that are 80, 90,000 words.

• 6:42Speaker 06

  For sure.

• 6:43Steven Rinella?

  So here we're talking about the journals are a million words.

• 6:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:45Steven Rinella?

  I never thought about them in a word count sense.

• 6:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, but it's, I mean, I, I, that I think conveys just how detailed they were. And you also have them from different perspectives. So something will happen. You'll see what Lewis and Clark are seeing. But then one of the enlisted soldiers might notice something different. And so that's why it's such an incredible resource. So I read all million words. And what I noticed was that like, I only knew half the story, even as somebody who's a historian, who's like, pretty well informed on these topics. I kept noticing these human details again and again that I didn't realize. So at that point I was like, well, this is, I can, this is worth spending a couple of years on. But then I found more new stuff in the archives. I really thought there's nothing new to find on those.

• 7:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I would imagine that there's no thing. Cause so many historians and writers and just old dudes with a lot of spare time.

• 7:29Speaker 06

  Right.

• 7:29Steven Rinella?

  Have just dug and dug.

• 7:31Speaker 06

  I'm telling you, man, I found, I found so much, I found new stuff about Lewis and Clark, to say nothing of all the other people I read about. I found a lot of new stuff.

• 7:38Steven Rinella?

  New stuff that you haven't seen in other books.

• 7:39Speaker 06

  That's right. You wanna, you wanna example?

• 7:42Steven Rinella?

  Wolf Caff.

• 7:43Speaker 06

  Wolf Caff, that's probably the biggest one. This is an interview with a Blackfoot man named Wolf Caff. And, and one of the two big interactions between Lewis and Clark and native people, one was with the Lakota. And the other was with the Blackfoot on the way back. It was just Lewis. And so we've always had Lewis's journal. And then there's been a letter of a guy named George Bird Grinnell, who your listeners probably know, because you all are so well informed. Where George Bird Grinnell was like, I interviewed this guy who met Lewis and Clark. But in that letter, George Bird Grinnell is like, I might have more from my interview with this guy in my, my notebooks. I'll, let me check. And he never checked. But his notebooks are just sitting there at a, at a library. So I went to his notebooks. Not only did I find the three pages of transcripts from the interview, Grinnell remembered wrong. So Grinnell's version of this guy's interview in the letter is completely different than the actual interview.

• 8:27Speaker 06

  So in my book, in the back, I just print the whole interview, because that's a big document for historians. But I also hope readers read it too. And they can kind of see like, to get Wolf Caff's perspective versus Lewis's perspective. And I print Lewis's journal entries too. So like side by side, you have Lewis's journal entry, you have Wolf Caff's interview. You can see the two different accounts of this episode.

• 8:45Steven Rinella?

  Did, did one, do they contradict on factual matters?

• 8:49Speaker 06

  They do in some ways, but I really found while working on this book that it was rarely about opposition, it was about conversation. So like Wolf Calf says, "We tried to steal the American horses." But everybody else who's written about this said that the Blackfoot people tried to steal the American guns. So there's like a long tradition of horse raids on the plains, that that was kind of a, that's a different thing. But going for guns, obviously that's an escalation.

• 9:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 06

  And so Lewis in his journal entry says, "They went for our guns." But once I read Wolf Calf saying, "Well, actually, all we wanted were the horses." And once I read a bunch of scholarship by people like John Ubers, who like dedicated their whole lives while he worked at the Smithsonian to study in these horse raids, the horse raids were almost never violent. They were focused on horses. So then I went back to Lewis's journal entry and I noticed something that nobody had seen before. And this is like, this is not a discovery because that journal's been there for anybody to find, but you can read things differently. And what was interesting is that Lewis was asleep when things went sideways. So like when they either went for the horses or guns, Lewis, by his own admission, was in a deep sleep. So what you have here is not Lewis's word versus Wolf Calf's word. You have this one enlisted soldier who was probably asleep while on watch, which was a capital crime. You have his word against Wolf Calf's word. And the American soldier

• 9:57Speaker 06

  had every reason to play up the violence of the native people because he screwed up. He's the one who fell asleep. He let this happen. He's the one who his brother ended up killing one of the native people in the, in the battle that followed. So for the American guy, like these two brothers are the ones who tell the story to Lewis after the fact. And they have every incentive to make it seem as scary as possible because they're the ones who let it happen. And they, you know, and so in my book, I try to hedge here carefully. And I try to say, you know, I, I, I think Wolf Calf was right. I think his version makes more sense, but I'm not going to say that his version is completely right because we'll never know. But I think what's cool in my book is you can get both versions and kind of lay them side by side.

• 10:34Steven Rinella?

  Do me a favor real quick.

• 10:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:37Steven Rinella?

  Or however long you want to do it for. For people that, I was just talking up how people know this story real well. Let's just say they don't.

• 10:43Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 10:44Steven Rinella?

  Do you mind laying out in a way that entertains me and Randall?

• 10:49Speaker 06

  What?

• 10:51Steven Rinella?

  What do we mean when we say the Lewis and Clark expedition?

• 10:54Speaker 06

  Sure. So let's, you could start it in Washington DC with like Thomas Jefferson's political stuff. That's all new in my book too, but I'll try to keep it more entertaining. So let's start near St. Louis. So, spring of 1804, they leave near St. Louis. They go up the Missouri River. They, Jefferson thinks that the Missouri River and the Columbia River basically touch. That was sort of the like default idea in this time period. So the idea is they're going to go up the Missouri River, hop over this, a mountain or two, because the Rockies aren't that much to deal with. Then go down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. And so they want to find this water route because it's good for traders, but it's also good. Jefferson is already thinking about the future because Jefferson always thought about the future. So he's thinking about like traders today, farmers tomorrow. And so Lewis and Clark go up the Missouri in 1804.

• 11:36Speaker 06

  They, they make their first winter quarters in, in what's now North Dakota at Fort Mandan. And then in 1805, they keep going along the Missouri. They find out that the Rocky Mountains are the Rocky Mountains. And so they get through that, go down the tributaries and the Columbia River and get to the Pacific Ocean. Spend another winter there on the Pacific coast. And then in the last year, 1806, come back to St. Louis and then to Washington.

• 11:58Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:59Speaker 06

  Eight thousand miles.

• 12:00Steven Rinella?

  And just to go back one step, previous to that, or like sort of an initiating

• 12:06Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 12:06Steven Rinella?

  instance is kind of lay out the national picture with Louisiana Purchase and Manifest Destiny.

• 12:13Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 12:13Steven Rinella?

  All that kind of good stuff.

• 12:14Speaker 06

  People love to bring up the Louisiana Purchase and, and it does become important. But Jefferson had been working on the expedition way before the Louisiana Purchase.

• 12:21Steven Rinella?

  Is that right? He would have gone and done it anyway.

• 12:22Speaker 06

  He was trying to do it in 1783. He asked William Clark's older brother, George Rogers Clark, to lead this expedition.

• 12:27Steven Rinella?

  That guy was badass.

• 12:28Speaker 06

  He was, he was, but he would not do it because he thought he's like, America screwed me over. They haven't paid me enough for all the fighting I did. So no, I'm not leading your expedition.

• 12:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Speaker 06

  So 30 years later, Jefferson works it out with Lewis. Lewis brings on George Rogers's baby brother, William. But yeah, Jefferson was always thinking about land. And, and that's one thing that's new in my book is I found all these small details where you can see Lewis and Clark are talking in political terms. Like there, there's this idea of the right of soil, like native people. What like do they, who claims the land and who do we negotiate with to buy it? And when Lewis deals With a grizzly bear, he says that the grizzly bear was quote tenacious of the rite of soil. Which A, that's just a great joke. Like Lewis is a funny guy, but that's also like a term that could have been used in the White House. So you can see that Lewis and Clark are always thinking about land, who owns it, where America's going to go next.

• 13:16Speaker 06

  And this is, this all started before the Louisiana Purchase. The Louisiana Purchase was like a happy accident that supercharged it.

• 13:21Steven Rinella?

  So what, like, what was his, what was his deal? If they hadn't have done the, if they hadn't bought the land, he was just gonna send guys out and have them duke it out with this, have them duke it out with the Spanish or what?

• 13:31Speaker 06

  Well, first of all, the Louisiana Purchase didn't cover the whole route. So the Pacific Northwest, like.

• 13:36Steven Rinella?

  I mean, the, kind of the big chunk of it.

• 13:38Speaker 06

  Well, but I mean, they were really interested in the Pacific Northwest. Like out there, you had like Russian ships, British ships, Spanish ships, French ships, American ships, all circling on that coast. So a part of it was getting out there, like different ships had gone there, but having, but going the route by land offered you a different claim. All these empires had this, there's this idea called the law of nations. And so there are all these rules and sort of theoretical debates. The native people were just like, we don't really care about theoretical debates. There are more of us than there are of you in this time period. But Jefferson was thinking about how do we like advance America's legal claims? And so sending Lewis and Clark would help in the Pacific Northwest. And they were already eyeing the Louisiana, the area that would become the Louisiana Purchase. Like Jefferson's Secretary of Treasury, Gallatin, whose name we see all over the place here.

• 14:21Speaker 06

  Gallatin said, you know, and when they were planning out the expedition, he's like, the Missouri country is of particular interest to us. Cause that's the first place Americans are gonna go. So there's no question that Gallatin, Jefferson, Lewis, Clark, they were thinking in the, in these terms.

• 14:35Steven Rinella?

  Huh. That, that's something I hadn't, that's something I hadn't realized that he would have gone ahead and done that anyway.

• 14:40Speaker 06

  Oh yeah. They would have just like, the Spanish were not intimidating. So like British traders had been sneaking past them for decades. And so Jefferson thought the American, like he tried to get passports and like dot his I's and cross his T's. But he knew at the end of the day, Lewis and Clark could just sneak by them and keep going.

• 14:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like so hard to find somebody.

• 14:56Speaker 06

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

• 15:27Steven Rinella?

  Well, what, uh, I don't want to spend too much time on this, but

• 15:31Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 15:31Steven Rinella?

  What, uh,

• 15:34Steven Rinella?

  what part after the purchase, what part were they, what were they, what were the Spanish imagining as the, the line? Like, what were they imagining that they, they don't want the Americans to do what?

• 15:49Speaker 06

  Right. Well, the thing is the lines were up for debate.

• 15:52Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 15:52Speaker 06

  Like the Louisiana Purchase happened, but nobody knew what the Louisiana Purchase meant. That's one reason Lewis and Clark were important because they were going to get latitude and longitude readings and bring back enlightenment science to, to adjudicate this. But like, one of the reasons that Lewis ends up meeting with the Blackfoot people is that Jefferson was like, no side missions. Just focus on the rivers, just get there and back. But once Lewis realized the Rocky Mountains are here, I'm not going to be able to find this river route that the president wants. Cause Lewis and Jefferson were very close. And so this is, this was not just about doing a good job. This, there was something personal to this relationship. And so on the way back, Lewis is like, I'm gonna do a side mission. I'm gonna disobey the president because if I can go, if I can find that this river goes far enough north, then the Louisiana Purchase is actually going to be hundreds of thousands of miles bigger. And so he goes up there trying to get that reading. The clouds don't cooperate, so he can't get the reading.

• 16:37Speaker 06

  Then he runs into the Blackfoot people and has this huge blow up that, that impacts relations between the Blackfoot and the Americans for decades to come, which that's how history works, right? Like you think you're going to do something and then something else happens. Sometimes it's amazing. Sometimes it's a battle where a person dies.

• 16:52Steven Rinella?

  No. You, you, in, in the book, you, you kind of take a perspective of, you set out a mission to really get into these personalities.

• 17:03Speaker 06

  Right.

• 17:05Steven Rinella?

  You know, like, sort of set, you know, the national motivation or Jefferson's motivation, but you sort of get into what are like the people motivated by.

• 17:15Speaker 06

  Right.

• 17:16Steven Rinella?

  Which, which is like, uh,

• 17:20Steven Rinella?

  If if anybody sits and imagines a uh if you imagine a world war, how like generally World War II movies work. Right about a squad or whatever, you know.

• 17:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:33Steven Rinella?

  Platoon, whatever it is.

• 17:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 17:34Steven Rinella?

  It's like you know, all the like geopolitical things going on. But in time, they, you know, the the object of the movie is what made.

• 17:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 17:45Steven Rinella?

  Captain Thompson join and what are his fears and anxieties, you know, like people are very familiar with this format, but no one's taking that approach here.

• 17:54Speaker 06

  Right, exactly. So I like in my book. You've got, you know, Jefferson is like the Churchill, right? Like that's the national motivation for going to do the World War II analogy. But my book is almost all at the platoon level. I like what I always tell people is I tried as a writer to put you in the canoe. But I think it's really important to to put you in different canoes because like even Lewis and Clark, best friends, both grew up in the same state. Both in the army, they had really different views about some issues. And so I felt like my job was to really show what each person saw. So the book. If anybody's read Game of Thrones, you know how like the chapters rotate in points of view, like one chapter, you're going to get a king's point of view. And the next chapter, you're going to get like a knight's point of view, that kind of thing.

• 18:31Steven Rinella?

  Not familiar, but I believe you.

• 18:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it.

• 18:35Speaker 06

  Well. I've got your back, Craig. All right, all right. I could have cited As I Lay Dying, maybe that would have been the better move.

