From the WNIN Public Media Center in Downtown Evansville.

I'm David James, and this is Two Main Street.

Okay.

Keep your powder dry, your canoe steady, and watch out for friend or foe at the next bend of the river.

Your co-captains on this core of discovery are Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

And the company includes a small group of Army regulars, a slave, and hired civilians known as the Kentuckians.

Later, they will be joined by a pregnant native girl, Sacagawea.

It's a more than two year, 8000 mile journey through mostly uncharted territory.

The explorers battled Mother Nature and human nature and pave a path for westward expansion.

Here to guide us on this epic journey that changed the landscape of a fledgling nation founded 250 years ago is historian and author Craig Fehrman.

His new book is This Vast Enterprise A New History of Lewis and Clark.

Craig Fehrman is a graduate of the University of Southern Indiana and is also the author of Author in Chief The Untold Story of Our Presidents, and the Books They Wrote.

So, Craig Fehrman, welcome to Two Main Street, and welcome back to Evansville.

Well thank you.

I'm so excited to be here.

And you have family here, don't you?

That's right.

My my kids are with their grandparents right now watching Looney Tunes.

And we're going to have a lot of fun.

They might be having even more fun.

All right.

Now, your new book, this vast enterprise is filled with great characters, plenty of drama, conflict, even frontier sex.

And it's not fiction, is it?

Nope.

It all happened.

We have these wonderful journals from the expedition.

That's one of the things that makes this so fun to write about is they left behind more than a million words.

I can't think of any equivalent of this for any event in American history.

So to have those journals, but then also to have native perspectives, native history, and to be able to bring it all together, it makes a great story even more, more delightful.

And you research this for how many years?

Five years.

Five years?

Yes.

And I know at the back of the book you all your sources are incredible.

Well, thank you.

And a lot of interviews.

A lot of interviews.

Yeah, I interviewed more than 100 people, actually.

And I think sometimes people don't think that historians should do interviews, but I find it enormously helpful.

Some of the interviews I would talk to academics, you know, somebody who is an expert on air rifles in the 19th century, I didn't even know there were air rifles in the 19th century.

So, you know, I need help there.

But definitely the interviews that helped me the most were with native sources.

So for each native person that I spent a lot of time with in the book, I tried to interview native people today and they just helped me understand the worldview, understand the values, understand the goals and those interviews.

They they let me know how serious the story was, how much the story mattered to them.

Just like Lewis and Clark matter to a lot of Americans.

And they also really informed my writing, I owe so much to those interviews.

And I know in the book you you have a cast of characters and there's a long cast of characters here, but that kind of keeps you, keeps you involved in the in the history of this book and the adventure of the book as well.

Well, I think when most people think of Lewis and Clark, people have probably seen this on family road trips that are those brown signs on the side of the highway.

And it's just two guys, right?

It's just Lewis and Clark, and that's what most people picture.

But, you know, it's right there in the title.

Vast.

This was an adventure that involved lots of people, not just Lewis and Clark, but their soldiers, native people.

You mentioned some of them in that great introduction.

So it was really important for me to show that this was not a story about two people.

This was an ensemble story, and I think that makes it a better story.

When you have more people, more goals, more desires, that just makes for a more entertaining story.

Of course, there have been a lot of stories about Lewis and Clark, and that's this is why your story is different, do you think?

I think so.

I you know, I've always wanted to write a big adventure story.

And so when it was after I wrote Author in Chief, I was sort of poking around what's next?

And when you think American Adventure Story, Lewis and Clark is the first one that comes to mind.

So I started reading those journals.

I didn't read all million words at first.

I eventually I read them a few times, but at first I was just kind of poking around and I was just like, I only know half the story.

I'm a historian.

This is supposed to be my job, but I really only know from those previous accounts half the story at most.

And so that's when I realized I need to dig deeper.

And the deeper I dug, I just kept finding amazing human beings, amazing sources.

I found a lot of new documents, and I was just like, there's a I want to tell the whole story.

I want to bring both sides together, and I just want to make this a very human, complicated, messy story because that's what it was.

That's the truth.

And I wanted to get the truth on the page.

A lot of chaos involved.

Yeah.

It didn't go as planned, did it?

No.

Life never does.

Right.

Okay, now take us back to 1803, a new nation.

Thomas Jefferson is president, and the United States suddenly doubles in size with the Louisiana Purchase.

$15 million.

I think it was $0.04 an acre, something incredible like that.

So we have this brand new nation, Jefferson, anxious to explore the land because the British, French, Spanish, even the Russians have been there.

And the mission is to find a water route from Saint Louis to the Pacific Ocean.

Of course, waterways were the transportation routes for trade at that time.

That's right, that's right.

They were the highways.

That was how you got from one place to another.

But there was also another level of importance, which is that waterways were important to imperial claims.

And one thing I really try to do in this book is sort of show.

How did power really work in 1804, 1803?

How did politics really work?

So the Louisiana Purchase is a great example.

It's easy to see those maps and say, oh, America doubled in size.

Here's the before, here's the after.

But that's just not how it was.

In reality.

It was so complicated because native people still own the land.

What America bought from France was the what's called the preemption rights, the right to negotiate with those native people.

So there were sort of two discussions happening at the same time, which was various empires having their discussions.

But then there were the people who owned the land, held the power, controlled the rivers, that was the native people.

And so Jefferson was constantly thinking in both in terms of both discussions at the same time.

And so he needed information, which is one thing that Lewis and Clark did.

They went out there and they said, you know, hey, if you want to deal with imperial powers now, it's not France, it's not Spain, it's America.

Now, some native people, and honestly, the Spanish and the French didn't necessarily agree with that.

There was a lot of different people competing for a lot of different things, but one of the things they did was sort of explore those rivers, because if you could control the river, then you could claim more of the land.

But again, the claim was only the first start.

You had to actually buy the land from the native people, work on treaties before anybody could move in or change anything like that.

And one thing I just tried to show again and again in the book is that native people were the ones who held the power.

Right now, Lewis and Clark knew this.

This is not me imposing a modern viewpoint or something like that.

This is just the actual reality.

In 1803, 1804, Jefferson said, you know, we have to make a good impression on the Sioux.

That was the term he used today.

We would say Lakota or the Sakhalin.

But Jefferson said, we have to make a good impression on the Sioux because in their part of the country where miserably weak.

That's a direct quote from Jefferson.

So the Corps of Discovery was an amazing thing.

But they part of the reason they were courageous is because they were going so far from where America's power bases were.

They were going into native country where native people set the agenda.

And again, that just makes it a better story.

It's not too heroic.

Americans going through a wilderness.

It's two heroic Americans going into an act of foreign policy and really negotiating with these other countries.

It's fascinating.

It's like Game of Thrones.

Yeah, and hostile territory.

Some of they didn't know what they were going to go into, some hostile, some friendly, and they just didn't know, you know, every time they would meet a new native nation that was part of the uncertainty and that war on them and a small group to it's not like a big, big regiment going there.

Right?

Jefferson's original plan was for 10 to 12 people.

There had been previous expeditions that size.

And Louis, I think, very intelligently realized that's not enough people.

First of all, the Missouri current is too much.

We can't move our boats with all our stuff without more manpower.