• 18:43Speaker 06

  A lot of books do this rotating point of view, but not many history books do. And so that that's what you're talking about, that kind of platoon perspective. So chapter one is from Lewis's point of view. Chapter two moves to the perspective of York, who was the enslaved guy who Clark brought along. He was on this entire expedition too. And so I still try to hit like the greatest hits like we've still got the rapids, we've still got the Rockies, we've still got the 8,000 miles. But I really wanted to show what this felt like to individual people. Because I think human beings are always the most interesting subject. And so I just really tried to capture for Lewis, for Clark. One of my favorite people in this book is a guy named John Ordway, who's like a working class sergeant. And you want to talk about platoon level dynamics? You've got Lewis and Clark like trying to keep Jefferson happy. You've got these enlisted soldiers who can kind of be a pain in the ass.

• 19:26Speaker 06

  And you've got Ordway stuck in the middle, trying to navigate all this stuff. So when I'm writing his chapters, I'm really trying to dig into those kind of soldierly dynamics. And I do that in all the chapters that kind of rotate points of view. And and I just hope it makes the book feel more human. And, you know, when I said, why write this, like, this is the reason I wrote this because I felt like I could tell like the other half of the story.

• 19:47Speaker 04

  I think the, one of the chapters that I read is the, the chapter on the, the winter on the Oregon coast.

• 19:56Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  And it's told from the perspective of.

• 19:58Speaker 06

  Cobway.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  And he, he's, he's a Klatsepp leader.

• 20:02Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 20:03Speaker 04

  And I feel like, I've read a lot of Lewis and Clark stuff that, that um, moment in the story is sort of like downtime.

• 20:15Speaker 06

  Right.

• 20:15Speaker 04

  In a lot of these narratives.

• 20:16Speaker 06

  Right.

• 20:16Speaker 04

  And it's kind of like they waited out the winter. It was pretty miserable, whatever. But I gained a totally new perspective on that moment because it's, the story's told from the perspective of someone who sort of, these guys have showed up. It's like a, he's an, he's an older guy.

• 20:35Speaker 06

  Right.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  This is kind of a blip on his radar of his whole life.

• 20:38Speaker 06

  Right.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  And he's thinking about how to make it advantageous for his people, but these guys just keep shooting elk.

• 20:46Speaker 06

  They over hunt.

• 20:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, they, they keep shooting elk and he's like noticing little details like they're, they're um, they've been picking away at some of the boards, the, the roof boards.

• 20:57Speaker 06

  Right.

• 20:57Speaker 04

  From the Klatsepp lodges. And it's like, all of a sudden that winter isn't just this gray dull waiting period.

• 21:06Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  It's like really active and, and there's all these maneuverings and even the trade, like their, their disinterest in trade. So I don't, if you want to tell that story better than I can, like, that was one example for me where it was just like, oh, this is, this could have, I, I would skip over that part.

• 21:23Speaker 06

  Right.

• 21:23Speaker 04

  In my, in my read, in my like elevator pitch retelling of Lewis and Clark.

• 21:27Speaker 06

  Right.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  But all of a sudden it became very interesting to me.

• 21:30Speaker 06

  Well, I, I really appreciate you saying that because I, I definitely, as a writer, I'm always thinking about like keeping this, keeping the pages turning, right? So like, if I had just done Lewis and Clark's perspective, or even York's perspective, or Ordway's perspective, that's like the third winter quarters they built at that point. So I'm like, how many ways can I talk about them chopping down logs and building huts? You know? So that's why that was the perfect spot to move to the native guys' point of view. And so I did a lot of research on these native people's points of view and what mattered to them. And Cobway and the Klatsepp. They were incredible traders. Like, when I think of Cobway, I think he should have been on Shark Tank. And I don't mean as like, one of the people pitching the show. I mean, as one of the Sharks. Because he was a brilliant trader. Because we mentioned all those ships coming in, they wanted otter skins. But Cobway also had, he was right on the mouth of the Columbia River. So he also had all these native people to the east, who would

• 22:14Speaker 06

  have, you know, starchy grains, or different vegetables to offer. And he was kind of the middleman. So he would buy, you know, whale stuff, whale meat from one person, sell the whale meat to somebody else, make a little more money, buy some more podo from them, sell it to somebody else, get some otter skins. And he was always kind of facilitating all these trades, which meant, he was very powerful, but he was also very knowledgeable. And so, when you think about his point of view, it helps you reframe so many episodes, too. Like, one of the most famous examples from Lewis and Clark is when they vote, right? Like, they're on the Pacific coast, and they're gonna have this vote about, well, you know, where are we gonna put our winter quarters? And they famously let York vote in this, which is amazing. People say they let Sacagawea vote, but that's not quite true. What happened is Sacagawea spoke up. Because like, if you look at Clark's journals, you can see that

• 22:57Speaker 06

  he didn't leave a space for Sacagawea. And then she just like, blurted out, here's what I think we should do. So he had to kind of add her at the bottom, which is, it's a cool detail. But like-

• 23:06Steven Rinella?

  For, for, for people that aren't as familiar, York is a, York is a slave.

• 23:10Speaker 06

  Right.

• 23:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. The only slave on the trip.

• 23:12Speaker 06

  That's right. That's right. And, and there had been lots of votes previous to this, and he, they did not let him have a say. But by the time they got out there, he had done so much work, you know, dealing with rapids, hunting, helping build forts, that they were like, we're gonna give you a say as well.

• 23:27Steven Rinella?

  Is he also the, I want you to keep going on this, but is he also the only person not on payroll?

• 23:32Speaker 06

  Well, here's what-

• 23:33Steven Rinella?

  Or did they put him on payroll?

• 23:34Speaker 06

  Here's what screwed up. He's on payroll, but not in the way you think. Because the army would compensate officers if they brought their slaves. So, the person who got paid for all York's work was Clark. Clark would get seven bucks a month for the, like, the, like, wear and tear on his property. But his property was York.

• 23:49Steven Rinella?

  Did he kick it back to York, or does no one know?

• 23:51Speaker 06

  You know, you know the answer to that.

• 23:52Steven Rinella?

  No, I don't know the answer to that.

• 23:53Speaker 06

  He did not kick it back to York. Because when they got back, York said to Clark, I've, look at all the stuff I've done. I've earned my freedom. And, and Clark said, no, you haven't. And so, he kept York enslaved for another 10 years after the expedition.

• 24:05Steven Rinella?

  What a son of a bitch, man, you know?

• 24:07Speaker 06

  There's a lot of things I like about William Clark, but that is not one of them.

• 24:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 24:11Speaker 06

  So, um, so yeah, this famous vote on the coast, where, again, things to like about William Clark, he and Lewis let York have a vote there. There was foreign interference in that election because the Klatzup and Koboway wanted the Americans to set up camp on their side of the Columbia River because they were like, we can trade with these people. So if you read the journals closely and the journals, those million words, they're always a great source, not just for what the Americans are doing, but for what native people are doing too. You just have to pay attention to the native stuff. Like three times before the vote, Klatzup people go over to the Americans' camp and are like, hey, you know where there's a lot of elk? There's a lot of elk on our side of the river. And they were right, but also that persuaded the Americans to go to their side of the river. Where things went sideways, as you said, is that the Americans killed more than 150 elk that winter. And so the elk would normally, I tracked all

• 24:55Speaker 06

  this stuff really carefully, the elk would normally like spend the winter down by the river and then go back up into the mountains. They would normally stay by the river until May, but by March 1st, the elk were gone because the Americans had hunted them so aggressively. And from the American point of view, they needed elk skins to make moccasins. They needed elk brains to mash into paste to soften the elk skins and they needed to eat. But they hunted so aggressively that they overhunted and that just like only made the dynamics more tense between them and the Klatzup.

• 25:24Steven Rinella?

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• 26:08Steven Rinella?

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• 27:44Steven Rinella?

  Have you found in looking at this, this thing I feel like is, well, I don't know if I think it's true or not, just an observation I've had.

• 27:54Steven Rinella?

  If you went and talked to, how do I put this? Have you found that as you go along the Lewis and Clark trail today,

• 28:03Steven Rinella?

  that people tend to, that the people that live along those places currently tend to pay most attention to what happened near them? Meaning, in Oregon, are they way into the part of the Lewis and Clark story that occurred there? Because it seems to me that, that the stuff that happened along

• 28:28Steven Rinella?

  east of the Rockies, out on the Great Plains, has always seemed to get much more attention, public attention.

• 28:38Steven Rinella?

  Um, but maybe it just feels that way because I live here. But I remember another person that doesn't live here, that was writing about this,

• 28:47Steven Rinella?

  was saying, no, I think it's true. I think that most national attention focuses on the Great Plains. And his theory on it was, because it's the place you can go and you can look and you can be like, I can picture it.

• 29:02Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 29:03Steven Rinella?

  You can go and be like, I can picture what it looked like.

• 29:05Speaker 06

  Right.

• 29:06Steven Rinella?

  Significant changes have happened, but I can picture it. And so that's why he feels that's the way it is. But have, did you find that to be true? Or do you find that like residents today?

• 29:17Steven Rinella?

  You know, out in a story or wherever, or whatever, you know, are very fixated on those parts of the narrative?

• 29:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, we were just talking about Lincoln and how different places have claim to them. And I think Lewis and Clark are absolutely at that level where different people have claimed to it. So people who don't live anywhere near the trail, I do think they picture the Great Plains and the bison and that, that kind of stuff. There's no question about that. Cause then a lot of the Limhi Pass still looks pretty much what it looked like when Lewis and Clark saw it. But I think if you talk to people who live in, in any of these, I mean, if you talk to people in St. Louis, like they just want to talk about Lewis and Clark in St. Louis. I just did a book event there and it was amazing. And there were so many people who could really get into the nitty gritty about their.

• 29:57Steven Rinella?

  Of like what they did there?

• 29:58Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 29:58Steven Rinella?

  Just like buying shit and getting all ready to go.

• 30:00Speaker 06

  Exactly. Or like the near mutinies where the men would get pissed off in the ordway that sergeant I was mentioning, like had to like calm everybody down. So like the St. Louis people, they love the whole story, but they really love their connection to it. And that makes sense to me. I mean, who doesn't like it? This is our national epic. This is such a great adventure story. So who doesn't love to have some kind of personal connection to it? I think that's great. I, I, that's one of the reasons I was excited and a little terrified to write this book.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  I can kind of speak to that too, because I grew up in Vancouver, Washington, and Lewis and Clark was a massive part of our middle school and high school curriculum. And it was all west of the Rockies. It was really heavy on Fort Clatsum. We took multiple field trips to Fort Clatsum, seaside Oregon. Uh, and, and I know, I can tell you almost nothing about the plains.

• 30:39Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 30:39Speaker 06

  Said it in your, in your, in your school version, did Cobway come up?

• 30:43Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 30:44Speaker 06

  Well, there you go. That's what's new about the book.

• 30:47Steven Rinella?

  Before, before we started recording.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  Phil, I'm sorry that I said that was a boring chapter of the story.

• 30:52Steven Rinella?

  That's what I'm like.

• 30:54Speaker 06

  Fuming over here.

• 30:54Steven Rinella?

  Up until today, I always thought it was a boring part of the story.

• 30:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:57Steven Rinella?

  But I'm like, how did I not know about this whole elk hunting deal?

• 31:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 31:00Steven Rinella?

  That's interesting.

• 31:01Speaker 06

  It's all in the journals. You just got to look.

• 31:03Steven Rinella?

  Cause I, I just, you know, people have their myopia and, and whenever.

• 31:09Steven Rinella?

  I don't know. In the work we've done. Mm hmm. We're always talking about them hanging out on the plains. Sure. Buffalo running every which way. Mm hmm. Wolves all running around, grizzly bears attacking everybody. That's right. Like, that's in my mind, it was just a bunch of boring shit. And then they got out there and it kicked, and it kicked ass. Yeah.

• 31:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. They kicked ass the entire time is, is what I would say.

• 31:32Steven Rinella?

  But you know, I, for a while I toyed with this idea that, that I didn't like them because it was big government.

• 31:38Steven Rinella?

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

• 32:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 32:01Steven Rinella?

  Like who would turn up in these places ahead of them. Right. And people don't talk about that that much.

• 32:06Speaker 06

  Well, I think it's important to see it as like a two part story. And if you're interested in an American, as an American story, you have to start with them. Cause all those free buck, free buckling, swashbuckling kind of guys were mostly French or Spanish or British. But Jefferson is kind of contradictory, like many politicians in that, you know, he's, he's a small government guy. But I, I do think Lewis and Clark was big government. One, one of the things I did was really crunch the numbers on how much it cost. And the officials, the official price tag was like $38,000, which is a crazy number today. It doesn't seem like anything, but back then it was a lot of money. And, but that number's wrong. Like, once I went back and like actually checked the numbers and did the work, it was closer to a hundred thousand dollars. So then to try to like, understand what that meant.

• 32:43Steven Rinella?

  Same accountant was just running numbers on the Iran war.

• 32:46Speaker 06

  I think you might be correct. Yeah. We, we can talk about the Missouri River as the new straight or the old Strait of Hormuz. If you're gonna do that too. Um, but, but yeah, so like the hundred thousand dollars, if you look at that as like a percentage of federal spending. Jefferson spent as much on Lewis and Clark as we spend on NASA today. So that's, that's absolutely true. So that's the scope we're talking about. Like when I call the book this vast enterprise, it's not just vast in terms of the territory they cover. It's, it's vast in terms of like the conception, how many people are involved. I'm serious. Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  I also think it's. Go back to not liking it because it's the government.

• 33:21Speaker 06

  Well, give me the rest of the episode. Maybe I can persuade you.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  I I also liked the the one of the, I guess, one of the things that always spins around in my mind when we're talking about the Lewis and Clark expedition is there's obviously two guys and they have a lot of words.

• 33:35Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  But it's a group of like 40 people.

• 33:41Speaker 06

  It fluctuates 30 to 40.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  30 to 40 and they're encountering all these different nations.

• 33:47Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 33:47Speaker 04

  And it's such a sprawling, if you were to, if you were to make, no one's done, no one's pulled off the HBO mini series. Yeah, but if you were to make a Lewis and Clark HBO mini series, you'd need a huge cast of characters, right? And so I think that, like, one of the ways in which your book helps kind of reshape how people think about the story is the emphasis on how many individual lives are intersecting along this trail.

• 34:23Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah. And that's it. It was always an ensemble, like, like the signs on the Lewis and Clark trail. It's just two guys, right? And those brown and white signs on the side of the road and they're wearing the wrong kind of hats. They're wearing like Revolutionary War era hats. If you want to get mad at the government, there's the the National Park Service should maybe do a rework on those signs. But if they get the right hats on them, they should also like, there should be more people in the sign too, because you're exactly right. This was always. And Lewis and Clark knew this, like, this does not take away from Lewis and Clark. This Fast Enterprise is a quote from Clark's letters. So like, they always knew they needed lots of help. I'm just trying to remind people to like, see the story the way the captain saw the story themselves.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  You know, it's, it's interesting that two things that have flummoxed filmmakers

• 35:06Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  will be Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.

• 35:09Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 35:11Steven Rinella?

  In the Lewis and Clark story.

• 35:12Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 35:14Steven Rinella?

  Everybody tries, but no one can do it.

• 35:16Speaker 06

  I know.

• 35:17Steven Rinella?

  People start and then they quit.

• 35:19Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 35:21Steven Rinella?

  But here's, here's my question for you. I kind of teed this up earlier, but I didn't get there. Before we started recording.

• 35:25Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 35:26Steven Rinella?

  You were telling me how Sacagawea was funny.

• 35:31Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 35:31Steven Rinella?

  And I'm like, come on.

• 35:34Steven Rinella?

  But let me, let me tee this up a little bit better.

• 35:36Speaker 06

  Take your time.

• 35:37Steven Rinella?

  Do you, do you ever read when Larry, Larry McMurtry? So the, the, the author of, uh.

• 35:44Speaker 06

  Lonesome Dove.

• 35:45Steven Rinella?

  Lonesome Dove.

• 35:45Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 35:46Steven Rinella?

  Larry McMurtry, uh, he wrote All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, Lonesome Dove. I mean, millions of things.

• 35:51Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 35:53Steven Rinella?

  He wrote a biography of Crazy Horse. Okay.

• 35:57Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 35:58Steven Rinella?

  Many people have done that. Guess how thick Larry McMurtry's biography of Crazy Horse is? It's about like a, as thick as this, this laptop.

• 36:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:08Steven Rinella?

  Screen.

• 36:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:09Steven Rinella?

  You know why? Cause he admits, I mean, right in the beginning of the book, he admits, he's like, really? Honestly, we don't know much. Like, we don't know much. I've read summations.

• 36:24Steven Rinella?

  Here and there, I've read summations of like, what actually is known about Sacagawea?

• 36:31Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 36:32Steven Rinella?

  And, and the thing we, Randall and I call this is in some of our American history works is we do this.

• 36:39Steven Rinella?

  We do this bit of how do we know what we know?

• 36:44Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 36:46Steven Rinella?

  Meaning everybody knows that blank.

• 36:49Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 36:50Steven Rinella?

  Right? But how do we know what we know?

• 36:52Speaker 06

  Right.

• 36:53Steven Rinella?

  And then you kind of dissect where does it come from? And in the process of how do we know what we know, you often find this thing where like, we don't really know that.

• 37:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:02Steven Rinella?

  And we don't know that.

• 37:02Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 37:03Steven Rinella?

  It's like, someone wrote a history, that history informs other historians, and then you build up this mythology.

• 37:10Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 37:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So I've, I've read, I can't even remember where or when, but I read a like, what is actually like, when historians look at Sacagawea's narrative?

• 37:21Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 37:22Steven Rinella?

  What are the sources? What are the actual sentences?

• 37:25Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 37:25Steven Rinella?

  And it's not much.

• 37:26Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 37:28Steven Rinella?

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

• 37:48Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 37:50Steven Rinella?

  Right? So during those years of putting a heavy emphasis on cultural inclusion, she elevated. When, when, there's geographical features all around the American West, Squaw River, Squaw Peak. When they were renaming one of the Squaw Peaks in Montana, Squaw being a derogatory term for a Native American woman.

• 38:17Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 38:18Steven Rinella?

  One of those peaks became, you guessed it, Sacagawea Peak. Right? So she, she has, she's utilized like a tool, sort of, the understanding. So when you said she's funny, I don't think we're in an era of great comics, and so you're trying to make her fit the times. But like, how can you say that? Where are her jokes compiled?

• 38:44Speaker 06

  Sure. No, I'm really glad you asked this because this is a very good question. And just as an aside, the idea of using her as a tool, that's not new either. Like the, there are more statues of Sacagawea than any other woman in North America. And the reason there are so, yeah, the reason there are is because suffragettes used her as a tool. So way back in the early 20th century, they were like, oh, a Native woman who was strong and empowered, we can help use her to help us get the right to vote. So like, this is, this has always been happening.

• 39:08Steven Rinella?

  More than Rosie, more than the fictional Rosie the Riveter.

• 39:11Speaker 06

  Right.

• 39:12Steven Rinella?

  Semi fictional Rosie the Riveter.

• 39:13Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 39:14Steven Rinella?

  More than Betsy Ross.

• 39:15Speaker 06

  I mean, it was all of the above. There's a lot of work to get women the right to vote. But yeah, Sacagawea was one of the tools that they used. But let me answer you in two ways.

• 39:24Steven Rinella?

  Oh, no, I wasn't referring to the suffragettes tool. I was referring to. Like statue figures.

• 39:31Speaker 06

  Right. But yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. She was right. She was. Yeah, there's more. That's National Park Service has that stat. Um, how do I know she was funny? Cause there's a story in the journals from Lewis and from Clark that show that she was funny.

• 39:41Steven Rinella?

  Tell me the story.

• 39:42Speaker 06

  Okay. I'm sorry that we're going back to Fort Clatzen. We're gonna spend this whole podcast.

• 39:46Steven Rinella?

  On the boring part.

• 39:47Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 39:48Steven Rinella?

  On Phil's dumb boring part.

• 39:49Speaker 06

  I know. I, I, I promised the Lakota have a huge part of the book. Like, like there's so many bison, like the, the rest of the stories.

• 39:56Steven Rinella?

  You start with the Lakota.

• 39:57Speaker 06

  It's like Phil.

• 39:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, exactly. So from back there behind his, his warped, uh, workbench.

• 40:02Speaker 06

  I mean, yeah, hats off. Very strategic.

• 40:04Steven Rinella?

  Thank you.

• 40:04Speaker 06

  Um, but when they get out there, they like, they, they can't go see the ocean first because the waves in that part of the Columbia River are so big. Their canoes keep getting swamped. So they like, it's hard for them even to find a place to stay dry. Their clothes are rotting. Their teepees are rotting. It's just, it's, it's a disaster. So they finally figure out what side of the river they're gonna go on. The Clatzen sort of guide them there because the elk and all that. And so then the Clatzen come back and say, hey, there's this huge beached whale that, that washed up on the shore.

• 40:32Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 40:33Speaker 06

  And so everybody's like, cool, let's go see that. And, and a lot of them haven't even gone to see the ocean yet. Even though they're only a few miles from the ocean, the conditions are so tough that they've just been kind of pinned in this camp. And so they're getting ready to go. And everybody is, you know, like the guy who owns Sacagawea or is her husband, depending on how you want to frame it, like he's getting ready to go. A lot of the soldiers are getting ready to go. And Sacagawea, like, nobody says she can go. And so she speaks up. Like, she's like, the phrase from the journals is, it would be very hard if she does not get to go. She's come all this way. And so for her not to get to see the whale in the ocean, that would be very hard. And so I think that's funny. I mean, I think she's like.

• 41:10Steven Rinella?

  Funny.

• 41:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. You don't think it's funny if she's like, if they're like, you gotta stay back here at the camp. And she's like, that's fucked up. I've come all this way too. I'm gonna go see the ocean too. You don't think that's funny?

• 41:18Steven Rinella?

  Are you married?

• 41:19Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 41:21Steven Rinella?

  If you're

• 41:24Steven Rinella?

  So when your wife gets mad at you, you think it's funny?

• 41:26Speaker 06

  Maybe not in the moment, but later on, like the next day when we're good again.

• 41:32Steven Rinella?

  When you realize that you hadn't seen her perspective.

• 41:36Speaker 06

  My wife or Saga Julia?

• 41:37Steven Rinella?

  Your wife, your wife.

• 41:39Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:39Steven Rinella?

  I mean, in hindsight, okay. He's not back to being, okay, I see what you're saying. Well.

• 41:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 41:47Speaker 06

  She, that's, I mean, That's somebody who has a sense of humor.

• 41:50Steven Rinella?

  That's a stretch.

• 41:51Speaker 06

  You don't think that's a funny story? You don't think her, like, I mean,

• 41:54Steven Rinella?

  They're like, hey, we're gonna go check out this whale. She's like, bullshit dude, like, I'm coming.

• 42:00Speaker 06

  That's not funny to you?

• 42:02Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 42:03Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 42:03Steven Rinella?

  That'd be, I'd put that under, um, forceful, admirable, stick it up for your, I mean, unless she had a funny joke.

• 42:13Speaker 06

  Okay. Well, I, I, I feel like at least it's very human and lively.

• 42:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, three people go to look at a whale. One of them says.

• 42:19Speaker 06

  We're called the aristocrats.

• 42:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 42:23Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 42:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Speaker 06

  Well, at the very least, we can disagree on whether or not that's funny. I think when you remember that she's 16 years old.

• 42:30Steven Rinella?

  That's impressive.

• 42:31Speaker 06

  When you remember that her husband would beat her until Clark would step in and say, you can't do that here. When you remember how tough her life was, I just feel like there's a real crackling personality behind that for her to be like, this is not fair.

• 42:44Steven Rinella?

  Tell the story of her, tell, tell the story of her life. And, and I know that this, it's, it's increasingly controversial.

• 42:49Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 42:50Steven Rinella?

  Not increasingly controversial, but

• 42:51Speaker 06

  It is controversial.

• 42:52Steven Rinella?

  Tell the outline of her life. And then if you don't mind, I, I wouldn't mind, um, you touching on some of the, a little bit of the custody battle

• 42:59Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 42:59Steven Rinella?

  that is underway about who, who, again, people that get claimed by many places.

• 43:05Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 43:06Steven Rinella?

  But, but first lay out just the, the known, the known understanding of her remarkable life.

• 43:12Speaker 06

  Well, I can do that while also answering your bigger question, which is like, how do we even know any of this stuff?

• 43:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 43:16Speaker 06

  So, and maybe she wasn't funny. Maybe she was just spunky. I don't like, pick your adjective. But we know things about her personality because they're in those million words of the journals. Like her saying, I want to go see the whale. Like Lewis and Clark wrote that down. So we know that that happened. And then we can infer as interpreters, as writers, as lovers of history, like what those details mean. But in terms of her life story, the reason we know that is because it's in the journals too. And this is also something that's new in my book, that it's not like the outlines of her life story have always been well-known, although now they are getting more contentious. She grew up, you know, on the sort of between what is now Idaho and what is now Montana in that Rocky region. Her people had had to move there because other nations like the Blackfoot had more horses and especially more guns. So it wasn't safe for the Shoshone

• 44:00Speaker 06

  to be out on the plains where the bison were. So they kind of stayed in the mountains most of the year. But then, once a year, they would go, they needed the skins to like to stay warm. They needed the fat. They needed stuff that only they could get from the bison. So once a year, they would go out to Three Forks, and then they would go a little bit past that sometimes, and they would hunt buffalo quickly as they could, get all the buffalo products they could, bison, sorry.

• 44:23Steven Rinella?

  No, no, no, I'm a buffalo guy. Randall kind of sits on the fence about it.

• 44:27Speaker 04

  If I may.

• 44:28Steven Rinella?

  He's an old bison guy.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  To get you guys back on the same page after the Sacagawea funny, not funny controversy.

• 44:34Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 44:35Speaker 04

  You say in the book.

• 44:36Steven Rinella?

  Because there was like a real split between me and the guest, you know?

• 44:38Speaker 04

  You make, you make a point to say in the book, all the characters in this book are going to encounter buffalo, not bison.

• 44:46Speaker 06

  Right.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  Because that's what they encountered.

• 44:49Speaker 06

  That's what they called it.

• 44:50Speaker 04

  In their time.

• 44:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  I thought you'd appreciate that.

• 44:52Steven Rinella?

  That's good.

• 44:53Speaker 06

  I mean, this is, this is not a book about 2026. It's a book about 1804. So I really tried, you know.

• 44:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, nobody saw bison on the Lewis and Clark.