But also, he realized that having more people would make them safer and make the native people realize this is something new.

This is something to take seriously.

So it's still a small group compared to, you know, you meet the Lakota and there's hundreds of people, hundreds of soldiers from the Lakota, only 40 or so from the Americans.

But it's, you know, the stakes are high and it's on their turf, too.

They know the land.

That's right, that's right.

Right now, our co-captains.

Let's go.

Kind of in bio on the who was Meriwether Lewis?

Sure.

Well, he was he's a fascinating guy and a very important American.

He was a he grew up in Virginia, grew up pretty close to Jefferson.

Clark grew up in Virginia, too.

And so Lewis was a soldier.

And when Jefferson became president, he wanted to get a secretary.

Now, secretary might seem like a not that important of a job title, but honestly, it's closer to what a chief of staff would do today.

So it was a very important position.

He would go meet with Congress, sort of be the in-between for Jefferson and the legislative branch.

There was a kind of a bromance between these two guys, I think.

So, yeah.

Like they were very they were very close.

And they, I think they, they, they recognized that they both cared about the same things.

They cared about the West, they cared about America, they cared about expansion.

And so there was also a mentorship there that Jefferson was older.

Lewis had lost his father at a very young age.

And so I think one of the things that makes the expedition such a human story is that Jefferson had his big geopolitical goals, but he also was sort of sending his protege out there to do something big and brave for the country they both loved.

Lewis, of course, is a kind of a complicated character in the military.

And he faced a court martial, didn't he?

That's right, that's right.

The documents are never quite as revealing as we would like, but I think it's pretty clear that some drinking was involved.

Lewis was somebody who, let's use Jefferson's word, because it's really important for me in the book, again, not to take modern categories, modern understandings, and impose it on there.

We know enough from 1804 to tell the story the way that they saw it and experienced it.

The word Jefferson used was that Lewis had depressions, sensible depressions of mind.

And so Lewis was somebody who his entire life struggled with, with depression, with, you know, the dark parts of his personality, with addiction.

And so that those kind of manifested, I think, in that court martial.

But to Lewis's credit, he was able to overcome that.

He kind of gave his own testimony to to win the trial of the court martial.

And one thing that really sticks out to me for Lewis, again, reading those journals we have so many words to study, is that you can see that Lewis understood his own mind.

He would analyze his mind.

He would say things like, you know, I tend to I tend to focus on the negative or I tend to worry about the future.

And then he would remind himself, don't do that.

You know, look for the positive.

Stay grounded here in the here and now.

And I just find that so heroic that Lewis struggled with these things, but then worked to stand up to them.

He didn't always succeed, but he tried.

And I mean, isn't that what we're all doing every day right now?

This this incident was at a dinner or something, and he insulted a superior officer, and they're going to have a duel, right.

Well, well, we have to remember that in 1804, this idea of personal honor was, was a really, really big deal.

And so there was a dinner older officers.

Lewis was an officer himself.

And so Lewis kind of stormed in, started running his mouth.

We don't know exactly what they were talking about, but if I had to guess, it would be politics.

We can talk about this too.

But, you know, politics today is a is a is a dicey subject, right?

Politics in 1803 also a very dicey subject.

And so they ended up having a fight.

A couple of the witnesses said that Lewis broke down and started weeping because he was so angry.

Lewis left and then came back and said, I want satisfaction, which was obvious code for I want to challenge you to a duel.

And this other guy kind of in a cowardly mood, accused or move, accused Lewis of being drunk and sort of tried to hide behind the army rules instead of just accepting the challenge of the duel.

He kind of said, let's just get this guy in trouble, and then I don't have to fight a duel.

And so the important thing to remember is that Lewis cared a lot about personal honor.

I think that's one reason the expedition meant so much to him.

He understood Jefferson's big picture ideas, but it was Lewis's name on this expedition.

Everyone in America was reading the newspapers and following along.

This was a viral news story.

This was national.

This was international news.

And Lewis knew that if it succeeded or failed, he was the person who would get the credit or blame.

He had such a strong sense of personal honor and that drove him.

But it also cost him things too.

Well, he was he wanted to impress Jefferson to he wanted to fulfill Jefferson's mission.

Okay.

Who was William Clark?

I know he was a slave owner, right.

That's that's absolutely true.

And that's one thing that's interesting to say is that Clark also grew up in Virginia, pretty close to a pretty close to Jefferson, although the Clark's ended up moving to Kentucky near Louisville because they wanted to access to the better land there.

But even though Clark and Lewis had very similar backgrounds, both grew up in Virginia, both from wealthy families.

They still were very different people.

And one thing I tried to do in this book is understand how each person saw the world.

So Clark was a slave owner.

One of the people that he owned was named York, who I'm sure we'll get to talk about a lot.

He's one of the best people in the book, I think.

Yes, but but yes, Clark was a slave owner.

He came from a family of slave owners.

Lewis, interestingly, and this is one of the one of the new arguments in my book, because other people haven't really engaged with this.

I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that Lewis, he didn't disapprove of slavery, but he didn't engage with it.

He sort of just stepped away with it.

It wasn't his thing, but Clark was fully enmeshed in this institution.

It's how his family made their money.

It's how his family built their built their plantation in Kentucky.

And so that was really important to Clark.

Clark was also a soldier.

He left that plantation for a long time, was a very brave and notable officer, and then sort of left the military, was doing family stuff in Louisville, kind of didn't know where his life was headed.

And then one day, this long letter shows up from Meriwether Lewis.

They had met in the Army.

They'd actually met in the Midwest and what would become Ohio.

And Clark gets this letter that says, hey, I'm going to go on this crazy mission.

Do you want to come with me?

And the rest is history.

And, of course, Clark's famous brother, George Rogers Clark.

Right, exactly.

He wrote the American Revolution.

That's right.

A very important influence on them both.

And again, if we think about Jefferson as an influence, Jefferson as someone to impress George Rogers.

Clark was part of that for for William Clark to where you've got somebody in the family who is accomplished huge things, and that's a shadow that he felt.

So we had the team of Lewis and Clark and getting ready to take this journey.

So tell me about the title of the book of this vast enterprise.

That was William Clark's words for the president.

That's right.

When once Clark got that letter from Lewis that said, hey, do you want to join me?

Clark wrote back right away and said, yes, I do.

Then Clark wrote back again and said, yes, I still do.

He was very excited.

He was, it was it was a mission that a lot of Americans wanted to participate in.

And so then Clark also wrote Jefferson.

They had met before.

They had had a little bit of a relationship.

And what Clark said is, I'm excited to join this vast enterprise.

And I remember reading that letter and that phrase, it's it's an interesting phrase.

It sort of feels old, but it also feels it feels mysterious, I guess.

But I also think it's a really fitting symbol for the kind of book I tried to write that it's not just about Lewis and Clark, although there's plenty of Lewis and Clark in it.

It's about all the people that came together to make this mission succeed.

And, you know, it was a vast crew of people.

Now, one of the early moments of the journey, they've got all their supplies, had some problems with the boat, I know, and kind of a drunken builder, I think.

Yeah.

There's all kinds of great little, little stories in this book.

Now Lewis is showing off an air rifle you talked about.