• 45:01Speaker 06

  Right. And the Americans called the Lakota the Sioux. So when I'm writing from the American point of view, I use the Sioux. When I'm writing from the Lakota point of view, I use the word Lakota. Like, it's important to me to give each person's perspective as they saw it and not to let our modern concerns kind of worm their way in there. But anyway, so like, the Shoshone would have to go out and get buffalo slash bison, try to keep both of you happy, each, each time in the fall. And so in 1800, when Sacagawea was like 13 or 14, her people go out there. And so they set up camp at Three Forks, and the men are off hunting buffalo, and the women and the kids are sort of, you know, back at the camp. And so then one day, some armed raiders with rifles, which the Shoshone do not have at this point, from the Hadatsa Nation.

• 45:45Speaker 06

  Show up and you know, they're, they're coming on horseback. So the Shoshone scatter, most of them get on their horses, which they are famous for their wonderful horses and escape. But Sacagawea, for whatever reason, can't get to a horse. So she starts running up the Jefferson River. And so she is running, there's smoke, there's screaming, there, there are people being clubbed to death. It's a very intense and violent situation. She makes it a couple of miles. Maybe she thinks, I'm going to actually be able to escape here. But then she hears a horse coming up behind her. There's a Hidatsa man. She tries to cross through the river, gets caught in the middle. He scoops her up, brings her back to the camp. So at this point, uh, we know that there are a couple, like a lot, a number of Shoshone people have been killed. And then some of the young Shoshone women have been captured by the Hidatsa people.

• 46:29Speaker 06

  They take Sacagawea and some other young Shoshone women, including one of her friends, all the way back to their towns, which are in what's now North Dakota. This is like the Mandan and Hidatsa towns where Fort Mandan will be built a few years later. So that's where she ends up living for a while. Then Lewis and Clark show up in the winter of 1804. The, her husband slash her owner, Charbonneau, who's a real creep. He just tries to like figure out, he sees that Lewis and Clark are big government and he's like, how can I get some of that government money for myself?

• 46:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, this guy's kind of a sleaze in general.

• 46:57Speaker 06

  Just the worst. Yeah. And so he tries to get hired and Lewis and Clark maybe are on the fence and so he's like, I have Shoshone wives. And Lewis and Clark know that they're going to need to meet the Shoshone and maybe need some of those Shoshone horses. So they agree to hire him and bring one of his wives with him. Now, how do we know all this? We know this because in the journals, Lewis and Clark write down Sacagawea's story. Like when they make it back to Three Forks, they, they ask her, like, what did you see here? What do you like, like what, what happened to you here? And she tells them this story. And so it's recorded in multiple journals. But one thing that I did that was new, because I was trying to think about like, what did Sacagawea see? What was her perspective, not just Lewis and Clark's? Is I, I tried to be really forensic when I was reading the journals. And so the first time her story shows up, it's not from Lewis and Clark.

• 47:41Speaker 06

  It's from this regular working class soldier named John Ordway. He writes about her a day before anybody else does. And it's when they first get back to Three Forks. So Clark isn't even in the camp. Charbonneau isn't even.

• 47:51Steven Rinella?

  So they have not mentioned her till now.

• 47:53Speaker 06

  They have mentioned her, but they've not mentioned her life story.

• 47:55Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 47:56Speaker 06

  So she, she's often just shows up as like the Indian woman.

• 47:58Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 47:59Speaker 06

  And so Clark and Charbonneau and some other people are off on a scout party. Lewis is like doing his astronomy readings and like thinking about empire. And so Ordway and the other men are doing the actual hard work of like unloading the canoes, airing out the gear, putting up the tents, and Sacagawea is doing that hard work too. And so if you look at it, the only like, the story comes up with her first, and I think it makes a lot of sense. Again, I use careful language at this part of the book, like probably and almost certainly, because we'll never know for sure, even though we have the journals about this. But the fact that she told the story to Ordway the day before the captains ever mentioned the story, it makes a lot of sense because they were all working at Three Forks on this physical site, the river where she was captured. They're all setting up the camp together. And also, how did they communicate? Well, through sign language.

• 48:43Speaker 06

  Previous historians have not given enough credit to sign language in this time period. And we know from other journal entries that John Ordway was fluent in sign language. We know from Clark's entries that Sacagawea was fluent in sign language. So I believe she-

• 48:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it was kind of like the Esperanto of its time, you know, like people-

• 48:59Speaker 06

  Right.

• 48:59Steven Rinella?

  Different tribes on the plains that couldn't communicate, that were from different language groups would be able to use this elaborate sign language.

• 49:05Speaker 06

  Right.

• 49:06Steven Rinella?

  And you could convey some complex messages with that shit, man.

• 49:08Speaker 06

  Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And especially when you think about, these are just like human beings who want to be understood by each other. They could really cover almost everything they needed to with sign language. So I can't say this for sure, but I can say this 98% for sure, that Sacagawea used sign language to tell her life story to John Ordway the first day. And then the second day, when Clark comes back, when Charbonneau's there, when Lewis is there, she tells the story again. And so that her story shows up a couple times in the journals, and each time, her story's a little different, like what year was she captured? So this is, even the stuff we know for sure, we don't know for sure because like, was Sacagawea captured in 1800 or 1799?

• 49:44Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 49:45Speaker 06

  I don't know. But all this to say that it's important to read the journals carefully because then what you're getting is Sacagawea is telling her story herself. Like if she is using sign language to do this, this is not her husband slash owner saying, here's here's Sacagawea's story. And I think this is so important for the current discussion. Because right now, like this, like in the journals, Lewis and Clark say Sacagawea is Shoshone. Most historians have agreed with that. But-

• 50:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there's this famous narrative that- They get to, I mean, you drive by the rock all the time around here, but they get to that, that rock on the big hole, right?

• 50:24Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 50:25Steven Rinella?

  What's the name of that rock?

• 50:26Speaker 06

  Beaverhead Rock.

• 50:27Steven Rinella?

  Beaverhead, yeah. There's a, there's a prominent unmistakable feature.

• 50:31Speaker 06

  For sure.

• 50:31Steven Rinella?

  And they get there and she's like, I know that rock.

• 50:33Speaker 06

  We're, I'm almost home. Yeah.

• 50:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:35Speaker 06

  For sure. And that's, that's again, how do we know these things about Sacagawea? Cause Lewis and Clark wrote it down.

• 50:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 50:40Speaker 06

  We just have to read it from her point of view and understand that's not just an important landmark for Lewis and Clark. That's a way to understand Sacagawea's life and like what the landscape meant to her. So, so the debate right now is, is Sacagawea Shoshone or was she Hidatsa? The Hidatsa people have put together a book and it's a really valuable book because remember there are a few years after she gets captured or enslaved where she's living with the Hidatsa. So it, I, I relied on in the book to understand those years because that's like, how did the Hidatsa people see her? What kind of oral traditions have they preserved about her? Now, in my book, I'm always very careful if something's coming from oral tradition to signpost that and say, you know, according to Hidatsa tradition, but still that the, the book has real value. And it also, the book talks about the debate about what happened to Sacagawea after the expedition. When did she die? I honestly do not know when she died.

• 51:25Speaker 06

  Like I, I don't have an opinion on that question. But where was she born? Who did she identify with? I think the evidence is still overwhelming that it was Shoshone. And the reason that the new kind of angle that I have it in my book is like, when we ignore this, when we try to say, maybe she wasn't Shoshone, we're not just silencing Lewis and Clark, we're silencing her. Cause I think the evidence, if you read it carefully, is very clear that she told her story herself through sign language to the other enlisted soldiers. And so that story of being born Shoshone and being captured, like it's a really dramatic and traumatic story, but I also think it's her story and, and she was explaining it.

• 52:00Steven Rinella?

  And what is the argument that she was Hidatsa? How do they explain her familiarity with turf so far away?

• 52:07Speaker 06

  Right. Well, what, what they say is that she maybe had some family ties and so she took trips back there. But the key argument, the key part of their argument is that Charbonneau created this cover story. And I defer to no one in my disdain for Charbonneau. But, but the idea that he invented this cover story, he said she was Shoshone even when she wasn't because that would make him be able to get this job. But that's why the, the moment about her telling the story herself is so important. Cause Charbonneau literally wasn't in the camp the day she told the story the first time. So if he's not even there, how's it going to be his cover story?

• 52:38Steven Rinella?

  Did the Hidatsa sell her to Charbonneau?

• 52:43Speaker 06

  They either sold her or traded her. And there's, this is another thing that you're like, how do, how do we know these things? There have been, I, I read a lot of academic research. And so there's been a really good academic research in the last few years about native enslavement, about slavery not just being something that Americans did or British did, but native people did it too. And there are differences, of course, but still like the term slavery, I think is the best way to understand it. And as an aside, Lewis and Clark use this word too. Like Clark, in an interview after the expedition called Sacagawea a slave. So again, this is not 2026 leeching into the past. This is just paying attention to the past.

• 53:16Steven Rinella?

  I have this, I have this conversation with my kids all the time, man, because the way like, I'm not hacking on school because you get, you know, you get like so many hours in a day and you're trying to gloss over a lot of stuff.

• 53:27Speaker 06

  Right.

• 53:27Steven Rinella?

  But it's funny, American kids today seem to, small sample set, my kids and their friends.

• 53:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 53:35Steven Rinella?

  Seem to carry this idea that slavery was somehow this kind of like American invention, rather than a ubiquitous, global occurrence.

• 53:47Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah. And that's just not true. The class of who we were talking about.

• 53:51Steven Rinella?

  I find myself all the time thinking, no, no, no. Like, this is something that happens everywhere, all the time.

• 54:00Speaker 06

  That's true.

• 54:00Steven Rinella?

  And then it starts to fade out.

• 54:02Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah. Right. And so that's, that's absolutely true. And so when I, the class of who we've been talking about, they enslaved people. The, the Shoshone enslaved people when they were at their kind of most powerful. The Hataz enslaved people too. So there, there are lots of good scholarship and then stories in the journals of, of talking about how native people would enslave women. But slavery can also be different in different circumstances. And so where things get really ugly is when somebody like Charbonneau gets involved. Because these, these academics have written about how native people would enslave young women from other nations and then sell them to fur traders. And so I went back and looked at documents where fur traders are like trying to provide collateral for new, new merchandise to then trade for fur. And like a fur trader will write, you know, my collateral is the little girl I own. Like really fucked up stuff.

• 54:46Speaker 06

  And, and like, let's remember Sacagawea is 13, 14, 15. She is owned by this guy. He beats her. We know that from the journal.

• 54:56Steven Rinella?

  She has his child, right?

• 54:57Speaker 06

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

• 55:40Speaker 06

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

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• 57:20Steven Rinella?

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• 57:46Speaker 04

  I like when you're describing the the scene in Three Forks where she's signing to Ordway. And then the next day tells the story to the captains.

• 57:56Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 57:58Speaker 04

  To me, and I saw this in different parts of the book, but it it it makes the most sense. If you just sort of have a gut instinct about social situations and group dynamics.

• 58:10Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 58:11Speaker 04

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

• 58:23Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 58:24Speaker 04

  You know, like that that sort of stuff happens all the time in like workplaces or or whatever sort of group dynamic. Where there's a bunch of people working together. One way you can elevate yourself. The person you're most likely to share something with is someone working side by side. You also has that serves as sort of a middle man to the group leader. So.

• 58:45Steven Rinella?

  It'd be like later today, I'd say, hey, did you hear that vultures killed Randall's chickens?

• 58:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then that would get.

• 58:52Steven Rinella?

  You should ask him.

• 58:53Speaker 04

  Play it up.

• 58:54Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 58:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:55Steven Rinella?

  Valuable information.

• 58:56Speaker 04

  But it's just, you know, like there's some like, you know, when you hear these stories about Sacagawea being this like very clear eyed, brave sort of tour guide.

• 59:09Speaker 04

  That comes across as somewhat artificial.

• 59:13Steven Rinella?

  Right.

• 59:13Speaker 04

  Or a projection.

• 59:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 59:15Speaker 04

  But when you understand her as.

• 59:18Steven Rinella?

  Sort of a, a, a social creature like all of us.

• 59:22Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 59:22Steven Rinella?

  And making these different connections with different members of the expedition and sort of leveraging her. Her influence that way, like it, all of a sudden you see these people as more three dimensional.

• 59:33Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 59:34Steven Rinella?

  Humans.

• 59:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, what, what was the expedition if not a workplace, right? Sometimes it's a workplace comedy or not a comedy. We disagree about what's funny, but, uh, but.

• 59:42Steven Rinella?

  Drama.

• 59:43Speaker 06

  Right. Exactly. Very serious, very somber. Um, but it, it was a workplace just made up of human beings. And I, I tried so hard to get that in the book, like another place of where we know what stuff comes from. I really wanted to show Sacagawea as a mother and this probably came because I have little kids and like I changed diapers. But even more than that, I saw my wife changing diapers and breastfeeding the kids. So I found Shoshone people and just interviewed them and were like, in your culture, and especially in this time period, what was a diaper? And so like, we know this carrier that Sacagawea famously had, like a lot of the statues will have that, that she had the baby strapped on her back in a carrier. But the bottom of the carrier was lined with either fur or some kind of soft vegetable material or something like that. And so each morning she would wake up, she would unlace the carrier, she would change out the lining, put in fresh lining.

• 1:00:27Speaker 06

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

• 1:01:06Steven Rinella?

  On the making it back deal, what, what's your take on, on, um?

• 1:01:12Steven Rinella?

  Is there any controversy anymore about whether, uh, Lewis killed himself?

• 1:01:17Speaker 06

  I'm sure that some people, um, believe that he may have been murdered. Um, I, I, I don't see it.

• 1:01:24Steven Rinella?

  You know, it's so funny. I kind of forgot about this. You remember a long time ago, we used to have that little plastic, what? Anyways, one of our, one of our buddies that we work with Spencer, he was telling, he was talking about Lewis killing himself. And he described that he killed himself at a, at a bed and breakfast.

• 1:01:41Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:47Speaker 06

  Not not.

• 1:01:48Steven Rinella?

  Which was called like what's it called? Butcher's Station.

• 1:01:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, Grinders.

• 1:01:52Steven Rinella?

  Grinder's Station, yeah. Of Ben and Brad.

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  It was like a melancholy Victorian.

• 1:01:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. They brought out scones for everybody. Yeah, Louis was like, no scones for me. I gotta kill myself. Yeah. Um, no.

• 1:02:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So, yeah. So get into that because you talk about he's like a sad dude, you know?

• 1:02:07Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:02:08Steven Rinella?

  And then has and then has behaves weird when he gets home and he kind of can't really.

• 1:02:13Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:02:13Steven Rinella?

  Can't really settle in on what his next gig's gonna be and.

• 1:02:17Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:02:17Steven Rinella?

  Probably in some way was haunted by it's a hard thing to come home from.

• 1:02:21Speaker 06

  Right. Well, and this is, this is where I found something new that I think is, is really important. When I wrote about Louis, I, I tried really hard not to be like he has bipolar disorder or he has PTSD. Because like those were not ideas back then.

• 1:02:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Speaker 06

  I'm not saying the neurochemical processes didn't exist, but I don't think it's helpful to understand somebody in the past with ideas that were not necessarily available in the past. So like Jefferson and Louis lived together for years and Jefferson was like, he suffers with addiction and he has Jefferson's quote, with sensible depressions of mind. So to me, I was like, that's enough. Like.

• 1:02:52Steven Rinella?

  What kind of addiction?

• 1:02:53Speaker 06

  Uh, mostly drinking, but also opium.

• 1:02:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:55Speaker 06

  Uh, because he had malaria. And so.

• 1:02:58Steven Rinella?

  Where do you pick up malaria?

• 1:03:00Speaker 06

  Um, who knows? Where, where wouldn't you pick up malaria in 1804? Right? Like it was, it was a real problem back then. So it could have been any number. It might've been on the expedition, but it's probably.

• 1:03:08Steven Rinella?

  Well, I don't think, did it go that far north?

• 1:03:10Speaker 06

  It was, it was, it was a huge problem, especially in the army, because they would often like build their forts in, in pretty swampy, damp areas. So like, if you go back and read military documents for this time period, like malaria and the various.

• 1:03:20Steven Rinella?

  I know like down like in the, in, well, it doesn't matter.

• 1:03:23Speaker 06

  Yeah. But I mean, you could, you could definitely get malaria along the Ohio River, like John Ordway's unit had a huge malaria problem on the Ohio River.

• 1:03:29Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:03:29Speaker 06

  At this time period. But anyway, like, I just was like, you know, depression and struggles with addiction, like that's enough. Like we don't, we don't need any modern categories to understand them. So I, I, when I was reading the journals, again, reading the journals closely, um, Louis. Was very self-aware. He would write about, you know, like, I'm so stressed out about the future, or I can't stop thinking about something bad that happened to me in the past. But then it's important to say, like, he tried to stand up to those things. Then he would remind himself, I don't want to, like, you know, it's gonna be okay, or we're gonna keep working, or the only thing we can do is go forward. So he was very self-aware about this kind of stuff. But there's no question that, that on the way back, like, the expedition just wore him down. He ends up getting shot in a hunting accident, which we could, we could talk about that.

• 1:04:12Steven Rinella?

  I didn't know that. Tell me that story.

• 1:04:14Speaker 06

  Okay, well, yeah, okay. So they're on their way back, and Louis is still trying to make Jefferson happy. So he's still trying to do astronomy readings and get all the data that Jefferson, like, wants them to do. And so they, they come to this stop, and they stop, like, 20 minutes too late. Like, to do astronomy readings in this time period, you need the sun at a certain height and things like that. So they get there, like, 20 minutes too late, which sucks. So they're just gonna have to kill time until the sun is at the right position to do the readings. So they always need more food, they always need more animal skin. So Louis and this other guy named Pierre Cruzat go out to hunt for elk. And it's important to know two things.

• 1:04:47Steven Rinella?

  And where are they at right now?

• 1:04:48Speaker 06

  Uh, they're on the way back, um,

• 1:04:50Steven Rinella?

  In the Dakotas?

• 1:04:51Speaker 06

  Right, in the Dakotas, yeah, on the Missouri. And so,

• 1:04:54Steven Rinella?

  North Dakota, yeah.

• 1:04:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. So the two things to know are that A, Cruzat only has one eye, so he can't see the best. And second, they're all dressed in animal skins at this point, because their uniforms and their, their fatigue clothes have all rotted through, because they're in the third year of this expedition. So Louis is dressed in elk skin, they're hunting in some willow trees where it's very thick and hard to see.

• 1:05:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I do know this story.

• 1:05:14Speaker 06

  And so from about 100 feet away, Cruzat shoots him and shoots Louis right in the ass. And so the bullet goes through, exits, it's, it's just like, it doesn't hit any bone or nerve or anything like that, but it's still a really bad wound. And so on the way back, Louis has to lay in the bottom of the boat, even when it's raining, there's nothing they can do about it, but he just lays on his stomach in the bottom of the boat for the way back. And they're, they try to, like, Clark takes care of him while he's trying to attend to Louis. Louis passes out sometimes, and so they, they have a little, like, they try to keep the wounds open so they can drain. But one thing I pointed out in the, in my book is that just a couple months before this, Louis had castrated all their horses. And his favorite horse had died. It had gotten the castration. Wounds had gotten infected. So like Louis like had to clean the maggots out and try to keep it alive. But eventually he had to put the horse down.

• 1:05:59Speaker 06

  And I think that really bothered Louis because he just clearly loved animals. Like he brought a dog with him, semen, and then everything Louis writes about animals. You can just see how much he connects with animals. But you know, I feel like Louis, he's not just shot and just stuck in the bottom of the boat, you know? They didn't have germ theory. He wasn't thinking, you know, in the way we would. But he still knew that like, if you have a big wound, bad things can happen. You get a fever and he writes in the journal like, I have a small fever. So there's just a ton of pressure on him on the way back from this hunting accident. And then he does heal. He gets better. He makes it to Washington DC and he's, he's a celebrity. Like everywhere he goes, I found these journals at the Library of Congress where, where he like goes to a play. And people come out and just ask him question after question. Like nobody cares about the play.

• 1:06:42Speaker 06

  Intermission, let's just fire a bunch like, what, what does a buffalo taste back or taste like? Are the native people cannibals? Like they just keep firing question after question at him because he's like a national hero.

• 1:06:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Speaker 06

  And so one of the new things I found was a letter from John Quincy Adams that, that nobody had seen before. And this is in this Washington DC period when Louis is finally back. And so John Quincy Adams was a senator at this point, like he had had dinner at the White House with Louis before, like they knew each other a little bit. And Adam says that he sat down to have dinner with Louis again after the expedition and Adams is writing to his wife. And Adam says, I didn't even recognize this guy. Like I knew who I was supposed to meet for dinner and I could not recognize him. And then Adam says, he looks like he's aged 15 years. And so, you know, previous accounts have sort of theorized, like, what did the expedition do to Louis? But like, thanks to John Quincy Adams, we know what the expedition did to Louis. Like that letter, I think is the linchpin for my entire interpretation of him. And why I believe the suicide is just the overwhelming likelihood.

• 1:07:38Speaker 06

  Because, you know, if somebody, if you can't even recognize somebody, if they look 15 years older. And again, in terms of human nature, it just makes sense to go through all this stuff. To come back then and then to like, in a sense, the expedition wore him down, but it also gave him something to live for. And he doesn't have that anymore. As a human being, it makes a lot of sense. And, and when you compare it with that new letter from John Quincy Adams about like the physical cost. I don't think there's any question that it just kind of broke Louis down.

• 1:08:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So where, so tell about where he was. Was when this, when this happened.

• 1:08:05Speaker 06

  So this is on the Natchez Trace, kinda, he was on the way, he, he, Jefferson had made him the governor of the Louisiana Territory. And I'm not sure why Jefferson did that, because Lewis was supposed to write a book. And like, in this time period, exploration was the first step, the book was the second step. Like, the whole point was to share this information, and the whole world was waiting to read this book. Like, like there, you know, when it finally did come out, when somebody else finished it after Lewis died, there are reviews in England, there are reviews in Germany, like, this was, this was global news. It's like, the way we all talked about Artemis II, like, that's how people talked about Lewis and Clark in this time period. And so Lewis has his hands full with this book that he has to write, but Jefferson sends him to be the governor of the Louisiana Territory. I think he kind of, Jefferson wanted to use Lewis's celebrity, celebrity and his reputation to sort of,

• 1:08:50Speaker 06

  try to control this, this pretty crazy, chaotic territory at this point after Louisiana Purchase. And so Lewis is just overwhelmed, he starts drinking more. We, we know from people who knew him, who talked about how much he was drinking in this time period.

• 1:09:03Steven Rinella?

  Wonder what, wonder what he drank?

• 1:09:05Speaker 06

  I mean, they drank all kinds of stuff back then, most of what they drank on the expedition was like, cheap corn whiskey, because that, you just got your soldiers drunk as cheaply as possible, so that was mostly what they had. But Lewis, Jefferson is no longer president at this point, Madison is, and Lewis sends some receipts back to get reimbursed for this big mission up the Missouri River, which is related to Lewis and Clark's expedition, actually. And, and the people in Washington DC are like, we're not covering this. Like, you, you have asked for more money than, than you are entitled to in your, in your government position. And so Lewis freaks out because he has such a strong sense of, of honor, he's such a patriotic guy. Like, in his letters about the expedition, he's always like, this is honorable for me, but it's also honorable for my country. Like, he loved America so much.

• 1:09:48Speaker 06

  And so now to have Americans being like, you're trying to like, defraud your government?

• 1:09:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Speaker 06

  He freaked out. I mean, he wasn't in a good place anyway, but he freaked out. So he starts heading from St. Louis back to Washington, and on the Natchez Trace, and in what is now Tennessee. He, uh, he, he killed himself and they're like, the detail that always sticks out for me about this is like, he's riding and he's got a, a person who's riding with him. He's got his dog semen with him and Louis just starts talking to Clark. Like Clark's not even there. Like Clark had just met with Louis before he left and Clark even writes in a letter like, I'm really worried about Louis. Like something's not right.

• 1:10:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:10:23Speaker 06

  But now they're hundreds of miles apart and like Louis is just saying things like, I always knew you'd come for me, Clark. I always knew you'd save me when I needed it.

• 1:10:31Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:10:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. And this is, this is the way we know this is because the person who was riding with Louis later told this to Clark.

• 1:10:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Speaker 06

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

• 1:10:59Steven Rinella?

  Well, what clouds, what clouds the suicide narrative. So he, he checks, he gets a booking at the bed and breakfast.

• 1:11:04Speaker 06

  Right, right, right. And they're like scones at 11. Yeah.

• 1:11:06Steven Rinella?

  He's up at his, he's up in his room and witnesses hear two gunshots.

• 1:11:12Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:11:13Steven Rinella?

  So that has always brought up speculation that it was some kind of highway gang or the, the, the, the grinders, the, the bed and breakfast owners, the, the, the people that ran grinder station.

• 1:11:25Speaker 06

  He left them a bad Yelp review and they're like, this can't stand.

• 1:11:27Steven Rinella?

  They offed him or robbed him, you know, because of this two, I think that without the two gunshot, it, it probably wouldn't be a thing people debate about, right?

• 1:11:36Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, in that time period, you carried more than one gun with you.

• 1:11:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:11:40Speaker 06

  And the accounts were that.

• 1:11:41Steven Rinella?

  I'm, I'm, I'm not in any way arguing that you did, but I'm just trying to go like, why was it a thing for a long, you know?

• 1:11:46Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:11:47Steven Rinella?

  Why was it a story for a long time that it was a sort of an asterisk?

• 1:11:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:51Steven Rinella?

  Next to that, that he'd killed himself.

• 1:11:53Speaker 06

  I think Louis's family was very invested in this theory.

• 1:11:56Steven Rinella?

  Is that right?

• 1:11:57Speaker 06

  Yeah. Because in this time period, suicide, we didn't understand suicide the way we understand suicide today. So today we would talk about suicide as like somebody with a, with a disease who is making a choice that feels rational to them, even if it's heartbreaking to everybody else. But obviously at that, in that time period, it was, it was a huge stain on your reputation.

• 1:12:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You're like, you're condemned to hell.

• 1:12:16Speaker 06

  Right. Exactly. So I think that that's the read, like, nobody wanted to believe that this national hero would do this to himself.

• 1:12:22Steven Rinella?

  So they were, they were, they were people that like to, to try to save his reputation.

• 1:12:27Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:12:28Steven Rinella?

  Or. Make make their own guilt less or whatever.

• 1:12:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't know what their motives were.

• 1:12:34Steven Rinella?

  We're sort of like putting out this idea, well, you never know, or this could be possible because he had, because in his suicide attempt, he had to shoot himself two times.