You researched an air rifle.

I'm not sure what that was.

You can tell us what that was, but something goes wrong with the air rifle when he demonstrates it and a woman is shot.

Sure.

So this air rifle is interesting in its own right, but I also think it's a good example of how we can kind of look at history a little bit differently, because previous people who have written about the air rifle have always focused on what it meant to native people.

The air rifle was basically a super powered BB gun, but it might be better to think of it as a repeater.

Obviously in this time, you know, have you use muzzle loaders, and so you'd have to put one bullet and powder in, use the ramrod.

It was kind of slow with the air rifle.

Lewis could pump it up.

You just have a hand pump.

Sort of like what you'd use for a bicycle tire.

You'd pump up just lots and lots of air.

And with that pressurized air, you could shoot a bullet, push a button, shoot a bullet, push a button.

So it became much closer to a modern weapon in terms of how quickly it could fire.

And it was still extremely powerful and accurate.

So this was a really impressive weapon.

And Lewis often used it during his diplomatic meetings with native people.

And the native people were very impressed.

And but that's all people focus on.

And what I tried to point out in the book is Americans were impressed, too.

Lewis had this in Pittsburgh where he was getting ready to leave, and everybody kept saying, show us your air rifle, show us your air rifle.

So to say that this was just something impressive to native people, that's not what was true in that time period.

It was impressive to Americans, too.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of people who wanted to see it.

Lewis did a demonstration.

It went great, and somebody said, can I hold the rifle?

This is an island outside of Pittsburgh.

The person sort of is inspecting the rifle.

You can imagine them kind of looking up, and they accidentally fire a shot, and it hits a woman about 40 yards away.

She drops.

Lewis can see the blood squirting out.

He panics.

He thinks I'm on this great American expedition.

And I've started by accidentally murdering one of our own citizens.

Thankfully, that's not what happened.

The bullet nectar.

She bled a lot, but she was okay.

But you can imagine the panic Lewis felt in that moment.

The uncertainty, the anxiety.

And that's the kind of feeling he was going to have to carry for the next three years.

Not a very good omen, is it?

No, no, it's not huge, vast enterprise.

That's right.

Now, before we learn more about the main characters profiled in the book, including Sacagawea, we won't forget about her and her friend Otter woman.

That's right.

That's right.

Otter woman.

We're going to learn more about my guest, Craig Fehrman.

You grew up in Dills Burrow, Indiana.

Where's Jill's burrow and what's to see and do in Dills Burrow?

I deliberately it is a small town.

It's a it's a wonderful place.

But the closest, closest landmark would be Cincinnati.

My wife is in Evansville, native.

And when I met her when we were both students at the University of Southern Indiana, I told her I was from Cincinnati trying to impress her as an 18 year old.

I guess it worked because we're still married.

But but you know, when I actually took her to Dills Borough a few years later, she was like, this is not Cincinnati, but but it's a wonderful place that I grew up.

And then I came to the University of Southern Indiana.

I met my wife there and made a lot of lifelong friends there, had wonderful professors there, and that's sort of been my connection to Evansville.

And we still come back to see my wife's family all the time.

And you went to Yale from.

That's right.

Yeah, I went to grad school.

I thought I was going to be an English professor because I love stories.

But then when I was in graduate school, I got more into history.

And what I like about this job now is I can kind of do both.

I can dig in those archives and find new documents, but I can also tell big stories.

And and I don't have to choose this way.

I can can have it my cake and eat it too.

Now you're in Bloomington now.

That's right, that's right.

And I you I teach there sometimes as an adjunct at the media school.

I actually teach sportswriting, which can't ask for a better place than Indiana to teach sports.

Right in there with all the sports around it.

It's been a good sports year for you.

Been a great sports year.

Absolutely.

So how did you get involved in sports writing?

I'm curious.

Well, just I like stories and I think that sports have some of the best stories around.

So when I was in graduate school, I started doing some sports writing and got into it.

And I mean, I've always been a sports fan, like like big stories, like heroes, like action, like adventure.

And I think sports is an area where we get that in modern life.

And, I mean, I grew up in Indiana watching basketball, too, that's, you know, getting up on the roof, adjusting the antenna so it would point towards an Annapolis and watch the Pacers games.

It's I was I was fated to be a sportswriter.

Where'd you got Larry Bird story.

That's a classic.

Of course.

Yeah.

My gosh, a hick from French Lick.

Amazing.

That's a wonderful story.

Now okay, let's go back to the interior of the North American continent.

Indian tribes along the route of Lewis and Clark.

We meet some powerful chiefs, including Black Buffalo and a warrior, including named Wolf Calf.

So these are great characters, aren't they?

They're.

They're amazing people.

And one thing I really wanted to do in this book was give them as much attention as Lewis and Clark, because Lewis and Clark are American heroes.

But these Black Buffalo is a Lakota hero.

Wolf calf is a Blackfoot hero, and I think it's a better story when you don't just have Lewis and Clark sort of those two guys on the highway sign, you know, just two guys by themselves.

It's much better if you have a story where there are two sides.

There are two accounts where, you know, Americans obviously wanted things from native people.

But let's remember, the native people held the power in this time period, and they wanted things from the Americans, too.

And so to understand black buffalo and wolf calf, wolf calf was a young man.

He was trying to build his reputation.

Black Buffalo was an older man.

He was trying to lead his people.

So even they were very different.

They wanted very different things and to sort of describe their world and how they interacted with the core discovery.

Those are some of my favorite parts of the book, just to see two worlds come together on on what I hope are equal terms.

And these Native American leaders were savvy traders, too.

They they wanted the best for their product, didn't they?

Right.

Yeah.

Black Buffalo is such a great example of this, and a good example of how power actually worked in this time period, because we think about it's not even right to say the story is Black Buffalo versus Lewis and Clark, because before Lewis and Clark ever showed up, Black Buffalo was in a really intense rivalry with another Lakota leader named the Partizan.

And so they each had different ideas about what Lakota society should look like, what kind of alliances they should make.

And Black Buffalo was so strategic that when Lewis and Clark showed up and his scouts came to him and was like, there's this really big boat.

It keeps hitting sandbars, but it's coming up to Missouri.

What's going on here?

They didn't really know what was happening either, but Black Buffalo saw I can use this for what I want to do.

And so it really is Black Buffalo's story, not Lewis and Clark story.

With Black Buffalo showing up and these tribes, they were devastated by smallpox.

That was incredible to read about.

Some of these like they like 80% of the tribe would.

It would vary nation by nation, but especially for the ones that that would sort of have permanent towns on the Missouri and they would farm.

They were wonderful farmers.

Lewis and Clark traded for a lot of their corn, and that's what kept them in alive during winters and things like that.

But then those, those towns that were sort of really dense in many ways bigger than Saint Louis was at that time.

If you wanted to see the big towns on the Missouri, it wasn't Saint Louis.

It would be the Arikara towns or the Mandan towns far up the Missouri.

There were more people, more density, more farming, but all that's really impressive.

But it did set them up that when those pandemics hit them, it it was devastating.

Whereas the Lakota were sort of more spread out.

So, you know, we we unfortunately, for the last few years, sort of know these principles of social distancing and things like that.