• 1:12:43Speaker 06

  Right. And he also carved his wrists up too, to bleed out. Like he definitely, there's a quote from, from one of the people who ran the bed and breakfast, where she says that he said, it, why is it so hard for me to die? Like, and I mean, that speaks to his toughness. Like he, he was, there is nobody who could endure more than him on, even on, I'm not just talking about like compared to us today. I'm talking about on the expedition. Nobody was tougher than Lewis. Like he was just an unbelievably, uh, just, just, he just had perseverance. He was just, he had grit. Um, so even at the end, you could see that. But I think there's no question that his family and the people around him, um, were trying to protect his reputation. It's worth saying Clark and Jefferson never questioned it. They thought he killed himself. They know him better than anybody else. Um, but

• 1:13:28Speaker 06

  then also I think there's a lot of people who like to look for conspiracy theories in, in history. That's never been my relationship to history, but I, you know, I understand that that can be a fun way to think about history. But I just don't think, you know, even if you compare this to some of the other great conspiracy theories or possible ones in history, the evidence just isn't there. The people who want to talk about the murder, they, they try to undermine the evidence that he killed himself, but they never have any affirmative evidence. They're never like, well, why would somebody kill him? Like bad Yelp reviews about the best they can come up with. They, they try to connect it to James Wilkinson and these political conspiracies and it just, just doesn't make any sense. Like sometimes the simplest explanation is the best one.

• 1:14:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. What's that? There's a name for that.

• 1:14:06Speaker 06

  Occam's razor.

• 1:14:07Steven Rinella?

  Occam's razor. That's right. Occam's razor. I need to get that tattooed on me so I don't forget that so often. Occam's razor. Um, do you, how much time do you spend on Coulter? John Coulter? He's kind of my favorite dude from the whole thing.

• 1:14:21Speaker 06

  Unfortunately, there's not a ton of Colter in there because I did the rotating points of view. So I had Ordway's point of view. So I really tried to talk about Ordway's life. But but Colter is amazing in their their whole book, certain about him. I don't begrudge your affection for Colter at all. He was a he was kind of a little rascally, but once he kind of got himself worked out, he was one of their most important soldiers.

• 1:14:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he liked to pull a cork. He got in a little trouble.

• 1:14:42Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Speaker 06

  And there's this. This is one of the new things I found about him. One of the times he shows up in the book is when they're in St. Louis. Shout out to my St. Louis people who love Lewis and Clark's relationship to St. Louis. But when they when they have their first winter quarters there, they're like, it's a boot camp, basically. Because like they have half regular soldiers, people like John Ordway. And then they have half people who are just civilians from Kentucky, who are really good shots or really good hunters or things like that. And so they got to make these two groups cohere, but they've also got to teach the non soldiers how to be soldiers. And so Colter is is kind of one of the troublemakers in this period. And at one point, Lewis and Clark head to St. Louis to like have a nice dinner and do diplomatic stuff. And Ordway, they leave Ordway in charge and the men rebel.

• 1:15:24Speaker 06

  And like Colter is like, we don't know exactly what happened, but the most likely thing is that Ordway was like, it's your turn to stand guard. Something like that, like some kind of like, go do your soldier task. And so Colter and Shields and a couple other people from Kentucky were like, we're gonna kill you. We don't give a fuck what you say. And, you know, people from Kentucky at this time period were were ordinary people. And so Ordway showed remarkable self control. Like, you know, I think if somebody had done this to Lewis, Lewis probably would have been like, let's have a duel. Like, you just challenged my honor, I'll kill you. But Ordway was able to maintain calm. And so he waited till Lewis and Clark came back and Lewis and Clark put in some some new disciplinary measures.

• 1:16:01Steven Rinella?

  And he tattled on Colter.

• 1:16:03Speaker 06

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

• 1:16:20Steven Rinella?

  They basically take a vote about in the end, they take a vote about Colter's fate.

• 1:16:25Speaker 06

  And if he can go on, yeah, for sure. And so one of the

• 1:16:27Steven Rinella?

  Can I real quick just remind people who this guy is?

• 1:16:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, go for it.

• 1:16:30Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so Colter is when I said he's my favorite guy, he's an interesting figure. He was he was hired onto the expedition. He was he was a woodsman, hired onto the expedition and had a role as sort of a scout and hunter.

• 1:16:44Steven Rinella?

  What's cool about him is when the expedition is coming to a close and they're descending the Missouri. They run into some trader trappers who are going upriver.

• 1:16:55Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:16:56Steven Rinella?

  And they're going upriver to engage in the beaver trapping and trading enterprise up there. And rather than going home,

• 1:17:06Steven Rinella?

  Colter wants to go with them. And ask permission and does a thing that I think would be great for a parenting technique.

• 1:17:16Steven Rinella?

  Lewis and Clark say to the guys, the rest of the guys, they say, um, we will let him go. We will cut Colter loose and let him go up to trap. If everyone here promises not to ask the same thing. Right?

• 1:17:33Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:17:34Steven Rinella?

  And everybody's like, I won't ask.

• 1:17:35Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:17:36Steven Rinella?

  And then they cut him loose.

• 1:17:37Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:17:38Steven Rinella?

  And he goes on to have some crazy adventures.

• 1:17:40Speaker 06

  No doubt about it. Yeah. His life after the expedition is wild. But, but at the beginning of the expedition, before he's kind of proven himself as this beloved soldier, because he was enlisted too. He was a soldier, not just like.

• 1:17:50Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I thought he was hired on as a, I thought he was, I thought he was hired on as a.

• 1:17:53Speaker 06

  I mean, he was, but they didn't hire him on and like, you can still be a frontiersman. Like they ran the military, like they had to practice their drills every night. Like John Ordway was like, put on your uniform. We're going to go learn how to counter march and march and all this stuff.

• 1:18:04Steven Rinella?

  All those guys had to like, had to conform to military standards.

• 1:18:09Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 1:18:09Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:18:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. It was, it was a military mission.

• 1:18:11Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:18:11Speaker 06

  And so, but that like, people like Colter hated that at first. So when Lewis and Clark are in St. Louis, Ordway's in charge, like Lewis and Clark are famous enough and good enough leaders that Colter's not going to do this to them. But when it's just Ordway and Ordway's like, it's time to go do watch. Colter's like, no. And so they end up yelling at each other. Colter's literally loading his rifle, like next to Ordway. Like you can hear the ramrod scraping on the barrel. And so Ordway diffuses the situation, tattletales, slash follows military protocol. But here's the cool thing. They have like Lewis and Clark, a couple of weeks after, it's only a couple of weeks after, they let them in, vote, who do you want to be your sergeant? And guess who Colter picks? He picks John Ordway.

• 1:18:50Steven Rinella?

  He respected him.

• 1:18:51Speaker 06

  Yes, exactly. And so to go from saying, I'm going to kill you, to saying, I want my life to be in your hands. That is such an amazing detail. I think it tells you something about. Coulter, I think it tells you something about Ordway. I think it tells you something about Lewis Clark. Nobody's ever pieced that together about the voting stuff, but that's because I was so interested in the human dynamics that we were talking about. Like, I figured out that they voted on it and I figured out, wow, Coulter wanted Ordway. And I think that's one of the most human details in the whole book.

• 1:19:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, that's the thing I didn't know.

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  One of the things you point out in the book that was kind of an interesting takeaway for me was when we talk about Lewis and Clark, when we talk about this expedition, we talk about it as this multifaceted, you know, they're establishing diplomatic relations, they're taking stock of resources, they're maybe staking claims to territory, and it's this big hybrid of sort of diplomacy, economic speculation, scientific, understanding or learning.

• 1:20:03Speaker 04

  And you make the point that Jefferson, when he thinks of native people wandering the West, he thinks of them as just being curious and just going from place to place. But you make the point that what Lewis and Clark are doing is a very familiar concept to all of the native people that they encounter along the way. Because when they are moving across the landscape, they're doing the same thing. They're interested in land, they're interested in what's there, and they're interested in who they can meet and what those people can give them. And so it's, I don't know, it's not like a mind blowing concept, but it drew an interesting connection for me that I don't think I'd appreciate yet.

• 1:20:45Speaker 06

  It was like you were saying with slavery, like, human beings have always practiced some form of slavery until today. Well, human beings have always explored too. Like, these are kind of universal ideas that that sort of constitute what it means to be a human. And one of my favorite point of view chapters in the book is this guy named Beahito, who was, he was a leader for the Erycara in what is now South Dakota. And Jefferson, like, the most big government thing of Lewis and Clark is that Jefferson said, if you meet important leaders, Send them to meet me in Washington DC. Well, taxpayers will fund it, but like I want to negotiate and meet with them in the White House. And I want to show them our power.

• 1:21:17Speaker 04

  Which was extraordinarily expensive.

• 1:21:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a lot of the price tag came from this because dozens of native people like this does not show up in the normal stories about Lewis and Clark. But while Lewis and Clark are heading west, dozens of native leaders authorized by Lewis and Clark are heading east. So instead of just like telling everybody's story, I zoomed in on this one guy, Biajito. So he goes from what's now South Dakota, all the way down the Missouri River to St. Louis, then makes it all the way to Washington DC. How do we know this? Because there are newspaper accounts recording this at all the time. Like he would, he would show up in towns and the towns would be like, this is a big deal. Let's write about this. And then once he makes it to Washington DC, people in Washington DC are writing about him in their journals. But the coolest thing, and this was only discovered a couple of years ago, I didn't find this, another school, a scholar found this.

• 1:21:59Speaker 06

  But in France, they found a map that Biajito had made of the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains. And on that map, he records not just how many nations there were there, but also where he met with Lewis and Clark. And so Biajito, we know from Jefferson's papers that he met with Jefferson at least twice in the White House. And so he probably brought this map with it and showed it to Jefferson. And so it was, I think that would have been such a cool meeting to send in because Jefferson's this older guy who's like interested in everything. But Biajito was an older guy who was interested in everything too. And so in my book, you know, the front end papers are Clark's famous map of the Missouri and the Rocky Mountains. But the backend papers are Biajito's map too, because I really think to get the full story, you don't just need Clark's point of view, you need Biajito's too.

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

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• 1:23:52Speaker 06

  Chat GPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer.

• 1:23:57Steven Rinella?

  Study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com slash parents to learn more. I was trying to tell my kids about this observation that I was reading about there a few months ago now. This astrophysicist was, uh, you know, they're looking at some, I think it's kind of going on currently. They're looking at some thing out

• 1:24:33Steven Rinella?

  in outer space, whatever, and it's coloration defies their understanding a little bit. And so there's this, this astrophysicist, uh,

• 1:24:45Steven Rinella?

  was ranking the likelihood that it was a, basically a, uh, I don't want to say manmade because that wouldn't mean human, but a not natural object. Okay? And he was giving some person, you know, whatever, 5% chance it's a not natural object. And

• 1:25:07Steven Rinella?

  he was talking about

• 1:25:12Steven Rinella?

  why we need to take more seriously the idea. I don't take it seriously at all, just personally, but why he feels why we need to take more seriously the idea that some extraterrestrial life form would show up here and we should be talking about this more.

• 1:25:27Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:25:28Steven Rinella?

  An observation this guy has is really interesting. He says, if it happens, they are not going to be interested in how we have divided up the earth.

• 1:25:44Steven Rinella?

  Which among many other things is like, of course they won't.

• 1:25:48Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:25:49Steven Rinella?

  You like they show up, aliens come down and you're like, oh, no, no, no. You need to talk to the, you'll need to talk to the governor of Idaho about that.

• 1:26:01Steven Rinella?

  So it like, it's just like such a funny concept.

• 1:26:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Steven Rinella?

  But it would be like the degree to which, when you think of Jefferson, whoever, any peoples. Okay. If you think of the second Americans, the second Ameri, the second band of Americans to come down from the Bering Strait.

• 1:26:19Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:26:20Steven Rinella?

  How interested were they?

• 1:26:24Steven Rinella?

  In how the first Americans had conceptualized and divided up the territory.

• 1:26:29Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:26:30Steven Rinella?

  What, what's interesting about Jefferson's like, ultimately the Americans don't care. Ultimately, they kind, they don't care, but they're, they're, they're interested in it. Maybe they're interested in it because they need to know that to manipulate other things. But they're like, they're at least initially in some cases interested about how it was divided up.

• 1:26:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:26:53Steven Rinella?

  Though ultimately it, that would all be disregarded.

• 1:26:56Speaker 06

  Right. Well, I mean, Jefferson thought he was doing the right thing. Jefferson was trying to act in a moral and honorable way. And they're like.

• 1:27:04Steven Rinella?

  But it would dissolve.

• 1:27:05Speaker 06

  Well, of course.

• 1:27:06Steven Rinella?

  It would dissolve. Those like, what I mean.

• 1:27:08Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 1:27:09Steven Rinella?

  Those boundaries.

• 1:27:10Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:27:11Steven Rinella?

  Did not endure.

• 1:27:12Speaker 06

  No, absolutely not. No, there's no question about that. But I'm just saying like, if we're looking at it from how Jefferson saw the world in 1803. And there was like a big international context too, because America's still pretty new on the scene. And so they want to maintain their reputation with the French and with the British. And there's, so there's, there's this like international rulebook, uh, you know, from these philosophers about like, you have to respect who owns it. Like, let's use the Louisiana Purchase as an example. What do you always hear in school? We're really bagging on school teachers today. I'm sorry about that.

• 1:27:40Steven Rinella?

  Hey man, no, no, no, I'm not bagging out. No.