It's a little easier for the Lakota to stay spread out.

And the diseases didn't hurt them as much.

But some nations, they would lose 8,090% of their populations in the course of a few years.

Just unfathomable to imagine that challenge related to the European traders.

Yeah.

And it would take there would be different waves.

It would take a long time, but it would slowly spread.

And it was, you know, it was it was a devastating tragedy.

Now, on the voyage of discovery, Lewis and Clark brought along a lot of gifts to hand out to the Indian chiefs.

They had special packages for the chiefs.

That was interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

And this is also where you can see Lewis and Clark improvising and adapting because they they were planners.

And so before they left their their fort near Saint Louis, they packaged everything out.

You know, this is going to be for this nation.

This is going to be for this nation.

They quickly realized, well, there's more nations than we knew about.

We don't know everything.

There were no maps that they could refer to.

There was no Google.

But they also realized, well, you know, sometimes, like the Lakota, if they had given the equal package to Black Buffalo and the Partizan, maybe they would have had a better time.

So they tried to adapt and sort of redo their packages, but they would always they would often give them military coats and say, you know, we're because we picture Lewis and Clark wearing buckskin and by the end they, they were.

But when they had these big council councils, they would put on their military uniforms.

So they would look real sharp.

They'd have their blue coats, they're red facing all the details, and they would give coats like that to the native people, which which they appreciated.

But also, you know, gunpowder, bullets, things they needed.

One detail I love this is from an oral history from the Missouri A nation.

But they talked about what was their reaction.

You know, Lewis and Clark show up.

We're going to have a big council.

All the soldiers are wearing their blue coats.

They're marching there.

And Lewis and Clark are thinking, wow, now we're really impressing them.

Now they're going to know American power.

But what the Missouri has said is these people look like blue jays.

No.

Okay, okay.

They they leave camp Dubois.

Dubois y Dubois outside Saint Louis.

That's where they gathered and launched their their mission up the Missouri River.

Right.

Okay.

And then into the mission.

The only member of the expedition to die was Sergeant Charles Floyd.

And did he have the appendix burst?

What was that?

That's the best guess that doctors have, is that he had appendicitis and then it became infected.

And so he would, even if he had been in Philadelphia with the best doctors of his day, he still would have died.

It's not that anybody didn't wrong, but that was certainly a worrying sign early on.

York, somebody that we've mentioned before took care of him.

They were on the boat.

They couldn't stop.

They had a mission to do so.

They were still trying to move.

Floyd was very sick, throwing up, trying to eat, getting delirious.

York was there, trying to take care of them.

And then he died.

They gave him a military funeral.

Everybody put on their blue uniforms.

They found a prominent hill.

They built him a coffin.

They buried him.

They called him their brother.

It was very much like the military culture we understand today, because this was a military mission.

But, you know, I think when that happened, nobody thought that's the first person who's going to die.

We have to remember that today we can see Lewis and Clark and in the full arc.

But for them every day, they didn't know what was going to happen.

They didn't know what was around the next Riverbend.

They didn't know who was going to get sick.

They didn't know if their gunpowder stores were going to catch fire and explode.

Every day was a mystery.

Every day was a threat.

And certainly something like one of their men dying early on just underline that.

And he was a key member, a sergeant.

He was and he was from the Kentucky side of things, too.

One thing that's really interesting about the that that is new to my book is I tried to pay attention to the dynamics among the men.

If you focus only on Lewis and Clark, you kind of forget that there's all these men underneath them, that they have different perspectives.

So some of them were kind of career soldiers, often from New England.

Some of them were more hunters from Kentucky that joined the Army just to be part of Lewis and Clark.

Those people had very different politics.

They had a lot of reasons to kind of butt heads, and they did very much butt heads.

And so one of the things that made Floyd important was that he was from Kentucky, but Lewis and Clark promoted him to sergeant.

I believe they were sort of trying to to heal that divide, you know, so if you have sergeants coming from the military side and from the Kentucky side, you're trying to forge some kind of cohesion.

And let's be clear, they did forge cohesion.

Their approach as military officers was really unique in this time period and really effective.

They were able to to build a unit that that lived up to the clichés that lived up to the hype, because there was some talk of mutiny there for a while, at multiple points, it really seemed not just at the start, but in the middle.

It seemed like things were going to fall apart.

It seemed like there were the men were ready to quit, or the men thought that Lewis and Clark weren't taking the native threat seriously, or the men were hungry and having to eat horses.

There were so many places where things got so bad and so hard, and they were all in during this together.

And Lewis and Clark were able to kind of hang on to that sense of unity in that sense of purpose.

But it was it was hard.

It was it was a really hard thing to do.

Now, we talked about York taking care of Sergeant Floyd.

York was Clark's slave.

The relationship between Clark and York talk about that a lot.

The dynamics between those two.

Yeah, I think it's a really because of those journals where we have a million words, we can really zoom in on this relationship.

And so what I like to say is I didn't write a book about slavery.

I wrote a book about York.

And I think it's a different perspective to really get down there and see, well, what did Clark want from York and what did York one from Clark.

And I think one of the most inspiring and surprising things about the expedition is that York was able to get a lot of the things he wanted during the expedition.

If you read these journals closely, you can see at the start Clark has his classic slave owner mentality.

He doesn't even say York's name.

He's like, this is my boy.

This is my servant.

Just a very he sees him as an extension of himself.

But the further they get away from America, the more York is able to assert himself, in part because York is a very valuable member of the expedition.

Yes, he would nurse and help people, but he was a large, strong man.

He was an important builder.

He was one of their best canoeists.

So when the rapids got really tough, that's when they would rely on York because York could swim.

This is something that blew my mind when I was starting the research.

Most of the men in this time period could not swim.

It was just something you didn't know how to do.

And so the few men who were good swimmers, like York, were extra important when they were going through difficult water.

So York was able to kind of leverage his his contributions.

And Clark and Lewis and the other men saw his contributions.

By the time they reached the Pacific Ocean, he had more privileges, he had more power.

He was able to do things he wanted to do.

And I think it's important to say that York earned that.

York was able to accomplish that through his hard work and through his courage.

And York being a large black man, he was a novelty to these Native Americans.

Some had never seen a black man.

That's right.

And in their cultures.

I talked to some of them.

We mentioned interviews.

I would talk to some of my native sources, and they would explain to me that black was a was a color in their culture that symbolized war, that symbolized victory, that symbolized success.

So if you have somebody show up, their first thought was, is he painted in black paint?

They rub me right?

They would spit on their hand, rub his skin, try to see, nope, this is not paint.

So it was something that was very surprising to them.

And they saw York as somebody with great spiritual power.

And you have to think that that had to be really interesting, not just for York, but for Clark, for a relationship that was flipped in America.

Now, all of a sudden, there were native nations that said, the most interesting and important person on this expedition is York.

That, again, is a sign of once you get outside of society, once you get in the middle of this expedition, those, those power hierarchies kind of invert in ways that are surprising and fresh.

He would entertain the children.

He would act like a bear and chase them around the village.

And they loved it.

Yeah.

The native families thought it was was a delight.

They would.

Thousands of them came to see York because he was he was a great entertainer and he was having fun.

He was making those choices.

Clark didn't like him doing that.

At first.

Clark was like, I really wish he would do less of that.

But York new out here, I can.

I you know, you can't do that in Saint Louis.

If Clark says, don't do that in Kentucky, he's going to need to listen or he's going to get beat.

But out here, the rules are changing a little bit.

Not all the way, but a little bit.

And York took advantage and the native women liked him.

That's true.

That's true.

There's one story of your cabin having sex with native women.

There may have been more.

The captains did mention this.

They were they were pretty frank about this, and they prepared for it.

You know, they had been soldiers long enough to know what soldiers do.

And the native people had reasons to do this, too.

If we think about native people as being very rational and very strategic, sex was a way for them to exchange spiritual power, but also make kinship ties.

So, you know, if their women had sex with the Corps of Discovery, that helped bring them together and forge those kinds of relationships that then the native people could take advantage of, the native women would even negotiate this.

They would talk to their husbands and say, well, if I'm going to have sex with this person, this is what we should get in return.

This was a strategic and very intelligent and very intentional choice form of barter there.

Exactly.

John Ordway, an Army sergeant all the way from New Hampshire.

Interesting character as well.

Yeah, one of my favorite people in the book.

And we should say that the book I wrote it in kind of a unique way for a history book where each chapter rotates to a different point of view.

So we've already mentioned wolf calf, black buffalo, Sacajawea, Lewis, Clark, Jefferson, and Ordway.

Now each of those people get chapters from their point of view.

And I think that was important to kind of put everybody on the same playing field.

And also, I just like biography.

I feel like when you're reading a biography, it's a chance to get inside somebody's mind and sort of see the world the way they do.

And so I wanted that to happen for Lewis, but I wanted that to happen for Wolf Calf, and I wanted that to happen for York and for John Ordway.

And it was important for me to include Ordway, because when we were talking about Lewis and Clark, they're both very wealthy men from Virginia.

They have a certain kind of life.

John.

Always.

Life was not like that.

He was poor.

He joined the Army because he didn't have any other options.

He really wanted to be a farmer.

He really wanted land.

And so every day on that boat in the Missouri, he's seen all this beautiful land that, from his perspective, is not being used the way it should be.

That was his motivation, that was his goal.

And I really wanted to capture, well, what was the like for somebody who has to do all the hard work for somebody who's towing the boats and feels that rope just kind of, you know, creating a burn across his shoulder, standing in the current, but also somebody who wants land.

And so Ordway, I think, was an incredible noncommissioned officer.

He deserves a lot of credit for that unit staying together for those mutinies.

Not happening.

But he's also just a really interesting guy.

Now to the a famous member of the expedition, Sacagawea, a teenage girl.

She was captured in a raid.

She had a child with a French trainer, Charbonneau.

Charbonneau a child.

She acted as a translator.

She was a very important member of this expedition.

Absolutely.

And again, like York, she was able she she lived in a system that was was very brutal.

She I think of her as a slave.

People want to say she's Charbonneau, his wife, but that's just not true.

And Clark used this word again, this is not modern categories.

Clark said she was a slave.

That's his quote.

That's his word and that's the truth.

So she, you know, she had to deal with sexual abuse, sexual violence.

It was a very difficult life.

But especially once she got on this expedition, she began seeing ways where, you know, I can help Louis find the plant specimens that will he's gathering for his botanical research.

Or I can help Clark teach the men how to forage, or I can help find once they got back to her territory, or that she knew where she had grown up, she could help me.

Yeah.

Shoshone.

So in the Rocky Mountains, present day Idaho, that's where she was captured.

That's right.

I know the tribe.

He's actually.

And then taking more than 500 miles away from her family.

And let's underline she was 12 when this happened.

13 so this is happening to somebody who's still a child.

And it's just it's unbelievable the amount of difficulty and despair that that could bring into somebody.

And I'm sure it did for her.

But then she was able to find a way to make her own choices, protect her son once she was born.

She was a very smart person.

She was a very kind person.

She was a very resilient person.

She's she's one of the stars of the book.

Just think of the trauma of her being captured without her woman, her friend, her young friend.

Yeah.

There was there was one woman that she was captured with who then ran away.

And then Charbonneau ended up owning another woman named Otter.

Woman and I. One of the things I put in the book, you know, we don't we don't have letters from Sacajawea, so we can't know exactly what happened.

So I'm very careful in these moments to say things like this might have happened.

This probably happened.

But one thing I like to think about is when Charbonneau was a trader, when he left on those missions, then all of a sudden their teepee is just Sacagawea and Otter Woman.

They can speak in Shoshone, they can be there for each other, they can look out for each other.

And I think that relationship between two women must have sustained them both.

But then Otter women wasn't able to go on the expedition, so it was bitter.

Even this triumph for Sacajawea had to feel bittersweet.

She was separated from her friend, right?

She got to go home.

But her friend, who was also Shoshone, didn't get to go home.

I know it, and she was pregnant through a lot of this and that.

She has a child on this, on this journey and the the I thought the core they kind of adopted this child, didn't they?

They were were there was a real kindness that that seemed to develop between them and, you know, right.

Pompey was the name of the son.

And long after the expedition, Patrick Gas, one of the soldiers, had a cat.

He named it Sacajawea.

So you can tell there was there were connections that were made.

There was they they they worked together.

They found things that they that they cared about each other.

And so Pompey was somebody that they that they looked out for.

And especially there was a time when Sacagawea became very, very ill, I think based on the journals of what's most likely is that Charbonneau had given her a sexually transmitted infection and that it flared up.

And so she was very close to dying during this time.

Somebody had to look out for Pompey.

Charbonneau wasn't even in the camp.

So it's fair to assume that that the men did the best they could to take care of this baby.

They were all in it together, you know.

They were they were they were trying to get to the ocean together.

And Pompey became Jean-Baptiste.

Yeah.

He went on to have a very long and important life in the West.

Spent some time in Europe, a really fascinating person who who went on plenty of adventures of his own.

That's another book.

Yeah, maybe.

There we go.

Right.

Okay.

I found this very interesting, Greg Fuhrman, that the Spanish sent out troops to try and stop the Lewis and Clark expedition a couple of times.

They sent out an expedition four times for sure.

Yeah, yeah.

And they came really close.

Like we think about how big the interior of the continent is.

A couple of times they were within a hundred miles.

And so if they had just pushed a little bit further or if the, you know, if they had gotten there two days earlier or two days later, we might have had a geopolitical standoff.

This is, you know, my books, an adventure story.

But I think it's kind of a geopolitical thriller, too, because you don't just have America versus the Lakota versus the Blackfoot versus the Mandan.

Spain's involved.

France is involved, Britain certainly involved.

So you have all these nations, all very powerful, all very strategic sort of feeling each other out.

And yeah, this the Spanish worked really hard to try to track Lewis and Clark down.

They never succeeded.

But Jefferson was sending out other expeditions, and the Spanish apprehended two of those expeditions and arrested one of them and forced the other to turn back.

So it's it's just a reminder that what Lewis and Clark was able to accomplish, it seemed sort of automatic today.

But at that moment, in that time, it was precarious.

It was scary.

It was hard.