• 1:27:42Speaker 06

  Okay. Well, I guess.

• 1:27:42Steven Rinella?

  There's lots of cover down there.

• 1:27:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:27:44Steven Rinella?

  There's a lot of cover down the school.

• 1:27:45Speaker 06

  Well, one, one thing that they might want to tweak slightly in coming years is Louisiana Purchase. Cause like, what do you hear in school? You hear that it's like the best real estate deal ever, right? It doubled the size of America.

• 1:27:56Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:56Speaker 06

  None of that's true.

• 1:27:57Steven Rinella?

  Nickel and acre.

• 1:27:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, none of that's true because the Louisiana Purchase was not about land. It was about this, this like extra layer of rights called preemption rights. So what France owned was not the land. France owned the right to buy the land from native people.

• 1:28:12Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:28:13Speaker 06

  And so that's what they sold to the Americans, but the like Jefferson would never say, we now own all this. He would say, we will one day own this. And so a historian has gone back and calculated all the treaties that turned like that before and after map we see in school into actually American land. And most of those treaties were negotiated by William Clark, by the way, later in his life. But America spent another $400 million. So the Louisiana Purchase cost $15 million, but that's just this like this theoretical right. There was another like decades of negotiation, also wars, also, you know, very poor treatment of native people. It's a, it's a messy and complicated story. But like, nobody in 1804 would be like, we doubled the size of the country.

• 1:28:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:52Speaker 06

  Cause they didn't. And so that's why you're like, you really gotta try to understand what Jefferson thought or what Lewis thought instead of what Andrew Jackson thought or something like that.

• 1:29:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no, I understand. And there's probably, you mentioned earlier, there were far more at that time. There were far more native people on the landscape.

• 1:29:09Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:29:10Steven Rinella?

  And it would have, it would appear in that time to be that that would be the case for a long time.

• 1:29:14Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:14Steven Rinella?

  So it could have been whether, however you felt about native claim to land. Even if you ultimately intellectually didn't accept it.

• 1:29:23Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:23Steven Rinella?

  You would have needed to accept the on the ground reality.

• 1:29:26Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:27Steven Rinella?

  That like it, it, you know, maybe you don't like it. Maybe that hasn't been how your government was operating.

• 1:29:33Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:33Steven Rinella?

  On the other half of the country.

• 1:29:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:34Steven Rinella?

  But at the time, you're acknowledging that these things are going to be negotiated and purchased. But it's coming from, you know, the same, like if you imagine government as a continuity.

• 1:29:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:44Steven Rinella?

  It's coming from the same. Organization.

• 1:29:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:48Steven Rinella?

  Uncle Sam.

• 1:29:49Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:50Steven Rinella?

  Who was also in the practice of buying land from tribes that didn't own it. And, and also really struggling to understand like, I, who exactly do I talk to?

• 1:30:04Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:30:04Steven Rinella?

  Who's the guy that makes the deals to people that don't have a guy that makes those deals?

• 1:30:10Speaker 06

  And one of Lewis and Clark's jobs was finding the guy. Like again and again, if you, this isn't in the journals. These are in like some boring reports that they put together later on, but I went back and read those reports. And you can see that again and again, Clark is asking the Lakota, like, okay, like what, how much land do you claim? Where do your boundaries stop? And so like, that shows you that Lewis and Clark and Jefferson were imagining that continuity that you're talking about.

• 1:30:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:32Speaker 06

  It was on their minds.

• 1:30:33Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:30:35Speaker 04

  Can you talk about, um,

• 1:30:39Speaker 04

  what the process was like for the oral history that you did for this? Because I think that was something also that I, you talk about oral history with, and you visited contemporary tribal groups and talked to them about their relationship to this story.

• 1:30:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Speaker 04

  And that's not something that I, that when going through the rolodex of Lewis and Clark, stuff I've encountered that you often get included.

• 1:31:06Speaker 06

  Well, I, I always started with the journals because like I'm a historian. So like, what I know to do is go to the written text. So like, that's what I would start with. But then I would also do these interviews. I would read lots of academic scholarship, like, and, and these different points of view. I almost felt like I wrote like 10 biographies because I'm trying to understand the world the way each person did. So that, that's why it took five years. But once I had like the academic scholarship and the journals themselves, I would often interview native people. And sorry, we're headed back to the Pacific Northwest, but the Klatzup were a really good example. I, I zoomed with some people from what's now called the Chinook Indian Nation, because they have kind of subsumed the Klatzup and some other people. And one of the people I talked to was a direct descendant of Koba Ways. And so when I talked to them, I like, they were interviewing me as much as I was interviewing them.

• 1:31:50Speaker 06

  Cause this one guy named Tony, who was sort of the head of the Chinook Indian Nation, he said something to me that I thought about every day I worked on the book where he was like, you know,

• 1:32:00Speaker 06

  What we have left is our history and our stories. And we have shared that with people and that's been exploited too. And so like, it was not like they were like Lewis and Clark, sweet, let's talk about it. They had to interview me first and they wanted to understand that I was like willing to do the work and, and listen to them and, and sort of have that kind of conversation. But they, they helped me so many ways, like there would be specific details. And again, in the book, I would say, you know, according to Klatse tradition, but they would also point me in different directions, like, like there's this famous anthropologist named Frank Boaz, and he recorded these stories way back in the 19th century of, of kind of like the, the tales, the, the literature of the, of the Chinook and the Klatse people. And they were like, if you want to understand Koboway and like how he saw the world, read

• 1:32:43Speaker 06

  those stories, don't read them for the plot, read them for the values. And I mean, we do the same thing, like, you know, George Washington and the cherry tree, there, there's a lot of American values in that story too. So they would help me understand things and they would, they would direct me to sources. And from that interview even, like they would give me lines, but because I was writing from Koboway's point of view, I could put right, right into the interview. Like I, I asked them about the elk and then the overhunting we were talking about. And I was like, well, you know, the Klatse asked Lewis and Clark to be there, like was that like, you know, was that an issue or something like that? That there, there's a famous moment where Lewis and Clark, not them, but some of the men, kill some elk and go home and they're like, we'll come back and get it tomorrow. And they go back tomorrow and the Klatse have taken some of the elk and some of the skins. And so that creates a lot of friction there.

• 1:33:28Speaker 06

  But you know, I, I asked them about that and I'm like, you know, were the Klatse stealing from, from Lewis and Clark there? And, and the Klatse people that I was zooming with were like, it's not stealing if it's yours in the first place. And so I put that line in the book, not because I personally endorsed that line or that interpretation, but because that chapter is written from Koboway's point of view. And so I'm trying like, how did he see the world? How did Lewis see the world and Clark see the world and so on? So what those interviews with the oral history did, they gave me some details that I tried to very clearly show where those details came from, but they also helped me just kind of take on perspectives and be able to understand the values. And the other thing is academics have done a lot of research to, to vet oral sources. Like they're, they're in the, in, in the Pacific Northwest, there have been oral traditions

• 1:34:10Speaker 06

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

• 1:34:46Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:35:04Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:35:05Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like, it's, I, I, I accept and agree with the cultural, it's a, there's a cultural gesture that you have to acknowledge is there. There's a, it's, it's, it's in some ways, in some cases, in some ways is performative.

• 1:35:27Speaker 06

  But.

• 1:35:28Steven Rinella?

  There's just like, there's a limit.

• 1:35:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:35:32Steven Rinella?

  Tell me about, okay, give me the oral tradition of your family 225 years ago. You cannot do it.

• 1:35:40Speaker 06

  But here's what I can do. I can tell you what my great grandparents' values were. They were hardworking people.

• 1:35:45Steven Rinella?

  But that's not 225 years ago.

• 1:35:47Speaker 06

  Huh? No, but you can tell family values and how those get passed on. So the first thing I would say is when we're talking about family stuff, I'm not saying that I said, what did Cobway eat for breakfast on the day Lewis and Clark showed up, but you can still learn those values, which are not my values. And the other thing.

• 1:36:00Steven Rinella?

  But check me out though. Okay, what, what was your, what was your great, I, I'd have to do the math. How many greats ago is 225 years?

• 1:36:09Speaker 06

  I mean.

• 1:36:10Steven Rinella?

  Tell me about the values of your great, great, great, great grandfather. What were his values?

• 1:36:19Speaker 06

  This is an impossible question for me to answer because I've read history about this time period too. So anything I would tell you would be shaped by my understanding of what people lived in Indiana. But there's one other thing I would say.

• 1:36:28Steven Rinella?

  I'm not, I'm not down, I'm not like, I don't think historians shouldn't do it.

• 1:36:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:36:33Steven Rinella?

  I just, when I hear it.

• 1:36:34Speaker 06

  I understand.

• 1:36:35Steven Rinella?

  When I hear it, I often feel.

• 1:36:40Steven Rinella?

  And you could contradict because you're in this situation.

• 1:36:42Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:36:42Steven Rinella?

  When I hear historians doing it about stuff, and I don't know the date, I don't know, I don't know the time, the, the life, the lifespan. Um, okay. Oral tradition about something 500 years ago about, 500 years ago, very, very skeptical.

• 1:36:59Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:37:00Steven Rinella?

  Oral tradition about something 150 years ago about, I'm like, okay. Somewhere between those, I start to get a little bit like, I, I feel that, that the traditions can be more informed by contemporary conflict, contemporary understandings.

• 1:37:19Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:37:19Steven Rinella?

  Contemporary issues.

• 1:37:22Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:37:22Steven Rinella?

  Contemporary social concerns.

• 1:37:24Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:37:24Steven Rinella?

  Can outweigh the parts of it that are, are coming from my, my, my great, great, great, great grandfather told my great, great, great, great grandfather this, and he passed it to my great, great, great, great grandfather, who passed it to my great, great grand, like.

• 1:37:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:37:40Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:37:41Speaker 06

  I do.

• 1:37:41Steven Rinella?

  It becomes that it becomes a more of a commentary.

• 1:37:46Steven Rinella?

  About the present.

• 1:37:47Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:37:48Steven Rinella?

  Not saying you shouldn't do it. I just, I hear it and I, and I always, I just, I hear it and I have, there's a feeling that washes over me.

• 1:37:55Speaker 06

  I understand.

• 1:37:55Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:37:56Speaker 06

  That feeling is skepticism and we should be skeptical, like historians can't do their job unless they're skeptical. So I totally get where you're coming from. Though I don't even disagree with you. The only things I would say is that first of all, a lot of the traditions didn't come from 150 years ago. They came from 50 years after. So like there, there were native people who met Lewis and Clark, who then talked to a white person and the white person wrote it down.

• 1:38:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Speaker 06

  So a lot of the stuff I'm drawing on is not the historical game of telephone you're talking about.

• 1:38:19Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:38:19Speaker 06

  The other thing is that native cultures, because they were often primarily oral, they sort of select people with good memories who are good storytellers.

• 1:38:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:28Speaker 06

  You know? And so they're like, you know, my great, great, great grandfather probably wrote it in a journal and didn't remember it as well. Whereas native people, you know, one historian, when he got older, would sort of train the next native historian. So there is more of a tradition there that I think helps, uh, helps you better be able to access those things. But really for me, then there are, I don't want to, I don't want to beat this into the ground, but. No, it's a, it's a, it's an important point.

• 1:38:50Steven Rinella?

  But, but there are cases where like, I don't want to act like I'm dismissive of, of the enterprise.

• 1:38:54Speaker 06

  I don't think you are.

• 1:38:54Steven Rinella?

  The, the, I can't remember the guy's name. There was a guy that much later was talked to people, Nez Perce, who were involved in the Nez Perce War.

• 1:39:05Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:39:06Steven Rinella?

  And the children of people involved in the Nez Perce War.

• 1:39:08Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:39:09Steven Rinella?

  You could say in some way, you could say some of that's firsthand account, like he took Nez Perce Warriors to battlefields and they'd be like, no, I was standing there.

• 1:39:17Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:39:17Steven Rinella?

  He was standing there. That's not oral tradition. That's firsthand.

• 1:39:20Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:39:20Steven Rinella?

  But huge value in talking to their kids, which at that point I guess is oral, I don't know, is that oral tradition? What is that?

• 1:39:29Speaker 06

  I think, I mean, it's the different historians are going to classify it different way, but for the conversation we're having, you're absolutely right that every generation of what you get away, it becomes more tenuous and you need to have more skepticism. I will say like, I think I maybe put us on the wrong foot by talking about like grandparents' values though, because like, the better example is not what your grandparents or my grandparents' values were. It'd be like, if I was writing about somebody in France, there I don't, France's values are not my values. So there like, you sort of need like that basic primer. So when I would talk to people today, it would be less like, what did your grandparents do? And it would be more like, how do your people see the world? What does land mean to your people? Did you have an understanding of sort of geographical rights and those kinds of things? So I think for me, at least as a writer,

• 1:40:13Speaker 06

  because I am not Klatzup, because I am not Lakota, it was very valuable for me to talk to those people who were generous with their time and said like, these are our values. And, you know, those values have of course shaped, like, there's no question, I can think of examples from my interviews where people, they would say something to me and I'd be like, that feels like that's, that's, that kind of modern life is impinging on, on the tradition as much as it is the tradition itself. That, I mean, that, that happens with us and how we tell American stories too. But I do think that, that for me at least, as an outsider, those interviews really helped me sort of feel like I could write from those people's points of view.