And and that just makes their story more exciting.

Yeah, the obstacles are incredible.

And the challenges facing these explorers, the rapids, the Soyuz.

I thought that was interesting.

Yeah.

The logs in the river that they run into and they get stuck there by mud and you might only see a little bit of it up top, but of course your boats, the draft is a little bit under the water.

You hit one of those, you puncture your boat or even worse, your boat turns and then the current sort of causes it to capsize or spin.

There's just so many ways the banks could cave in.

The river was a living, breathing thing, and that was their first challenge every day.

How do we move these boats?

How do we move all our supplies?

It was it was a logistical nightmare, and it's amazing what they were able to accomplish.

And they had never seen grizzly bears before.

They knew about black bears, but grizzly was like twice their size and more ferocious.

Much, much, yeah.

The first time one of the men dealt with the grizzly bear, he shot at him and the grizzly bear started chasing him, and the man just left his gun and stuff and just took off running and escaped.

Thankfully, we talk about only one man died.

It's amazing.

Ten men didn't die just in these encounters with grizzly bears, because they were extremely violent and extremely fierce.

So it would take several shots to bring one down, sometimes ten or more.

You know, there are these there are these stories in the journals of they're all in their canoes.

They see a grizzly bear on a sandbar.

They shoot it ten times in the lungs, and it's just kind of flopping around, wheezing, swiping, splashing.

And they just have to stop their canoes and kind of float for 30 minutes and watch it die.

And you imagine that, that, that immediate confrontation with nature.

And then, of course, Lewis gets out with his tape measure and measures the claws and cut them open to examine the heart.

And, you know, he's a scientist, too.

So it's all these things all at once.

Yeah.

The fact that Lewis collected flora and fauna along the way is incredible.

He even they captured a prairie dog for him.

That's right.

That was cool.

Yeah, there was a lot of work.

They were hard to capture.

What they ended up having to do is flush them out because they've got these burrows underground, these these labyrinthine networks.

So they poured water and they're finally flush out because they wanted to capture one alive.

And they mailed it all the way back to Jefferson.

Thought that was cool, and it made it back there.

The prairie dog made it to the white House.

But what's funny is that it became kind of a Partizan fight in that Jefferson's party was like, look, this expedition is working.

Look at this scientific discovery.

And then the people on the other side of the aisle were like, that's not really a prairie dog.

That's not new.

That's actually just related to animals.

We already know about it.

Yeah, exactly.

It's just a marmot.

And it's just, you know, I mean, how much does that feel like today where you've got two sides of the aisle fighting about something trivial?

Well, it was happening back then, too.

Speaking of critters, Clark brought along his dog semen.

Yeah, yeah, this is Lewis's dog, actually, but.

But this is not okay.

But that's I mean, kind of the whole expeditions dog.

They all, I think had had a fondness for them and he saved them several times.

There was one night where everybody was asleep.

There were a few guards out.

There were some campfires burning low and just a large male buffalo.

2,000 pounds or more just starts running through the camp.

Nobody knows why.

Maybe it's all the fires.

Maybe it was having a bad night, I don't know, but you know, the men later wrote in the journals that this buffalo was within a foot of stomping on people's heads.

And it ran through, ran through again.

And this time on this last time, it was headed for the teepee, where Sacajawea, Lewis, Clark, Pompey, everybody was sleeping.

York.

But the dog seaman ran out and started barking, caused the buffalo to kind of veer a little bit off, and then it ran into the night.

Nobody ever saw it again.

The dog's not there.

The buffalo runs into that teepee.

Maybe Lewis and Clark die there and who knows what happens next.

An ironic part of the book is the fact that the crew eats dog after a while.

Right.

Yeah.

It's the in the Rockies.

They started out eating horse, and that was not anybody's favorite meal, but they they really had no choice because of how difficult the Rockies were.

But they ended up eating dog meat and a lot of the men ended up liking it.

Clark never could develop a taste for it, but it's really interesting to see.

When they first started meeting native people like Black Buffalo, black Buffalo would offer them dog meat because it was an important ceremonial item for the Lakota.

And the men were kind of like, I don't know about this.

We'll take a bite to be polite, but but by the end of the expedition, they enjoyed dog meat and would trade for dogs to eat them because they preferred that to eating salmon or some of the other foods.

So it's, you know, people adapt.

Humans are resilient.

But seamen survived.

They never ate.

They never ate seamen.

I think Lewis would have had a real problem with that, because a couple of times native people tried to steal seamen because he was a very impressive dog, a big dog, Lewis, and taught him a lot of tricks.

And Lewis would have emotional outburst during the expedition, and often they would come from seamen where he would say, if you can't get the dog back, kill those people, and that that's not what Jefferson wanted.

But that shows Lewis struggling with his emotions.

But it also shows how much he loved that dog.

My guest is Gregg Furman, a graduate of the University of Southern Indiana and author of the new book, The Vast Enterprise.

The Corps of Discovery makes it to the headwaters of the Missouri.

They face the mountains and discover there is no direct water route, is there?

That's right.

What I like to think of is that they didn't fail so much as the topography failed them.

They were looking for something that just didn't exist and they had to make terms with that.

But that was not easy.

You know, they thought that they were going to find something.

They didn't find it.

And there were lots of ripple effects from that.

And that was the mission.

That was the mission, the water to find that quick water route, because that had implications for American empire, for American trade, for all sorts of things.

And so when that's not there, they had to sort of regroup, but they also had to just get across the mountains because, you know, finding that's not there is one thing, but they still need to get to the ocean.

They still need to complete the mission.

Crossing the mountains was no easy task, was it?

It was.

I mean, we've talked about the meeting horses, and that's when it happened.

Because they ran out of food.

It was easy to get lost.

There were some days it would be so hot that there would be wasp stinging their horses.

They were able to trade for horses from the Shoshone.

Sacajawea played an essential role in the Shoshone, agreeing to meet with them and trade with them.

So one day it's so hot wasps or stinging their horses.

The next day there's snow on the ground, and if they want something to drink, they just have to grab a handful of snow and melt it on a fire.

Their moccasins freeze to the ground.

So those weather extremes, the altitude.

It was one of the absolute hardest parts of the mission.

And you can talk about the mosquitoes, too, that they had to face.

Yeah.

And again, you can see Lewis tried to anticipate this.

Lewis a smart guy.

He brought mosquito netting for everybody.

Even Pompey on Sacagawea was back in his little carrier.

He had mosquito netting to try to keep him, you know, somewhat safe from these pests.

But over time, the mosquito netting rips.

It's not like there's replacement.

There's no target there.

So you just make the best of it.

Right.

Okay.

They finally cross the mountains after this arduous journey.

They reached the Pacific Ocean.

What was that like when they saw the Pacific?

Well, it was it was bittersweet.

Like a lot of things on the back half of the expedition, they were.

They were glad to have finally made it.

That was a big moment for a lot of people, and that was very meaningful.

But also they were they were miserable.

The rain in the Pacific Northwest, I think by some counts, they spent a whole winter there, and there were only 3 or 4 days where it didn't rain, so they were constantly soaked with water.

That's not fun to begin with, but it made it hard to preserve their food.

So they were having to eat spoiled, meet their relationships with the native people weren't as as warm and understanding as they were.

Was it one of the best?

One of the best people in the book, I think.

And definitely a place where the interviews were so meaningful because I talked to people who were his descendants today.

Oh, really?

Yeah, they really helped me understand his perspective.

I think Lewis and Clark did not do right by we.

I think I can understand why they were out of trade gifts.

They couldn't give Kobo one of those Grand Chief packages we were talking about.

They were out of merchandise.

They had not found what they were looking for.

So there were reasons for them to be upset.

But we tried to deal with them.

We tried to be fair with them, and they were just kind of surly in return.

But the ocean was bittersweet.

They had made it, but they hadn't found exactly what they were looking for.

So they finally the weather breaks and they head back home as this journey begins.

Back home.

Back in Washington, an Indian nation is meeting with the president.

Pito.

Right?

Bito Beto pronounce with a B will be okay.

And what was that?

How can I reception to the receive in Washington?

Well, if you want to talk about only knowing half the story, this is, I think, maybe the best example because other I can't think of anything else that's been written about Lewis and Clark that really takes these delegations seriously.

But I crunched the numbers here, and Lewis and Clark cost more than $100,000, which is a lot of money today.

But in 1803, that's an insane amount of money.

That's a bigger portion of the federal budget than NASA takes up today.

And more than half of that money went not to the boat, not to bullets, but went to these native delegations.

One of the things Jefferson asked Lewis to do was, when you meet with important native leaders, tell them we'll give them a taxpayer funded trip to Washington.

So while Lewis and Clark are going of miles to the west, these native leaders are going of miles to the east to meet with Jefferson and Washington.

And a number of them went.

And then when I decided to give his own chapter two to kind of get in his perspective was Beto.

He was an amazing guy, great sense of humor, very savvy diplomat.

And he traveled more than 2000 miles, met with Jefferson in Washington, D.C., and sort of said, you know, these are my people.

This is our land.

This is what we want from you.

He went to the white House and, you know, was a diplomat for his people.

And he wind and dine with the leaders in Washington.

That's right.

Jefferson's famous dinners.

Beto was there choking them things.

He had a map that he made.

He was very fluent in plain sign language.

Jefferson was impressed by him.

These were two aging men who were brilliant, who were fluent in many languages.

I think they probably found a lot to to seeing each other and appreciate.

But he didn't make it home.

Did he know?

And that's that's one of the one of the bittersweet parts of The Way Back is that he died.

He was older.

It was probably just some kind of sickness.

But there were real ripple effects from this.

There were unintended consequences.

If you think of Lewis and Clark as foreign policy.

And they were we're here in America's 250th anniversary.

If you want to understand, you know the American story, Lewis and Clark is a great place to start because they were the first attempt to do a lot of these things.

You know, the white House wasn't finished yet.

Yes.

Jefferson was having his dinners and his wine list, but there were plaster chunks that could fall off the wall.

America was literally still being built.

And so Lewis and Clark was this first attempt at foreign policy.

And what did the Americans tried to do?

They tried to pick new leaders.

They tried to change other nations, and there were unintended consequences.

So be a hito dying.

By the time that news travels 2000 miles back to his people.

They don't believe the Jefferson's story.

They don't believe that he died of natural causes.

They're angry at the Americans, and all of a sudden, the Americans versus the become a really important flashpoint on the Missouri.

For decades after that point, it all happened because of this and Clark expedition.

It's a ripple effect.

Okay.

The Corps begins a long journey home.

They've made it to the Pacific.

Now they're going to go back to Saint Louis.

And in route, captain Lewis is shot.

And how that happened?

Well, he was just trying to do his job.

He was trying to get some astronomical measurements, you know, using a sextant, using his oxygen to get the the data.

That would help Clark make this big map, which was one of the things they would produce.

So they stopped.

They didn't get there quite in time.

There were a couple minutes late for the sun's position to measure it.

So they're going to have to kill some time and measure it a little bit later on.

And you can see these kind of butterfly wing moments where one small thing like that can ripple out.

So because there are a couple of minutes late, they can't get the measurement.

They got to kill time.

So Lewis thinks I'm going to go kill some elk.

We need the skins for clothes.

We need the food to eat.

Well, he's hunting with somebody else and somebody else accidentally shoots.

Lewis at this point is dressed in deerskin or elk skin himself.

So he kind of looks like an elk.

And this man shoots at him and hits Lewis in the buttocks.

And it's a very terrible wound.

He's lucky that it didn't clip any bones or nerves or anything like that, but a lot of blood, a lot of a lot of fear.

Because Lewis's first thought was, are we under attack?

And so this became a moment that really, I think, defined Lewis's trip back there, trying to get back as quickly as they can.

But Lewis just has to lay in the bottom of the boat face down.

He can't, you know, he's worried.

Am I getting an infection?

Am I going to die from this?

Did I didn't find the Northwest Passage, that water connection.

And now am I going to die of an infection being shot by my own man in the.

But that's that.

You can see why that would weigh on him and cause him to kind of really grapple with despair.

Those kinds of things we've talked about with him.

And William Clark is kind of like the camp doctor, wasn't he?

Yeah.

Clark was.

Lewis did a lot of the doctrine on the first half.

But I think one way you can see that Lewis was struggling in the second half of the expedition.

Is that Clark?

There was never any written document or anything like that.

Clark just sort of said, I want to help my friend out.

I'm going to do more of this.

And so he did more and more of the doctrine.

I think it's a way to show him trying to help his friend out.

But unfortunately, because of that errant shot, he ended up having to doctor his friend.

And let's be honest, Lewis was a terrible patient, Clark says.

You know, no walking.

He leaves, he comes back.

Lewis has walked all over the place.

And the injury.

Lewis was just a very headstrong and stubborn and energetic person, and that makes it hard to heal, right?

Oh, okay.

This ragged band of explorers, and I'm sure they looked really ragged when they reached Saint Louis on September 23rd, 1806.

What was the reception in Saint Louis?

Well, people couldn't believe it.

Everyone thought they were dead, that, you know, they had started to meet traders as they got closer and closer who were doing their deal.

And those traders would say, everybody thinks you're dead.

The president still has some hope, but everybody else assumes you're gone.

So the reaction in Saint Louis was rapturous.

People were enthralled.

People made some jokes.

They said they kind of looked like Robinson Crusoe, which is what you're talking about.

You know, they don't.

They don't have the clothes.

Everything's been worn out.

Everything's been destroyed.

But people were excited.

There were toasts, there were celebrations.

And that happened as they slowly made their way from Saint Louis to Washington.

It happened around the world.

This was a this was an international story that so many people were interested in the North American continent, in different empires.

And so finally somebody had crossed it.

Somebody was ready to map it from the European or the imperial perspective.

This was a big story.

And Lewis and Clark became celebrities.

Their men became celebrities.

Bito became a celebrity.

Now, in your epilog, you mentioned sex among the crew and the tribal women.

And today, even some Native Americans claim to be descendants of the crew, even Captain Lewis.

Yeah, there are native traditions, kind of oral histories that say that Lewis and Clark fathered men with them.

And there are also contemporary sources from the time that definitely some men from men on, some children from men on the expedition were fathered.