• 1:40:48Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:40:49Speaker 06

  And it was just important in the book, like, We have great biographies of Lewis or Colter or people like that. But I really, I didn't want the sections on Cobway or Black Buffalo or Sacagawea to just be like, this is what Lewis and Clark did. I wanted you to feel like you were in the canoe with them. Because I wanted the storytelling to be equal, you know? Like, I wanted you to know what Lewis cared about, but I wanted you to know what Black Buffalo cared about, too. And the reason we can know that is often not these oral traditions, but the journals. Like, Lewis and Clark wrote down what Black Buffalo wanted. It's just my job as a historian to be like, that deserves like a scene, that deserves some description. He, Black Buffalo is not a supporting character. Black Buffalo is a main character. And that's a choice I made in this book.

• 1:41:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, understood. I got one last question, but you go ahead, Randall.

• 1:41:36Speaker 04

  No, you go ahead.

• 1:41:39Steven Rinella?

  I don't, I probably knew this and forgot, maybe, but I don't know.

• 1:41:44Steven Rinella?

  York the slave, he gets back, he petitions for his, he petitions for his

• 1:41:49Speaker 06

  Freedom, yeah.

• 1:41:50Steven Rinella?

  Freedom, based on his meritorious conduct.

• 1:41:53Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:41:54Steven Rinella?

  Is denied.

• 1:41:55Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:41:56Steven Rinella?

  What comes to him? How old is he when the expedition ends?

• 1:41:59Speaker 06

  He's, we don't know exactly how old he is, but given how relation, like, he was what was called Clark's body servant. Like, he was somebody who grew up alongside Clark and took care of Clark. That's why Clark wanted to take him on the expedition, among other reasons. Like, Clark really respected York as a, as a outdoorsman, too. But, so he was roughly Clark's age, so he was probably, you know, late twenties, early thirties during the expedition. But he requests his freedom when he gets back, and we know that he directly linked it to his service on the expedition because Clark has this letter to his brother. And in this letter, Clark says, you know, "I don't agree with York that his immense services have earned his freedom." And so, for Clark, again, there's a lot of things about

• 1:42:37Steven Rinella?

  He's like, "I'd like to raise a counterpoint."

• 1:42:39Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:42:40Steven Rinella?

  You know, "I feel like I still own you."

• 1:42:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. Right, counterpoint, this is how America works at this time period. But it like, you know, you can hear Clark's voice in that, the kind of sarcasm.

• 1:42:51Steven Rinella?

  Here's why I feel I should be able to like, make my own decisions about myself. I don't know. Just throw this out there.

• 1:42:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. But you can, you can hear York's side of the debate too, though, right? Like, that's Clark's letter, but Clark is preserving York's, York's rationale. And so they had lived in Louisville, Kentucky, outside of Louisville, Kentucky. And so Clark becomes like the top diplomat with native people and he has to move to St. Louis. And he will make all these like, when he died in 1838, a third of what was American land, Clark negotiated the treaties for. Clark had a very important life after the expedition. So he has to be in St. Louis to do that. So he tells York, you're coming with me. But York's wife is in Kentucky and we know that York cared a lot about his wife. He sent buffalo skins back to his wife from the expedition for her to have. And so York doesn't want to go and that's where this real friction and tension emerges. That York's like, I want to be free and also I want to stay in Kentucky with my wife. And Clark says, I don't care.

• 1:43:43Speaker 06

  And so they have really, really tough interactions. There, there's one letter where Clark says, I like, I'm ready to beat York, but Lewis talked me out of it.

• 1:43:52Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:43:53Speaker 06

  So you can again see like, I don't think it makes sense to just talk about slavery in the abstract. You need to talk about like, how did Clark see it? How did Lewis see it? Cause even though they're similar guys, they had very different views on slavery. And so Lewis was basically like, we don't know exactly why he thought this, but he definitely said, you know, don't, you don't need to be Clark or beat York right now. Let's, let's, let's take it easier on him. But either way, Clark waited more than a decade to free York. York's wife ended up having to move further down south. So he was not able to reunite with her in the way that he wanted. And York ended up dying probably sometime in his 50s, probably of cholera. We don't know for sure, but that's, it seems pretty clear.

• 1:44:27Steven Rinella?

  His wife was enslaved?

• 1:44:28Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:44:29Steven Rinella?

  By a different owner?

• 1:44:30Speaker 06

  Different families, right? Because the Clarks, Clarks had 10 or 12 slaves. So often in plantations of that size, you would have to, you know, you would marry somebody from a different plantation.

• 1:44:39Steven Rinella?

  You say he did not reunite with his wife?

• 1:44:41Speaker 06

  He, I mean, he was, he, well, once he was freed, he ended up having a wagon business. So maybe he rode the wagon down further south, but that, that would be pretty precarious in 1820 to, you know, as a, as a freed black person, take your wagon further south. That's not what most people would do. So we don't know for sure because York couldn't read or write. But I, he definitely saw less of his wife than he wanted to. We know that.

• 1:45:01Steven Rinella?

  Man, there's, you almost think about it like a, like, like, I don't,

• 1:45:08Steven Rinella?

  I'm not a big play fan, like plays, you know? I like them. Okay. But I'm more, I'm more into movies, but.

• 1:45:15Steven Rinella?

  A good play would be, you know, in the autumn of Boone's, Daniel Boone's life.

• 1:45:20Speaker 06

  Uh huh.

• 1:45:21Steven Rinella?

  He would go on these hunting trips with his slave.

• 1:45:23Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:45:24Steven Rinella?

  Him and his slave.

• 1:45:25Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:45:27Steven Rinella?

  Would get and paddle up river.

• 1:45:29Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:45:29Steven Rinella?

  And do these big hunting trips.

• 1:45:31Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:45:32Steven Rinella?

  And like, like, what are those conversations like?

• 1:45:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35Steven Rinella?

  It would be the two of them.

• 1:45:36Speaker 06

  Right. That would, that would be, that'd be like waiting for a good O, but plus slavery, that'd be wild.

• 1:45:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Or York trying to explain, you know, here's why I think I shouldn't be a slave.

• 1:45:49Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:45:50Steven Rinella?

  But I mean, like, like, how, like, how does that conversation play out?

• 1:45:54Speaker 06

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

• 1:46:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:03Speaker 06

  He was big and strong. He could swim. A lot of the people in the expedition could not swim, which that's a fact that I still can't wrap my head around. Like, you're doing this river expedition.

• 1:46:12Steven Rinella?

  One of the first questions I would have asked, you know, in my recruiting.

• 1:46:14Speaker 06

  You would think so, but.

• 1:46:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, he could, but he could have, he could have taken that rifle and swung it around and been like, you son of a bitch.

• 1:46:19Speaker 06

  Right, right. No, it's, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a wild, it's a wild dynamic.

• 1:46:24Steven Rinella?

  So hard to understand.

• 1:46:25Speaker 06

  It, it really is.

• 1:46:26Steven Rinella?

  So hard to understand.

• 1:46:26Speaker 06

  I think one reason the journals are helpful is they help you see Clark's point of view on this too. Because you can see how, for lack of a better word, possessive Clark is, like, like York, the native people, once they get far enough to the north, and the native people are obsessed with York because they've never met somebody with black skin before. So they, like, they come up and they'll spit on their hands and try to, like, rub York's skin to rub the paint off.

• 1:46:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:47Speaker 06

  And then when they realize it's not paint, they're like, whoa, this is, this is something new. And when you read Clark's journal entries, you can see that Clark is just kind of like jealous in a weird way. Because he's so used to being the person above York that once York starts to get more attention, that, that makes their relationship get even stranger. So there, it's just.

• 1:47:04Steven Rinella?

  I think York could have beat his ass too.

• 1:47:06Speaker 06

  I mean, Clark, again and again, talked about how big York was. So I, I, I think York was probably the largest guy on the, on the whole expedition.

• 1:47:13Steven Rinella?

  I can't remember, we had a guest recently, or someone turned us on to this quote, um, the past is a strange country.

• 1:47:21Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:47:23Steven Rinella?

  You know, because some of the stuff you just, you just can't understand it.

• 1:47:26Speaker 06

  I know.

• 1:47:27Steven Rinella?

  You can't, the dynamics you'll never, ever understand.

• 1:47:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I felt that tension again and again, writing this book, because it's like, on, on one hand, Sacagawea's actions feel like it's at a workplace, right? Like she's, you know, she's, she's doing human interactions the same way we would. But on another hand, it's just a completely different world. And so I, I don't think there's a way to resolve that as a historian. I think you just need to accept that like both things are true, and then try to tell the story as honestly as you can. But it's like that, that push-pull, I felt that again and again in this book.

• 1:47:58Speaker 04

  Hmm. I feel like

• 1:48:01Speaker 04

  a lot of what you do in this book is you're sort of building the story out from this myopic understanding of miraculous journey led by two incredible individuals.

• 1:48:17Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:48:18Speaker 04

  And you're building it out. And I'm curious if there's still a blank spot in your canvas that you weren't able to fill in, not to end on a downer.

• 1:48:29Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:48:30Speaker 04

  But what did you, was there something you wanted?

• 1:48:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:48:33Speaker 04

  To, to build out in this book that just wasn't

• 1:48:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:36Speaker 04

  there?

• 1:48:37Speaker 06

  I spent five years on this. I love all 10 of the people in this book, and I still have way more questions than answers. Like, is that a crazy thing to say? But that's, like, if you're trying to be an honest and accurate historian, I don't know how, what other response you would have. Like, I just wonder, what did Lewis think about York?

• 1:48:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:53Speaker 06

  Because Lewis specifically told Clark, recruit unmarried men, because they knew that like, they wanted people without family ties, but they also knew that the men were going to have sex with lots of native women. Like, they'd been in the army, they knew that they wanted young guys who were not attached. And so Lewis shows up, and Clark's like, York's coming. And York's married, York's black, he's enslaved. So I, like, did Lu, did they argue about that? Was Lewis like, this is a terrible idea? Was Clark like, I'm not coming unless York comes? Did Lewis just sort of roll his eyes and have some kind of resentment about it, but they just worked through it? Probably that's what happened. But we'll never know. So, like, I feel like, unlike William Clark's maps, my map is still mostly blank spaces. I just tried to fill in as much as I could with this book.

• 1:49:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, I do the movie, man, is, uh, we were talking about the beginning of Apocalypse Now this morning.

• 1:49:40Speaker 06

  Mm hmm.

• 1:49:40Steven Rinella?

  Randall was. You know, like the hotel scene.

• 1:49:44Speaker 06

  Sure.

• 1:49:46Steven Rinella?

  I would probably open the movie.

• 1:49:50Steven Rinella?

  Grinder station.

• 1:49:53Speaker 04

  There is.

• 1:49:54Steven Rinella?

  Blood everywhere, you know what I'm saying? And he's like, oh, like he's dying.

• 1:49:58Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:50:01Steven Rinella?

  And then, and then you'd like, what in the world is going on?

• 1:50:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:50:04Steven Rinella?

  You know, I mean, the people downstairs like, what is going on up there?

• 1:50:06Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:50:07Steven Rinella?

  And then he, and then he trips back flashback.

• 1:50:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's a classic introductory device.

• 1:50:14Steven Rinella?

  Cause it'd grab you by the boo boo for sure.

• 1:50:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:50:17Speaker 04

  Maybe that's the magic key that will unlock the successful HBO mini.

• 1:50:21Steven Rinella?

  They just couldn't think of a good opening scene. That's the problem. That was the problem all along. It wasn't, how do you tell a three year long story?

• 1:50:27Speaker 04

  Thinking Christian Bale.

• 1:50:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:50:29Speaker 04

  Perfect.

• 1:50:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, fingers crossed on the HBO series. That's, that's all I'll say, but.

• 1:50:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:34Speaker 06

  Fingers crossed. I think. That's a blank space on my map is I would really like somebody to make a TV show out of this.

• 1:50:39Speaker 04

  Undaunted courage, which we haven't wrought up until now. I think that was always the, you know, the, if it was going to spin into a series, that was it. But like, this is just such a more, you know, human tale that I, I see the, we'll keep our fingers crossed.

• 1:50:56Steven Rinella?

  I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna brag, but I got one in the oven right now. That's gonna be prime Pickens for movie.

• 1:51:01Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:51:02Steven Rinella?

  Which I've never had happen.

• 1:51:04Speaker 06

  I'm, I'm sure.

• 1:51:05Speaker 04

  But again, he doesn't wanna brag now.

• 1:51:07Speaker 06

  He just wants to tell us how great it feels.

• 1:51:09Steven Rinella?

  So don't ask him about it.

• 1:51:10Speaker 06

  It feels so good, but other than that, I can't say anything.

• 1:51:12Steven Rinella?

  The only problem is I haven't written it yet either.

• 1:51:13Speaker 06

  Well, yeah.

• 1:51:15Speaker 06

  I hear, I hear that could be a tricky process.

• 1:51:16Speaker 04

  You did the work.

• 1:51:18Steven Rinella?

  It's just a step along the way, you know? For sure. Right. Well, good luck. I hope they do get it. Uh, we've been, we've been talking to Craig Furman, author of this vast enterprise, a new history of Lewis and Clark. So a new history of a, of a old and fascinating, fascinating story with endless threads to pull at, and it sounds to me like you pulled out some fresh ones.

• 1:51:44Speaker 06

  I did my best, man. It's, it's a big story. I gave it everything I had.

• 1:51:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:47Steven Rinella?

  Highly recommended. Once again, this vast enterprise, a new history of Lewis and Clark by Craig Furman.

• 1:52:19Steven Rinella?

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