Do we know that Lewis and Clark were part of them?

We don't know that for sure.

But there are plenty of examples where I found these oral traditions checked out in a really convincing way.

To me, it doesn't make sense to think, well, we have oral history and we have written history, and these are in opposition.

They work best in conversation.

And what's really interesting is that I've interviewed native people about this, and they're starting to use DNA research to to try to test this and see.

And so they haven't been able to completely prove it yet, but they haven't disproven it yet either.

What testing is best at is saying there's no way Lewis could be this person's father, but that's not what they found.

They found that this possibility is still open.

So I hope there continues to be more research.

I would love it if a university and some scientists would get in here and help these native people, because it's a really interesting question to them.

It's not, you know, is Lewis the person?

It's this is their history.

They want to know their history.

And it's interesting to see those kind of histories.

And Lewis was Batchelor never was he was never married.

And that's one of the things that's sort of one of the mysteries about Lewis.

Lewis is somebody that we know a lot about.

He left behind a half million words in writing, but we don't know everything about him and and his his sexual identity is one of them.

There he was he a bachelor by choice?

Was he a bachelor?

Because he was kind of a prickly guy and he couldn't find the right person.

Was he a bachelor because of those kind of dark parts that that kept him preoccupied?

That's one of those things we'll never know.

And I think sometimes as a writer, it's okay to say we just don't know.

So that that part in the back when I talk about Lewis and Clark possibly having native children, I'm just going to kind of throw my hands up and say, you know, until the DNA research comes in, we can't know for sure, but we should take these possibilities seriously.

Okay.

Meriwether Lewis is is a hero.

But he didn't finish his journal that he wanted to write.

Right.

And then he commits suicide.

Yeah.

Dark side.

And was in Tennessee.

Is that where it happened?

That's right, that's right.

He was on a road called the Natchez Trace.

He was coming back.

We talked about honor.

Once Jefferson was replaced by Madison, some new government officials from a new administration sort of questioned the way Lewis was doing some things.

He had become governor of the Louisiana Territory.

And so Lewis took that very personally.

He was very angry.

And so he went back.

But there are a lot of other signs, like Clark met with him to kind of review his finances.

Lewis was in financial trouble, and Clark wrote something like, you know, when we parted, I would have been happy if his mind was fine, but his mind was not.

And so it's really heartbreaking.

On the way back on that road, somebody was with Lewis, and Lewis started talking to Clark.

Clark's hundreds of miles away.

He's not there.

And Lewis is saying things out loud like, I always knew you'd come rescue me.

I knew you were my friend.

I knew you'd be there when I need me.

Clark's not even there.

Lewis was clearly just in a very dark place, and in the end, he decided that.

That the pain of being alive was was worse than the pain of being dead.

And that's that's why he took his own life.

He shot himself.

That's right.

Twice.

Okay, now William Clark becomes a general, right?

Gets married, and he names his first son after Meriwether Lewis.

That's right.

That was interesting.

Yeah, that relationship continued.

They even lived together for a little bit in Saint Louis when?

When Clark was a newlywed.

I doubt Clark's wife was a big fan of that arrangement, but they made it work.

Okay, but yeah, Clark became a very important diplomat and was, you know, when you talked about the Louisiana Purchase, slowly, those territories getting purchased and deals being made, Clark was kind of the point man for that for decades after the expedition.

Okay.

What happened to William Clark, slave York?

This is this might be the most bittersweet part of all, because when York got back, York had changed.

Your kid asserted himself.

And so he said to Clark, I've done enough to earn my freedom.

And I crunched the numbers.

You know, if you look at what the regular soldiers were paid on this expedition, it was much more value than what you would have taken for York to buy his own freedom.

I think York had a very compelling case, but Clark wouldn't give it to him.

Clark wanted it.

Things to go back to the way they were before the expedition, where York was my servant, my boy, that he was just kind of an extension of him.

And I think it's interesting to see that York fought back this time.

And that shows you how much the expedition changed him.

Clark treated him one way before the expedition.

We don't have any record of issues after the expedition.

Clark treats him this way, and York stands up for himself and says, this isn't right.

This isn't how I want to be treated.

Unfortunately, Clark doesn't free him until more than a decade after the expedition, and you're almost certainly dies shortly after that.

So you would like to see a story where York wasn't the only one who changed on the expedition?

Clark changed, too.

But once he got back to America, he sort of reimbursed that institution of slavery, and York and his family felt the price.

And York was married.

That's right.

He was married to a woman in Louisville.

And that certainly exacerbated things, because Clark moved to Saint Louis to take this new, important government job.

And he could have let York stay in Louisville.

He could have sold York to somebody in Louisville.

There are many things he could have done that would have been kinder.

But instead he was like, nope, you're coming with me.

And York was furious cause he wanted to be with his wife.

Separated him again from his wife.

Exactly.

Wow.

Okay.

No choice now.

Sacagawea.

What happened to Sacajawea?

This is a tricky one.

There are a lot of different traditions, and we can't.

You know, there are people who are kind of working on DNA testing here.

Although I think this this question will be a lot harder to answer that way.

But what we know happened for sure is she tried to live in Saint Louis for a little while, didn't really like it.

So eventually Pompey got started to live with Clark, and Clark sort of paid for Pompey's schooling.

I think actually the federal government paid for Pompey's schooling.

And so Sacagawea and Charbonneau went back out into the, you know, into the great West.

And the best written evidence we have is that she died around 1812.

She had another child, and Clark became the legal guardian for that child, too.

But there are also native traditions that she didn't die then, that she that she lived a long time after that.

And the written documents, they talk about a Shoshone woman who was the wife of Charbonneau.

But they don't say Sacagawea.

They're not as precise as you know, a death certificate would be for today.

So the way I see it, we don't really know exactly what happened to her.

But the fact that there are so many possibilities, I think that just speaks to what an appealing woman she was.

And what an amazing and inspiring character that so many people can see their stories in her.

So the nation is celebrating its 250th anniversary.

What's the legacy of the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery?

Well, I think, you know, I tried to tell a story that had all these different elements in it.

But if we're going to focus on the American element, I think it's just really the expedition itself is a very American story.

It's confident, it's swaggering.

They wanted to make the world a better place, but they were also so sure that their way was going to make the world a better place, that maybe they didn't listen as much as they should.

And then there are also darker legacies that that, you know, their work laid the foundation for America to make imperial claims on the Pacific Northwest.

And then people like Kobe, we talked about, they ended up losing a lot of their land and losing a lot of their sovereignty, because America claimed that land.

And then the Oregon Trail opened up and lots of settlers started flooding in Jefferson.

And other presidents would often say, we're not going to take natives people's lands without their consent.

We'll make deals.

We'll do this in the right way.

But that was kind of the theory among elites.

What actually happened is that people got their wagons and they went where there was land, because the settlers wanted land and needed land.

And so there was always a gap between sort of the intentions and the reality.

And for many native people, the reality was brutal.

All right.

My thanks to Craig Fehrman, author of This Vast Enterprise.

It's a great read.

It's an adventure story.

That's what I tried for.

Thanks for being my guest.

Oh, it's my pleasure.

Thank you.

I'm David James, and this is Two Main Street.